But do I have a right to be able to manipulate the bits as I see fit? Can I share the bits? These are the truly thorny questions
There is really nothing thorny about whether you can share the bits. It is well understood that copyright applies to that configuration of bits so copyright law bounds your actions.
What is thorny, I think, is the applicability of EULAs. If I buy software from the store, I can assume that copyright applies (and a court would assume that I am aware of this). But what can I assume about licensing? That is not on the package. It is only once you have shelled out the money do you find out what additional restrictions the producer has decided to place on you.
There is a strong case to be made that absent any other information bounding the purchase agreement that I am only bound by copyright law. The thorny issue isn't about distribution. It is about whether a vendor can restrict how I personally use a product.
This does nothing for transparency of government, though. I like to know what my government is doing and that means publishing information. It seems scary to me that the government could arrest you and not have to tell anyone about it. I think Bush and Cheney would have loved that to be accepted in general.
If you want a transparent government, then you have to accept that a certain amount of information is going to be revealed. I think that is a reasonable price considering the amount of power that a government has.
The question, though, is just how should the law be changed. We can't just prohibit the collection of data in general. We can't just prohibit the selling of collections of data. Things like HIPAA protect medical records. Should we have individual laws that target particular types of data as illegal to distribute? That seems very complex and cumbersome to me.
I think there are few people who are unconcerned with the direction that these data collections are taking us. It is easy to see how this can be abused. But it is also true that the law currently has no problem with this. It is one thing to recognize a problem, but it is something else entirely to come up with a generalized law that prevents the problem without causing unintended damage.
It doesn't sound like a dumb question to me. From a legal perspective (in the US), we don't really have a "right to privacy". There are some rights (e.g. prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure) that come close, but they really aren't the same. The law specifically grants a privacy right for some things (e.g. medical information), but it is limited in scope. It could become feasible that for a fee you could collect a complete history of someones driving, phone calls, grocery list, movie rentals. It is reasonable to be concerned about this.
The problem, though, is that there is no legal reason today to prohibit the collection and reselling of this data. The law's view is the same as OverlordQ's question. All of the information involved was public so what is the big deal? The law must be extended to allow prohibitions of this behavior. But how should that law be structured? It seems difficult to structure things so that privacy can be protected without imposing unreasonable restrictions on businesses.
The actual problem is the set-asides imposed by referendums.
Indeed, California is suffering from too much democracy. It is especially easy to get well-meaning things (or at least things that sound well-meaning) on the ballot. People vote for them because they sound nice and the voters don't have to try to balance the state budget. This commits money to all sorts of things and prevents the government from fixing the budget. The Economist recently did an article on this topic that is very enlightening. As bad as politicians may be at budgeting, the voters are far, far more dangerous
If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
The question is why would developers want to expand their market share among the non-technical users? Personally, I could care less if my mom uses Linux. You know why? Because she is not a developer and will not contribute one line of code to the OSS world. I want Linux to develop a following among the technical/programmer crowd. This means a larger developer base, which means a greater pace of improvement. This has been happening consistently for the 15 years I've been using Linux and that keeps me happily on this platform. Its all about Developers! Developers! Developers! to me. Microsoft and Apple can have all the rest.
When someone decides that there is money in getting non-techies onto Linux, they will be able to polish Linux into something really slick. Ubuntu is trying, but there really doesn't seem to be enough money in it now so they aren't able to apply a lot of resources to it. Who knows? There may never be any real money in that kind of market (for Linux, anyway).
Changes in government following lawful elections very clearly do not amount to an overthrow of the state.
I think they are both overthrows. Anytime that you remove people in power and replace them with someone else, that is an overthrow. The difference is in the legality of the methods. Using guns is illegal; using the ballot box is legal. Modern democracies institutionalize overthrows by regularly requiring elections. As long as the elections are fair, there is never a need for violent overthrows.
It is possible to get laws like this preemptively declared unconstitutional (not the right legal term, I know). A party that could be affected could go to the Supreme Court and say that this is threatening their first amendment rights without waiting to be prosecuted. The ACLU will be all over this so it really wouldn't cost the party anything. The Supreme Court is very sensitive to first amendment restrictions so the case would likely be heard. It would probably have to work its way through some lower courts first, though.
There is a more interesting way to fight this in the short term. Everyone in South Carolina who hates this could register on the grounds that they will vote against the douchebags that came up with this law. That effectively amounts to a government overthrow, so you want to be safe. This could result in millions of registrations. It is hard to imagine that they are prepared for that kind of response.
One reason to be against your proposal is that criminalizing political actions would result in horrible unintended consequences. The threat of criminal prosecution and jail time could become the result of losing a political battle. So if you are an honest politician (yes they actually exist) and you are trying to fight a stupid or corrupt political machine (like the entire state of South Carolina), just how hard are you willing to fight the system? Most reasonable people would simply walk away from politics and go back to running their profitable businesses if losing meant jail time. The only people that would be left are those who will cow-tail to the existing system or those who are ruthless enough to think they can overthrow the system and hang onto it with an iron fist.
There is, in fact, an accountability mechanism called elections. Whether the voters in South Carolina are smart enough to use it to boot the idiots out of office is an open question. Regardless of whether they are or not, throwing people in jail because the voters are irresponsible is not the best solution. At a certain point, voters are entitled to elect irresponsible idiots and live with the results of that (see New Orleans). It sucks, but that is the nature of democracy.
The key to running something that depends on advertising is providing an effective platform for delivering advertisements. Effectiveness means that people will actually take some time to actually see and respond to the ad. This is why advertisers are generally obsessed with demographics. They want to make sure they make their pitch to potential customers.
You have to find a way to match up the visitors to your website to an ad that may interest them. Of course, this is hard. Too bad. Throwing up intrusive, annoying ads does not suddenly make your advertising platform effective. If I'm not interested in something, then it doesn't matter how intrusive you are; I'm still not interested. Many advertisers suffer from the delusion that if people just payed attention to their pitch, they would all come running to hand over money. Bzzzt! Wrong! It doesn't work that way. If you can't find an effective way to deliver ads, then someone else will come along (like Google) and kick your butt, so stop being annoying and start using your brain.
Is this really true, though? Every time a web site annoys me, I hit the Back button and go somewhere else. There aren't very many places that have content so compelling that I will consent to being badgered and interrupted. I cannot imagine that I am the only one who thinks like this. I would think that these sites would see in their web logs that thousands of people are leaving the site almost immediately because of in-your-face ads. And it gets worse because I will not embarrass myself by forwarding links to annoying places to my friends.
It doesn't surprise me that their are advertisers who will pay extra for ads that cannot be ignored and so that will generate a short-term increase in revenue for the site operator. But this comes at the expense of a negative view of your site and a depression on the number of future visitors. This limits the future revenue to be gained from advertisers since you will have fewer eyeballs to provide. I can't imagine that these ad campaigns work for the advertisers either. If these campaigns are not actually effective, then advertisers will spend their money somewhere else and this will drive down the price of annoying ads.
I can't see where trading future revenue for a small increase in current revenue results in a total increase in the amount of money received over time.
Within the computer science realm, I found there were two major lecture methods being used. The first and most common was a lecture based off of powerpoint slides and the slides are almost always available in advance. Those classes are easy because you can just print the slides (or view them on your notebook) and just take some small notes on the few things not covered in the slides.
The other major method was usually for the more mathematically oriented classes and involved seeing hand-written proofs, equations and diagrams. I think the best method was to use pen and paper to write things down. Then, the next day I transcribe those notes into a LaTeX document. Transcribing makes you go back and follow through all the math and you can take your time to make sure it looks nice. I then study off of the electronic version (which I call my cheatsheet).
As a side note, I always recommend making cheatsheets for every class. It isn't that you actually cheat, but you say if I were going to cheat, what would I want to have with me. It forces you to concisely summarize the class in a small space and is very useful and forces you to go beyond just tryng to memorize things.
It is not price fixing when Amazon and Rupert Murdoch decide on a good price for Amazon to resell Murdoch's goods. That is just basic business and not at all illegal.
Price fixing would be when Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble collude to sell things at a set price. Now it may just work out that Murdoch is able to negotiate the same deal with all the retailers, but there are very few companies that have that kind of clout, and he is probably not one of them.
The real problem is that the two formats compete with one another. Many readers will opt for a cheaper e-book if the price difference between electronic and print format is significant enough. Ignoring for a moment the potentially increased readership, it's quite possible that the result could be significantly reduced profits.
This is exactly what Rupert Murdoch is complaining about. He is setting a wholesale price of $14 and expecting Amazon to take some markup on top of that. Instead, Amazon sells it for $9. Now normally Murdoch wouldn't care except that he has this competing product which is a hardcover selling for $20-30. Since most of his fixed costs are being covered by the sales of the hardcover, he is understandably very sensitive to anything that undercuts the sales of that.
I read his comment as a statement to Amazon that hardcover sales are far more important to his business than ebook sales and that he will drop ebooks if a decent pricing model can not be found. In other words, it is a negotiation tactic. Right now Amazon and the publishers have different objectives. Amazon wants to drive the popularity of the Kindle with low prices on ebooks and publishers want to make money (with hardcovers having much better margins). Once the Kindle is established, Amazon would probably not mind modest price increases, but they don't want it now. Like any other business arrangement, the two parties will come to some agreement eventually.
What is your solution for all the orphaned works then? It is impossible for an author that cannot be contacted to opt in.
If the owners of a copyright are impossible to locate, then you can actually just infringe like crazy and do what you want. It is not technically legal, but if there is no one around with the right to sue you then there will be no downside.
This does not mean that it is easy to determine if a work is orphaned. Just because someone does not respond to Google's opt-out call does not mean their work has been orphaned.
None of the things that I see mentioned will really help build community or get people to know each other. To do that, you need to setup an informal environment where people can relax. An all-hands company meeting can never be that. One company I worked at used to have some sort of celebration a few times a year. For example, they would have an Oktoberfest thing with free beer and snacks on a Friday afternoon. Other events were summer barbeques and ice cream socials.
All of these things encourage people to talk with others outside their department in an informal way. This can foster communication and collaboration during business hours and is actually pretty cheap to put on. Not everything needs to have a technical solution.
The flip side, of course, is that monitoring for radio signals is extremely cheap. It uses equipment that we already use for other purposes and a small number of researchers. The potential upside is huge, though. Discovering that an advanced civilization exists somewhere is such a big deal that there is no reason not to do something cheap and easy to find it.
I agree that the odds are stacked against us and that it is unlikely that we find anything. Even if we are lucky enough to pick up a signal, establishing communications would be difficult. The odds are stacked against us, no question. But we are a curious species and we just can't pass up an opportunity to learn something, especially when it costs us so little.
I imagine that by the time a civilization has the power to go to another solar system for colonization issues of overcrowding would be overcome by technology.
I'm sure the Native Americans that occupied North America would have thought that about the Europeans, too.
It is really hard to make any assumptions about why aliens might show up on our doorstep. There are logical explanations for why a peaceful, curious society would make the journey, but there are equally logical explanations for a hostile society. Certainly, the ability to develop long distance space travel means that a society has a high level of organization and cooperation. But we have seen that here on earth with both the United States and Nazi Germany. We also know that military conflict can be a great motivator to developing some kinds of technology, so visitors to earth might arrive in warships.
The bottom line is we just don't know and no explanation seems any more plausible than any others.
NASA has held no one back, they have pushed forward. Just because no one followed does not mean they are holding them back.
You are absolutely right. In fact, they have made it easier for someone to follow in their footsteps. A commercial company could reuse much of the existing designs and technology instead of reinventing it themselves. I'm sure the NASA contractors would love to have additional customers.
Where there has been commercial viability to space missions (i.e. launching satellites), private companies have absolutely stepped up. We have private companies that can do satellite launches, private satellite TV, radio and telephones, and homemade ham radio equipment up there.
The major thing missing on the private front is human transport and that is because it is too damn expensive and there is too little revenue to be gained from it. For example, how can space tourism be profitable if it costs $100 million per passenger? NASA has done little to figure out how to reduce these costs which doesn't help private industry, but it certainly doesn't hurt it.
Moving your entire company to another country is not the only way to stick up for your ideals. Another way is to fight to change the system. Many people with far less power than the sf.net overlords have been able to do this and succeed.
Not everyone has the power to simply pick up their ball and run away every time they run into things they don't like. Sometimes you have to compromise and sometimes you have to try to work the system to improve it.
if you are talking deterrence then I think the judgment would have to be insanely high to have any real effect, given the extremely low probability of being caught
If the risk of getting caught is really low, then there is no penalty that can act as a deterrent. After all, what is the difference to me in being fined $1 million or $1 trillion?
I think you are pointing out the major reason that the music industry has abandoned suing its customers. They have the downside of negative publicity for being jerks, but they get no upside. They cannot possibly pursue these infringers in large enough quantities at a reasonable cost. This means they get negative PR while providing no deterrent and increasing their legal expenses with little hope of recovering those costs when they win in court.
if you shoplift, there is a much greater chance you will be caught, so the penalties don't need to be as high to have the same deterrence effect.
Having worked in retail for many, many years, I can tell you that the odds of getting away with shoplifting is extremely high. It happens all the time, but it is quite rare to actually catch someone. On top of that, most states have a civil restitution provision which allows the payment of a fine (~$200) directly to the store in lieu of criminal prostitution. This means that even if you get caught you can walk away by paying a small amount and not even getting a criminal record.
If they have one, I can't imagine them not using it
I don't know about that. I think there is logic in not pushing this issue. There is no way you can tell me that $54,000 is not a deterrent. In fact, I would be more scared of that than a $2 million judgement. With $2 million, there is no way I can pay and so I can start pursuing bankruptcy to get this off my back. But $54,000 is payable over several years by most people and so it would be hard to get out of that.
The bottom line is that they now have a judgement with a tough penalty that can stick. Also keep in mind that they are currently not pursuing any new infringement cases because it is apparently bad for business to sue the hell out of your customers.
Still, I think $18,000 is a number that already more than took into effect the need for deterrence and costs of enforcement, since it's already massively higher than any actual damages or lost revenues, which are in the several hundreds of dollars.
I think the problem with the law is that there are two different things it is addressing. This case is about an individual who shared a handful of songs with a few people with no expectation of monetary gain. For that case, a few thousand dollars is a significant deterrent.
But there is also the case where someone decides to make a business out of selling illegally copied music. The statutory damages in the law are really meant to be a serious deterrent to this kind of business. Without being able to attach a really big number to each infringing activity, someone might decide that the risk of paying a few thousand dollars is offset by the big money you can make by selling music without having to pay any artists.
I think the law itself is reasonable, it just gets really ugly when it is applied to individuals. They probably need to expand the law to distinguish personal file sharing from commercial intent. That could result in reasonable penalties for infringement. It sounds like the judge was doing the best he could to provide justice while still following the law.
Of course I read the link. I didn't say anything about the difficulty of obtaining said information. The original story laid out just how easy it was. At times, a simple phone call or a post-it note was enough. It was also illegal, which was my point. The ECPA says when and how you can get information without a warrant. It lays out specific conditions. If those conditions are not met, then the data access is illegal.
I posted the link to refute the various statements I see that claim that it is legal for the phone company to hand over customer data anytime the government says "please".
There is no law preventing the government from asking without a court order.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should prevent this. Since the FBI is bound to uphold the law, they should certainly not induce or pressure others to violate the law by giving out information that the ECPA says should be withheld from the government. It is very troubling that both the FBI and phone companies had no trouble in playing fast and loose with ECPA.
In order for the FBI to get information from the phone companies without having to seek a warrant, they needed to certify that the information was related to a counterterrorism investigation. They did this with a form that required 4 signatures from senior FBI people. The phone companies are obligated by law to require this. At some point, people stopped following these procedures but the phone companies still turned over records.
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But do I have a right to be able to manipulate the bits as I see fit? Can I share the bits? These are the truly thorny questions
There is really nothing thorny about whether you can share the bits. It is well understood that copyright applies to that configuration of bits so copyright law bounds your actions.
What is thorny, I think, is the applicability of EULAs. If I buy software from the store, I can assume that copyright applies (and a court would assume that I am aware of this). But what can I assume about licensing? That is not on the package. It is only once you have shelled out the money do you find out what additional restrictions the producer has decided to place on you.
There is a strong case to be made that absent any other information bounding the purchase agreement that I am only bound by copyright law. The thorny issue isn't about distribution. It is about whether a vendor can restrict how I personally use a product.
This does nothing for transparency of government, though. I like to know what my government is doing and that means publishing information. It seems scary to me that the government could arrest you and not have to tell anyone about it. I think Bush and Cheney would have loved that to be accepted in general.
If you want a transparent government, then you have to accept that a certain amount of information is going to be revealed. I think that is a reasonable price considering the amount of power that a government has.
The question, though, is just how should the law be changed. We can't just prohibit the collection of data in general. We can't just prohibit the selling of collections of data. Things like HIPAA protect medical records. Should we have individual laws that target particular types of data as illegal to distribute? That seems very complex and cumbersome to me.
I think there are few people who are unconcerned with the direction that these data collections are taking us. It is easy to see how this can be abused. But it is also true that the law currently has no problem with this. It is one thing to recognize a problem, but it is something else entirely to come up with a generalized law that prevents the problem without causing unintended damage.
Pretty dumb question.
It doesn't sound like a dumb question to me. From a legal perspective (in the US), we don't really have a "right to privacy". There are some rights (e.g. prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure) that come close, but they really aren't the same. The law specifically grants a privacy right for some things (e.g. medical information), but it is limited in scope. It could become feasible that for a fee you could collect a complete history of someones driving, phone calls, grocery list, movie rentals. It is reasonable to be concerned about this.
The problem, though, is that there is no legal reason today to prohibit the collection and reselling of this data. The law's view is the same as OverlordQ's question. All of the information involved was public so what is the big deal? The law must be extended to allow prohibitions of this behavior. But how should that law be structured? It seems difficult to structure things so that privacy can be protected without imposing unreasonable restrictions on businesses.
The actual problem is the set-asides imposed by referendums.
Indeed, California is suffering from too much democracy. It is especially easy to get well-meaning things (or at least things that sound well-meaning) on the ballot. People vote for them because they sound nice and the voters don't have to try to balance the state budget. This commits money to all sorts of things and prevents the government from fixing the budget. The Economist recently did an article on this topic that is very enlightening. As bad as politicians may be at budgeting, the voters are far, far more dangerous
If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
The question is why would developers want to expand their market share among the non-technical users? Personally, I could care less if my mom uses Linux. You know why? Because she is not a developer and will not contribute one line of code to the OSS world. I want Linux to develop a following among the technical/programmer crowd. This means a larger developer base, which means a greater pace of improvement. This has been happening consistently for the 15 years I've been using Linux and that keeps me happily on this platform. Its all about Developers! Developers! Developers! to me. Microsoft and Apple can have all the rest.
When someone decides that there is money in getting non-techies onto Linux, they will be able to polish Linux into something really slick. Ubuntu is trying, but there really doesn't seem to be enough money in it now so they aren't able to apply a lot of resources to it. Who knows? There may never be any real money in that kind of market (for Linux, anyway).
Changes in government following lawful elections very clearly do not amount to an overthrow of the state.
I think they are both overthrows. Anytime that you remove people in power and replace them with someone else, that is an overthrow. The difference is in the legality of the methods. Using guns is illegal; using the ballot box is legal. Modern democracies institutionalize overthrows by regularly requiring elections. As long as the elections are fair, there is never a need for violent overthrows.
It is possible to get laws like this preemptively declared unconstitutional (not the right legal term, I know). A party that could be affected could go to the Supreme Court and say that this is threatening their first amendment rights without waiting to be prosecuted. The ACLU will be all over this so it really wouldn't cost the party anything. The Supreme Court is very sensitive to first amendment restrictions so the case would likely be heard. It would probably have to work its way through some lower courts first, though.
There is a more interesting way to fight this in the short term. Everyone in South Carolina who hates this could register on the grounds that they will vote against the douchebags that came up with this law. That effectively amounts to a government overthrow, so you want to be safe. This could result in millions of registrations. It is hard to imagine that they are prepared for that kind of response.
One reason to be against your proposal is that criminalizing political actions would result in horrible unintended consequences. The threat of criminal prosecution and jail time could become the result of losing a political battle. So if you are an honest politician (yes they actually exist) and you are trying to fight a stupid or corrupt political machine (like the entire state of South Carolina), just how hard are you willing to fight the system? Most reasonable people would simply walk away from politics and go back to running their profitable businesses if losing meant jail time. The only people that would be left are those who will cow-tail to the existing system or those who are ruthless enough to think they can overthrow the system and hang onto it with an iron fist.
There is, in fact, an accountability mechanism called elections. Whether the voters in South Carolina are smart enough to use it to boot the idiots out of office is an open question. Regardless of whether they are or not, throwing people in jail because the voters are irresponsible is not the best solution. At a certain point, voters are entitled to elect irresponsible idiots and live with the results of that (see New Orleans). It sucks, but that is the nature of democracy.
The key to running something that depends on advertising is providing an effective platform for delivering advertisements. Effectiveness means that people will actually take some time to actually see and respond to the ad. This is why advertisers are generally obsessed with demographics. They want to make sure they make their pitch to potential customers.
You have to find a way to match up the visitors to your website to an ad that may interest them. Of course, this is hard. Too bad. Throwing up intrusive, annoying ads does not suddenly make your advertising platform effective. If I'm not interested in something, then it doesn't matter how intrusive you are; I'm still not interested. Many advertisers suffer from the delusion that if people just payed attention to their pitch, they would all come running to hand over money. Bzzzt! Wrong! It doesn't work that way. If you can't find an effective way to deliver ads, then someone else will come along (like Google) and kick your butt, so stop being annoying and start using your brain.
Intrusive ads generate more revenue... yep.
Is this really true, though? Every time a web site annoys me, I hit the Back button and go somewhere else. There aren't very many places that have content so compelling that I will consent to being badgered and interrupted. I cannot imagine that I am the only one who thinks like this. I would think that these sites would see in their web logs that thousands of people are leaving the site almost immediately because of in-your-face ads. And it gets worse because I will not embarrass myself by forwarding links to annoying places to my friends.
It doesn't surprise me that their are advertisers who will pay extra for ads that cannot be ignored and so that will generate a short-term increase in revenue for the site operator. But this comes at the expense of a negative view of your site and a depression on the number of future visitors. This limits the future revenue to be gained from advertisers since you will have fewer eyeballs to provide. I can't imagine that these ad campaigns work for the advertisers either. If these campaigns are not actually effective, then advertisers will spend their money somewhere else and this will drive down the price of annoying ads.
I can't see where trading future revenue for a small increase in current revenue results in a total increase in the amount of money received over time.
Within the computer science realm, I found there were two major lecture methods being used. The first and most common was a lecture based off of powerpoint slides and the slides are almost always available in advance. Those classes are easy because you can just print the slides (or view them on your notebook) and just take some small notes on the few things not covered in the slides.
The other major method was usually for the more mathematically oriented classes and involved seeing hand-written proofs, equations and diagrams. I think the best method was to use pen and paper to write things down. Then, the next day I transcribe those notes into a LaTeX document. Transcribing makes you go back and follow through all the math and you can take your time to make sure it looks nice. I then study off of the electronic version (which I call my cheatsheet).
As a side note, I always recommend making cheatsheets for every class. It isn't that you actually cheat, but you say if I were going to cheat, what would I want to have with me. It forces you to concisely summarize the class in a small space and is very useful and forces you to go beyond just tryng to memorize things.
How is this NOT price fixing?
It is not price fixing when Amazon and Rupert Murdoch decide on a good price for Amazon to resell Murdoch's goods. That is just basic business and not at all illegal.
Price fixing would be when Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble collude to sell things at a set price. Now it may just work out that Murdoch is able to negotiate the same deal with all the retailers, but there are very few companies that have that kind of clout, and he is probably not one of them.
The real problem is that the two formats compete with one another. Many readers will opt for a cheaper e-book if the price difference between electronic and print format is significant enough. Ignoring for a moment the potentially increased readership, it's quite possible that the result could be significantly reduced profits.
This is exactly what Rupert Murdoch is complaining about. He is setting a wholesale price of $14 and expecting Amazon to take some markup on top of that. Instead, Amazon sells it for $9. Now normally Murdoch wouldn't care except that he has this competing product which is a hardcover selling for $20-30. Since most of his fixed costs are being covered by the sales of the hardcover, he is understandably very sensitive to anything that undercuts the sales of that.
I read his comment as a statement to Amazon that hardcover sales are far more important to his business than ebook sales and that he will drop ebooks if a decent pricing model can not be found. In other words, it is a negotiation tactic. Right now Amazon and the publishers have different objectives. Amazon wants to drive the popularity of the Kindle with low prices on ebooks and publishers want to make money (with hardcovers having much better margins). Once the Kindle is established, Amazon would probably not mind modest price increases, but they don't want it now. Like any other business arrangement, the two parties will come to some agreement eventually.
What is your solution for all the orphaned works then? It is impossible for an author that cannot be contacted to opt in.
If the owners of a copyright are impossible to locate, then you can actually just infringe like crazy and do what you want. It is not technically legal, but if there is no one around with the right to sue you then there will be no downside.
This does not mean that it is easy to determine if a work is orphaned. Just because someone does not respond to Google's opt-out call does not mean their work has been orphaned.
None of the things that I see mentioned will really help build community or get people to know each other. To do that, you need to setup an informal environment where people can relax. An all-hands company meeting can never be that. One company I worked at used to have some sort of celebration a few times a year. For example, they would have an Oktoberfest thing with free beer and snacks on a Friday afternoon. Other events were summer barbeques and ice cream socials.
All of these things encourage people to talk with others outside their department in an informal way. This can foster communication and collaboration during business hours and is actually pretty cheap to put on. Not everything needs to have a technical solution.
The flip side, of course, is that monitoring for radio signals is extremely cheap. It uses equipment that we already use for other purposes and a small number of researchers. The potential upside is huge, though. Discovering that an advanced civilization exists somewhere is such a big deal that there is no reason not to do something cheap and easy to find it.
I agree that the odds are stacked against us and that it is unlikely that we find anything. Even if we are lucky enough to pick up a signal, establishing communications would be difficult. The odds are stacked against us, no question. But we are a curious species and we just can't pass up an opportunity to learn something, especially when it costs us so little.
I imagine that by the time a civilization has the power to go to another solar system for colonization issues of overcrowding would be overcome by technology.
I'm sure the Native Americans that occupied North America would have thought that about the Europeans, too.
It is really hard to make any assumptions about why aliens might show up on our doorstep. There are logical explanations for why a peaceful, curious society would make the journey, but there are equally logical explanations for a hostile society. Certainly, the ability to develop long distance space travel means that a society has a high level of organization and cooperation. But we have seen that here on earth with both the United States and Nazi Germany. We also know that military conflict can be a great motivator to developing some kinds of technology, so visitors to earth might arrive in warships.
The bottom line is we just don't know and no explanation seems any more plausible than any others.
NASA has held no one back, they have pushed forward. Just because no one followed does not mean they are holding them back.
You are absolutely right. In fact, they have made it easier for someone to follow in their footsteps. A commercial company could reuse much of the existing designs and technology instead of reinventing it themselves. I'm sure the NASA contractors would love to have additional customers.
Where there has been commercial viability to space missions (i.e. launching satellites), private companies have absolutely stepped up. We have private companies that can do satellite launches, private satellite TV, radio and telephones, and homemade ham radio equipment up there.
The major thing missing on the private front is human transport and that is because it is too damn expensive and there is too little revenue to be gained from it. For example, how can space tourism be profitable if it costs $100 million per passenger? NASA has done little to figure out how to reduce these costs which doesn't help private industry, but it certainly doesn't hurt it.
Moving your entire company to another country is not the only way to stick up for your ideals. Another way is to fight to change the system. Many people with far less power than the sf.net overlords have been able to do this and succeed.
Not everyone has the power to simply pick up their ball and run away every time they run into things they don't like. Sometimes you have to compromise and sometimes you have to try to work the system to improve it.
if you are talking deterrence then I think the judgment would have to be insanely high to have any real effect, given the extremely low probability of being caught
If the risk of getting caught is really low, then there is no penalty that can act as a deterrent. After all, what is the difference to me in being fined $1 million or $1 trillion?
I think you are pointing out the major reason that the music industry has abandoned suing its customers. They have the downside of negative publicity for being jerks, but they get no upside. They cannot possibly pursue these infringers in large enough quantities at a reasonable cost. This means they get negative PR while providing no deterrent and increasing their legal expenses with little hope of recovering those costs when they win in court.
if you shoplift, there is a much greater chance you will be caught, so the penalties don't need to be as high to have the same deterrence effect.
Having worked in retail for many, many years, I can tell you that the odds of getting away with shoplifting is extremely high. It happens all the time, but it is quite rare to actually catch someone. On top of that, most states have a civil restitution provision which allows the payment of a fine (~$200) directly to the store in lieu of criminal prostitution. This means that even if you get caught you can walk away by paying a small amount and not even getting a criminal record.
If they have one, I can't imagine them not using it
I don't know about that. I think there is logic in not pushing this issue. There is no way you can tell me that $54,000 is not a deterrent. In fact, I would be more scared of that than a $2 million judgement. With $2 million, there is no way I can pay and so I can start pursuing bankruptcy to get this off my back. But $54,000 is payable over several years by most people and so it would be hard to get out of that.
The bottom line is that they now have a judgement with a tough penalty that can stick. Also keep in mind that they are currently not pursuing any new infringement cases because it is apparently bad for business to sue the hell out of your customers.
Still, I think $18,000 is a number that already more than took into effect the need for deterrence and costs of enforcement, since it's already massively higher than any actual damages or lost revenues, which are in the several hundreds of dollars.
I think the problem with the law is that there are two different things it is addressing. This case is about an individual who shared a handful of songs with a few people with no expectation of monetary gain. For that case, a few thousand dollars is a significant deterrent.
But there is also the case where someone decides to make a business out of selling illegally copied music. The statutory damages in the law are really meant to be a serious deterrent to this kind of business. Without being able to attach a really big number to each infringing activity, someone might decide that the risk of paying a few thousand dollars is offset by the big money you can make by selling music without having to pay any artists.
I think the law itself is reasonable, it just gets really ugly when it is applied to individuals. They probably need to expand the law to distinguish personal file sharing from commercial intent. That could result in reasonable penalties for infringement. It sounds like the judge was doing the best he could to provide justice while still following the law.
Of course I read the link. I didn't say anything about the difficulty of obtaining said information. The original story laid out just how easy it was. At times, a simple phone call or a post-it note was enough. It was also illegal, which was my point. The ECPA says when and how you can get information without a warrant. It lays out specific conditions. If those conditions are not met, then the data access is illegal.
I posted the link to refute the various statements I see that claim that it is legal for the phone company to hand over customer data anytime the government says "please".
There is no law preventing the government from asking without a court order.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should prevent this. Since the FBI is bound to uphold the law, they should certainly not induce or pressure others to violate the law by giving out information that the ECPA says should be withheld from the government. It is very troubling that both the FBI and phone companies had no trouble in playing fast and loose with ECPA.
In order for the FBI to get information from the phone companies without having to seek a warrant, they needed to certify that the information was related to a counterterrorism investigation. They did this with a form that required 4 signatures from senior FBI people. The phone companies are obligated by law to require this. At some point, people stopped following these procedures but the phone companies still turned over records.