I think you could probably make as many encrypted or encoded (.tar,.zip, etc) copies as you like. But the media players and recorders will refuse to use these alternatively encoded copies since the disc drive won't authenticate these files through the key encrypted special calls that are part of the system. So unless you have a alternative (eg, illegal thanks to DMCA) player, the encoded/encrypted copies can't be played.
The only area where I think patents and the resulting disclosure make sense is in pharmaceuticals. And even in that case, the duration should be shortened. In other areas, I would rather have the freedom to independently discover/implement something or reverse engineer it than be fenced off from an idea that is patented. How many programmers have the time and money required comb over all of the "disclosed" patents out there, find all infringing areas in his program, then license each of them? This situation is an unnecessary impediment to intellectual freedom, IMHO. Again, I don't consider ideas to be flowing freely if I am not allowed to apply them.
While it is true that a patent involves disclosure, the fact remains that the information that has been patented is locked down, only to be used by the "owner" and those licensed. This kind of disclosure is hardly a bargain when you consider the loss of freedom that results.
But this will lead to a whole other argument about whether ideas and patterns should be able to be owned. I don't think it's worth the loss of freedom and privacy to allow/enforce that kind of ownership (IP). Not a good deal for society at large. And there are business models that allow intellectual workers and artists to get paid that do no require "intellectual property" and its intellectual straight jackets. Some business models (eg, novelist) would no longer be viable full time occupations, but that's OK in the grand scheme of things. Some people would still write books for free anyway. The intellectual police state we're heading towards is a step in the wrong direction and isn't jusitified as a means to prop up antiquated business models. But you'll probably disagree with this and we could go round and round forever about it.
Weakness in IP laws is not a threat to the free flow of information at all. Stronger IP laws would be a threat to the free flow of information since, after all, at the heart of the very notion of "intellectual property" lies implied limitations in transmission and reproduction of information. Intellectual property is the antithesis of the free flow of information IMHO.
Techies will cry foul, but I think that the legal departments of Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate will cave in fear of Sony, AOL Time Warner, et all.
You're absolutely right. People who love their freedom and privacy will have no voice until they organize themselves into something big enough to compete with the influence of the megacorps. Something as powerful as the NRA. Maybe it will be the EFF. But how log is it going to take us to do this? And will it come too late?
At what point did consumer rights just completely disappear? What happened to the idea that you try to please your customer? Where did that mentallity disappear to?
Unfortunately, they think that controlling the customer is more effective. And they've learned how to sugar coat this insidious erosion of our freedoms so that the poison goes unnoticed by most. I've never been one for biblical prophecies, but that part about everyone having to have a number to buy or sell is dead on. It's happening and it's not a good thing for people who care about freedom or privacy.
Re:All sites with Linux source code will be illega
on
Copy Protection Galore
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· Score: 1
[i]Simple... The MPAA/RIAA will go back to their favorite puppet, "Judge" Kaplan and get Linux/BSD and anything else that can use ext2 illegal as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Furthermore, the Linux source code, as it contains this "illegal" code.[/i]
But the DMCA doesn't have teeth if there are significant noninfringing uses, right? Or am I confusing this clause with another law? Anybody know more about the "significant noninfriging use" clause?
It doesn't matter to the bands just starting out since they don't recieve significant royalties anyway. The bands that are just starting out are the ones much more likely to "give it away" to spread the word. The bands like Offspring, who have platinum sales (and thus sell enough to recieve royalties) are the ones with something to lose by giving the recordings away.
However if you aren't confident that it won't be taken from you, then you would never spend the time or money building anything
That's simply not true. But it's a common myth of IP supporters. Did Michelangelo, Leonardo DeVinci, Isaac Newton, Aristotle and all the other creative types who existed before intellectual property laws came into existence have no motivation to do their thing? Of course not! If there is no intellectual property, will companies stop competing to sell consumers products that they want to buy? Of course not! If there is market demand, then somebody will meet it - with or without the existence of intellectual property.
I can't fathom how Napster's desire to suck at the trough overrides the desire of some musicians to charge for their recordings
At a superficial level, it sounds like it may be a good thing to let musicians control their recorded works, but when you think through the ramifications involved, the complexity of licensing and enforcement, the slow unequivocal degradation of our fundamental freedoms that are needed to enforce IP laws - the ugliness of it all - I no longer think "intellectual property" is a good idea. I think our society and business environment would be much healthier without it. And I don't think a wholesale abandonment of IP, as I have advocated, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But obviously, a lot of people disagree with me either because they don't want to open their mind (my opinion) or because I'm not thinking clearly (their opinion).
Sorry, but you're confused. Even as an idiot I see these things clearly - so I think there just might be a chance for you too.
There is, of course, an intrinsic rate of decay in any physical representation of information - this is obvious to any high school student and isn't what we're talking about here. In these discussions, I am not refering to the degradation of the specific instances of information, but the temporal-spatial distribution of information, which is also subject to the second law (entropy increases).
If you still don't understand this, let me make it simple for you. Consider a collection of marbles on the floor during an earthquake. Each marble may be subject to chips and degradation - a more disordered state. But the collection of marbles as a whole is also subject to the statistical mechanics of entropy the promote their spread throughout the room.
So, presuming that you worked 1 to 5 nights a week, you made a decent living. Good to know somebody does.
I forgot to mention that that money was split 4 ways and it was hard to make any kind of living. So I got a real job and now just do music as a hobby. I like it better that way since my creativity doesn't have to be burdened by trying to make a living off of it.
If music wants to be free, why am I paying a cover charge?Because there are a limited number of seats. And you are paying not for their music, but for a one time service - like you pay for your doctors or lawyer's advice rather than the information in their medical texts. And people love going to shows because it is about much more than just the music, so they're willing to pay. And I'd pay $30 any day of the week just to watch Eric Johnson's fretboard finess.
If you choose to work strictly live, that's a perfectly reasonable choice, but if somebody else chooses to record I'd have to see a pretty compelling reason to stop him
Live shows are hard, hard work. Recording at home or in a studio can be tedious, but not nearly as exausting. Besides, nobody is forced to do recording. There are multitudes that do it all the time (me included) just for the fun of it - when they get home from their day job and on the weekends. One of my key points is that in a world with no IP, nobody will be forced to create information such as art, software, etc - but enough people will do it without regard for money as a hobby like we see in the free software movement. And they will have day jobs tailoring that free software to meet specific clients' needs, performing live shows, parties & weddings, tailoring music for advertising jingles and television soundtracks - providing services.
Just like it would be silly for me to make a career out of taking in wounded animals and nursing them back to health, in the future it won't make sense to try to make a career out of certain things. People can still do those things, but it will be with the knowledge that it isn't going to be a money maker - just like a lot of activities today and in the past.
Well, during the 10 year stretch I played in bars (1980-1990), the take home pay at a bar ranged from $100 to $1000. Sometime is was a flat rate, other times it was the cover and/or a percentage of liquor sales. Royalties do not even enter the equation for most musicians since most don't even have CD's. We had tapes to sell, but sales at live shows never exceeded the pay from the club and rarely came anywhere close. Napster would have had exactly zero impact on this.
Thermodynamics makes a good analogy for why it is hard to restrict and control information. Thermodynamics are not invoked here as a moral argument - the moral argument is in a separate post. In the "thermodynamic" model I am using as an analogy, the labor cost of producing the pattern is irrelevant to the ease with which the pattern is spread. Spend $1000 or $100000 producing some music. The mp3 flows just as freely in both cases because the cost of copying patterns is so low at this point in our history. This makes the enforceability of IP an increasingly expensive proposition that will become untenable in many cases. Again, this line of reasoning is not meant to be a moral argument, just an observation about the dynamics of information.
The cost of copying cars and other material objects is still quite high (for now), so that is why the thermodynamics of cars is quite different than that of information.
Anyway, I argued in another part of the thread that time and effort spent do not logically imply property. Time and effort are spent raising a child, yet when he is released into the world as an adult he is not your property. Some things shouldn't be owned. And ideas and patterns are something that shouldn't be owned.
Nobody forces a person to spend time and effort in an activity that they don't want to do or offers no reasonable chance of compensation. So, in a world without IP, people will just have to change their expectations of what kind of work will produce monetary rewards. General purpose software is not likely to be an area that produces monetary rewards - it will come from labors of love. People will not be able to expect a legally imposed artificial scarcity of information as a basis for their product's value. But that doesn't mean the end of the intellectual worker. Nobody says thinking isn't work. And nobody says thinking can't be compensated under certain conditions. The ability to own ideas and patterns is not a precondition to making money through thinking. But business models may change in some cases.
There will always be payment waiting for people who can do intellectual work to solve someone else's specific problems (engineering, movie soundtrack, customization of software, etc). I don't see intellectual workers making less money in a world without IP. The easy problems that will be solved by eliminating IP and sharing already existing ideas and technology freely without liscences will always be replaced by problems at the next step. In every industry or company, there is always a next step that will require problems solvers who sell their talents to the highest bidder.
Well I don't think IP is necessarily evil - it's just a bad concept whose benefits no longer outweigh it's drawbacks. And I don't think it can be equated to enslaving people. Using the GPL as IP is one way to fight for change from within the existing system. Once IP no longer exists, there will no longer be any barriers in front of the free software community such as the entangled web of software patents that currently make it nearly impossible to write an unencumbered program.
Thanks for the reference - I'll head over to read it.
And I apologize for not being totally up on licenses, so if you could explain the functional difference between a BSD type license and public domain I would appreciate it.
Who are we to say how an artist may earn their money?
The existence or nonexistence of IP laws will affect everyone's business models, not just artists. But if you really want to know if there are artists going to the poor house because of Napster, I can tell you unequivocally no!
It's a well known fact that you have to have an album doing platinum or better to generate significant artist royalties from sales of CD. Up until that point, all royalties are taken by the label to recoup the cost of producing the CD - to pay off their buddies at the studio, their buddies in promotion, their buddies in every part of the pork barrel. The typical working artist will never go platinum, so royalies are a moot point. They survive off of live shows and do not see royalties. You are definitely not hurting them. The exceptional artist that is platinum or better could be affected by royalties, but will already be rich selling out big venues. And even if they are platinum, royalties aren't guaranteed - see that VH-1 episode about the Goo Goo Dolls for an example of this. Their #1 song "Name" was all over the airwaves and they were extremely popular. They album was platinum. They got home from their tour and found a royalty statement in their mailbox - it said they still owed the label six figures for production costs. They had to pay for that and all the legal fees in the ensuing battle by going out and touring some more! And theirs is not an isolated story.
This is not an issue that affects musicians much at all. It mainly affect the pork barrel practices of the labels, but has been recast into a "protect the musician" fight because they believe their case will be more appealing that way. Notice how they haven't been able to find a poster child musician whose gone to the poor house to hold up as an example of the damage napster has done. If there was such an orrurance, you can bet your ass that they would be using it as propaganda!
Live shows have always been how the typical musician makes their money. They will continue to make money this way. They will not miss royalties they never recieved. The typical musician on mp3.com gets more money from downloading "pay for play" royalties than they ever would from label royalties, even though the "pay for play" royalties amount to a paltry sum. Any amount of tipping over the internet will exceed the typical royalty payment ($0) that the typical musician recieves.
The bottom line is that we do not need to have "Intellectual Property" around for musicians to make the same or better money than they do now. Getting rid of Intellectual Property would restore a lot of our personal freedoms, but would not place musicians in more financial danger than the current situation. It might bust open the pork barrels in the music industry, but that's fine with me.
We don't need labels anymore anyway. I have a 16 track hard disk based digital studio with 8 channels of effects that can burn straight to CDR via SCSI port, and it's small enough to sit in my lap. I cost $2000 - far, far less than a typical studio session. I can sell my CD off of mp3.com and get a 50% royalty (more than any label offers), and get royalties for every download of one of my songs that are subsidised by their banner ads (a paltry sum, but more than the $0 a typical artists gets from labels as royalties). I can generate interest in my live shows using the net.
That's more studio power and self promotion power than the Beatles ever had. I'm limited only by my own performance and creativity. We don't need the labels anymore. They became self-serving a long time ago.
Sorry, but here comes that argument again. I've been a musician for a long time and I know a lot of musicians. It's the live shows that pay. Have you ever been to a bar that charges a cover? A cover of $5 to $10 is not unusual at all. When I played bars regularly, we got the cover and a percentage of the bar sales. One or both of these is the norm for working musicians. Sure, some people sell tapes and CD's at the shows, but that's not where the money's mainly coming from, and even if it were, napster isn't cutting into that kind of CD sale at all. How much money does has Noe Venable lost because of Napster?
Again, you've been misinformed. Live shows are how the vast majority of working musicians make their money. You're simply wrong when you say album sales generate more money because the typical musician doesn't even have an album. And the typical musician who does have an album (I know many) does not make much at all selling it compared to what they make playing clubs. That's a fact.
The flaw in this reasoning is as follows: property implies value is a true statement.
property => value
But it does not logically follow that
value => property
In the world of logic, A=>B does not mean that B=>A.
I do not believe that something must become the property of someone simply because it has value. The moon is scarce and has a lot of value to me because it makes me happy and provides nice lighting for romantic interludes. By your reasoning, its scarcity and subjective value make it property. I can think of other examples that show the flaw in this reasoning, but that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that information can be valued does not mean it is property.
I think it is much more logical that you need at least both scarcity and value to have property, and these should be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for property (as I still don't believe the moon is property). What do you think?
I mean, c'mon, how does RIAA's ripping off of artists make it OK to rip off artists even more by downloading their music via Napster?
How many artists can you name that are going to the poor house because of napster? What percent of working musicians do you think make a living on royalties? How can you steal something from artists that they don't even have in the first place?
And... come to think of it, the Slashdot community relies on copyright laws to protect something that is very close to their hearts... the GPL.
You are correct. The GPL exists only because we are currently living under antiquated laws enforcing "intellectual property". "When in Rome", so to speak. If and when IP is no longer recognized, then the GPL will no longer be needed.
There's no law that says you must own all the latest music.
This is a valid point.
If it costs money to produce (information) then money will be charged for production (this is ECONS 101).
Just because it costs money to produce something, it does not logically follow that you are entitled to receive money. It costs money to raise a child and release him into the world as a healthy adult, so who are you going to charge? In a world without IP, you will obviously spend your money doing things that will lead to reimbursement, if making money is your aim. The absence of IP won't stop you from making money. Your business model might have to change though. If you spend money on a business model that depend on the protection of IP laws and expect to be paid, then you would be wasting your time and money.
Indie bands give away music - Yes, to gain mindshare.
It's all about mindshare for the vast majority of artists. Precious few make any money on IP. Most make it on live shows. So they want the word out (mindshare) so attendence will be good. Musicians do not need IP to make a living. The absence of IP will not make a dent in the lives of the vast majority of working musicians. It will make it hard for those in the musical pork barrel industry that grafts itself onto musicians' backs.
It it not OK for corporations to put GPL in their closed source code because we currently live in under laws enforcing the antiquated notion of IP. GPL is an IP weapon of war that uses the mechanisms of IP itself. If IP were no longer allowed, then the GPL would no longer hold. But then it would no longer be necessary either.
You have stated as much in other posts by recommending that if others don't want their experiences shared, then they should keep them inside their own heads. Thus you have acknowledge that people have a fundamental right to control the distribution of their life experiences to others.
Yes, I believe people should be in complete control of what they pass on to others. But not in control of what others pass on to others. What others pass on to others is within their control, not yours.
You seem to think just because you experienced a representative replaying of an experience, that you have a right to the original representation of the experience
Not at all. You retain your original copy (master tapes, or whatever) in your own possession. I record and share my experience of the information in whatever way I see fit and share it with whatever fidelity I see fit. If I hear sounds, then they become part of my experience and I can record and redistribute them, whether it is birds chirping, music blaring, or whatever.
ou seem convinced that once my experience is "out there" and that you experience it, then that representation of my experience which I ORIGINALLY DISTRIBUTED is somehow a part of your experience.
Yes, that is true. And again, you still retain control of the original tapes if you wish. That I made another representation (another CD, or mp3, or tape) does not cause you to lose your master tapes.
You have already agreed that the experience is mine to withhold or distribute. In this case, the mechanism for sharing my experience is VLI-1. Some other and very different "very large integer" (call it VLI-2) is the representation of your experience of enjoying an instance of the decoding of VLI-1. Go right ahead and share your VLI-2 with your friend.
VLI-2 is an mp3. Or a number that differs by only one bit. At what fidelity of reproduction do you draw the line? And VLI-1 did not come out of your head any more than VLI-2 came out of mine. VLI-1 is an encoding of some stuff that came out of your head. VLI-2 is an encoding of some stuff that came into my head that enables me to share my experience with another. Do I have to actually put in a cochlear implant and mp3 encoder into my head for you to understand brain augmentation devices? They don't actually have to be inside the brain!
I DO believe that you can own patterns and ideas: the ones that come out of my head. You do too, or you would not have earlier stated that you have the right to distribute your experiences. This is the fundamental discord between your stated beliefs and arguments. They are in fundamental conflict.
There is no conflict at all. I control what I pass on to others, not what others pass on to others. I don't control other people, only myself. This is entirely consistent with everything I've said.
I believe that if we did not own the ideas and patterns that we produce, then we would have NO rights.
That is a fascinating belief. I belive that the world would be a better place without IP, and that we would be less encumbered by restrictions on our rights.
My children all understood this principle well before they got their driver's licenses: they own the Title to the car, not the car itself.
So, if your neighbor takes a picture of your car that is in public view and makes a copy, is he in trouble?
Whether explict or implicit, I feel this whole argument boils down to the fact that you do not believe that I have the right to enter into contracts because there is no such thing as property.
There is such thing as property, but I do not believe there should be such thing as "intellectual property".
You do not seem to recognize that a "pattern" does not exist outside of its physical representation: whether it be in my head, on a CD, as a written "very large integer" or as a DNA encoding, or as a contract.
Actually, this fact is fundamental to my argument. You possess, control, and "own" your physical copies of a pattern and I control mine. My possession of a copy of a pattern does not make you lose your copy of the pattern. The physical copies can be owned, not the patterns. Now if you entered an explicit contract with a person stating that you will give him a copy of your pattern under the conditions that he does not distribute the pattern further, then that is between you and him. I never said that people can't make explicit contracts with eachother. If this person leaks the pattern, then you can enforce whatever contract you made with him. But you can't control others who came across the information who did not sign your contract!
If my rights stop where your body begins then I could, morally and legally, strip you of every possesion (they are not in your body) or surround you in an inescapable box, deny you access to food or water or air until you die, all without EVER touching your body.
You are misreading the statement, or perhaps misapplying logic. Just because your rights must stop when it comes to my body and brain, that does not mean that they do not also stop when it comes to my means of life support. If you have no rights over set B, it does not follow that you have every right over the complement of that set! That is the fallacy of your reasoning. Set B is my personal body and brain, which has experiences and shares expereriences.
By the same token I could, using our mythical mind reading machine, grab every thought or feeling or memory in your head, just by reading the passive EM emanations from your head. As a result, you would have no rights at all to THE CONTENTS OF YOUR OWN MIND.
If this point were ever reached, then your thoughts would essentially be on public display. At that point, I would have a right to put a Faraday hat on if I didn't want people seeing my emanations.
You have no fundamental rights to the "ripples of information" spreading out to me because I released those ripples upon contractual conditions.
If you released your information under contractual conditions, then you have recourse against the person who signed a contract with you. But contracts are not transitive. If the info leaks into the public domain, you can't just sue everyone! Unless, or course, you are the motion picture industry.
You have attempted to make the case that my position is frought with contradiction. I believe I have shown that it is not. Please respond if you have other ideas.
How can there be plagarism if software cannot be owned? How can you compel attribution without ownership rights?
Identifying a point of origin or modification does not require intellectual property. There are already many real world examples of this. Of course you can't control whether or not someone plagiarises your creation, but it's still immoral to plagiarise in my mind. And you can always plead your case to the public whenever someone takes credit for your work. But again, attribution of authorship does not require the notion of intellectual property. It's just a matter of people being honest or dishonest. You can't prevent them from being dishonest, but you can try to point out their dishonesty (in a public place if necessary) and discourage them from being dishonest in the future.
I admit to having a lot to learn about the FSF. Perhaps the GPL is a temporary measure to achieve their goals in the current situation where IP is used as a weapon in the war. Once the battle against IP is won, perhaps they will put down their weapon (the GPL) and just release into the public domain like BSD.
Oops! I spent all that time and effort writing that post and botched the last sentence, which should read: A world with no IP is nowhere near as bleak as you seem to believe
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you could probably make as many encrypted or encoded (.tar, .zip, etc) copies as you like. But the media players and recorders will refuse to use these alternatively encoded copies since the disc drive won't authenticate these files through the key encrypted special calls that are part of the system. So unless you have a alternative (eg, illegal thanks to DMCA) player, the encoded/encrypted copies can't be played.
The only area where I think patents and the resulting disclosure make sense is in pharmaceuticals. And even in that case, the duration should be shortened. In other areas, I would rather have the freedom to independently discover/implement something or reverse engineer it than be fenced off from an idea that is patented. How many programmers have the time and money required comb over all of the "disclosed" patents out there, find all infringing areas in his program, then license each of them? This situation is an unnecessary impediment to intellectual freedom, IMHO. Again, I don't consider ideas to be flowing freely if I am not allowed to apply them.
While it is true that a patent involves disclosure, the fact remains that the information that has been patented is locked down, only to be used by the "owner" and those licensed. This kind of disclosure is hardly a bargain when you consider the loss of freedom that results.
But this will lead to a whole other argument about whether ideas and patterns should be able to be owned. I don't think it's worth the loss of freedom and privacy to allow/enforce that kind of ownership (IP). Not a good deal for society at large. And there are business models that allow intellectual workers and artists to get paid that do no require "intellectual property" and its intellectual straight jackets. Some business models (eg, novelist) would no longer be viable full time occupations, but that's OK in the grand scheme of things. Some people would still write books for free anyway. The intellectual police state we're heading towards is a step in the wrong direction and isn't jusitified as a means to prop up antiquated business models. But you'll probably disagree with this and we could go round and round forever about it.
Weakness in IP laws is not a threat to the free flow of information at all. Stronger IP laws would be a threat to the free flow of information since, after all, at the heart of the very notion of "intellectual property" lies implied limitations in transmission and reproduction of information. Intellectual property is the antithesis of the free flow of information IMHO.
Techies will cry foul, but I think that the legal departments of Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate will cave in fear of Sony, AOL Time Warner, et all.
You're absolutely right. People who love their freedom and privacy will have no voice until they organize themselves into something big enough to compete with the influence of the megacorps. Something as powerful as the NRA. Maybe it will be the EFF. But how log is it going to take us to do this? And will it come too late?
At what point did consumer rights just completely disappear? What happened to the idea that you try to please your customer? Where did that mentallity disappear to?
Unfortunately, they think that controlling the customer is more effective. And they've learned how to sugar coat this insidious erosion of our freedoms so that the poison goes unnoticed by most. I've never been one for biblical prophecies, but that part about everyone having to have a number to buy or sell is dead on. It's happening and it's not a good thing for people who care about freedom or privacy.
[i]Simple... The MPAA/RIAA will go back to their favorite puppet, "Judge" Kaplan and get Linux/BSD and anything else that can use ext2 illegal as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Furthermore, the Linux source code, as it contains this "illegal" code.[/i] But the DMCA doesn't have teeth if there are significant noninfringing uses, right? Or am I confusing this clause with another law? Anybody know more about the "significant noninfriging use" clause?
Microsoft did get in trouble for something like this!
My point exactly. If the artists with the most to lose aren't afriad, then nobody should be!
However if you aren't confident that it won't be taken from you, then you would never spend the time or money building anything
That's simply not true. But it's a common myth of IP supporters. Did Michelangelo, Leonardo DeVinci, Isaac Newton, Aristotle and all the other creative types who existed before intellectual property laws came into existence have no motivation to do their thing? Of course not! If there is no intellectual property, will companies stop competing to sell consumers products that they want to buy? Of course not! If there is market demand, then somebody will meet it - with or without the existence of intellectual property.
At a superficial level, it sounds like it may be a good thing to let musicians control their recorded works, but when you think through the ramifications involved, the complexity of licensing and enforcement, the slow unequivocal degradation of our fundamental freedoms that are needed to enforce IP laws - the ugliness of it all - I no longer think "intellectual property" is a good idea. I think our society and business environment would be much healthier without it. And I don't think a wholesale abandonment of IP, as I have advocated, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But obviously, a lot of people disagree with me either because they don't want to open their mind (my opinion) or because I'm not thinking clearly (their opinion).
There is, of course, an intrinsic rate of decay in any physical representation of information - this is obvious to any high school student and isn't what we're talking about here. In these discussions, I am not refering to the degradation of the specific instances of information, but the temporal-spatial distribution of information, which is also subject to the second law (entropy increases).
If you still don't understand this, let me make it simple for you. Consider a collection of marbles on the floor during an earthquake. Each marble may be subject to chips and degradation - a more disordered state. But the collection of marbles as a whole is also subject to the statistical mechanics of entropy the promote their spread throughout the room.
I forgot to mention that that money was split 4 ways and it was hard to make any kind of living. So I got a real job and now just do music as a hobby. I like it better that way since my creativity doesn't have to be burdened by trying to make a living off of it.
If music wants to be free, why am I paying a cover charge?Because there are a limited number of seats. And you are paying not for their music, but for a one time service - like you pay for your doctors or lawyer's advice rather than the information in their medical texts. And people love going to shows because it is about much more than just the music, so they're willing to pay. And I'd pay $30 any day of the week just to watch Eric Johnson's fretboard finess.
If you choose to work strictly live, that's a perfectly reasonable choice, but if somebody else chooses to record I'd have to see a pretty compelling reason to stop him
Live shows are hard, hard work. Recording at home or in a studio can be tedious, but not nearly as exausting. Besides, nobody is forced to do recording. There are multitudes that do it all the time (me included) just for the fun of it - when they get home from their day job and on the weekends. One of my key points is that in a world with no IP, nobody will be forced to create information such as art, software, etc - but enough people will do it without regard for money as a hobby like we see in the free software movement. And they will have day jobs tailoring that free software to meet specific clients' needs, performing live shows, parties & weddings, tailoring music for advertising jingles and television soundtracks - providing services.
Just like it would be silly for me to make a career out of taking in wounded animals and nursing them back to health, in the future it won't make sense to try to make a career out of certain things. People can still do those things, but it will be with the knowledge that it isn't going to be a money maker - just like a lot of activities today and in the past.
Well, during the 10 year stretch I played in bars (1980-1990), the take home pay at a bar ranged from $100 to $1000. Sometime is was a flat rate, other times it was the cover and/or a percentage of liquor sales. Royalties do not even enter the equation for most musicians since most don't even have CD's. We had tapes to sell, but sales at live shows never exceeded the pay from the club and rarely came anywhere close. Napster would have had exactly zero impact on this.
The cost of copying cars and other material objects is still quite high (for now), so that is why the thermodynamics of cars is quite different than that of information.
Anyway, I argued in another part of the thread that time and effort spent do not logically imply property. Time and effort are spent raising a child, yet when he is released into the world as an adult he is not your property. Some things shouldn't be owned. And ideas and patterns are something that shouldn't be owned.
Nobody forces a person to spend time and effort in an activity that they don't want to do or offers no reasonable chance of compensation. So, in a world without IP, people will just have to change their expectations of what kind of work will produce monetary rewards. General purpose software is not likely to be an area that produces monetary rewards - it will come from labors of love. People will not be able to expect a legally imposed artificial scarcity of information as a basis for their product's value. But that doesn't mean the end of the intellectual worker. Nobody says thinking isn't work. And nobody says thinking can't be compensated under certain conditions. The ability to own ideas and patterns is not a precondition to making money through thinking. But business models may change in some cases.
There will always be payment waiting for people who can do intellectual work to solve someone else's specific problems (engineering, movie soundtrack, customization of software, etc). I don't see intellectual workers making less money in a world without IP. The easy problems that will be solved by eliminating IP and sharing already existing ideas and technology freely without liscences will always be replaced by problems at the next step. In every industry or company, there is always a next step that will require problems solvers who sell their talents to the highest bidder.
Well I don't think IP is necessarily evil - it's just a bad concept whose benefits no longer outweigh it's drawbacks. And I don't think it can be equated to enslaving people. Using the GPL as IP is one way to fight for change from within the existing system. Once IP no longer exists, there will no longer be any barriers in front of the free software community such as the entangled web of software patents that currently make it nearly impossible to write an unencumbered program.
Thanks for the reference - I'll head over to read it.
And I apologize for not being totally up on licenses, so if you could explain the functional difference between a BSD type license and public domain I would appreciate it.
The existence or nonexistence of IP laws will affect everyone's business models, not just artists. But if you really want to know if there are artists going to the poor house because of Napster, I can tell you unequivocally no!
It's a well known fact that you have to have an album doing platinum or better to generate significant artist royalties from sales of CD. Up until that point, all royalties are taken by the label to recoup the cost of producing the CD - to pay off their buddies at the studio, their buddies in promotion, their buddies in every part of the pork barrel. The typical working artist will never go platinum, so royalies are a moot point. They survive off of live shows and do not see royalties. You are definitely not hurting them. The exceptional artist that is platinum or better could be affected by royalties, but will already be rich selling out big venues. And even if they are platinum, royalties aren't guaranteed - see that VH-1 episode about the Goo Goo Dolls for an example of this. Their #1 song "Name" was all over the airwaves and they were extremely popular. They album was platinum. They got home from their tour and found a royalty statement in their mailbox - it said they still owed the label six figures for production costs. They had to pay for that and all the legal fees in the ensuing battle by going out and touring some more! And theirs is not an isolated story.
This is not an issue that affects musicians much at all. It mainly affect the pork barrel practices of the labels, but has been recast into a "protect the musician" fight because they believe their case will be more appealing that way. Notice how they haven't been able to find a poster child musician whose gone to the poor house to hold up as an example of the damage napster has done. If there was such an orrurance, you can bet your ass that they would be using it as propaganda!
Live shows have always been how the typical musician makes their money. They will continue to make money this way. They will not miss royalties they never recieved. The typical musician on mp3.com gets more money from downloading "pay for play" royalties than they ever would from label royalties, even though the "pay for play" royalties amount to a paltry sum. Any amount of tipping over the internet will exceed the typical royalty payment ($0) that the typical musician recieves.
The bottom line is that we do not need to have "Intellectual Property" around for musicians to make the same or better money than they do now. Getting rid of Intellectual Property would restore a lot of our personal freedoms, but would not place musicians in more financial danger than the current situation. It might bust open the pork barrels in the music industry, but that's fine with me.
We don't need labels anymore anyway. I have a 16 track hard disk based digital studio with 8 channels of effects that can burn straight to CDR via SCSI port, and it's small enough to sit in my lap. I cost $2000 - far, far less than a typical studio session. I can sell my CD off of mp3.com and get a 50% royalty (more than any label offers), and get royalties for every download of one of my songs that are subsidised by their banner ads (a paltry sum, but more than the $0 a typical artists gets from labels as royalties). I can generate interest in my live shows using the net.
That's more studio power and self promotion power than the Beatles ever had. I'm limited only by my own performance and creativity. We don't need the labels anymore. They became self-serving a long time ago.
Again, you've been misinformed. Live shows are how the vast majority of working musicians make their money. You're simply wrong when you say album sales generate more money because the typical musician doesn't even have an album. And the typical musician who does have an album (I know many) does not make much at all selling it compared to what they make playing clubs. That's a fact.
property => value
But it does not logically follow that
value => property
In the world of logic, A=>B does not mean that B=>A.
I do not believe that something must become the property of someone simply because it has value. The moon is scarce and has a lot of value to me because it makes me happy and provides nice lighting for romantic interludes. By your reasoning, its scarcity and subjective value make it property. I can think of other examples that show the flaw in this reasoning, but that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that information can be valued does not mean it is property.
I think it is much more logical that you need at least both scarcity and value to have property, and these should be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for property (as I still don't believe the moon is property). What do you think?
How many artists can you name that are going to the poor house because of napster? What percent of working musicians do you think make a living on royalties? How can you steal something from artists that they don't even have in the first place?
And... come to think of it, the Slashdot community relies on copyright laws to protect something that is very close to their hearts... the GPL.
You are correct. The GPL exists only because we are currently living under antiquated laws enforcing "intellectual property". "When in Rome", so to speak. If and when IP is no longer recognized, then the GPL will no longer be needed.
This is a valid point.
If it costs money to produce (information) then money will be charged for production (this is ECONS 101).
Just because it costs money to produce something, it does not logically follow that you are entitled to receive money. It costs money to raise a child and release him into the world as a healthy adult, so who are you going to charge? In a world without IP, you will obviously spend your money doing things that will lead to reimbursement, if making money is your aim. The absence of IP won't stop you from making money. Your business model might have to change though. If you spend money on a business model that depend on the protection of IP laws and expect to be paid, then you would be wasting your time and money.
Indie bands give away music - Yes, to gain mindshare.
It's all about mindshare for the vast majority of artists. Precious few make any money on IP. Most make it on live shows. So they want the word out (mindshare) so attendence will be good. Musicians do not need IP to make a living. The absence of IP will not make a dent in the lives of the vast majority of working musicians. It will make it hard for those in the musical pork barrel industry that grafts itself onto musicians' backs.
It it not OK for corporations to put GPL in their closed source code because we currently live in under laws enforcing the antiquated notion of IP. GPL is an IP weapon of war that uses the mechanisms of IP itself. If IP were no longer allowed, then the GPL would no longer hold. But then it would no longer be necessary either.
Yes, I believe people should be in complete control of what they pass on to others. But not in control of what others pass on to others. What others pass on to others is within their control, not yours.
You seem to think just because you experienced a representative replaying of an experience, that you have a right to the original representation of the experience
Not at all. You retain your original copy (master tapes, or whatever) in your own possession. I record and share my experience of the information in whatever way I see fit and share it with whatever fidelity I see fit. If I hear sounds, then they become part of my experience and I can record and redistribute them, whether it is birds chirping, music blaring, or whatever.
ou seem convinced that once my experience is "out there" and that you experience it, then that representation of my experience which I ORIGINALLY DISTRIBUTED is somehow a part of your experience.
Yes, that is true. And again, you still retain control of the original tapes if you wish. That I made another representation (another CD, or mp3, or tape) does not cause you to lose your master tapes.
You have already agreed that the experience is mine to withhold or distribute. In this case, the mechanism for sharing my experience is VLI-1. Some other and very different "very large integer" (call it VLI-2) is the representation of your experience of enjoying an instance of the decoding of VLI-1. Go right ahead and share your VLI-2 with your friend.
VLI-2 is an mp3. Or a number that differs by only one bit. At what fidelity of reproduction do you draw the line? And VLI-1 did not come out of your head any more than VLI-2 came out of mine. VLI-1 is an encoding of some stuff that came out of your head. VLI-2 is an encoding of some stuff that came into my head that enables me to share my experience with another. Do I have to actually put in a cochlear implant and mp3 encoder into my head for you to understand brain augmentation devices? They don't actually have to be inside the brain!
I DO believe that you can own patterns and ideas: the ones that come out of my head. You do too, or you would not have earlier stated that you have the right to distribute your experiences. This is the fundamental discord between your stated beliefs and arguments. They are in fundamental conflict.
There is no conflict at all. I control what I pass on to others, not what others pass on to others. I don't control other people, only myself. This is entirely consistent with everything I've said.
I believe that if we did not own the ideas and patterns that we produce, then we would have NO rights.
That is a fascinating belief. I belive that the world would be a better place without IP, and that we would be less encumbered by restrictions on our rights.
My children all understood this principle well before they got their driver's licenses: they own the Title to the car, not the car itself.
So, if your neighbor takes a picture of your car that is in public view and makes a copy, is he in trouble?
Whether explict or implicit, I feel this whole argument boils down to the fact that you do not believe that I have the right to enter into contracts because there is no such thing as property.
There is such thing as property, but I do not believe there should be such thing as "intellectual property".
You do not seem to recognize that a "pattern" does not exist outside of its physical representation: whether it be in my head, on a CD, as a written "very large integer" or as a DNA encoding, or as a contract.
Actually, this fact is fundamental to my argument. You possess, control, and "own" your physical copies of a pattern and I control mine. My possession of a copy of a pattern does not make you lose your copy of the pattern. The physical copies can be owned, not the patterns. Now if you entered an explicit contract with a person stating that you will give him a copy of your pattern under the conditions that he does not distribute the pattern further, then that is between you and him. I never said that people can't make explicit contracts with eachother. If this person leaks the pattern, then you can enforce whatever contract you made with him. But you can't control others who came across the information who did not sign your contract!
If my rights stop where your body begins then I could, morally and legally, strip you of every possesion (they are not in your body) or surround you in an inescapable box, deny you access to food or water or air until you die, all without EVER touching your body.
You are misreading the statement, or perhaps misapplying logic. Just because your rights must stop when it comes to my body and brain, that does not mean that they do not also stop when it comes to my means of life support. If you have no rights over set B, it does not follow that you have every right over the complement of that set! That is the fallacy of your reasoning. Set B is my personal body and brain, which has experiences and shares expereriences.
By the same token I could, using our mythical mind reading machine, grab every thought or feeling or memory in your head, just by reading the passive EM emanations from your head. As a result, you would have no rights at all to THE CONTENTS OF YOUR OWN MIND.
If this point were ever reached, then your thoughts would essentially be on public display. At that point, I would have a right to put a Faraday hat on if I didn't want people seeing my emanations.
You have no fundamental rights to the "ripples of information" spreading out to me because I released those ripples upon contractual conditions.
If you released your information under contractual conditions, then you have recourse against the person who signed a contract with you. But contracts are not transitive. If the info leaks into the public domain, you can't just sue everyone! Unless, or course, you are the motion picture industry.
You have attempted to make the case that my position is frought with contradiction. I believe I have shown that it is not. Please respond if you have other ideas.
Identifying a point of origin or modification does not require intellectual property. There are already many real world examples of this. Of course you can't control whether or not someone plagiarises your creation, but it's still immoral to plagiarise in my mind. And you can always plead your case to the public whenever someone takes credit for your work. But again, attribution of authorship does not require the notion of intellectual property. It's just a matter of people being honest or dishonest. You can't prevent them from being dishonest, but you can try to point out their dishonesty (in a public place if necessary) and discourage them from being dishonest in the future.
I admit to having a lot to learn about the FSF. Perhaps the GPL is a temporary measure to achieve their goals in the current situation where IP is used as a weapon in the war. Once the battle against IP is won, perhaps they will put down their weapon (the GPL) and just release into the public domain like BSD.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.