"stealing" is the act of depriving someone of the economic value of a thing
So when the copyright expires someone has stolen it from you?
Copyright has no basis in social norms; in the absence of the actual law you could not explain to your peers how you would have been deprived of anything just because someone else copied something you had made. The ethical case against copyright is much better, as it is easily demonstrable that copyright deprives people of right to do what they wish with their own property, including copying it.
You could conceivably make a case that it's somewhat equivalent to tax avoidance on the same level of not paying VAT on the dinner you cooked for your friends (but then again there are those who argue that tax is theft, so there you go).
You may wish to make it 'wrong' by associating it with a demonstrable 'wrong', but ultimately most forms of state sponsored monopoly rights are unjustifiable in themselves and thus carry no moral weight.
Well, they make some nice projectors. Which I recently didn't buy because of Sony's behaviour. There are competitors and they don't leave quite the bad taste in the mouth that Sony does these days.
Considering the efficiency of sound waves at swaying man's moral compass I'm not sure this really changes much. With the rates indicated by various Milgramesque experiments, simply appending 'that's an order' may be a far more effective way of disabling someone's moral compass than pointing fancy-shmancy TMS equipment at them.
Compared to encasing the chips in material that itself releases the ionizing radiation, I suspect that any altitude related increase in radiation would be statistically insignificant. There would also be a lot more shielding to penetrate to hit the chip unlike in the case where you have radioactive packaging.
You make the mistaken assumption that IP adds value to an economy. It doesn't. It's a way of redistributing, and eventually, removing value from the economy; those paying for the IP are in the economy subject to the IP, those receiving the payment may or may not be. Fundamentally it's equivalent to a taxation form where the recipients may be outside the economy where the tax is levied.
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
Somehow that doesn't exactly sound like a very good business plan to me. I'm sure it's great business for the recipients (who tend to be the only stakeholders represented as by calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' some seem to assume that the money isn't taken from someone else), but for everyone else, it's simply another of those economic burdens that are making rapidly making western economies uncompetitive.
I think you underestimate just how much storage video can eat. I can easily see applications like PVR's that basically records all channels all the time and lets you simply pick what you wanted to watch post-broadcast. Something which could easily eat all the storage you could throw at it for a long time...
A petabyte isn't much these days; when my corporate co-workers lose perspective and think we have lots of storage as we're a big corporation with many petabytes, I point out that the many regular online computer shops where we buy consumer parts from have several times our total storage volume lying around in stock for next day delivery. Corporate storage may be expensive, but the volumes seem to grow far slower than consumer storage.
Oracle is changing the rules of the game in mid-stream.
Well, to be fair, it's not exactly Oracle that's changing the rules, it's Sun's stockholders who decided to sell to Oracle. That Oracle was going to do exactly what they're doing was pretty obvious to most who've followed these companies... the reason customers were dropping Sun during the pre-merger period was hardly the regulatory dragging, but rather the high power suction device snaking towards their wallet.
Sooner or later, you pay for what you get.
Probably. But either way, if it's not open source you basically hand someone else control over your costs. Which may later turn out to be a bad business decision.
but not as much as if it would have if it stayed in China.
Is there any analysis to support that conclusion? I can't see much in Googles fundamental business that requires a physical corporate presence in China. Neither selling ads to Chinese producers nor displaying them to Chinese consumers really requires more than a network presence.
Combine that with the goodwill the company gains elsewhere by not kowtowing to an oppressive government, certainly a competitive advantage in a business segment where the customers perception of the safety of their personal data may carry some weight, and I'm not at all sure that it's a financial loss for Google.
China will make itself whatever its government wants it to become
Perhaps. That doesn't mean one has to collaborate with it or even that collaboration is a financially sound long term strategy.
Even 12000W may give a worse signal to noise ratio than a home system, depending on the prevalence of annoying noise sources in your cinema or your home.
Personally I have two main show stoppers for going to the cinema; first, the inability to fast forward, a feature I have grown to consider a necessity for enduring most modern "movies", and second, money going to MAFIAA companies. Neither which I expect will change soon.
Monopoly pricing isn't really related to inflation but to disposable income. As other things have gotten cheaper (tech, formerly housing, etc), monopoly goods such as copyrighted or significantly patented goods will find their revenue maximization point shifted higher and take up the slack left in wages, so such rising prices and percentage of pay checks is to be expected.
Of course, the monopoly burden will eventually result is a very uncompetitive economy. Which may or may not by seem familiar to an economy near you.
The purpose of an economy is to maximize (perceived) wealth within it; monopolies as a general rule result in lower total wealth generated than what the economy would generate without them (although they tend to create concentrations that may give the appearance of more wealth, as you don't note the smaller piles of wealth lost).
Concert places are in themselves limited, so selling more of them would not create more of them, and no extra wealth.
Trademarks are less damaging, especially in their use as identifiers. They're not without damage though, in the sense that they divert excessive amounts of funds into advertising rather than more wealth producing fields (advertisements are fairly overproduced due to the various regulations that overincentivize them).
Without IP, that's perfectly okay.
Sounds great. Lets do that.
The fact of the matter is that without IP, it's pretty darn hard for creators to get paid for their work
The fact of the matter is that with IP they're not getting paid much anyway, in fact, most get nothing. And beyond that they get to compete on a very tilted playing field and exposed to legal risks in their own work. Basically any funding method would be better for creators, because it's hard to find one that works as bad as IP. Personally I tend to argue for something similar to the mandatory radio licensing, but applicable to all copying and exacted as a percentage of gross revenue per copy, and handled like any other tax/benefit scheme (if we really feel that extra incentives are actually needed).
economics in the real world.
Sounds like you ought to read up on economics a bit. Economists such as von Mises and Hayek have criticised IP for the damage it causes to a free market economy, so outside the IP lobbyist groups it's certainly not as if copyright or other IP variants are accepted as a net gain for the economy.
The easiest and most simplified way to demonstrate the net loss in the production/incentive stage would be to equate IP laws with a tax/benefit scheme (from a macroeconomic point of view there isn't a significant difference). As such it becomes simply a matter of efficiency at accomplishing the goal, and at general efficiency levels of the IP industries with between 5-20% of funding going towards the goal they're even less efficient than most government schemes. IE, IP is a net loss even compared to outright funding the production with taxes and allowing free distribution.
IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.
IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.
it'll be up to our inventions and our software and our innovation in exporting ideas
Please. IP is mainly good for extracting resources out of an economy, it has nothing to do with 'exporting'. Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy, and most of the time (certainly in the case of the US), the monopoly rights will be held by foreign corporations.
The only way forward is to make western economies competitive again. Repealing at the very least copyright and patents would be a good start towards reestablishing a highly competitive free market and lowering the burden on western labour (thus reducing their price).
you'll see a collapse of the US consumer economy as we know it
Of course, a consumer economy is unsustainable either way, as eventually it runs out of suckers who'll lend it money. Expanding an asset inflation bubble is basically just printing money, and someone is going to get stuck with a lot of worthless paper.
because we've abandoned the idea of making goods domestically due to higher costs
Costs such as intellectual 'property' that burden the economy as a whole...
Ultimately costs would adjust with floating currency tho, but there's a lot of interest in maintaining the gap, at least until the US starts defaulting on its loans to a greater extent. At that point the US consumer may not exactly be interesting any more.
it requires a room which is 100% free from other radiation sources.
One may wonder how the subjects deal with the comparatively strong field that usually surrounds them in the form of earth's magnetic field. Better sit very... very... still.
solved through extensive use of mind-altering drugs.
Many modern variants which, ironically, are barely better than placebo...
Thank GOD we finally got some management in who is setting firm guidelines about exactly what we are and are not expected to do as part of our jobs.
Sorry to tell you this, but if you've got management setting firm guidelines about such things one of those expected things will soon be 'speak fluent hindi'. Job descriptions changing from 'what the customer wants' to 'x, y and five hours per week of z level a' is a good step towards preparing an RFP for outsourcing...
By going to MS only, you can cover most(if not all) of your bases while only requiring one skillset to maintain them.
Until that sentence I was really wondering which way you were going to go, and was leaning towards 'So we've found that using MS only products is a great way to keep employment up, constantly being able to attend education for new incompatible software and getting the opportunity to start from scratch every few years.'
I can only assume you're fairly new to the IT business, as the Microsoft franchise pretty much is the poster boy for 'flavour of the month'.
your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
Do people reboot that often or have so little RAM? I mean, personally I have enough RAM that most of the OS and any applications I use with any frequency will be cached anyway. I can see the use for portable and constrained devices, but is there a significant benefit compared to simply adding more memory?
That's actually called fractional reserve banking. As to how it's not stealing, well, ask the Fed...
Seriously tho, if you're worried about the loss of value of a fiat currency, don't store your buying power in it. No counterfeiter in the world can do anything near what's done every day by those running the monetary systems.
That would have said something, it would have at least expressed dissatisfaction with the process.
Frankly, failure to vote can be equated with dissatisfaction either way; getting people to engage in pointless practices when their actions are futile is unrealistic.
Personally, I'd suggest every non-vote should count as a vote for reformation; and in a fptp system, if the strongest candidate can't even beat the non-vote, the representative would automatically be a neutral party with only the rights to work on voting system reform.
If you include the people they've pissed off so badly they will no longer give any money to any media company for any reason whatsoever, and will do whatever they can to deny them income beyond that, I'd say the damage they've caused themselves goes quite a bit beyond losing money.
Personally I can certainly afford buying a lot of media, but people raping teenagers simply are not getting my money.
Without a doubt. The more disturbing part is rather how 50k people roadkill can not be front page news while 'human interest' items like half-a-dozen shooters, or aviators failing to miss a building can be.
I wonder how it would turn out if we got flying cars... would the papers turn into thousand page volumes on air traffic death, or would planes crashing into buildings get treated by media approximately like a bus turning over?
Either way, more proportional reporting would perhaps result in more appropriate spending. And at the very least, less incentive for media inclined lunatics to go on rampages.
And ACTA is fundamentally about protecting monopolists from competition. Does that make ACTA a counterfeit trade agreement? As IP can certainly be considered a kind of fraud it certainly would be somewhat fitting.
Its not like there are not alternative ways to get your media, TV shows, movies or otherwise.
Indeed. Most 'media providers' on the net certainly don't seem to be asking for SSN...
And in cases where it's hard to avoid some tracking, like social networking sites, just sprinkle freely with sockpuppet identities to screw with the tracking. If you're worried about leakage between browser profiles or users, create virtual machines to run multiple virtual identities. Create your own happy little multiple-personality collective.
Those with the idea that they want to track 'everything' often seem to miss how much crap 'everything' actually contains. And while they can attempt to record as much as they can, they can neither make you tell the truth, nor the whole truth, nor shut you up once you wander off into fantasyland.
And hey, best of all, polluting the data really seems to piss the data mining junkies off.
CRU was trolled by FOIA requests. They are nuisance to deal with, as far as I was told.
Such requests are easy to deal with: publish all the data, code and any other relevant material on a public site and there is no longer any need for FOIA requests, and there certainly isn't any difficulty dealing with any that come anyway.
Of course, FOIA requests may be a nuisance to deal with if you'd rather not disclose the data. Which is the actual problem here.
Slashdot Mirror
"stealing" is the act of depriving someone of the economic value of a thing
So when the copyright expires someone has stolen it from you?
Copyright has no basis in social norms; in the absence of the actual law you could not explain to your peers how you would have been deprived of anything just because someone else copied something you had made. The ethical case against copyright is much better, as it is easily demonstrable that copyright deprives people of right to do what they wish with their own property, including copying it.
You could conceivably make a case that it's somewhat equivalent to tax avoidance on the same level of not paying VAT on the dinner you cooked for your friends (but then again there are those who argue that tax is theft, so there you go).
You may wish to make it 'wrong' by associating it with a demonstrable 'wrong', but ultimately most forms of state sponsored monopoly rights are unjustifiable in themselves and thus carry no moral weight.
What's to love about Sony anyway?
Well, they make some nice projectors. Which I recently didn't buy because of Sony's behaviour. There are competitors and they don't leave quite the bad taste in the mouth that Sony does these days.
Considering the efficiency of sound waves at swaying man's moral compass I'm not sure this really changes much. With the rates indicated by various Milgramesque experiments, simply appending 'that's an order' may be a far more effective way of disabling someone's moral compass than pointing fancy-shmancy TMS equipment at them.
Compared to encasing the chips in material that itself releases the ionizing radiation, I suspect that any altitude related increase in radiation would be statistically insignificant. There would also be a lot more shielding to penetrate to hit the chip unlike in the case where you have radioactive packaging.
You make the mistaken assumption that IP adds value to an economy. It doesn't. It's a way of redistributing, and eventually, removing value from the economy; those paying for the IP are in the economy subject to the IP, those receiving the payment may or may not be. Fundamentally it's equivalent to a taxation form where the recipients may be outside the economy where the tax is levied.
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
Somehow that doesn't exactly sound like a very good business plan to me. I'm sure it's great business for the recipients (who tend to be the only stakeholders represented as by calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' some seem to assume that the money isn't taken from someone else), but for everyone else, it's simply another of those economic burdens that are making rapidly making western economies uncompetitive.
I think you underestimate just how much storage video can eat. I can easily see applications like PVR's that basically records all channels all the time and lets you simply pick what you wanted to watch post-broadcast. Something which could easily eat all the storage you could throw at it for a long time...
A petabyte isn't much these days; when my corporate co-workers lose perspective and think we have lots of storage as we're a big corporation with many petabytes, I point out that the many regular online computer shops where we buy consumer parts from have several times our total storage volume lying around in stock for next day delivery. Corporate storage may be expensive, but the volumes seem to grow far slower than consumer storage.
Oracle is changing the rules of the game in mid-stream.
Well, to be fair, it's not exactly Oracle that's changing the rules, it's Sun's stockholders who decided to sell to Oracle. That Oracle was going to do exactly what they're doing was pretty obvious to most who've followed these companies... the reason customers were dropping Sun during the pre-merger period was hardly the regulatory dragging, but rather the high power suction device snaking towards their wallet.
Sooner or later, you pay for what you get.
Probably. But either way, if it's not open source you basically hand someone else control over your costs. Which may later turn out to be a bad business decision.
but not as much as if it would have if it stayed in China.
Is there any analysis to support that conclusion? I can't see much in Googles fundamental business that requires a physical corporate presence in China. Neither selling ads to Chinese producers nor displaying them to Chinese consumers really requires more than a network presence.
Combine that with the goodwill the company gains elsewhere by not kowtowing to an oppressive government, certainly a competitive advantage in a business segment where the customers perception of the safety of their personal data may carry some weight, and I'm not at all sure that it's a financial loss for Google.
China will make itself whatever its government wants it to become
Perhaps. That doesn't mean one has to collaborate with it or even that collaboration is a financially sound long term strategy.
Even 12000W may give a worse signal to noise ratio than a home system, depending on the prevalence of annoying noise sources in your cinema or your home.
Personally I have two main show stoppers for going to the cinema; first, the inability to fast forward, a feature I have grown to consider a necessity for enduring most modern "movies", and second, money going to MAFIAA companies. Neither which I expect will change soon.
Monopoly pricing isn't really related to inflation but to disposable income. As other things have gotten cheaper (tech, formerly housing, etc), monopoly goods such as copyrighted or significantly patented goods will find their revenue maximization point shifted higher and take up the slack left in wages, so such rising prices and percentage of pay checks is to be expected.
Of course, the monopoly burden will eventually result is a very uncompetitive economy. Which may or may not by seem familiar to an economy near you.
The purpose of an economy is to maximize (perceived) wealth within it; monopolies as a general rule result in lower total wealth generated than what the economy would generate without them (although they tend to create concentrations that may give the appearance of more wealth, as you don't note the smaller piles of wealth lost).
Concert places are in themselves limited, so selling more of them would not create more of them, and no extra wealth.
Trademarks are less damaging, especially in their use as identifiers. They're not without damage though, in the sense that they divert excessive amounts of funds into advertising rather than more wealth producing fields (advertisements are fairly overproduced due to the various regulations that overincentivize them).
Without IP, that's perfectly okay.
Sounds great. Lets do that.
The fact of the matter is that without IP, it's pretty darn hard for creators to get paid for their work
The fact of the matter is that with IP they're not getting paid much anyway, in fact, most get nothing. And beyond that they get to compete on a very tilted playing field and exposed to legal risks in their own work. Basically any funding method would be better for creators, because it's hard to find one that works as bad as IP. Personally I tend to argue for something similar to the mandatory radio licensing, but applicable to all copying and exacted as a percentage of gross revenue per copy, and handled like any other tax/benefit scheme (if we really feel that extra incentives are actually needed).
economics in the real world.
Sounds like you ought to read up on economics a bit. Economists such as von Mises and Hayek have criticised IP for the damage it causes to a free market economy, so outside the IP lobbyist groups it's certainly not as if copyright or other IP variants are accepted as a net gain for the economy.
The easiest and most simplified way to demonstrate the net loss in the production/incentive stage would be to equate IP laws with a tax/benefit scheme (from a macroeconomic point of view there isn't a significant difference). As such it becomes simply a matter of efficiency at accomplishing the goal, and at general efficiency levels of the IP industries with between 5-20% of funding going towards the goal they're even less efficient than most government schemes. IE, IP is a net loss even compared to outright funding the production with taxes and allowing free distribution.
IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.
IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.
it'll be up to our inventions and our software and our innovation in exporting ideas
Please. IP is mainly good for extracting resources out of an economy, it has nothing to do with 'exporting'. Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy, and most of the time (certainly in the case of the US), the monopoly rights will be held by foreign corporations.
The only way forward is to make western economies competitive again. Repealing at the very least copyright and patents would be a good start towards reestablishing a highly competitive free market and lowering the burden on western labour (thus reducing their price).
you'll see a collapse of the US consumer economy as we know it
Of course, a consumer economy is unsustainable either way, as eventually it runs out of suckers who'll lend it money. Expanding an asset inflation bubble is basically just printing money, and someone is going to get stuck with a lot of worthless paper.
because we've abandoned the idea of making goods domestically due to higher costs
Costs such as intellectual 'property' that burden the economy as a whole...
Ultimately costs would adjust with floating currency tho, but there's a lot of interest in maintaining the gap, at least until the US starts defaulting on its loans to a greater extent. At that point the US consumer may not exactly be interesting any more.
it requires a room which is 100% free from other radiation sources.
One may wonder how the subjects deal with the comparatively strong field that usually surrounds them in the form of earth's magnetic field. Better sit very... very... still.
solved through extensive use of mind-altering drugs.
Many modern variants which, ironically, are barely better than placebo...
Thank GOD we finally got some management in who is setting firm guidelines about exactly what we are and are not expected to do as part of our jobs.
Sorry to tell you this, but if you've got management setting firm guidelines about such things one of those expected things will soon be 'speak fluent hindi'. Job descriptions changing from 'what the customer wants' to 'x, y and five hours per week of z level a' is a good step towards preparing an RFP for outsourcing...
By going to MS only, you can cover most(if not all) of your bases while only requiring one skillset to maintain them.
Until that sentence I was really wondering which way you were going to go, and was leaning towards 'So we've found that using MS only products is a great way to keep employment up, constantly being able to attend education for new incompatible software and getting the opportunity to start from scratch every few years.'
I can only assume you're fairly new to the IT business, as the Microsoft franchise pretty much is the poster boy for 'flavour of the month'.
your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
Do people reboot that often or have so little RAM? I mean, personally I have enough RAM that most of the OS and any applications I use with any frequency will be cached anyway. I can see the use for portable and constrained devices, but is there a significant benefit compared to simply adding more memory?
Uh.. of course it's stolen. The value is stolen.
That's actually called fractional reserve banking. As to how it's not stealing, well, ask the Fed...
Seriously tho, if you're worried about the loss of value of a fiat currency, don't store your buying power in it. No counterfeiter in the world can do anything near what's done every day by those running the monetary systems.
That would have said something, it would have at least expressed dissatisfaction with the process.
Frankly, failure to vote can be equated with dissatisfaction either way; getting people to engage in pointless practices when their actions are futile is unrealistic.
Personally, I'd suggest every non-vote should count as a vote for reformation; and in a fptp system, if the strongest candidate can't even beat the non-vote, the representative would automatically be a neutral party with only the rights to work on voting system reform.
They will lose money on the overall deal.
If you include the people they've pissed off so badly they will no longer give any money to any media company for any reason whatsoever, and will do whatever they can to deny them income beyond that, I'd say the damage they've caused themselves goes quite a bit beyond losing money.
Personally I can certainly afford buying a lot of media, but people raping teenagers simply are not getting my money.
it would be a front page story for a week.
Without a doubt. The more disturbing part is rather how 50k people roadkill can not be front page news while 'human interest' items like half-a-dozen shooters, or aviators failing to miss a building can be.
I wonder how it would turn out if we got flying cars... would the papers turn into thousand page volumes on air traffic death, or would planes crashing into buildings get treated by media approximately like a bus turning over?
Either way, more proportional reporting would perhaps result in more appropriate spending. And at the very least, less incentive for media inclined lunatics to go on rampages.
And ACTA is fundamentally about protecting monopolists from competition. Does that make ACTA a counterfeit trade agreement? As IP can certainly be considered a kind of fraud it certainly would be somewhat fitting.
Its not like there are not alternative ways to get your media, TV shows, movies or otherwise.
Indeed. Most 'media providers' on the net certainly don't seem to be asking for SSN...
And in cases where it's hard to avoid some tracking, like social networking sites, just sprinkle freely with sockpuppet identities to screw with the tracking. If you're worried about leakage between browser profiles or users, create virtual machines to run multiple virtual identities. Create your own happy little multiple-personality collective.
Those with the idea that they want to track 'everything' often seem to miss how much crap 'everything' actually contains. And while they can attempt to record as much as they can, they can neither make you tell the truth, nor the whole truth, nor shut you up once you wander off into fantasyland.
And hey, best of all, polluting the data really seems to piss the data mining junkies off.
CRU was trolled by FOIA requests. They are nuisance to deal with, as far as I was told.
Such requests are easy to deal with: publish all the data, code and any other relevant material on a public site and there is no longer any need for FOIA requests, and there certainly isn't any difficulty dealing with any that come anyway.
Of course, FOIA requests may be a nuisance to deal with if you'd rather not disclose the data. Which is the actual problem here.