Actually the US has already tried something similar. In the Vietnam war they dropped thousands of sensors along the Ho Chi Minh trail that were supposed to detect enemy troop and supply movements. The program was not particularly successful - partly because the sensors were not very good at distinguishing between humans and animals, and partly because of the delays involved in getting fire laid down where it was supposed to be.
If you are interested in following this up, the operation was called "Igloo White".
What may save us is information overload. We can't be sure of that, but do you really believe that someone spends all day reading email that carnivore has intercepted? How many people would it really take? But we can't be certain, because there might be some way to handle the overload.
I think there is already a way to handle information overload - or at least there are ways to handle it and those ways are going to improve faster than the volume of information. Credit card companies have already developed some very sophisticated, and effective, methods for detecting fraudulent transactions amongst the millions (or is it billions now?) of transactions that they process every day. Methods like this, for spoting unusual or suspect behavior are going to rapidly improve along with surveilence technology.
Of course there is no way to watch everyone, but it is possible to watch everyone that is doing something interesting.
Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.
I thought seriously about discussing this idea in my original post. A number of ethical theorists like Bentham and Locke thought that the idea of constant observation by God was a key part of moral consciousness. Religious people who take this idea seriously are always in a position of having to think about what their behavior would look like from God's perspective. Bentham actually proposed that prisons should be built, so that the inmates were literally under constant observation, in the hope that they would get into this habbit of thinking (his plan which he called the "panopticon" has actually be implemented in some places).
I am an athiest, but like Machiavelli I am willing to consider the possibility that religion might serve a useful social function even though it is strictly fiction. Still it seems to me that there are serious problems with the idea of grounding morality in religion. For one thing it is getting increasingly harder to maintain the fiction. For another thing, people who think that God is the source of all value are prone to forget that it is really individual human lives that matter. When that happens they tend to do horrible things even though they think God is watching.
Wouldn't it be better if we could really make it true that we will be held accountable for every action, and that it is our fellow hummans who will do the accounting?
So the entire French language, where, in the the case of plurals the masculine form is taken is sexist?
No doubt if you asked a few French women about it then they would say that the language is sexist, and hard to fix. Fortunately in English it is much easier to avoid sexist language - which is why there is no good excuse for not doing so.
No I think he meant it as a euphemism for a metaphorical use of "screwed over". As in "you will be one of the last people to be butt fucked by management when money gets tight".
Anyone who thinks this is sexist has a problem which your essay is not here to address.
Anyone who thinks that using female pronouns is unproffessional has a sexist bent that really shouldn't be pandered to. One reason why women avoid programing might just be that everything they read about it reminds them that women are not supposed to program.
Personally I think it is quite healthy for authors to remind themselves, and their readers (especially if those readers are typically male), that women exist as well and that they also might be interested interested in reading what the author has to say.
I spent a little time wondering what it would be like living in a world with total surveilence - a world where someone could be watching or at least recording everything that happens. In some respects it doesn't actually look that bad.
No one would would be in any doubt about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No crime would go unsolved. No one would expect to get away with cheating on their spouse. Lying in general would become far less common. There just wouldn't be much to lie about which couldn't be verified by someone who wanted to.
Of course you would have to get used to the idea that six billion people could, if they wanted to, watch you take a dump every morning. But somehow I suspect that the excitement of voyerism would wear off if every act became a public act. Who knows, maybe we would all be happier if there was no longer any point in maintaining a public mask to cover our private lives.
I worried at first that total surveilence would lend itself too well to totalitarianism. "No crime would go unsolved" really just means that if you do anything the state disapproves of then it would not go unnoticed. But then it occured to me that totalitarianism would have a hard time getting established if eveything happens in the public view. Politicians could not cut deals behind closed doors, the military could not plot coups, the state could not lie to the people about what it is doing.
Living in a world like this would be really different from living in the world as it is, and it would be uncomfortable to people like us who are used to a good deal of privacy. But it wouldn't necessarily be bad - just very different.
Of course total surveilence is not going to happen any time soon. What will happen is an increase in certain types of surveilence by certain people. The way I see it, the problem with this is that we might wind up with a world where the state can watch the people, but the people cannot watch the state, or a world where the US knows exactly what Iraq is up to, but no one knows exactly what the US is up to. This kind of world really would be bad.
So here is a suggestion. Perhaps instead of trying to stem the tide of surveilence, what we should do is try to make sure that it washes over everyone evenly. If the state has this technology, then push for the same technology to be made available to private citizens. If the state wants more information about the people, then push for a more open government, so that the people will also have more information about the state.
It looks like they had two seperate goals here. One goal was to enable the ship to be commanded from any point. The obvious advantage to this is that it no longer matters if the bridge gets destroyed. You can re-establish your command center anywhere you like. The second was to reduce manpower by introducing more automated systems, which means that merely being able to issue orders by voice from any place on the ship is no longer enough. You need to be able to control automated systems from anywhere on the ship. Of course this doesn't explain why they went for wireless access points, rather than a whole bunch of wired access points.
The article explains the need for wireless here:
So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of the sensors.
If you take a closer look at the article you will also see just how better communications combined with a new set of sensors (etc) is expected to reduce manpower needs:
The wireless LANs will change the way crew members perform their jobs. "Today, they have to do rounds, every 45 minutes or two hours, for example," says Benga Erinle, director of government operations for 3ETI. "They're checking equipment, machinery, and filling out and signing paper logs." The TSM system is intended to do all this automatically. "It goes beyond simply gathering information," Erinle says. "We also use programs for diagnostics and prognostics, based on the data. If a critical system is going to fail, we'll pick that up and alert the chief engineer that this is pending." The TSM system also will change the Navy's long-standing practice of time-based maintenance--of replacing or tearing down machinery after so many hours or days of use.
In other words, on top of all the people who actually man the weapons and run the ship, you need a whole bunch of people who are just doing maintenance. This new system should reduce the number of those people.
The British Royal Navy has resisted automation for years. They purposefully take many more crew members than they need so that when they lose half of them in battle the ship can still function.
In contrast the US Navy has always prefered to take twice as many ships as it needs.
Seriously - this is what you do if you have a sack load of money, but want to fight with a smaller number of more highly trained personel, and minimise casualties. You never use more people when you could just spend more money on hardware.
Alcohol causes dehyrdation which in turn will increase the probability of clots forming. You can reduce this effect by drinking plenty of other (preferably clear) fluids (no I don't mean stoli - I mean stuff like water).
Actually no - if it were a drug delivery system then it would fall within the scope of the FDA's power to regulate. So far the Tobacco companies have escaped that horror or horrors.
Smokeless cigarettes on the other hand (i.e. cigarettes that are considerably better for the smoker and entirely safe for those around him) were ruled to be drug delivery systems, and were kept out of the market. Life is strange sometimes.
What's the point of leaving out the drug?
I wondered about this myself - this stuff will ruin your health without making you feel good. Kind of like taking a burger and removing the flavor, but leaving the fat. Hmmm...
I don't want to rain on your parade, but in China the laws are already considerably worse than in the US (Why is this a surprise to anyone? These are the guys who like to drive tanks over protesting students). For example, people have been prosecuted for collecting information which has been published in newspapers. The Chinese have no reson to outlaw circumvention - they will happily throw you in the can for posessing entirely unprotected public domain information.
Actually I think you will find that most European countries have already signed on to the same treaties as the Australians, and that they are also in the process of introducting DMCA-like laws.
Take a look here for example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25088.htm l
where you will find this:
The directive [EUCD], which was approved last year, extends European copyright legislation so that it is even more restrictive than America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), critics argue. National governments have until December 22 to incorporate the directive in national legislation.
I'd like to think so too - but NZ politicians like the idea of NZ turning into a "knowledge economy", and they almost certainly think that stricter ip laws will be required for that to happen.
Take a look here for a look at the bright future offered by the "knowledge economy":
http://www.med.govt.nz/pbt/infotech/knowledge_ec on omy/
Take a look here to see what that might require:
http://www.med.govt.nz/buslt/int_prop/digital/po si tion/position-11.html#P563_140517
Where you will find this little tidbit:
H. WIPO Internet Treaties
36. The Ministry recommends making any changes to the Act as a result of the current review in a way that benefits New Zealand, whilst enabling our compliance with relevant aspects of the WIPO Internet Treaties. Views are sought on New Zealand's possible accession to these treaties.
Re:Big legal mistake...
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Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Again: this is makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who owns a copyright is entitled under copyright law to legally defend that copyright, music (monopoly) / industry included...especially if the distributor doesn't legally have permission (from the copyright owner) to distribute the music...permission would include ownership of the distributed media or rights granted by the owner to distribute the copyrighted material. Neither case exists for Kazaa.
This does make sense in fact. You are not allowed to use intellectual property rights to protect a monopoly (other than the monopoly expressly granted by the ip-right obviously). So for example, IBM was not allowed to use its BIOS copyrights to defend a monoply on PC hardware. Courts can infact void intellectual property rights which are misused in this way.
It sounds like Kazaa is arguing that copyright owners are in fact a monopoly (presumably Kazaa is arguing that the Music industry is trying to maintain a monopoly in the online retail market), and that they are using their ip to defend this monopoly (that is they are suing anyone who tries to compete in the online retail market for copyright infringement), which would in fact be illegal.
An interesting feature of this strategy is that it may force any copyright infringement cases to be put on hold until after the anti-trust case is resolved - which may well take 10 years or more (the IBM case it was not reolved until long after it had ceased to matter).
Re:Actually is my pet peeve
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You need to spend more time talking to philosophers and/or logicians. You will soon find out that a lot can be made out the distinction between the actual and the possible - the distinction between what is and what might have been.
Although philosophers have a very technical use for the term, it does corespond roughly to the common use, which is to indicate a greater degree of reality or probability of occurance. So for example the difference between "this post might be off topic" and "this post might actually be off topic" is that the second suggests more than a mere possibility - it suggests something that has a good chance of being true.
Actually no. Fines are usually assessed above and beyond damages. There is a general legal principle that punishment ought to be proportional to the crime - but that does very little to constrain the penalties that congress can attach to crimes. Note for example that it has not hindered three-strikes laws that impose very lengthy sentences on people who commit relatively minor crimes (on top of prior convictions for violent crimes).
Prosecution by the Justice Department? I thought they were there to serve the public, to keep serial killers of the street and so on. Spend tax payers money for prosecuting folks that share their favourite musician's work with other fans? Get real.
Just imagine that you get busted and the prosectutor gives you the following choices: (A) plead guilty and agree to give us all your money, up to a max of 250k, (B) don't plead guilty and still give us all of your money, plus go to jail for 3 years, or (C) (ha ha - this one is just for a laugh - see below) spend all of your money on a successful defense.
Which option would you pick? My guess is most people will go for (A) which means that the prosecution of these cases will almost certainly turn a profit for the feds. That is one of the great things about draconian penalties - sensible people are not willing to run the risks asociated with defending themselves.
And get it to stand up, when going through the higher courts? I don't think so.
This may come as a surprise, but similar laws with similar penalties for copyright violations have been around for a long time - haven't you ever watched the warning at the start of a rental video? As Jessica Litman notes in her book "Digital Copyright", novices to copyright law are often surprised to find out that what they are doing is illegal and that it is subject to such harsh penalties. They often decide to fight it out in court, and they always lose.
In this type of case the burden of proof is very low. They just have to show that you had a copy of something. Then it is up to you to show that you really owned it - if you can. Unless they are careless enough to conduct a bad search there will be nothing to appeal.
It depends a lot on who they prosecute and how often they prosecute.
During Nixion's war on drugs there was a shift towards legalising dope in the US for precisely this sort of reason. Too many white middle class parents found that their kids were being tossed into jail and deprived of future careers as doctors and lawyers.
Reagan's war on drugs avoided this problem by mostly targeting poor people or blacks (about one third of the black male population in the US is unable to vote - mostly because of minor drug convictions). Middle class white kids get some sort of first-offender program if they ever get caught at all.
In this case you can expect the same sort of thing. If they start routinely prosecuting middle class white people, then yes the law will get changed pretty fast.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. The real purpose here is to terrorise the population into obeying the law. Even a small risk of such harsh penalties will frighten many people away from P2P. Only a small number of people will actually have to be prosecuted in order to achieve this effect.
I think you missed the main thrust of the point that was being made.
If Microsoft stops supporting something then it will never be supported by anyone. No bug fixes, nothing. If RedHat stops supporting something then there is nothing to stop you from paying someone to pick up where RedHat left off. Hell someone might even find a viable bisiness model here by servicing old RedHat distros (OldHat?)
Actually this may explain why RedHat is doing things this way. If major apps require old versions of RedHat then that would, all by itself, force a lot of people to refrain from upgrading - even if they would like to. Even worse if different apps require different versions then that is going to seriously undermine the value of the RedHat Distro.
By limiting support to a small number of versions they encourage vendors to keep up with more recent releases of Redhat, and make it more likely that all the major apps will actually work on one of those supported versions.
Movies are about to be a lot cheaper to make. Very soon there will be no real difference between what Hollywood uses to shoot and edit video and what the kid next door is using.
I think this is probably true, so some time in the future movies will become like books in the sense that the production costs for most of them will not be very high. This does us no good right now. While some of my favourite movies were ultra-low budget (like Peter Jackson's "Bad Taste") others were not (like Peter Jackson's LoTR trilogy) and it is unlikey that films like that will be possible on a low budget even ten years from now.
As for drugs, do you seriously mean to suggest that the present system is in any way satisfactory at all?
You set a very low standard - sure there are lots of ways in which the current system is satisfactory - it produces lots of new and effective drugs for treating the sorts of diseases that some one like me (a middle class citizen of a reasonably wealthy nation) is likely to suffer from. Of course there are lots of other ways in which the current system is dis-satisfactory.
More than half of this research is tax-payer subsidized in any case.
True, but also rather misleading in two ways. Private spending on R&D massively outweighs public spending and, more importantly, you mistakenly suppose that that the incentives created by IP law are not driving public spending as well as private spending. In the US at least, the government is willing to spend large amounts of money on R&D because they expect the comercialised results to benefit the US economy and US tax revenues. If the results were free for all of the world to use, then it is highly likely that public expenditure on R&D would also go down.
Re:they'll just change the laws in 13 years
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Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
Politicians didn't "run for office", they were selected to serve a 5 year term. Once selected, they were put under guard, not to protect them, but to ensure they didn't try to avoid completing their term. To ensure that they did their absolute best for the country, their personal property was liquidated and the funds invested in the Treasury, to be returned when their term was over. If the country prospered, so did they. If the country didn't prosper, neither did they. Kind of like buying Government Bonds, I guess.
Something like this already happens in the US. In order to avoid conflicts of interest many politicians put their assets in so called "blind trusts". The politicians still own the stuff, but someone else makes all the choices about how and where it will be invested.
Interestingly enough the idea that you describe from Eddings books is similar in many ways to the system described by Plato in The Republic. He was worried about exactly the same kinds of problem because in the Ancient Athens of his day it seemed like no matter who was in power, they used their power to steal from everyone else. Oligarchs would steal from everyone, Aristocrats ould steal from the poor, and under Democracy the poor would steal from the rich. His proposal was to have a ruling class which would not have any private property, and hence would not have any incentive to steal.
Anyway, your post was hardly offtopic - most of the problems with intellectual property law boil down to different groups trying to use the political system to steal from everyone else.
The second is that copyright simply is not needed. The intent was to encourage people to produce works of science and useful arts, but history has shown that that is simply not necessary. People produce such works even without the promise that the state will use violence to ensure their compensation.
You are right to some extent - when it comes to books, music, and software, we probably would have many of the same goods produced (perhaps even better quality goods) without the incentives created by IP law. You are almost certainly wrong in other respects - especially when it comes to goods that require very large investments for their production, like new drugs and movies.
I'm a bit disappointed in the old guard Economist for failing to make the strongest economic argument for revamping the copyright laws.
They did not make that argument because the question of how IP law affects the amount of wealth in the world is considerably more complex than you suggest.
If we were just talking about the allocation of existing intellectual goods then you would be right - in fact it is pretty easy to show that a totally unobstructed commons would produce the most efficient allocation of of existing intellectual goods.
Unfortunately we also have to consider the production of new intellectual goods. As the authors of the US constitution realised, even if it is unpalatable to fence in parts of the intellectual commons, it might be worth it if the result is a higher rate of production of intellectual goods.
So the Economist made the right kind of argument - they tried to argue that we could *improve* the incentives to produce and *expand* the commons at the same time. That is the kind of argument that any economist can appreciate.
Re:What the People In Charge don't mention,
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
Would our economy be scrod?
There are several different problems hidden away in this question.
(1) The paper problem - if goods are not being bought and sold (even though they are being produced and consumed) then it is hard to take account of them when calculating the value of all the goods being produced and consumed. The result is that even if the total value of the economy increased as a result of expanding the commons, on paper it might look like it had decreased.
(2) Taxation - for similar reasons it is hard to tax production or consumption that does not involve any cash transactions. I think this probably is one of the reasons why an expanded commons does not look attractive to politicians. Even if an expanded commons would be better for the public - it would reduce the ability of politicians to do what they think is good for the public.
(3) Producing Nations vs Consuming Nations - the US obviously exports vastly more IP than it imports. The same is true of Western Europe, and some other developed nations. If the commons were expanded then, even if it increased both the production and consumption of goods in the global economy, it would almost certainly change the distribution of wealth in favour of consuming nations, at the expense of producing nations.
This is probably most of the reason why developed nations are more enthusiastic about increased protection for IP, while developing nations are less enthusiastic about it.
So - would our economy suffer as a result of an expanded commons? If you mean the the global economy then the answer is probably not, although it might look worse on paper, and it might look worse to politicians. If you mean the US (or EU) economy then the answer is probably yes. It would look worse on paper, it would look worse to politicians, and we would probably hold a smaller share of the world's wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the US has already tried something similar. In the Vietnam war they dropped thousands of sensors along the Ho Chi Minh trail that were supposed to detect enemy troop and supply movements. The program was not particularly successful - partly because the sensors were not very good at distinguishing between humans and animals, and partly because of the delays involved in getting fire laid down where it was supposed to be.
If you are interested in following this up, the operation was called "Igloo White".
What may save us is information overload. We can't be sure of that, but do you really believe that someone spends all day reading email that carnivore has intercepted? How many people would it really take? But we can't be certain, because there might be some way to handle the overload.
I think there is already a way to handle information overload - or at least there are ways to handle it and those ways are going to improve faster than the volume of information. Credit card companies have already developed some very sophisticated, and effective, methods for detecting fraudulent transactions amongst the millions (or is it billions now?) of transactions that they process every day. Methods like this, for spoting unusual or suspect behavior are going to rapidly improve along with surveilence technology.
Of course there is no way to watch everyone, but it is possible to watch everyone that is doing something interesting.
Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.
I thought seriously about discussing this idea in my original post. A number of ethical theorists like Bentham and Locke thought that the idea of constant observation by God was a key part of moral consciousness. Religious people who take this idea seriously are always in a position of having to think about what their behavior would look like from God's perspective. Bentham actually proposed that prisons should be built, so that the inmates were literally under constant observation, in the hope that they would get into this habbit of thinking (his plan which he called the "panopticon" has actually be implemented in some places).
I am an athiest, but like Machiavelli I am willing to consider the possibility that religion might serve a useful social function even though it is strictly fiction. Still it seems to me that there are serious problems with the idea of grounding morality in religion. For one thing it is getting increasingly harder to maintain the fiction. For another thing, people who think that God is the source of all value are prone to forget that it is really individual human lives that matter. When that happens they tend to do horrible things even though they think God is watching.
Wouldn't it be better if we could really make it true that we will be held accountable for every action, and that it is our fellow hummans who will do the accounting?
So the entire French language, where, in the the case of plurals the masculine form is taken is sexist?
No doubt if you asked a few French women about it then they would say that the language is sexist, and hard to fix. Fortunately in English it is much easier to avoid sexist language - which is why there is no good excuse for not doing so.
No I think he meant it as a euphemism for a metaphorical use of "screwed over". As in "you will be one of the last people to be butt fucked by management when money gets tight".
Anyone who thinks this is sexist has a
problem which your essay is not here to
address.
Anyone who thinks that using female pronouns is unproffessional has a sexist bent that really shouldn't be pandered to. One reason why women avoid programing might just be that everything they read about it reminds them that women are not supposed to program.
Personally I think it is quite healthy for authors to remind themselves, and their readers (especially if those readers are typically male), that women exist as well and that they also might be interested interested in reading what the author has to say.
I spent a little time wondering what it would be like living in a world with total surveilence - a world where someone could be watching or at least recording everything that happens. In some respects it doesn't actually look that bad.
No one would would be in any doubt about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No crime would go unsolved. No one would expect to get away with cheating on their spouse. Lying in general would become far less common. There just wouldn't be much to lie about which couldn't be verified by someone who wanted to.
Of course you would have to get used to the idea that six billion people could, if they wanted to, watch you take a dump every morning. But somehow I suspect that the excitement of voyerism would wear off if every act became a public act. Who knows, maybe we would all be happier if there was no longer any point in maintaining a public mask to cover our private lives.
I worried at first that total surveilence would lend itself too well to totalitarianism. "No crime would go unsolved" really just means that if you do anything the state disapproves of then it would not go unnoticed. But then it occured to me that totalitarianism would have a hard time getting established if eveything happens in the public view. Politicians could not cut deals behind closed doors, the military could not plot coups, the state could not lie to the people about what it is doing.
Living in a world like this would be really different from living in the world as it is, and it would be uncomfortable to people like us who are used to a good deal of privacy. But it wouldn't necessarily be bad - just very different.
Of course total surveilence is not going to happen any time soon. What will happen is an increase in certain types of surveilence by certain people. The way I see it, the problem with this is that we might wind up with a world where the state can watch the people, but the people cannot watch the state, or a world where the US knows exactly what Iraq is up to, but no one knows exactly what the US is up to. This kind of world really would be bad.
So here is a suggestion. Perhaps instead of trying to stem the tide of surveilence, what we should do is try to make sure that it washes over everyone evenly. If the state has this technology, then push for the same technology to be made available to private citizens. If the state wants more information about the people, then push for a more open government, so that the people will also have more information about the state.
It looks like they had two seperate goals here. One goal was to enable the ship to be commanded from any point. The obvious advantage to this is that it no longer matters if the bridge gets destroyed. You can re-establish your command center anywhere you like. The second was to reduce manpower by introducing more automated systems, which means that merely being able to issue orders by voice from any place on the ship is no longer enough. You need to be able to control automated systems from anywhere on the ship. Of course this doesn't explain why they went for wireless access points, rather than a whole bunch of wired access points.
The article explains the need for wireless here:
So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of the sensors.
If you take a closer look at the article you will also see just how better communications combined with a new set of sensors (etc) is expected to reduce manpower needs:
The wireless LANs will change the way crew members perform their jobs. "Today, they have to do rounds, every 45 minutes or two hours, for example," says Benga Erinle, director of government operations for 3ETI. "They're checking equipment, machinery, and filling out and signing paper logs." The TSM system is intended to do all this automatically. "It goes beyond simply gathering information," Erinle says. "We also use programs for diagnostics and prognostics, based on the data. If a critical system is going to fail, we'll pick that up and alert the chief engineer that this is pending." The TSM system also will change the Navy's long-standing practice of time-based maintenance--of replacing or tearing down machinery after so many hours or days of use.
In other words, on top of all the people who actually man the weapons and run the ship, you need a whole bunch of people who are just doing maintenance. This new system should reduce the number of those people.
All makes sense to me.
The British Royal Navy has resisted automation for years. They purposefully take many more crew members than they need so that when they lose half of them in battle the ship can still function.
In contrast the US Navy has always prefered to take twice as many ships as it needs.
Seriously - this is what you do if you have a sack load of money, but want to fight with a smaller number of more highly trained personel, and minimise casualties. You never use more people when you could just spend more money on hardware.
Alcohol causes dehyrdation which in turn will increase the probability of clots forming. You can reduce this effect by drinking plenty of other (preferably clear) fluids (no I don't mean stoli - I mean stuff like water).
Actually no - if it were a drug delivery system then it would fall within the scope of the FDA's power to regulate. So far the Tobacco companies have escaped that horror or horrors.
Smokeless cigarettes on the other hand (i.e. cigarettes that are considerably better for the smoker and entirely safe for those around him) were ruled to be drug delivery systems, and were kept out of the market. Life is strange sometimes.
What's the point of leaving out the drug?
I wondered about this myself - this stuff will ruin your health without making you feel good. Kind of like taking a burger and removing the flavor, but leaving the fat. Hmmm...
I don't want to rain on your parade, but in China the laws are already considerably worse than in the US (Why is this a surprise to anyone? These are the guys who like to drive tanks over protesting students). For example, people have been prosecuted for collecting information which has been published in newspapers. The Chinese have no reson to outlaw circumvention - they will happily throw you in the can for posessing entirely unprotected public domain information.
Actually I think you will find that most European countries have already signed on to the same treaties as the Australians, and that they are also in the process of introducting DMCA-like laws.
m l
Take a look here for example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25088.ht
where you will find this:
The directive [EUCD], which was approved last year, extends European copyright legislation so that it is even more restrictive than America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), critics argue. National governments have until December 22 to incorporate the directive in national legislation.
I'd like to think so too - but NZ politicians like the idea of NZ turning into a "knowledge economy", and they almost certainly think that stricter ip laws will be required for that to happen.
c on omy/
o si tion/position-11.html#P563_140517
Take a look here for a look at the bright future offered by the "knowledge economy":
http://www.med.govt.nz/pbt/infotech/knowledge_e
Take a look here to see what that might require:
http://www.med.govt.nz/buslt/int_prop/digital/p
Where you will find this little tidbit:
H. WIPO Internet Treaties
36. The Ministry recommends making any changes to the Act as a result of the current review in a way that benefits New Zealand, whilst enabling our compliance with relevant aspects of the WIPO Internet Treaties. Views are sought on New Zealand's possible accession to these treaties.
Again: this is makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who owns a copyright is entitled under copyright law to legally defend that copyright, music (monopoly) / industry included...especially if the distributor doesn't legally have permission (from the copyright owner) to distribute the music...permission would include ownership of the distributed media or rights granted by the owner to distribute the copyrighted material. Neither case exists for Kazaa.
This does make sense in fact. You are not allowed to use intellectual property rights to protect a monopoly (other than the monopoly expressly granted by the ip-right obviously). So for example, IBM was not allowed to use its BIOS copyrights to defend a monoply on PC hardware. Courts can infact void intellectual property rights which are misused in this way.
It sounds like Kazaa is arguing that copyright owners are in fact a monopoly (presumably Kazaa is arguing that the Music industry is trying to maintain a monopoly in the online retail market), and that they are using their ip to defend this monopoly (that is they are suing anyone who tries to compete in the online retail market for copyright infringement), which would in fact be illegal.
An interesting feature of this strategy is that it may force any copyright infringement cases to be put on hold until after the anti-trust case is resolved - which may well take 10 years or more (the IBM case it was not reolved until long after it had ceased to matter).
You need to spend more time talking to philosophers and/or logicians. You will soon find out that a lot can be made out the distinction between the actual and the possible - the distinction between what is and what might have been.
Although philosophers have a very technical use for the term, it does corespond roughly to the common use, which is to indicate a greater degree of reality or probability of occurance. So for example the difference between "this post might be off topic" and "this post might actually be off topic" is that the second suggests more than a mere possibility - it suggests something that has a good chance of being true.
A fine should relate to the damage done, right?
Actually no. Fines are usually assessed above and beyond damages. There is a general legal principle that punishment ought to be proportional to the crime - but that does very little to constrain the penalties that congress can attach to crimes. Note for example that it has not hindered three-strikes laws that impose very lengthy sentences on people who commit relatively minor crimes (on top of prior convictions for violent crimes).
Prosecution by the Justice Department? I thought they were there to serve the public, to keep serial killers of the street and so on. Spend tax payers money for prosecuting folks that share their favourite musician's work with other fans? Get real.
Just imagine that you get busted and the prosectutor gives you the following choices: (A) plead guilty and agree to give us all your money, up to a max of 250k, (B) don't plead guilty and still give us all of your money, plus go to jail for 3 years, or (C) (ha ha - this one is just for a laugh - see below) spend all of your money on a successful defense.
Which option would you pick? My guess is most people will go for (A) which means that the prosecution of these cases will almost certainly turn a profit for the feds. That is one of the great things about draconian penalties - sensible people are not willing to run the risks asociated with defending themselves.
And get it to stand up, when going through the higher courts? I don't think so.
This may come as a surprise, but similar laws with similar penalties for copyright violations have been around for a long time - haven't you ever watched the warning at the start of a rental video? As Jessica Litman notes in her book "Digital Copyright", novices to copyright law are often surprised to find out that what they are doing is illegal and that it is subject to such harsh penalties. They often decide to fight it out in court, and they always lose.
In this type of case the burden of proof is very low. They just have to show that you had a copy of something. Then it is up to you to show that you really owned it - if you can. Unless they are careless enough to conduct a bad search there will be nothing to appeal.
It depends a lot on who they prosecute and how often they prosecute.
During Nixion's war on drugs there was a shift towards legalising dope in the US for precisely this sort of reason. Too many white middle class parents found that their kids were being tossed into jail and deprived of future careers as doctors and lawyers.
Reagan's war on drugs avoided this problem by mostly targeting poor people or blacks (about one third of the black male population in the US is unable to vote - mostly because of minor drug convictions). Middle class white kids get some sort of first-offender program if they ever get caught at all.
In this case you can expect the same sort of thing. If they start routinely prosecuting middle class white people, then yes the law will get changed pretty fast.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. The real purpose here is to terrorise the population into obeying the law. Even a small risk of such harsh penalties will frighten many people away from P2P. Only a small number of people will actually have to be prosecuted in order to achieve this effect.
I think you missed the main thrust of the point that was being made.
If Microsoft stops supporting something then it will never be supported by anyone. No bug fixes, nothing. If RedHat stops supporting something then there is nothing to stop you from paying someone to pick up where RedHat left off. Hell someone might even find a viable bisiness model here by servicing old RedHat distros (OldHat?)
Actually this may explain why RedHat is doing things this way. If major apps require old versions of RedHat then that would, all by itself, force a lot of people to refrain from upgrading - even if they would like to. Even worse if different apps require different versions then that is going to seriously undermine the value of the RedHat Distro.
By limiting support to a small number of versions they encourage vendors to keep up with more recent releases of Redhat, and make it more likely that all the major apps will actually work on one of those supported versions.
Movies are about to be a lot cheaper to make. Very soon there will be no real difference between what Hollywood uses to shoot and edit video and what the kid next door is using.
I think this is probably true, so some time in the future movies will become like books in the sense that the production costs for most of them will not be very high. This does us no good right now. While some of my favourite movies were ultra-low budget (like Peter Jackson's "Bad Taste") others were not (like Peter Jackson's LoTR trilogy) and it is unlikey that films like that will be possible on a low budget even ten years from now.
As for drugs, do you seriously mean to suggest that the present system is in any way satisfactory at all?
You set a very low standard - sure there are lots of ways in which the current system is satisfactory - it produces lots of new and effective drugs for treating the sorts of diseases that some one like me (a middle class citizen of a reasonably wealthy nation) is likely to suffer from. Of course there are lots of other ways in which the current system is dis-satisfactory.
More than half of this research is tax-payer subsidized in any case.
True, but also rather misleading in two ways. Private spending on R&D massively outweighs public spending and, more importantly, you mistakenly suppose that that the incentives created by IP law are not driving public spending as well as private spending. In the US at least, the government is willing to spend large amounts of money on R&D because they expect the comercialised results to benefit the US economy and US tax revenues. If the results were free for all of the world to use, then it is highly likely that public expenditure on R&D would also go down.
Politicians didn't "run for office", they were selected to serve a 5 year term. Once selected, they were put under guard, not to protect them, but to ensure they didn't try to avoid completing their term. To ensure that they did their absolute best for the country, their personal property was liquidated and the funds invested in the Treasury, to be returned when their term was over. If the country prospered, so did they. If the country didn't prosper, neither did they. Kind of like buying Government Bonds, I guess.
Something like this already happens in the US. In order to avoid conflicts of interest many politicians put their assets in so called "blind trusts". The politicians still own the stuff, but someone else makes all the choices about how and where it will be invested.
Interestingly enough the idea that you describe from Eddings books is similar in many ways to the system described by Plato in The Republic. He was worried about exactly the same kinds of problem because in the Ancient Athens of his day it seemed like no matter who was in power, they used their power to steal from everyone else. Oligarchs would steal from everyone, Aristocrats ould steal from the poor, and under Democracy the poor would steal from the rich. His proposal was to have a ruling class which would not have any private property, and hence would not have any incentive to steal.
Anyway, your post was hardly offtopic - most of the problems with intellectual property law boil down to different groups trying to use the political system to steal from everyone else.
The second is that copyright simply is not needed. The intent was to encourage people to produce works of science and useful arts, but history has shown that that is simply not necessary. People produce such works even without the promise that the state will use violence to ensure their compensation.
You are right to some extent - when it comes to books, music, and software, we probably would have many of the same goods produced (perhaps even better quality goods) without the incentives created by IP law. You are almost certainly wrong in other respects - especially when it comes to goods that require very large investments for their production, like new drugs and movies.
I'm a bit disappointed in the old guard Economist for failing to make the strongest economic argument for revamping the copyright laws.
They did not make that argument because the question of how IP law affects the amount of wealth in the world is considerably more complex than you suggest.
If we were just talking about the allocation of existing intellectual goods then you would be right - in fact it is pretty easy to show that a totally unobstructed commons would produce the most efficient allocation of of existing intellectual goods.
Unfortunately we also have to consider the production of new intellectual goods. As the authors of the US constitution realised, even if it is unpalatable to fence in parts of the intellectual commons, it might be worth it if the result is a higher rate of production of intellectual goods.
So the Economist made the right kind of argument - they tried to argue that we could *improve* the incentives to produce and *expand* the commons at the same time. That is the kind of argument that any economist can appreciate.
Would our economy be scrod?
There are several different problems hidden away in this question.
(1) The paper problem - if goods are not being bought and sold (even though they are being produced and consumed) then it is hard to take account of them when calculating the value of all the goods being produced and consumed. The result is that even if the total value of the economy increased as a result of expanding the commons, on paper it might look like it had decreased.
(2) Taxation - for similar reasons it is hard to tax production or consumption that does not involve any cash transactions. I think this probably is one of the reasons why an expanded commons does not look attractive to politicians. Even if an expanded commons would be better for the public - it would reduce the ability of politicians to do what they think is good for the public.
(3) Producing Nations vs Consuming Nations - the US obviously exports vastly more IP than it imports. The same is true of Western Europe, and some other developed nations. If the commons were expanded then, even if it increased both the production and consumption of goods in the global economy, it would almost certainly change the distribution of wealth in favour of consuming nations, at the expense of producing nations.
This is probably most of the reason why developed nations are more enthusiastic about increased protection for IP, while developing nations are less enthusiastic about it.
So - would our economy suffer as a result of an expanded commons? If you mean the the global economy then the answer is probably not, although it might look worse on paper, and it might look worse to politicians. If you mean the US (or EU) economy then the answer is probably yes. It would look worse on paper, it would look worse to politicians, and we would probably hold a smaller share of the world's wealth.