Bear in mind that copyright holders are using economics arguments
Copyright holders have very few valid economic arguments; the economic effects of copyright are fundamentally equivalent to any other taxation scheme. Claiming that more copyright is better for the economy is equivalent to claiming more tax is better for the economy.
The more likely flow of argument is that industry goon tells USTR representative that more copyright is good for him, then the USTR threatens various countries, who cave in as handing money to the industry goon is cheaper than fighting trade wars.
Of course, the main reason they get away with that is because IPR funding isn't accounted for in state budgets as it's an externally gathered tax. Had the actual state budget had a '"insurance" payoffs to the MAFIAA so nothing "happens" to our trade status' line it might have been a bit harder to motivate.
Copying infringes the content owners property rights
Copyright infringes the object owners property rights. Copyright is a limitation in what you can do with the property that you own. 'Content owners' have no property right; they have a monopoly right.
I don't know how we get past this.
Either copyright is abolished, perhaps replaced with a system that simply pays the creators directly based on popularity of their works straight out of government budgets like any other benefit system.
Or copyright gets rendered meaningless by f2f darknet migrations.
Well, on the upside, these actions certainly encourage the adoption of encryption, vpns and distributed darknets on a much more massive scale. Soon enough the evolutionary pressure towards unmonitorable connections will have put private communications permanently out of reach of any agencies.
Encrypted f2f sharing is certainly the killer app for the emerging distributed social networks.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 1
Having the CEO rot in jail will make the next CEO motivated to ensure that the corporate safety regulations are appropriate and that they are followed. After the next CEO has then terminated several employees that play fast and loose with his future freedom to make themselves look good, it will become very popular to take sufficient care to be certain to avoid any liability.
The only way to prevent these kinds of accidents is by creating a cost-benefit analysis for the top responsible party where the cost is near infinite so no potential profit will ever outweigh the risks. Corporate charter revocation and hard time for the executives would be appropriate in cases like this. Anything else simply encourages repeats and will merely demonstrate that no matter how much harm you cause others you'll be let off the hook.
it's basic social wisdom to compromise in favor of the people who really do care.
Not when they are actively seeking out the object of their ire. In such cases they basically cannot be constructively compromised with as accommodating them will only result in them seeking out more material to be offended at and widening their criteria for offensiveness. As this case illustrates.
The correct way to deal with such people is to offer them counselling so they can get help with their actual problem and perhaps cease their offence addiction.
The solution here is not to allow monopoly rights at all. If there is a desperate desire to divert money towards specific fields or specific holders of certain papers, then just outright pay them from whatever public purse whose politicos they control, and leave the actual economy and business of getting jobs done alone.
Patents and other IPR seems like a good idea to some because their costs are not accounted for, but there is no macroeconomic difference between the privatized taxation rights of IPR and taxing and having the state pay out for per-patent use. Except, of course, it's much easier to say 'we're giving 20 years of monopoly rights to encourage innovation' than 'we're handing out X billions of which barely 20% is used for the purpose we intended'. And, of course, the fact that private monopolies seem to become even less efficient than (at least accountable) public monopolies.
And it's certainly not something to consider shameful. As IPR in general is equivalent to taxation from a macroeconomic perspective, it's basically a list of who has lower taxes on media duplication.
Copying is the social norm; it's the foundation of civilization.
Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms,
I don't see much of facebook changing any social norms; people seem to share more or less what they've always done. Facebook is just a whole lot more promiscuous about who they decide you should be social with, and over what time periods they do it.
The lack of easy granularity and difficulty of controlling information spread mainly means many tend to spew things ranging from the banal and inane that most their friends don't give a crap about to the too personal that they would rather not know. Things that have a time and a place, things that were appropriate under some circumstances but not others merge into something somewhat akin to a garbage heap of human interaction.
For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me.
Well, that's what you use your half-dozen facebook accounts for; as the site doesn't lend itself to appropriate social separation, do it yourself. Where do you think facebooks inflated numbers of accounts come from...
Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing.
Indeed it is. Even if it might not come back and bite you in a bad way, it can certainly put sand in the social machinery and make relations with people you can't avoid associating with, such as relatives and co-workers, more difficult.
That's one of the main reasons for moving to 4K sectors; larger sectors means less of the total needs to be dedicated to ECC data (and lower chance of minor defects taking out too much of the sector for the ECC to correct). That will make it possible to grow density without reaching the point of diminishing return where you need to keep adding more ECC data than you get new space.
There are some problems getting beyond 4K sectors tho; 4k page sizes are significantly harder to change and more built into OS's. And there appear to be some disadvantages to changing that, as far as optimum usage is concerned.
Still, personally I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of 5 1/4 inch or full height storage devices; imagine the amount of data you could stick in one of those with today's storage density. We could probably easily have 10-20 TB devices today.
Now, a bit of internet reading won't make me an expert, but during my consultation it allowed me to be an active participant
Misdiagnosis is very common, rates around 10%-30% are often seen, so obviously a medical degree doesn't necessarily make one an expert either. Human disease is simply a far too varied field with far too many similar symptoms for doctors to have even a fighting chance to get it right much more than that with the time available for each patient.
Researching on your own has shown to cut down the chances of misdiagnosis quite a lot; at least you can point out possible problems or alternatives that the doctor might have missed or forgotten, or point out symptoms that you may have thought insignificant at first.
It would be nice with more refined diagnosis tools on the net tho; easily accessible and structured decision trees which can guide you through how to both rule in and rule out possibilities would make a good tool for both patients and doctors. Done correctly it could even cut down unnecessary doctors visits and/or increase chances of early discovery of some diseases.
I pointed out that theft of time is also considered a crime,
So... you mean we should sue the producers of media we didn't like for wasting our time...?
Seriously tho. Theft of time is as irrelevant to monopoly rights violations as theft of property; there is no implied promise of payment, in fact, the premise of copyright itself doesn't even suggest that any production is guaranteed to be anything but a waste of time.
Further, in both theft of time and theft of property it's possible to demonstrate harm outside the framework of law. With violations of monopoly rights you cannot demonstrate that you have lost anything without leaning on the existence of the law; you can't demonstrate harm any more than I can demonstrate that you're causing me harm as you're not paying for air that I could conceivably own had I been granted a monopoly on air.
Laws that have no root in social mores or natural rights can be dubious in nature, and IPR rights certainly are of dubious value and lack moral and ethical foundations. Ultimately, copyright infringement simply isn't wrong, so trying to argue against it is an exercise in futility.
Mainly because rent-seeking is always good business; why work hard to make products at a competitive price when you can chat up a few politicians and get them to give you protection from competition.
Without the ability to receive credit and resources from that work - people won't do it.
They always have and they always will.
without having spent 4 billion dollars and 15 years developing it
Ask yourself why it costs 4 billion. Ask yourself why only 20% of the pharma costs are actually R&D.
When you have monopoly rights you charge what the market can bear, and your costs always grow until they absorb most revenue. Pharmaceutical research is as expensive as it is _because_ of the protection; without free market competition that's exactly what happens in any field. And in privatized monopolies like the IPR industries it's even worse than in government, as there isn't even democratic control or GAO oversight to limit the expenditures.
Here it'd take about 1-2 years for 2x1TB vs 1x2TB, at a difference of about $10/year, depending on energy prices. The difference in per GB cost is simply so small that even such a minor cost can push it over. Add to that costs of scaling up SATA controllers, which tend to get more expensive the more ports you use, supporting CPU/MB's if you need more storage than easily fits in one, etc.
If price is the main criteria, at this point in time you're probably better off with 2TB disks if you need to store more than half a dozen TB.
If you count the overhead of extra SATA slots, space, and the extra power to run you're certainly better off with 2TB disks today if you need the space.
Further, when comparing disks of differing sizes it's not certain that higher RPM translates into higher data rate; higher data density means less surface to travel for the same amount of data. Depending on the exact construction of the disks compared, but the typical example would be the tests where people just partition the fastest segment of large 7200 rpm drives (for example, 300GB of a 1.5T disk) and get the same performance as you get out of higher rpm performance (and price) disks like Velociraptors.
the inventor saw a potential to make some money off of his idea
The inventors lawyer saw a potential to make some money off the inventor would seem more likely. Most patents never make any money.
The disclosure process would be much more efficiently and appropriately served by simply outright paying for the disclosure. Whether you construct a system as payment on delivery or payment based on usage, any system that doesn't grant a monopoly or result in litigation would be more cost efficient.
Personally I recently refrained from buying a $2k+ Sony projector due to their behaviour. It probably performed a bit better than my second choice, but buy from Sony and you get screwed one way or another. The company is not getting another cent from me.
Except you don't put $51 Billion into the system, you take it from elsewhere. Which means 500K to 1M jobs are lost in other industries, with the funds transferred to the software industry.
Copyright and other IPR are fundamentally taxation systems. They artificially transfer funds from one place in the economy to another; saying $51B more to IPR industries creates more jobs is equivalent to saying that $51B more in taxes would create more jobs.
Of course, calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' makes it much more palatable in political circles.
where does that leave the future revenue source of the US?
Same as if it does; you assume such IPR wouldn't be made and owned by non-US interests as well. In reality there's little reason to expect such production wouldn't follow the pattern of other manufacturing.
Fundamentally, IPR is equivalent to any other taxation form; stronger protection and enforcement for IPR is equivalent to raising taxes. Depending on where the money goes taxes may or may not serve their purpose well, but they rarely make the economy more competitive.
As the weeds in this case so clearly demonstrate, the resistance he actually managed to breed certainly isn't beyond natural selection either. Little more than the fact that Monsanto can litigate successfully is proven.
Of course, that's a minor case of Monsanto evil anyway. Compared to wilfully and knowingly poisoning thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people their patent nastiness pales.
The company is the poster boy for a corporate death penalty and it should be put down to lessen the stench of corruption and improve the image of business in general, as well as lessening future health risks for the population around any sites they are active at.
Actually that's a universal rule of monopoly pricing; revenue is maximized at a price point where a significant amount of potential customers cannot afford the product, and at a point significantly above the marginal cost per copy.
As long as you allow monopoly pricing you'll have people not affording or willing to pay for artificially controlled copies, but perfectly able to pay for the costs incurred for the uncontrolled copying. Which, of course, it the good thing about actual free markets; prices fall towards the minimum needed to produce a certain good and perceived wealth in the economy is maximized.
Personally I'd pay about $30-$50 per month for unlimited/all I can eat access to a non-DRM library of all media. I've paid $10 per month for years for emusic.com.
Well, at least I would have. With the behaviour of the media corps and their lobbyists I consider financing them to be on about equal footing with financing terrorists, and I will happily pay even more to ensure they get jack.
What's to keep an asshat from making their rootkit masquerade as a cutesy Linux screensaver instead of a cutesy Windows screeensaver?
Mainly the fact that they need to get their cutesy screen-saver into a distribution repo to actually gain a significant level of deployment. At least most Linux users I know add very little software that isn't included in their main repo or one of very few specific extras. Anything beyond that gets treated with a certain level of suspicion.
That's what irritates me about the whole thing; companies like Bell just want to defraud customers by claiming a wildly inaccurate price for certain bandwidth. If they want to, they can sell 0.1 Mbit lines for $50 with 5Mbit burst capability. But if they're selling 5Mbit lines where you cant actually use 5Mbit at the price they're claiming to sell it for without incurring extra charges, then it's simply fraud.
Further, paying metered access for a resource where basically anyone in the whole world can run your meter is a profoundly bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind that copyright holders are using economics arguments
Copyright holders have very few valid economic arguments; the economic effects of copyright are fundamentally equivalent to any other taxation scheme. Claiming that more copyright is better for the economy is equivalent to claiming more tax is better for the economy.
The more likely flow of argument is that industry goon tells USTR representative that more copyright is good for him, then the USTR threatens various countries, who cave in as handing money to the industry goon is cheaper than fighting trade wars.
Of course, the main reason they get away with that is because IPR funding isn't accounted for in state budgets as it's an externally gathered tax. Had the actual state budget had a '"insurance" payoffs to the MAFIAA so nothing "happens" to our trade status' line it might have been a bit harder to motivate.
It's the catholic solution.
A Catholic solution? Won't somebody (apart from the priests) think of the children?!?
Copying infringes the content owners property rights
Copyright infringes the object owners property rights. Copyright is a limitation in what you can do with the property that you own. 'Content owners' have no property right; they have a monopoly right.
I don't know how we get past this.
Either copyright is abolished, perhaps replaced with a system that simply pays the creators directly based on popularity of their works straight out of government budgets like any other benefit system.
Or copyright gets rendered meaningless by f2f darknet migrations.
Either way it's dead. And good riddance.
Well, on the upside, these actions certainly encourage the adoption of encryption, vpns and distributed darknets on a much more massive scale. Soon enough the evolutionary pressure towards unmonitorable connections will have put private communications permanently out of reach of any agencies.
Encrypted f2f sharing is certainly the killer app for the emerging distributed social networks.
Having the CEO rot in jail will make the next CEO motivated to ensure that the corporate safety regulations are appropriate and that they are followed. After the next CEO has then terminated several employees that play fast and loose with his future freedom to make themselves look good, it will become very popular to take sufficient care to be certain to avoid any liability.
The only way to prevent these kinds of accidents is by creating a cost-benefit analysis for the top responsible party where the cost is near infinite so no potential profit will ever outweigh the risks. Corporate charter revocation and hard time for the executives would be appropriate in cases like this. Anything else simply encourages repeats and will merely demonstrate that no matter how much harm you cause others you'll be let off the hook.
it's basic social wisdom to compromise in favor of the people who really do care.
Not when they are actively seeking out the object of their ire. In such cases they basically cannot be constructively compromised with as accommodating them will only result in them seeking out more material to be offended at and widening their criteria for offensiveness. As this case illustrates.
The correct way to deal with such people is to offer them counselling so they can get help with their actual problem and perhaps cease their offence addiction.
The solutions here
The solution here is not to allow monopoly rights at all. If there is a desperate desire to divert money towards specific fields or specific holders of certain papers, then just outright pay them from whatever public purse whose politicos they control, and leave the actual economy and business of getting jobs done alone.
Patents and other IPR seems like a good idea to some because their costs are not accounted for, but there is no macroeconomic difference between the privatized taxation rights of IPR and taxing and having the state pay out for per-patent use. Except, of course, it's much easier to say 'we're giving 20 years of monopoly rights to encourage innovation' than 'we're handing out X billions of which barely 20% is used for the purpose we intended'. And, of course, the fact that private monopolies seem to become even less efficient than (at least accountable) public monopolies.
And it's certainly not something to consider shameful. As IPR in general is equivalent to taxation from a macroeconomic perspective, it's basically a list of who has lower taxes on media duplication.
Copying is the social norm; it's the foundation of civilization.
Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms,
I don't see much of facebook changing any social norms; people seem to share more or less what they've always done. Facebook is just a whole lot more promiscuous about who they decide you should be social with, and over what time periods they do it.
The lack of easy granularity and difficulty of controlling information spread mainly means many tend to spew things ranging from the banal and inane that most their friends don't give a crap about to the too personal that they would rather not know. Things that have a time and a place, things that were appropriate under some circumstances but not others merge into something somewhat akin to a garbage heap of human interaction.
For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me.
Well, that's what you use your half-dozen facebook accounts for; as the site doesn't lend itself to appropriate social separation, do it yourself. Where do you think facebooks inflated numbers of accounts come from...
Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing.
Indeed it is. Even if it might not come back and bite you in a bad way, it can certainly put sand in the social machinery and make relations with people you can't avoid associating with, such as relatives and co-workers, more difficult.
That's one of the main reasons for moving to 4K sectors; larger sectors means less of the total needs to be dedicated to ECC data (and lower chance of minor defects taking out too much of the sector for the ECC to correct). That will make it possible to grow density without reaching the point of diminishing return where you need to keep adding more ECC data than you get new space.
There are some problems getting beyond 4K sectors tho; 4k page sizes are significantly harder to change and more built into OS's. And there appear to be some disadvantages to changing that, as far as optimum usage is concerned.
Still, personally I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of 5 1/4 inch or full height storage devices; imagine the amount of data you could stick in one of those with today's storage density. We could probably easily have 10-20 TB devices today.
Now, a bit of internet reading won't make me an expert, but during my consultation it allowed me to be an active participant
Misdiagnosis is very common, rates around 10%-30% are often seen, so obviously a medical degree doesn't necessarily make one an expert either. Human disease is simply a far too varied field with far too many similar symptoms for doctors to have even a fighting chance to get it right much more than that with the time available for each patient.
Researching on your own has shown to cut down the chances of misdiagnosis quite a lot; at least you can point out possible problems or alternatives that the doctor might have missed or forgotten, or point out symptoms that you may have thought insignificant at first.
It would be nice with more refined diagnosis tools on the net tho; easily accessible and structured decision trees which can guide you through how to both rule in and rule out possibilities would make a good tool for both patients and doctors. Done correctly it could even cut down unnecessary doctors visits and/or increase chances of early discovery of some diseases.
I pointed out that theft of time is also considered a crime,
So... you mean we should sue the producers of media we didn't like for wasting our time...?
Seriously tho. Theft of time is as irrelevant to monopoly rights violations as theft of property; there is no implied promise of payment, in fact, the premise of copyright itself doesn't even suggest that any production is guaranteed to be anything but a waste of time.
Further, in both theft of time and theft of property it's possible to demonstrate harm outside the framework of law. With violations of monopoly rights you cannot demonstrate that you have lost anything without leaning on the existence of the law; you can't demonstrate harm any more than I can demonstrate that you're causing me harm as you're not paying for air that I could conceivably own had I been granted a monopoly on air.
Laws that have no root in social mores or natural rights can be dubious in nature, and IPR rights certainly are of dubious value and lack moral and ethical foundations. Ultimately, copyright infringement simply isn't wrong, so trying to argue against it is an exercise in futility.
You don't understand why we have IP laws?
Mainly because rent-seeking is always good business; why work hard to make products at a competitive price when you can chat up a few politicians and get them to give you protection from competition.
Without the ability to receive credit and resources from that work - people won't do it.
They always have and they always will.
without having spent 4 billion dollars and 15 years developing it
Ask yourself why it costs 4 billion. Ask yourself why only 20% of the pharma costs are actually R&D.
When you have monopoly rights you charge what the market can bear, and your costs always grow until they absorb most revenue. Pharmaceutical research is as expensive as it is _because_ of the protection; without free market competition that's exactly what happens in any field. And in privatized monopolies like the IPR industries it's even worse than in government, as there isn't even democratic control or GAO oversight to limit the expenditures.
Here it'd take about 1-2 years for 2x1TB vs 1x2TB, at a difference of about $10/year, depending on energy prices. The difference in per GB cost is simply so small that even such a minor cost can push it over. Add to that costs of scaling up SATA controllers, which tend to get more expensive the more ports you use, supporting CPU/MB's if you need more storage than easily fits in one, etc.
If price is the main criteria, at this point in time you're probably better off with 2TB disks if you need to store more than half a dozen TB.
If you count the overhead of extra SATA slots, space, and the extra power to run you're certainly better off with 2TB disks today if you need the space.
Further, when comparing disks of differing sizes it's not certain that higher RPM translates into higher data rate; higher data density means less surface to travel for the same amount of data. Depending on the exact construction of the disks compared, but the typical example would be the tests where people just partition the fastest segment of large 7200 rpm drives (for example, 300GB of a 1.5T disk) and get the same performance as you get out of higher rpm performance (and price) disks like Velociraptors.
the inventor saw a potential to make some money off of his idea
The inventors lawyer saw a potential to make some money off the inventor would seem more likely. Most patents never make any money.
The disclosure process would be much more efficiently and appropriately served by simply outright paying for the disclosure. Whether you construct a system as payment on delivery or payment based on usage, any system that doesn't grant a monopoly or result in litigation would be more cost efficient.
I won't buy another VAIO
Personally I recently refrained from buying a $2k+ Sony projector due to their behaviour. It probably performed a bit better than my second choice, but buy from Sony and you get screwed one way or another. The company is not getting another cent from me.
It sounds like it would be applicable against post-sale removal of features as well, as in the Sony PS3 other os case.
If you put $51 Billion into the system
Except you don't put $51 Billion into the system, you take it from elsewhere. Which means 500K to 1M jobs are lost in other industries, with the funds transferred to the software industry.
Copyright and other IPR are fundamentally taxation systems. They artificially transfer funds from one place in the economy to another; saying $51B more to IPR industries creates more jobs is equivalent to saying that $51B more in taxes would create more jobs.
Of course, calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' makes it much more palatable in political circles.
where does that leave the future revenue source of the US?
Same as if it does; you assume such IPR wouldn't be made and owned by non-US interests as well. In reality there's little reason to expect such production wouldn't follow the pattern of other manufacturing.
Fundamentally, IPR is equivalent to any other taxation form; stronger protection and enforcement for IPR is equivalent to raising taxes. Depending on where the money goes taxes may or may not serve their purpose well, but they rarely make the economy more competitive.
As the weeds in this case so clearly demonstrate, the resistance he actually managed to breed certainly isn't beyond natural selection either. Little more than the fact that Monsanto can litigate successfully is proven.
Of course, that's a minor case of Monsanto evil anyway. Compared to wilfully and knowingly poisoning thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people their patent nastiness pales.
The company is the poster boy for a corporate death penalty and it should be put down to lessen the stench of corruption and improve the image of business in general, as well as lessening future health risks for the population around any sites they are active at.
Universal Iron rule of the Internet:
Actually that's a universal rule of monopoly pricing; revenue is maximized at a price point where a significant amount of potential customers cannot afford the product, and at a point significantly above the marginal cost per copy.
As long as you allow monopoly pricing you'll have people not affording or willing to pay for artificially controlled copies, but perfectly able to pay for the costs incurred for the uncontrolled copying. Which, of course, it the good thing about actual free markets; prices fall towards the minimum needed to produce a certain good and perceived wealth in the economy is maximized.
Personally I'd pay about $30-$50 per month for unlimited/all I can eat access to a non-DRM library of all media. I've paid $10 per month for years for emusic.com.
Well, at least I would have. With the behaviour of the media corps and their lobbyists I consider financing them to be on about equal footing with financing terrorists, and I will happily pay even more to ensure they get jack.
What's to keep an asshat from making their rootkit masquerade as a cutesy Linux screensaver instead of a cutesy Windows screeensaver?
Mainly the fact that they need to get their cutesy screen-saver into a distribution repo to actually gain a significant level of deployment. At least most Linux users I know add very little software that isn't included in their main repo or one of very few specific extras. Anything beyond that gets treated with a certain level of suspicion.
That's what irritates me about the whole thing; companies like Bell just want to defraud customers by claiming a wildly inaccurate price for certain bandwidth. If they want to, they can sell 0.1 Mbit lines for $50 with 5Mbit burst capability. But if they're selling 5Mbit lines where you cant actually use 5Mbit at the price they're claiming to sell it for without incurring extra charges, then it's simply fraud.
Further, paying metered access for a resource where basically anyone in the whole world can run your meter is a profoundly bad idea.