Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
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Fair IP Laws?
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I like giving information away. It's a fun hobby. I write almost every day. Rather than selling my writing, I write about things that I could never sell and give that writing to whomever comes to my website. Are you calling my readers criminals?
No, but then you already admitted that you could never sell your writing. Would you still give it away if you could sell it for a handsome sum of money?
Sure you have the occasional artist who has great record sales and manages to come out on top after they're anally raped by their label, but the great majority of smaller performers make their money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling concert tickets. Even then, they may not break even.
But is this the fault of the labels or the performer? Perhaps he's just not that good a performer. Or perhaps he's not that good at handling the business end of the job.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
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But is there a shortage of copyrighted material? Maybe we don't have an unlimited amount of water and, so, water should be treated as an economic scarcity. But, since a program (or a song) can be copied for almost nothing, should it be considered a scarce economic resource?
Re:But who created the content?
on
Fair IP Laws?
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The content creators (ie. the songwriters) own the copyright and, therefore, decide how it's used. The others are just performers of the song. The performance artists are free to negotiate their contract for doing the performance anyway they want (which might be anything from a one-time payment to a share of the royalties of the song), but they don't own the song.
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
on
Fair IP Laws?
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Let's assume that what you're asking happens (I kind of think it already had, but...). What does that lead to?
Individual song writers now have to track their songs and how the songs are used.
Popular songs are used in a vast array of ways and for many different purposes (depending upon the popularity of the song).
Individual song writers cannot keep up with the legal and business demands of tracking their songs as well as write new songs.
So, individual song writers band together and hire some entity to track song usage and manage copyrights (let's call it the Song Writer's Industry Association of America).
So basically we're going to go to an all pay per view model with no copying, right? Think about it:
The viewers don't want all these commercials.
The broadcasters want to make money.
The producers want to make money.
The artists (and their reps) don't like people preventing them from making money on their product (which unlimited free copies would do).
I don't see anyway around it. They'll basically go to an all pay per view model and pass all costs (including the profits they want) onto the final customer.
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
This might be a good thing. At this point, economics breaks down and everyone is free to live without worrying about acquiring things. Economics is the management of scarce resources, but, if everyone could replicate what they needed, then resources are no longer scarce and economic theory no longer applies.
If buying a $20 CD with only a track or two that you want isn't good for you, would you pay (say) $1 (or less) per track if you could mix the CD at the time of purchase with any set of tracks you wanted?
RIAA gets their revenue.
You get your choices of music.
Musicians see precisely which songs are hot.
Wasn't there already a company that had this business model?
Teachers could legitimately claim to have participated in the creative process by giving you the tools for doing your homework the proper way. Can you make the same claim for the music you burn?
If it was only 5 people, probably not. If it was 100 people, I might think I had something that people might actually pay for if I stopped giving it away. If it was 10000 people, then I might have discovered my next profession!
Isn't this just a variation on the psychological premise that people can only deal with 7 (give or take) things at a time? This leads to the conclusion that there could only be a few major companies in any market because more than half a dozen is too many for the customers to keep track of. Therefore, the goal of any company is to be the one with the most recognizable name in the particular market they're shooting for.
They probably don't fit in the same way. Unlike a company like Amazon, the porn industry is more apt to want to get its product out to the customer without a recognizable company name attached to it. On the web, they try to make it easier to search for the product than to search for the company putting out the product.
The "goons" that M$ uses is the company's shareholders. If M$ takes away some substantial portion of the company's profits (by not giving the company a discount), the shareholders of the company will shoot the executives for M$.
Actually, an interesting lawsuit will be the one against PVRs that copyright owners bring under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. PVR manufacturers will probably have to put an "anti-skip commercial" feature in as a means of appeasement.
Give it 5 more years and most people will be replacing their VCR (either to get new features or to simply replace it when it dies). How much you want to bet that the only available replacements will either no longer allow you to tape copyrighted programs or have an "anti-skip commercial" feature to prevent you from blowing by the commercial???
Wrong. That means you have the right to pull anything you can out of the public airwaves. However, that does not mean that it has to be useable by you. If the TV corporations find that they cannot make money in freely distributing television shows, they'll begin broadcasting encrypted signals using patented algorithms and supply decryption boxes to their PAYING customers. Then, if you capture the feed AND decrypt it, you'll have violated the patent and be chargeable under that.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
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So when the DoJ goes to trial over monopolies, licensing patents at a much lower price to competitors is often part of the deal when settling out of court.
Well, yeah! That doesn't mean that the two are being equated. That means that, once a monopoly has been determined, something must be done to level the playing field with all the competitors. If the company has patents in the area it is a monopoly, then spreading those patents around would give competitors something with which they could better compete against the monopolist.
You're confusing programming language with design concepts. The question is not "is Fortran better for engineering problems than C++?" but rather "can OO design and development be applied well to engineering problems?"
If you're going to refactor your Perl code, I would suggest pushing to have the code well documented with a tool like PerlDoc. One of the key problems that new people have with code is trying to understand the decisions that previous people made in the design of the code. Pushing more documentation into the code will help that in the long run. Plus, making documentation a standard part of your code will help make the code better as the developers will tend to throw out and/or rewrite code that they can't explain in the documentation.
Now if you could only get this to work such that, when I insert a CD on my Linux machine, the programs source code will automatically build and install.
It's also a bit of culture. Windows users are "used to" doing it one way (like inserting a CD in the drive) and Linux/Unix users are "used to" doing it another way ("configure; make; make install"). There's probably no reason that you couldn't have an autorunning CD do a call to a program that does "copy; configure; make; make install" (or some safer variation).
If you want to ask yourself the really BIG questions about the future of science, there is the book Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer which seems to unite science and religion. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm not sure how it comes out, but it is really interesting so far.
But, if SOAP is going to pipe all sorts of requests across one port, does it really matter if you force people to connect to that port via a secure connection? I mean, that may keep out the average hacker, but your service requestor still has access to all sorts of things that you may not want him to have access to -- right?
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No, but then you already admitted that you could never sell your writing. Would you still give it away if you could sell it for a handsome sum of money?
But is this the fault of the labels or the performer? Perhaps he's just not that good a performer. Or perhaps he's not that good at handling the business end of the job.
But is there a shortage of copyrighted material? Maybe we don't have an unlimited amount of water and, so, water should be treated as an economic scarcity. But, since a program (or a song) can be copied for almost nothing, should it be considered a scarce economic resource?
The content creators (ie. the songwriters) own the copyright and, therefore, decide how it's used. The others are just performers of the song. The performance artists are free to negotiate their contract for doing the performance anyway they want (which might be anything from a one-time payment to a share of the royalties of the song), but they don't own the song.
Let's assume that what you're asking happens (I kind of think it already had, but...). What does that lead to?
Aren't we back where we started?
So basically we're going to go to an all pay per view model with no copying , right? Think about it:
I don't see anyway around it. They'll basically go to an all pay per view model and pass all costs (including the profits they want) onto the final customer.
This might be a good thing. At this point, economics breaks down and everyone is free to live without worrying about acquiring things. Economics is the management of scarce resources, but, if everyone could replicate what they needed, then resources are no longer scarce and economic theory no longer applies.
If buying a $20 CD with only a track or two that you want isn't good for you, would you pay (say) $1 (or less) per track if you could mix the CD at the time of purchase with any set of tracks you wanted?
Wasn't there already a company that had this business model?
Teachers could legitimately claim to have participated in the creative process by giving you the tools for doing your homework the proper way. Can you make the same claim for the music you burn?
If it was only 5 people, probably not. If it was 100 people, I might think I had something that people might actually pay for if I stopped giving it away. If it was 10000 people, then I might have discovered my next profession!
Isn't this just a variation on the psychological premise that people can only deal with 7 (give or take) things at a time? This leads to the conclusion that there could only be a few major companies in any market because more than half a dozen is too many for the customers to keep track of. Therefore, the goal of any company is to be the one with the most recognizable name in the particular market they're shooting for.
They probably don't fit in the same way. Unlike a company like Amazon, the porn industry is more apt to want to get its product out to the customer without a recognizable company name attached to it. On the web, they try to make it easier to search for the product than to search for the company putting out the product.
But they apparently will penalize OEMs for giving you a free web-browser that isn't made by M$.
The "goons" that M$ uses is the company's shareholders. If M$ takes away some substantial portion of the company's profits (by not giving the company a discount), the shareholders of the company will shoot the executives for M$.
Actually, an interesting lawsuit will be the one against PVRs that copyright owners bring under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. PVR manufacturers will probably have to put an "anti-skip commercial" feature in as a means of appeasement.
Oh really...
Give it 5 more years and most people will be replacing their VCR (either to get new features or to simply replace it when it dies). How much you want to bet that the only available replacements will either no longer allow you to tape copyrighted programs or have an "anti-skip commercial" feature to prevent you from blowing by the commercial???
Wrong. That means you have the right to pull anything you can out of the public airwaves. However, that does not mean that it has to be useable by you. If the TV corporations find that they cannot make money in freely distributing television shows, they'll begin broadcasting encrypted signals using patented algorithms and supply decryption boxes to their PAYING customers. Then, if you capture the feed AND decrypt it, you'll have violated the patent and be chargeable under that.
Why does it have to be an either-or?
The advantages of a book are:
The advantages of an e-book are:
The advantages of online material are:
Can't these all just "get along"???
Well, yeah! That doesn't mean that the two are being equated. That means that, once a monopoly has been determined, something must be done to level the playing field with all the competitors. If the company has patents in the area it is a monopoly, then spreading those patents around would give competitors something with which they could better compete against the monopolist.
Oh, there was a smiley in there.
You're confusing programming language with design concepts. The question is not "is Fortran better for engineering problems than C++?" but rather "can OO design and development be applied well to engineering problems?"
If you're going to refactor your Perl code, I would suggest pushing to have the code well documented with a tool like PerlDoc. One of the key problems that new people have with code is trying to understand the decisions that previous people made in the design of the code. Pushing more documentation into the code will help that in the long run. Plus, making documentation a standard part of your code will help make the code better as the developers will tend to throw out and/or rewrite code that they can't explain in the documentation.
Now if you could only get this to work such that, when I insert a CD on my Linux machine, the programs source code will automatically build and install.
It's also a bit of culture. Windows users are "used to" doing it one way (like inserting a CD in the drive) and Linux/Unix users are "used to" doing it another way ("configure; make; make install"). There's probably no reason that you couldn't have an autorunning CD do a call to a program that does "copy; configure; make; make install" (or some safer variation).
If you want to ask yourself the really BIG questions about the future of science, there is the book Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer which seems to unite science and religion. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm not sure how it comes out, but it is really interesting so far.
Can you say Trojan Horse virus?
But, if SOAP is going to pipe all sorts of requests across one port, does it really matter if you force people to connect to that port via a secure connection? I mean, that may keep out the average hacker, but your service requestor still has access to all sorts of things that you may not want him to have access to -- right?