That exact advice and reasoning were stated explicitly in an employee training I took at Microsoft. Incredibly, the words of Steve Martin: "I forgot armed robbery was illegal!" appear to have some actual weight.
A while ago I read on Slashdot that given enough time, a technological civilization will eventually figure out how to create complex, completely realistic simulations of worlds and universes. We are on the verge of being able to do that ourselves. In a sufficiently complex simulation, the creatures living inside the virtual universe will also attain that ability. The simulated universes would greatly outnumber the real ones, which means that our own universe is far more likely to be a simulation than to be real. I wonder what odds the bookmakers would give on that?
One problem is that the copyright industry has been very successful at equating copyright and property in the public mind. Many people now believe that the right to control the use of everything we create is an inherent human right that has existed since the dawn of time, and that copyright laws merely codified this right. In their view copyright infringement is the moral equivalent of snatching a little old lady's purse. It's hard to have a reasonable discussion of Fair Use when the copyright industry gets to cast itself as the little old lady.
But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Or maybe agribusiness lawyers just haven't come up with a way to pull that off yet.
Farmers know it would be totally impractical to try to stop each other from selling plants that grow spontaneously from seeds that blow from field to field. But Canada's supreme court has upheld the rights of Canola grain patent holders to do exactly that.
To some people it's blindingly obvious that they're geniuses surrounded by idiots. Obviousness is never an argument for anything. The basic issue in IP discussions always seems to boil down to whether IP rights are granted with society's consent, or are inherent properties of being human. "Because it's mine" is not an argument.
Anticommons didn't seem to be the blocking factor for Golden Rice, according to the Wikipedia article you cited. It says the companies involved readily granted humanitarian use licenses. It mentions that Greenpeace and other organizations opposed Golden Rice, but that doesn't explain why it's still not available for human consumption 7 years after development. They seem to have acquired all the IP rights and they had excellent publicity. Any idea what actually went wrong?
Wow, thanks for that amazing post. I don't entirely follow your medicine argument; the FDA's mission, whether they accomplish it or not, is to protect the public from snakeoil. But that aside, I'm glad you've freed yourself from the need to build a castle wall around your creations. I hope other writers and artists read your post and that you post more about your personal success every chance you get.
Discussing patents and copyrights can quickly become an exercise in futility when people have an almost religious fervor about their rights. While some would say that copying ideas is natural human behavior, which IP laws artificially restrict to a degree in the name of public good, others would argue that IP is an inherent human right which IP laws simply recognize. These two positions are fundamentally opposed.
But even IP fundamentalist can be convinced that fully exercising one's own rights is not always in one's own best interest. For example, suppose we believed that each of us had the innate right to rule the world and everything in it. That right would work fine if humans could live far enough apart so as never to have any contact with each other. We could live under the illusion of total dominion (at least until we wanted to reproduce). But stubbornly defending that right in practice would be a huge obstacle to forming any kind of functioning society.
Modern IP laws and their vocal proponents have gone a long way toward convincing the public that IP rights are indeed inherent and sacred, not merely privileges granted by lawmakers "for limited times," but a fundamental requirement of civilization. In discussions about limiting copyrights or patent rights, IP fundamentalists invoke images of a backward, anarchic world without modern conveniences, medicines, literature or basic services. It's a false dichotomy, but one that has been painted all too vividly on the public's mind.
I've always found that real-world examples are a good way to point out the flaws in absolutist arguments. The example of the aircraft patent pool illustrates how IP cooperation can be beneficial even when it has to be forced. But there are readers out there who will argue that even that specific example was a bad idea. Some people feel threatened by any notion that something they consider theirs might be taken away from them. They seem to feel that losing everything is at stake whenever they give up anything, and that totalitarianism is always just around the corner. I don't know how to communicate with those people.
A gaseous core reactor would radiate ultraviolet energy directly to the hydrogen, eliminating the need to generate electricity. Take a look at this article about a hypothetical design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable nuclear rocket using the Saturn V form factor that could lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return an equal payload to a powered landing.
I confess. I've made millions of illegal copies of copyrighted material on my retinas and transferred them to my visual cortex and long-term memory, where I routinely call them up for unauthorized viewing. Just let me gouge out my eyes and I'll call 911 and turn myself in.
If you live in Seattle forget Radio Shack. Go to Radar Electric on Western Ave. It's staffed by people who actually know about electronics, and is very much like I remember Radio Shacks from the pre-computer era. They have a vast array of components in bulk bins, and usually some surplus odds and ends on sale cheap.
When I used to work for Tektronix they had testing software that could simulate circuitry. That was back in the 80s. Aren't there by now virtual electronics labs for PCs that let you wire up components on screen and see what happens? Seems like that would be a faster way to learn than by breadboarding or soldering.
Yes, it was a drive to setup and adhere to standards, but not exactly unfunded. The people who created the standards and the slew of accompanying rules and training materials got paid plenty. The overall result was to turn the public education system into a test prep system. To be fair, it was an attempt to respond to a serious decline in basic readin' writin' and 'rithmetic skills, as measured by businesses having to train their employees to do things they should have learned in school. Employers don't need you to know how the government works.
No Child Left Behind was a far-right pendulum swing in the ongoing battle over whether the purpose of public education is to train people to function as workers or to lead better lives. In the past 4 or 5 decades public education had drifted quite far to the left. Rather than attempt to create a philosophical shift back toward basics, which requires people skills and time, No Child Left Behind simply imposed rules and financial consequences, which can take effect quickly.
Both bills require a "good faith effort" to find a rights holder. Such loosely defined terms are fodder for litigation. Registration provides a clear-cut way to prove rights or lack therof. How about automatic registration for a short term like 5 years, and then required registration after that? Then creators wouldn't have to register anything until it proved itself valuable enough, and re-users would only have to establish that material is more than 5 years old and not registered. Is that too simple for the minds of legislators?
The mere idea of people from the recording industry crossing over to run internet services bothers me fundamentally. Really bigtime record execs seem to share an almost feudal belief that music innately belongs to them, exists only to enrich them, and couldn't exist without them. It goes way beyond a normal business level of competitiveness. It's more like the Divine Right of Kings. The infrastructure of the Internet is far too important for them to control.
The original terms of copyright protection were for 7 years. For a long time it was normal for copyrights to expire. But at some point lawmakers started extending copyright terms whenever someone with influence wanted to hang onto something. The laws have been tailored to benefit the rights holders of this tiny percentage of material. The vast majority of material has only historical value after a couple decades. But historians and documentarists can't re-use any of it unless they can identify the rights holders. When the cost of doing this is too high because time has obscured the trail, the material just lies there until it's forgotten. That's the modern version of preserving culture.
You can transfer your rights to someone else. Actually, the control Lucas has over the storm trooper uniforms is really the result of a contractual transfer of the innate rights Ainsworth would have had by virtue of creating them.
I think that's a good analysis. Isn't it great that we have laws to stop people from re-using an idea until it becomes worthless? The Founding Fathers would approve!
Bah! All you have to do is convince yourself that when the Founding Fathers talked about promoting progress and creativity, they surely must have meant "hiring contract labor."
After nobody buys these overpriced things, HP will dump them within 2 years, and they'll be on EBay for $90. Just like the 3Com Audrey, a diskless "internet appliance" a sort of Jetsons tablet computer. Was $495, now $85. If only this HP thing had a touch screen...
Cheapo incandescent light bulbs are rated to burn for 750 hours, which is about 6 months at 4 hours of use per day. More expensive ones go 1000 hours. Compact fluorescents last 10,000 hours -- more than 5 years. So these argon jobs should average 10 years before replacement. If they get these into a form factor for home use they could easily compete with compact fluorescents. The real cost of a light bulb is in the electricity it uses.
If electricity costs 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, in 20,000 hours you would use: Incandescents: 20 75-watt bulbs in 10 years, plus $160 for electricity Compact Fluorescents: 2 bulbs in 10 years, $48 for electricity Argon: 1 bulb, $24 for electricity
A couple years ago I replaced all my incandescent household bulbs with CFs. They have saved me hundreds of $$/year in electricity, and I have replaced exactly two bulbs. One was defective; the manufacturer sent me a new one after a phone call to the 800 number printed on the bulb base. The other one I broke. The electricity saving made it worthwhile to throw away all the incandescents rather than wait for them to burn out. This was true even though I replaced 75-watt incandescents with 100-watt-equivalent CFs because I could only find CFs in 60 or 100-watt equiv. This might not be necessary with the argons, in which case their 10-year electricity cost would be only $12 instead of $16.
If argons become available for home use, they could be priced more than 10 times higher than CF bulbs and still be cheaper over their lifespans, besides giving you full-spectrum light with no mercury. I will happily do another full round of replacements!
My theory is that the Galactica is about 40 light years from present-day Earth. Radio waves carrying Jimi Hendrix music from the 60s are passing through the ship's structure and are somehow being converted to sounds, which those characters alone can hear because of their cylon nature.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that the people who bought laptops etc. with all those overpriced screens in them won't see a dime of it. Just a guess though.
That exact advice and reasoning were stated explicitly in an employee training I took at Microsoft. Incredibly, the words of Steve Martin: "I forgot armed robbery was illegal!" appear to have some actual weight.
A while ago I read on Slashdot that given enough time, a technological civilization will eventually figure out how to create complex, completely realistic simulations of worlds and universes. We are on the verge of being able to do that ourselves. In a sufficiently complex simulation, the creatures living inside the virtual universe will also attain that ability. The simulated universes would greatly outnumber the real ones, which means that our own universe is far more likely to be a simulation than to be real. I wonder what odds the bookmakers would give on that?
One problem is that the copyright industry has been very successful at equating copyright and property in the public mind. Many people now believe that the right to control the use of everything we create is an inherent human right that has existed since the dawn of time, and that copyright laws merely codified this right. In their view copyright infringement is the moral equivalent of snatching a little old lady's purse. It's hard to have a reasonable discussion of Fair Use when the copyright industry gets to cast itself as the little old lady.
But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Or maybe agribusiness lawyers just haven't come up with a way to pull that off yet.
Farmers know it would be totally impractical to try to stop each other from selling plants that grow spontaneously from seeds that blow from field to field. But Canada's supreme court has upheld the rights of Canola grain patent holders to do exactly that.
To some people it's blindingly obvious that they're geniuses surrounded by idiots. Obviousness is never an argument for anything. The basic issue in IP discussions always seems to boil down to whether IP rights are granted with society's consent, or are inherent properties of being human. "Because it's mine" is not an argument.
Anticommons didn't seem to be the blocking factor for Golden Rice, according to the Wikipedia article you cited. It says the companies involved readily granted humanitarian use licenses. It mentions that Greenpeace and other organizations opposed Golden Rice, but that doesn't explain why it's still not available for human consumption 7 years after development. They seem to have acquired all the IP rights and they had excellent publicity. Any idea what actually went wrong?
Wow, thanks for that amazing post. I don't entirely follow your medicine argument; the FDA's mission, whether they accomplish it or not, is to protect the public from snakeoil. But that aside, I'm glad you've freed yourself from the need to build a castle wall around your creations. I hope other writers and artists read your post and that you post more about your personal success every chance you get.
Discussing patents and copyrights can quickly become an exercise in futility when people have an almost religious fervor about their rights. While some would say that copying ideas is natural human behavior, which IP laws artificially restrict to a degree in the name of public good, others would argue that IP is an inherent human right which IP laws simply recognize. These two positions are fundamentally opposed.
But even IP fundamentalist can be convinced that fully exercising one's own rights is not always in one's own best interest. For example, suppose we believed that each of us had the innate right to rule the world and everything in it. That right would work fine if humans could live far enough apart so as never to have any contact with each other. We could live under the illusion of total dominion (at least until we wanted to reproduce). But stubbornly defending that right in practice would be a huge obstacle to forming any kind of functioning society.
Modern IP laws and their vocal proponents have gone a long way toward convincing the public that IP rights are indeed inherent and sacred, not merely privileges granted by lawmakers "for limited times," but a fundamental requirement of civilization. In discussions about limiting copyrights or patent rights, IP fundamentalists invoke images of a backward, anarchic world without modern conveniences, medicines, literature or basic services. It's a false dichotomy, but one that has been painted all too vividly on the public's mind.
I've always found that real-world examples are a good way to point out the flaws in absolutist arguments. The example of the aircraft patent pool illustrates how IP cooperation can be beneficial even when it has to be forced. But there are readers out there who will argue that even that specific example was a bad idea. Some people feel threatened by any notion that something they consider theirs might be taken away from them. They seem to feel that losing everything is at stake whenever they give up anything, and that totalitarianism is always just around the corner. I don't know how to communicate with those people.
A gaseous core reactor would radiate ultraviolet energy directly to the hydrogen, eliminating the need to generate electricity. Take a look at this article about a hypothetical design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable nuclear rocket using the Saturn V form factor that could lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return an equal payload to a powered landing.
I confess. I've made millions of illegal copies of copyrighted material on my retinas and transferred them to my visual cortex and long-term memory, where I routinely call them up for unauthorized viewing. Just let me gouge out my eyes and I'll call 911 and turn myself in.
If you live in Seattle forget Radio Shack. Go to Radar Electric on Western Ave. It's staffed by people who actually know about electronics, and is very much like I remember Radio Shacks from the pre-computer era. They have a vast array of components in bulk bins, and usually some surplus odds and ends on sale cheap.
When I used to work for Tektronix they had testing software that could simulate circuitry. That was back in the 80s. Aren't there by now virtual electronics labs for PCs that let you wire up components on screen and see what happens? Seems like that would be a faster way to learn than by breadboarding or soldering.
Yes, it was a drive to setup and adhere to standards, but not exactly unfunded. The people who created the standards and the slew of accompanying rules and training materials got paid plenty. The overall result was to turn the public education system into a test prep system. To be fair, it was an attempt to respond to a serious decline in basic readin' writin' and 'rithmetic skills, as measured by businesses having to train their employees to do things they should have learned in school. Employers don't need you to know how the government works.
No Child Left Behind was a far-right pendulum swing in the ongoing battle over whether the purpose of public education is to train people to function as workers or to lead better lives. In the past 4 or 5 decades public education had drifted quite far to the left. Rather than attempt to create a philosophical shift back toward basics, which requires people skills and time, No Child Left Behind simply imposed rules and financial consequences, which can take effect quickly.
'nuff said.
Both bills require a "good faith effort" to find a rights holder. Such loosely defined terms are fodder for litigation. Registration provides a clear-cut way to prove rights or lack therof. How about automatic registration for a short term like 5 years, and then required registration after that? Then creators wouldn't have to register anything until it proved itself valuable enough, and re-users would only have to establish that material is more than 5 years old and not registered. Is that too simple for the minds of legislators?
The mere idea of people from the recording industry crossing over to run internet services bothers me fundamentally. Really bigtime record execs seem to share an almost feudal belief that music innately belongs to them, exists only to enrich them, and couldn't exist without them. It goes way beyond a normal business level of competitiveness. It's more like the Divine Right of Kings. The infrastructure of the Internet is far too important for them to control.
The original terms of copyright protection were for 7 years. For a long time it was normal for copyrights to expire. But at some point lawmakers started extending copyright terms whenever someone with influence wanted to hang onto something. The laws have been tailored to benefit the rights holders of this tiny percentage of material. The vast majority of material has only historical value after a couple decades. But historians and documentarists can't re-use any of it unless they can identify the rights holders. When the cost of doing this is too high because time has obscured the trail, the material just lies there until it's forgotten. That's the modern version of preserving culture.
You can transfer your rights to someone else. Actually, the control Lucas has over the storm trooper uniforms is really the result of a contractual transfer of the innate rights Ainsworth would have had by virtue of creating them.
I think that's a good analysis. Isn't it great that we have laws to stop people from re-using an idea until it becomes worthless? The Founding Fathers would approve!
Bah! All you have to do is convince yourself that when the Founding Fathers talked about promoting progress and creativity, they surely must have meant "hiring contract labor."
After nobody buys these overpriced things, HP will dump them within 2 years, and they'll be on EBay for $90. Just like the 3Com Audrey, a diskless "internet appliance" a sort of Jetsons tablet computer. Was $495, now $85. If only this HP thing had a touch screen...
Cheapo incandescent light bulbs are rated to burn for 750 hours, which is about 6 months at 4 hours of use per day. More expensive ones go 1000 hours. Compact fluorescents last 10,000 hours -- more than 5 years. So these argon jobs should average 10 years before replacement. If they get these into a form factor for home use they could easily compete with compact fluorescents. The real cost of a light bulb is in the electricity it uses.
If electricity costs 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, in 20,000 hours you would use:
Incandescents: 20 75-watt bulbs in 10 years, plus $160 for electricity
Compact Fluorescents: 2 bulbs in 10 years, $48 for electricity
Argon: 1 bulb, $24 for electricity
A couple years ago I replaced all my incandescent household bulbs with CFs. They have saved me hundreds of $$/year in electricity, and I have replaced exactly two bulbs. One was defective; the manufacturer sent me a new one after a phone call to the 800 number printed on the bulb base. The other one I broke. The electricity saving made it worthwhile to throw away all the incandescents rather than wait for them to burn out. This was true even though I replaced 75-watt incandescents with 100-watt-equivalent CFs because I could only find CFs in 60 or 100-watt equiv. This might not be necessary with the argons, in which case their 10-year electricity cost would be only $12 instead of $16.
If argons become available for home use, they could be priced more than 10 times higher than CF bulbs and still be cheaper over their lifespans, besides giving you full-spectrum light with no mercury. I will happily do another full round of replacements!
I like Josh Whedon's analogy (at least I think it was him) about BSG, that it's like they took a canvas high-top and made it into an Air Jordan.
My theory is that the Galactica is about 40 light years from present-day Earth. Radio waves carrying Jimi Hendrix music from the 60s are passing through the ship's structure and are somehow being converted to sounds, which those characters alone can hear because of their cylon nature.