Maybe we should remove all copyrights on fictional written works for a while? The industry is creating a false sense for would-be-artists that they can make a good living doing what they excel at, but most of them don't get anywhere due to mismanagment and greed. So - copyrights have largely ceased to benefit those who create the works of art.
Maybe not. This stems from a basic lack of understanding regarding what a copyright is and how it is meant to work. The copyright is primarily intended as a sort of patent on intellectual property and is treated as such and administered as such. Note what government agency you contact to request a copyright. It does not and never will guarantee profitable return nor that any sort of living wage can be magically expected.
Conversely, I don't know of any publisher anywhere that encourages the thought that it can. I don't know any author that encourages any sort of similar thought. There is a public perception that having your name on the spine of a book guarantees riches beyond imagining, but everyone who has even considered a life in the publishing industry knows that that is not true. Most authors that I know, or know of, are well aware of the unprofitability of what they do. One author even has a formula worked out for when writing becomes profitable enough to quit the day job. It involves stuff like not having debt.
Most of the people who write, the vast, vast majority of people that I know who write, do not write because it makes them money, or ever will in Clancy/Grisham/Grafton-like amounts. They hope, they dream... but they write because they love to write. Because they enjoy the creative process and they love to see the finished work in their hands and can say, with pride, "This is mine, I made it." They get their thrills from people saying, "I love what you wrote, please write some more."
And guess what? That's what the copyright protects, that's where its protective, nurturing action is, not in the mythical guarantee of a paycheck, but in the hard, real, concrete, actionable guarantee that no shmuck, loser or poseur can themselves claim it as their own.
The copyright, the patent, and the trademark are not and never will be a guarantor of profits and Ghod help us if anyone ever tries to make them so. All they do, all they ought to do is protect the creator and his, her or their creation. What is needed is for people, authors and the like, to enter into contractual arrangements armed with knowledge and understanding. A little understanding can go a long way, like in the case of profits versus gross. Me, I want to make sure my slice comes off the top, so I'm going to tell my agent that that's a priority for me. He, on the other hand, ought to know that, and since his slice comes from a chunk of my slice, his interests there are my interests.
There's nothing wrong with copyright law right now, and least not in this arena. There's everything wrong with how corporations exploit artists, on the very bases that Stan is getting exploited.
Unless you want to suggest that we turn to a socialist economy where every artist is guaranteed a living wage for their efforts, there's not much else we can do but try to make the authors smarter about agents and contracts. And if that is your suggestion, I suggest in turn that you take a close look at the cultural life of the Soviet Union, especially in the 1930s under Stalin's Cultural Revolution... look into the lives of people like Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Bulgakov and see just how happy these people were having a living wage paid to them... but having their work subjected to censors and official government approval. Pretty eye-opening stuff.
The great thing about photovoltaic cells is that they let us get our electricity from a huge fusion reactor that is conveniently located 100,000,000 miles from any population center.
Yeah, but when containment on that thing fails... well, let's just say you won't have to worry about your kids having three arms.
Re:does this break the theory of relativity?
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
It does, but no-one remembered to make c final so it's a variable.
Right. What we know as the supposed physical constant of C is actually the mean (?) value of a series of observations. I believe the "true cosmic" maximum speed of light is somewhat (fractionally, I'm sure) higher.
Just by way of some sort of corollary (though by no means exact), what about AOL? For years they existed solely as an online service, with little to no actual "Internet" content at all... then all of a sudden the web exploded and there were more TCP/IP apps out there than they could replicate within the AOL service (Napster for one, though I don't honestly know if that came before or after AOL started including TCP/IP functionality).
Anyway, this would stand, I guess as an example of a successful service/software provider having to go more open in response to economic forces. Even though (I think) they were the leader in the online market (market being defined... widely) at the time.
The real stastic that should be looked at, instead of browser market share, is the design preferences of developers, right? If Joe Web-Developer decides all of his stuff is going to pedantically W3C compliant, does it matter how many people are using MSIE over NS? The developers, it seems to me, are the ones you have to win over, not the consumer, for this nightmare vision to come true.
Are you trolling? Are you seriously suggesting that with regards to human rights, the "Judeo-Christian ethic" has been responsible for it all?
No more than the guy I was replying to who implied that certain religions were the root of the currently debated evil. And while I admit that the Judeo-Christian ethic does not have an out-and-out monopoly on the concept of human rights, I'll stand by my statement that they are responsible. By 60 AD, the most liberal society on Earth was that of Rome, which still fed people to lions for sport and where the paterfamilias held the rights of life and death over his family. Socratic/Platonic philosophy, perhaps the largest other proponent of human rights to date, had been largely stamped out by a Roman Imperium jealous of its own purported divinity. If you can supply another philosophical system that has, at its base, a regard for human rights equal to that of the Judeo-Christian system and equal in influence on Western culture, then I'll concede the point.
But no, I'm not trolling. Just giving an historical perspective to a ridiculous comment.
Just because the federal government doesn't run Ole Sparky 24/7 Texas-style doesn't mean it doesn't have death penalty provisions, because it does.
Minor mischaracterization of my position. I did not say that the federal government does not have any provisions for the death penalty, though I did not realize there were many (if any) at all other than treason. What I did say was that "The 'United States' does not execute people," which is true from your own admission: it does not and has not for 38 years. I doubt a single other jurisdiction with the death pentalty on the books has gone so long. And why is that? The reasons I stated before: power of the people. The federal death penalty is an upopular option. Hell, Aldrich Ames didn't even get it for selling out to the Soviets/Russians for how many ever years. Straight up treason. In the third world countries that the original poster mentioned, that would have earned him a bullet in the back of the head immediately following trial if there had even been a trial, and for traitors that's not likely.
First of all, here, let me stand in defense of the Judeo-Christian ethic here for a moment, which is what I gather Coke Bear refers to in his comment:
(My guess is that it has something to do with religion, but thats just me...)
The Judeo-Christian religions are probably the most responsible for human rights advances over the past 6000 years than any other single religious/philosophical arc available. Historically and culturally, they are the source of it all. Just for the record.
No, in fact, much of what drives all of these things we're seeing, the privacy issues, the death penalty, the voting problem, is power. And you can cry about it all you want, but the dead truth of it is that the source of power in the United States is people. Media can manipulate people, and thus shift power, but that's only feasible insofar as a story can be "spun." If something big enough were to happen, there's very little the Media could do to force an angle contrary to what occurred. Politicians can think they have power, but in most cases the only thing keeping them in those positions is the power of inertia and apathy. Witness that many elected representatives on the national level spend as much, if not more time pressing the flesh back at home than actually sitting in Congress and doing what they were elected to do.
Also, another clarification: The "United States" does not execute people. Not unless it's treason in time of war, and some people have even snuck out of that. (btw, I don't think there is a civilized country that does not offer the death penalty for such a transgression.) However, some individual states do carry the death penalty. Recent overturnings of the death penalty in some states is evidence of the power of the people, the nature of the nation and states as democratic republics (the US's technical classification) affirmed.
But what we've discovered in this country, in this political experiment that we call the United States, is the power of apathy. Occasionally, enough people get jolted out of it to make something happen, but those occasions are few and far between... and honestly, often misguided. And such is the case with the privacy issue. Americans don't care, by and large, who knows what about them. They might get annoyed with this or that or the other thing, but fundamentally, they don't care enough to take action.
When will it hit home enough? When honest computer nerds start being persecuted for hacking crimes on the basis of pirated personal information? There's one school of thought that says, "So what?" If there's convictable evidence found, then they should be sent to jail! There's another school of thought, however, that says: "We're still protected by the courts." And this, by and large, is true. What books I read is still circumstantial evidence in any court of law, and more to the point there's no proof that I've read any of the books I bought, according to Amazon. Have people been convicted by circumstantial evidence? Yes. Have trumped up charges been applied in this manner? Occasionally. Will there be a significant increase in these types of cases? Not likely.
But, of course, Mr. Katz's biggest complaint is not about the government's use of private data, but that of corporations. Corporations? What are they going to do, drown you in spam and junk mail? That's ridiculous. And this article is mostly alarmism at its worst, the most common form of media manipulation. Now, I'm no friend to the corporate conglomerates and I realize that there is reason to fear for and protect your privacy, but Mr. Katz does not compel me to any of those reasons. I think that people ought to take more care, that they ought to understand what they are doing, but ultimately they don't, and that's the problem; privacy issues are merely a symptom.
And btw, France has some of the worst civil rights laws on the books (or lack thereof), so let's not go crowing about how awesome and ahead of us Europe is. If you had a small, semi-homogenous population concentrated in a space the size of Pennsylvania, you wouldn't face the problems we do today. Yeah, corporations and lobbyists are evil, so what else is new? They also lobby against unions, environmental protection, safety standards, the minimum wage and so on. Duh. It's in their interests to do so.
Honestly, the privacy debate is about as newsworthy as my grandma. In other words, I care about her and everything, but she doesn't belong on the national news or having rants written about her. The real issue, of course, is that we don't want criminals to have our private information, which is more obvious than anything stated above. If that means keeping it out of the hands of the government or corporations, then by all means let's protect it. But Wal Mart having my phone number or Radio Shack my mailing address makes very, very little difference to me personally--since it's public domain information anyhow, I can't see what advantageous use they can make of it other than, gasp, to let me know what wonderful products they have, which is the meat and potatoes of any for-profit corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not. This stems from a basic lack of understanding regarding what a copyright is and how it is meant to work. The copyright is primarily intended as a sort of patent on intellectual property and is treated as such and administered as such. Note what government agency you contact to request a copyright. It does not and never will guarantee profitable return nor that any sort of living wage can be magically expected.
Conversely, I don't know of any publisher anywhere that encourages the thought that it can. I don't know any author that encourages any sort of similar thought. There is a public perception that having your name on the spine of a book guarantees riches beyond imagining, but everyone who has even considered a life in the publishing industry knows that that is not true. Most authors that I know, or know of, are well aware of the unprofitability of what they do. One author even has a formula worked out for when writing becomes profitable enough to quit the day job. It involves stuff like not having debt.
Most of the people who write, the vast, vast majority of people that I know who write, do not write because it makes them money, or ever will in Clancy/Grisham/Grafton-like amounts. They hope, they dream... but they write because they love to write. Because they enjoy the creative process and they love to see the finished work in their hands and can say, with pride, "This is mine, I made it." They get their thrills from people saying, "I love what you wrote, please write some more."
And guess what? That's what the copyright protects, that's where its protective, nurturing action is, not in the mythical guarantee of a paycheck, but in the hard, real, concrete, actionable guarantee that no shmuck, loser or poseur can themselves claim it as their own.
The copyright, the patent, and the trademark are not and never will be a guarantor of profits and Ghod help us if anyone ever tries to make them so. All they do, all they ought to do is protect the creator and his, her or their creation. What is needed is for people, authors and the like, to enter into contractual arrangements armed with knowledge and understanding. A little understanding can go a long way, like in the case of profits versus gross. Me, I want to make sure my slice comes off the top, so I'm going to tell my agent that that's a priority for me. He, on the other hand, ought to know that, and since his slice comes from a chunk of my slice, his interests there are my interests.
There's nothing wrong with copyright law right now, and least not in this arena. There's everything wrong with how corporations exploit artists, on the very bases that Stan is getting exploited.
Unless you want to suggest that we turn to a socialist economy where every artist is guaranteed a living wage for their efforts, there's not much else we can do but try to make the authors smarter about agents and contracts. And if that is your suggestion, I suggest in turn that you take a close look at the cultural life of the Soviet Union, especially in the 1930s under Stalin's Cultural Revolution... look into the lives of people like Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Bulgakov and see just how happy these people were having a living wage paid to them... but having their work subjected to censors and official government approval. Pretty eye-opening stuff.
The great thing about photovoltaic cells is that they let us get our electricity from a huge fusion reactor that is conveniently located 100,000,000 miles from any population center.
Yeah, but when containment on that thing fails... well, let's just say you won't have to worry about your kids having three arms.
It does, but no-one remembered to make c final so it's a variable.
Right. What we know as the supposed physical constant of C is actually the mean (?) value of a series of observations. I believe the "true cosmic" maximum speed of light is somewhat (fractionally, I'm sure) higher.
Just by way of some sort of corollary (though by no means exact), what about AOL? For years they existed solely as an online service, with little to no actual "Internet" content at all... then all of a sudden the web exploded and there were more TCP/IP apps out there than they could replicate within the AOL service (Napster for one, though I don't honestly know if that came before or after AOL started including TCP/IP functionality).
Anyway, this would stand, I guess as an example of a successful service/software provider having to go more open in response to economic forces. Even though (I think) they were the leader in the online market (market being defined... widely) at the time.
The real stastic that should be looked at, instead of browser market share, is the design preferences of developers, right? If Joe Web-Developer decides all of his stuff is going to pedantically W3C compliant, does it matter how many people are using MSIE over NS? The developers, it seems to me, are the ones you have to win over, not the consumer, for this nightmare vision to come true.
Are you trolling? Are you seriously suggesting that with regards to human rights, the "Judeo-Christian ethic" has been responsible for it all?
No more than the guy I was replying to who implied that certain religions were the root of the currently debated evil. And while I admit that the Judeo-Christian ethic does not have an out-and-out monopoly on the concept of human rights, I'll stand by my statement that they are responsible. By 60 AD, the most liberal society on Earth was that of Rome, which still fed people to lions for sport and where the paterfamilias held the rights of life and death over his family. Socratic/Platonic philosophy, perhaps the largest other proponent of human rights to date, had been largely stamped out by a Roman Imperium jealous of its own purported divinity. If you can supply another philosophical system that has, at its base, a regard for human rights equal to that of the Judeo-Christian system and equal in influence on Western culture, then I'll concede the point.
But no, I'm not trolling. Just giving an historical perspective to a ridiculous comment.
Just because the federal government doesn't run Ole Sparky 24/7 Texas-style doesn't mean it doesn't have death penalty provisions, because it does.
Minor mischaracterization of my position. I did not say that the federal government does not have any provisions for the death penalty, though I did not realize there were many (if any) at all other than treason. What I did say was that "The 'United States' does not execute people," which is true from your own admission: it does not and has not for 38 years. I doubt a single other jurisdiction with the death pentalty on the books has gone so long. And why is that? The reasons I stated before: power of the people. The federal death penalty is an upopular option. Hell, Aldrich Ames didn't even get it for selling out to the Soviets/Russians for how many ever years. Straight up treason. In the third world countries that the original poster mentioned, that would have earned him a bullet in the back of the head immediately following trial if there had even been a trial, and for traitors that's not likely.
But no, I don't make this stuff up as I go along.
First of all, here, let me stand in defense of the Judeo-Christian ethic here for a moment, which is what I gather Coke Bear refers to in his comment:
(My guess is that it has something to do with religion, but thats just me...)
The Judeo-Christian religions are probably the most responsible for human rights advances over the past 6000 years than any other single religious/philosophical arc available. Historically and culturally, they are the source of it all. Just for the record.
No, in fact, much of what drives all of these things we're seeing, the privacy issues, the death penalty, the voting problem, is power. And you can cry about it all you want, but the dead truth of it is that the source of power in the United States is people. Media can manipulate people, and thus shift power, but that's only feasible insofar as a story can be "spun." If something big enough were to happen, there's very little the Media could do to force an angle contrary to what occurred. Politicians can think they have power, but in most cases the only thing keeping them in those positions is the power of inertia and apathy. Witness that many elected representatives on the national level spend as much, if not more time pressing the flesh back at home than actually sitting in Congress and doing what they were elected to do.
Also, another clarification: The "United States" does not execute people. Not unless it's treason in time of war, and some people have even snuck out of that. (btw, I don't think there is a civilized country that does not offer the death penalty for such a transgression.) However, some individual states do carry the death penalty. Recent overturnings of the death penalty in some states is evidence of the power of the people, the nature of the nation and states as democratic republics (the US's technical classification) affirmed.
But what we've discovered in this country, in this political experiment that we call the United States, is the power of apathy. Occasionally, enough people get jolted out of it to make something happen, but those occasions are few and far between... and honestly, often misguided. And such is the case with the privacy issue. Americans don't care, by and large, who knows what about them. They might get annoyed with this or that or the other thing, but fundamentally, they don't care enough to take action.
When will it hit home enough? When honest computer nerds start being persecuted for hacking crimes on the basis of pirated personal information? There's one school of thought that says, "So what?" If there's convictable evidence found, then they should be sent to jail! There's another school of thought, however, that says: "We're still protected by the courts." And this, by and large, is true. What books I read is still circumstantial evidence in any court of law, and more to the point there's no proof that I've read any of the books I bought, according to Amazon. Have people been convicted by circumstantial evidence? Yes. Have trumped up charges been applied in this manner? Occasionally. Will there be a significant increase in these types of cases? Not likely.
But, of course, Mr. Katz's biggest complaint is not about the government's use of private data, but that of corporations. Corporations? What are they going to do, drown you in spam and junk mail? That's ridiculous. And this article is mostly alarmism at its worst, the most common form of media manipulation. Now, I'm no friend to the corporate conglomerates and I realize that there is reason to fear for and protect your privacy, but Mr. Katz does not compel me to any of those reasons. I think that people ought to take more care, that they ought to understand what they are doing, but ultimately they don't, and that's the problem; privacy issues are merely a symptom.
And btw, France has some of the worst civil rights laws on the books (or lack thereof), so let's not go crowing about how awesome and ahead of us Europe is. If you had a small, semi-homogenous population concentrated in a space the size of Pennsylvania, you wouldn't face the problems we do today. Yeah, corporations and lobbyists are evil, so what else is new? They also lobby against unions, environmental protection, safety standards, the minimum wage and so on. Duh. It's in their interests to do so.
Honestly, the privacy debate is about as newsworthy as my grandma. In other words, I care about her and everything, but she doesn't belong on the national news or having rants written about her. The real issue, of course, is that we don't want criminals to have our private information, which is more obvious than anything stated above. If that means keeping it out of the hands of the government or corporations, then by all means let's protect it. But Wal Mart having my phone number or Radio Shack my mailing address makes very, very little difference to me personally--since it's public domain information anyhow, I can't see what advantageous use they can make of it other than, gasp, to let me know what wonderful products they have, which is the meat and potatoes of any for-profit corporation.
Duh, Jon, duh.