"GPLv3 affects any hardware that the software is distributed with."
No it doesnt. It refuses to be distributed _with_ software that isnt as free or more free than the GPL. That doesnt 'infect' anything, it affects only the GPL software itself.
"I'm pretty sure that this makes it viral *by definition*."
No, that makes it ethically principled by definition. GPL software will refuse to associate with components taking away further freedom from the users.
If you want to hang with the cool freedom-loving GPL crowd, you can abide by those rules. You dont have to, you can go skulk with the bullies and beat up kids for lunch money if you want, but the GPL crowd arent going to help, and you arent going to get invited to the parties.
There you go, a more accurate antropomorphization. As far as those go.
"There are some folks who take that position but they are generally *NOT* GPL proponents."
Not quite true. The GPL is empowered by copyright, but only copyright makes it necessary. Remove the necessity, and the ability to enforce copyleft would no longer be essential.
"Abolish copyrights and my guess is all the big software publishers will just adopt a TiVo-like solution that ensures only legitimate copies of their product will run."
I doubt it would work to any serious extent; without anti-circumvention laws, the economic incentive for bypassing such protection would be huge.
Think mod-chips in wal-mart. You basically wouldnt be able to sell an un-hacked version.
"People seem to be getting this nasty assumption that you're guilty unless you can prove otherwise"
The word 'suspected' has in many ways become synonymous with 'guilty'.
Perhaps it would be useful with a firefox plugin for newssites that always replaces 'suspected' with 'innocent', 'by unreputable sources accused of being' or 'random joe off the street to be scapegoated to further a political agenda'.
Of course, in light of the US history with the political idea of "no taxation without representation" I assume that means that felons dont have to pay taxes?
"It looks like paper is a better choice for keeping records than digital formats."
Not quite the same problem; there are two factors at work here. The first is the medium on which the data is stored, which has to last.
The second is the encoding of the data. Had they stored the constitution in Word format they could have written it in stone and still have the same trouble reading it.
Of course, our ancestors thankfully weren't quite as... challanged... as some members of the current generations.
Take a clue from the forefathers, store your data in ASCII. Or Unicode.
Personally I always keep original data in a pure text format. Typeset it afterwards if you wish a nice presentation, otherwise typesetting just gets in the way of both the writing and the reading.
Intellectual 'property' is an intentionally applied misnomer, with the exact purpose of confusing people to think exactly as you appear to do. Copyright and other such legal constructs arent 'property' as such, but government granted temporary monopolies.
As it isnt property, that dictionary definition obviously does not apply.
Perhaps you could come up with some other word to define 'to violate someones government granted monopoly without right or permission'. Stealing, however, just isnt it.
The US needs a proportional representation system.
Two party systems are one party away from being a dictatorship.
In a two party system the parties have more to gain from cooperating with eachother against the interest of the voters; collectively they are immune to voter oversight.
Of course, due to the IP industries gross misuse of the word the meaning of 'piracy' in this context has degraded to something akin to 'competeing', 'quoting', 'deriving from', or 'cut'n'pasting'.
You cant necessarily infer any assumption of illegality from the use of that word anymore.
F) The bad guys dont figure out they can utterly compromise the value of fingerprint and DNA data by proactively contaminating any scenes with false imprints and cells.
G) The enforcement types figure out that there really wasnt twohundredthousand people in that room, someone merely gathered the vacuum cleaner bags from a hotel or a sports event and ran them on reverse, so perhaps the crowd they rounded up and sent to the new Gulags werent all guilty.
Wearing gloves and a hairnet when out in public is starting to seem like reasonable security precautions (in fact, full body latex suits and breathing masks seem to be the only way you can be sure you're not recklessly spreading your 'identity' around). You never know who's going to be collecting your biometric identification data and placing it somewhere it shouldnt be.
"Software, whether you like it or not, is licensed"
Copyright largely governs what you can and cannot do with software; clickwrap extensions trying to enforce post-sale contractual obligations are much less certain.
"but then you shouldn't expect them to respect the GPL either."
The GPL doesnt extend beyond copyright law, the GPL grants rights the user does not _have_ under copyright law. It's a copyright license, falling back on copyright law. Without the GPL the distributor has no rights to distribute at all.
Software clickwrap licenses restrict the user beyond what copyright law does, and try to take away rights the user normally has. Such licenses fall back on contract law, and are in their nature vastly different in their enforcability (the contract has to be found valid at all, the clauses have to be deemed acceptable, etc), and if it isnt found enforcable then the user has all the rights copyright grants them (ie, to use the product any way they deem fit).
"or any other valuable non-currency good that you might invest in."
s/valuable non-currency good/pyramid scheme/g
Virtual goods are non-scarce items without any inherent value. As such they are not comparable with stocks, but rather with monopoly money or pyramid investments.
Otherwise I'd say you're perfectly right. Just because it's small enough not to be noticed and hard enough to trace that the IRS might not care doesnt mean it isnt income and taxable. I dont see why there would be a need for any specific law to handle it, any more than there'd need to be for picking leaves in a forest and selling them on ebay. You make money off it, you're quite likely already supposed to be paying taxes for it.
"Thus, I think you are off-base saying that "adding regulation" to an industry reduces jobs. If anything, it creates them."
Eh, I thought that was just what I said...
"and that's because air isn't (nor can it be) regulated."
Oh, technically it could very well be. Put gas masks on everyone outside their homes and pipe the air through ducts into the homes. Imagine the opportunities for profit... (of course, employing people in an industry whose sole purpose would be to count the use of a non-scarce resource would be horrendously inefficient and transfer massive amounts of resources from other sectors for no good reason, effectively reducing the total wealth in the economy by the same amount).
That's sortof the point when it comes to the production of intanglible materials; copies of music, software or movies are in their nature non-scarce resources, employing hundreds of thousands of people manufacturing, distributing and accounting for those copies is as bad for the economy as counting the air we breath.
Of course, I'm purposely ignoring the production of the original copy (or the air), because to solve that issue is an entirely different problem (as would the production of air be, in case we were faced with a scarcity (in which case I'd suggest that the above described accounting system would not be the most efficient way to deal with a scarcity of air)).
"However what you're talking about now is competition for similar (but different) products."
No. I'm talking about the specific monopoly of each and every instance of a copyrighted work. Each and every one of them is a monopoly, exacting monopoly rent in that thin product segment.
The damage of monopolies isnt that you cannot make alternate products (you could make steel instead of aluminium, you could make coal instead of oil, you could take a car instead of the rail, etc), but that they increase the price of a specific product far above the competetive production cost, thus preventing the maximization of wealth in the economy. Having hundreds of thousands of unique monopolies still exacts the damage on the economy, despite partially overlapping in use.
"Copyright law exists to create an incentive for people to make a living by creating art"
The most common excuse for copyright law is that some claim it creates an incentive. This ignores the fact that there are other vastly more appropriate ways to incentivize creativity; you'd do far better simply slapping a mandatory instantiation royalty on the revenue of selling copies and forwarding the money directly to the artists and creators, and letting the distribution and marketing battle it out in the marketplace, thus bypassing the areas in which most of the monopoly damage is accrued (and thus allowing artists and creators the same amount of money as now, but at approximately a tenth of the end-user cost).
The last few decades have shown the fallacy of copyright as an incentive; the development of free software and other free culture has shown that without the monopoly rights of copyright the development rate and cost is vastly improved as compared to the proprietary vendors.
"the product is separate from the medium on which it is delivered."
All products contain an element of specific organization and embodiment in a medium. The idea and design of a hammer are elements of its embodiment. Yet, if you see a hammer you can make another just like it.
The fact that the intanglible properties of information are fixated in a medium is no difference in essence; it's just a matter of degree. If we invented matter-copiers, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have people trying to argue that nobody should be allowed to copy material objects as it'd destroy their revenue stream.
"well, some guy in china is actually feeding himself on the effort."
Not particularly well tho, and not in a particular long-term or humanity improving fashion. The dollars paid for 'producing' the 'gold' is money not spent buying some other item instead, so is it better spent this way?
To phrase it in another fashion; if you had a program that did a useful thing but had a bug that required you press every button on the keyboard five thousand times for the useful thing to occur, would you a) outsource the buttonpressing to China or b) demand that the supplier of the program actually fixed the bug? And which case, as a whole, would make humanity better off?
Paying for people to waste time in a particularly elaborate way of typing an sql statement to update a non-scarce database row misdirects economic resources in a insidously damaging fashion. The exact same 'wealth' could have been created by the millisecond of work it takes to simply update the database and spending actual money and resources to create real scarce wealth, such as food, clothing, etc instead. The economy as a whole thus loses wealth as compared to the optimum producing solution. With no more input of resources we could have _both_ instead of just one of the desired things.
Personally I think the MMORPGs should just get it over with and create graded scales of difficulty for separate servers. Range it from no-holds-barred duping-allowed, here's your item-creation-tool, through 'normal' to 'every-item-is-unique' servers.
Rather like sports. It's not like you can hire a Chinese guy to play a game for you and have them pause the game and let you step in and score the goal. If you want to play, you play in your division.
"If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies."
And if you were only allowed to buy telephones from AT&T, more people would pay more for AT&T phones. If you were only allowed to breathe metered air from Standard Air Corp, people would be spending a whole lot more for air.
The question is wether paying more for AT&T phones and metered air benefits the economy and market at a whole. Or if a free market could produce better phones cheaper without the monopoly. And if air could maybe be provided to everyone without a high overhead if you dont have hundreds of thousands of people employed to account for everyones breathing...
Yes, denying AT&T a monopoly on phones, and not creating an air monopoly means those companies (or potential companies) will be employing fewer people and they'd 'lose' a lucruative source of income. Allowing them the monopoly, however, means that the ones paying for it will be unable to pay for some other service, costing jobs in _other_ sectors instead. Implementing tranfer systems as monopoly rights is no different from other forms of taxation; it shifts money from one sector to another. The question is wether it's the most efficient way to accompish the purpose and produce the desired good. And frankly, anyone who's read a public filing for any company involved in the IP industries would say no.
The failure of monopolies to produce competetive products cannot be used as a justification for maintaining or strengthening monopoly enforcement.
"It doesn't take into account the likelihood of a challenging test to create social pressure that influences people to self-filter."
Mmm. I'm not sure that would be a desireable feature; that'd bias the test situation in favour of arrogant idiots. For some professions confidence may be more desireable than knowledge (marketing?), but for a doctor I think one would prefer someone being reluctantly right than someone being confidently wrong.
It's a bit easier to write another check than to write another software project.
Mainly the weirdness is due to the changed way the GPL is used these days tho. Originally the FSF was the sole copyright holder to many of the GPL licensed projects (and they require copyright assignment on included code); for them to release code and giving second-hand recepients the option to update the license without the cooperation of middle-men makes perfect sense.
For other projects requiring copyright assignment there is no real weirdness (altho, of course, requiring copyright assignment may make casual contributors reluctant to contribute, depending on how much they trust you). The weirdness surfaces when you mix multi-sourced GPL code and the only option for license changes becomes the 'or-later' clause. In that case, I'd say that the FSF is pretty much the only organization I'd trust with the blank check.
"Now, if you come back and say "global warming is a huge problem", you'll get more press, the organization that funded you gets more money, you get even more grants to do your research."
And then you have organizations like the IPCC, whose mission is, and I quote "The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
An organization explicitly intended to assess the dangers of human-induced climate change claiming there's a danger coming from human-induced climate change.
Say it aint so.
So basically we end up with two camps of which neither can be trusted.
Personally I really dont give a shit wether it's human-induced or not. It really doesnt matter anymore, the credibility of both camps is shot, and the issue so heavily politicised and so nebulous that it's impossible to get a straight answer.
So forget it.
What would be interesting would be if either camp started using the models to figure out a useful way to combat warming effects. Forget reducing emissions, that just goes back to the pointless debate, it's a long term issue and it will work itself out eventually anyway. Try more practical or radical ideas instead. What if we quit particle filtering coal power plants (hey, a whole lot of the warming issue started when we tightened emissions regulations, ever thought the _skewed_ handling of emissions is part of the problem)? Can we reduce incoming heat? What if we increase cloud seeding effects to reflect sunlight instead? Is it possible to create clouds by shooting particle cannons through the atmosphere, particularly if global warming causes increased water vapour pressure? The grounding of planes after 9/11 indicated a large increased temperature variance caused by the lack of plane vapour trails, what would increasing/decreasing that effect do? What about spewing out finely granulated calcium? That could combat acid rain as well.
Fire the debating teams and start hiring some engineering scientists who can actually look at a problem and _solve_ it instead of whining about whose to blame.
"Seriously, what kind of loser/sucker pays real money of in-game money anyway?"
Heh, if I were running an MMORPG and saw out-of-game transactions going on I'd run irregular devaluations/random drop rate changes with the money supply just to screw with the minds of the traders.
Face it, in-game money is a non-scarce resource. The devs can create a bazillion plat with a database change. If players desperately need to obtain gold, then that's a balance/economy problem that needs to be adressed by the devs, so the players need to complain about it. Buying the gold merely worsens the problem.
I mean, if it were some other closed-source program and the vendor told you to pay someone else to fix/work around a bug, would you buy that program from the vendor again? (of course, considering the situation with Windows and viruses, maybe that's not such a good question...)
Dont forget newspaper and TV media. Parents are definitely the first failure in responsibility (as in, taking care of their kids mental health), but I'll bet the media hype around the incidents is what's placed that particular way of blowing themselves and everyone around them away on the top ten checklist of ways to go out in a bang.
Sometimes I think news media should get a mandatory death-equality legislation. Ie, for every word written about death by terrorism, murder/suicide, etc, they should have to publish as many words about other causes of death in accurate proportions. For every word about WTC, 20 about traffic death, even more about cancer and heart diseases. For every word about Columbine or anything else, several thousand about the more common but less splatter/outrage media friendly causes.
At the very least it might generate a more sensible distribution of funds and attention. And bury articles about insignificant assholes like suicide murderers in an avalanche of death not even the most horrific deliberate human atrocities can rival.
Mmm, ought to teach me to write complicated sentances:). Reread it. I was referring to patent trolls and various other 'IP' parasites that the 'freedom fighters' fight. The Free software crowds may respect a desire to be left alone and just write code and support yourself, but various segments in the proprietary 'IP' business will find ways to get at you no matter what you do.
As long as 'intellectual property' remain implemented as legalized monopoly rights, for a private entrepreneur there really is no hiding on the sidelines trying to ignore the legal and political issues.
" '2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)' Only if it's LGPL."
With an added caveat; you can statically link the code with an LGPL library, but _you have to provide the option for the recepient to dynamically link should they so desire_. Include an unsupported dynamically linked binary, or perhaps better, object files so the recepient can relink statically against another version (again, you dont have to support that, just provide the option).
This is so that if the libraries are changed and upgraded, security bugs fixed, etc, the user isnt stuck having to use that particular statically linked version.
"'Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?' You can do whatever you want with BSD code"
As long as it's only BSD code, of course. Depending on the definition of 'BSD-based boxes', they can perfectly well include GPL, LGPL, or code under any other license. Anything you link against or in any other way include you have to check for licenses, wether it's Free, free or proprietary software.
And of course, no matter how careful you are with licenses, you can get legally nuked when the USPTO with its usual competence level grants a patent on "putting obfuscated code linked with free software on an embedded device" (or whatever your device is supposed to do).
You may just want to do your job and make a living, but those the 'freedom fighters' are trying to protect you from have no interest in your wishes. They want your money if you're lucky. Or they want you off the market if you're not.
"If Torvalds doesn't like that, he should have picked a difference license."
IIRC, he did at first, but was talked into using the GPL. Of course, had he picked a different license it's dubious that Linux would have gained any significant traction in the end.
For all of Linus's abilities as a technical project leader, his judgement and track record on license issues hasnt exactly been spotless.
RMS, however, has been exceedingly clear on exactly what his purpose with the FSF has been, and has been so utterly consistent in his views on freedom that I'd as soon expect the sun to rise in the west as RMS to accept proprietarization in any form.
And heck, most everyone who has read anything about the FSF and places code they're writing under the GPL knows exactly what they're doing, and place it under the GPL for exactly that reason. This is not a reaction to some events' that RMS 'and some others' are philosophically opposed to. This is the natural evolution of the GPL to cope with attempted violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the GPL.
Having knowingly placed code under the GPL myself, I'd expect nothing less than for the FSF to continue protecting everyones right to freely use, modify, run and distribute that code and the code of any derivatives.
GPL2 License: Use our code, but give back your code too.
GPL3 License: Use our code, but give back your code too. And quit trying to get cute, smartarse.
"I think v3 makes the GPL less attractive to companies"
Hardly. It makes trying to do end runs around the license less attractive. For those who intend to honor the letter and spirit of the GPL it makes no real difference.
For honest companies recieving and using GPL code it serves to protect them against further submerged litigation mines. The only ones hurt are those intent on breaking the rules.
"A company can't put time and money into helping a project when a competitor can then just use those changes"
Yes they can. The time lead and expertise is enough to compete very well in an industry with rapid product turnover. They're getting _most of their code for free_, remember? The only resources they have to invest are their edge above the baseline.
The competetive free market isnt about protecting ROI while you sit twiddling your thumbs. It's about allowing profit until cutthroat competition will catches up, thus enforcing a constant equilibrium of forced continous improvement or risking lost profits.
The GPL enforces this cycle of rapid competitive improvements and subsequent baseline merges. This enforced free market, this protection from market control and monopoly inefficiency is what enables free software, just like a free market, to compete with, and even outcompete the protected markets with a fraction of the investment and resources.
Slashdot Mirror
"GPLv3 affects any hardware that the software is distributed with."
No it doesnt. It refuses to be distributed _with_ software that isnt as free or more free than the GPL. That doesnt 'infect' anything, it affects only the GPL software itself.
"I'm pretty sure that this makes it viral *by definition*."
No, that makes it ethically principled by definition. GPL software will refuse to associate with components taking away further freedom from the users.
If you want to hang with the cool freedom-loving GPL crowd, you can abide by those rules. You dont have to, you can go skulk with the bullies and beat up kids for lunch money if you want, but the GPL crowd arent going to help, and you arent going to get invited to the parties.
There you go, a more accurate antropomorphization. As far as those go.
"There are some folks who take that position but they are generally *NOT* GPL proponents."
Not quite true. The GPL is empowered by copyright, but only copyright makes it necessary. Remove the necessity, and the ability to enforce copyleft would no longer be essential.
"Abolish copyrights and my guess is all the big software publishers will just adopt a TiVo-like solution that ensures only legitimate copies of their product will run."
I doubt it would work to any serious extent; without anti-circumvention laws, the economic incentive for bypassing such protection would be huge.
Think mod-chips in wal-mart. You basically wouldnt be able to sell an un-hacked version.
"People seem to be getting this nasty assumption that you're guilty unless you can prove otherwise"
The word 'suspected' has in many ways become synonymous with 'guilty'.
Perhaps it would be useful with a firefox plugin for newssites that always replaces 'suspected' with 'innocent', 'by unreputable sources accused of being' or 'random joe off the street to be scapegoated to further a political agenda'.
"taking away their right to vote"
Of course, in light of the US history with the political idea of "no taxation without representation" I assume that means that felons dont have to pay taxes?
Right?
"It looks like paper is a better choice for keeping records than digital formats."
... challanged... as some members of the current generations.
Not quite the same problem; there are two factors at work here. The first is the medium on which the data is stored, which has to last.
The second is the encoding of the data. Had they stored the constitution in Word format they could have written it in stone and still have the same trouble reading it.
Of course, our ancestors thankfully weren't quite as
Take a clue from the forefathers, store your data in ASCII. Or Unicode.
Personally I always keep original data in a pure text format. Typeset it afterwards if you wish a nice presentation, otherwise typesetting just gets in the way of both the writing and the reading.
Intellectual 'property' is an intentionally applied misnomer, with the exact purpose of confusing people to think exactly as you appear to do. Copyright and other such legal constructs arent 'property' as such, but government granted temporary monopolies.
As it isnt property, that dictionary definition obviously does not apply.
Perhaps you could come up with some other word to define 'to violate someones government granted monopoly without right or permission'. Stealing, however, just isnt it.
The US needs a proportional representation system.
Two party systems are one party away from being a dictatorship.
In a two party system the parties have more to gain from cooperating with eachother against the interest of the voters; collectively they are immune to voter oversight.
Of course, due to the IP industries gross misuse of the word the meaning of 'piracy' in this context has degraded to something akin to 'competeing', 'quoting', 'deriving from', or 'cut'n'pasting'.
You cant necessarily infer any assumption of illegality from the use of that word anymore.
F) The bad guys dont figure out they can utterly compromise the value of fingerprint and DNA data by proactively contaminating any scenes with false imprints and cells.
G) The enforcement types figure out that there really wasnt twohundredthousand people in that room, someone merely gathered the vacuum cleaner bags from a hotel or a sports event and ran them on reverse, so perhaps the crowd they rounded up and sent to the new Gulags werent all guilty.
Wearing gloves and a hairnet when out in public is starting to seem like reasonable security precautions (in fact, full body latex suits and breathing masks seem to be the only way you can be sure you're not recklessly spreading your 'identity' around). You never know who's going to be collecting your biometric identification data and placing it somewhere it shouldnt be.
"Software, whether you like it or not, is licensed"
Copyright largely governs what you can and cannot do with software; clickwrap extensions trying to enforce post-sale contractual obligations are much less certain.
"but then you shouldn't expect them to respect the GPL either."
The GPL doesnt extend beyond copyright law, the GPL grants rights the user does not _have_ under copyright law. It's a copyright license, falling back on copyright law. Without the GPL the distributor has no rights to distribute at all.
Software clickwrap licenses restrict the user beyond what copyright law does, and try to take away rights the user normally has. Such licenses fall back on contract law, and are in their nature vastly different in their enforcability (the contract has to be found valid at all, the clauses have to be deemed acceptable, etc), and if it isnt found enforcable then the user has all the rights copyright grants them (ie, to use the product any way they deem fit).
"or any other valuable non-currency good that you might invest in."
s/valuable non-currency good/pyramid scheme/g
Virtual goods are non-scarce items without any inherent value. As such they are not comparable with stocks, but rather with monopoly money or pyramid investments.
Otherwise I'd say you're perfectly right. Just because it's small enough not to be noticed and hard enough to trace that the IRS might not care doesnt mean it isnt income and taxable. I dont see why there would be a need for any specific law to handle it, any more than there'd need to be for picking leaves in a forest and selling them on ebay. You make money off it, you're quite likely already supposed to be paying taxes for it.
"Thus, I think you are off-base saying that "adding regulation" to an industry reduces jobs. If anything, it creates them."
Eh, I thought that was just what I said...
"and that's because air isn't (nor can it be) regulated."
Oh, technically it could very well be. Put gas masks on everyone outside their homes and pipe the air through ducts into the homes. Imagine the opportunities for profit... (of course, employing people in an industry whose sole purpose would be to count the use of a non-scarce resource would be horrendously inefficient and transfer massive amounts of resources from other sectors for no good reason, effectively reducing the total wealth in the economy by the same amount).
That's sortof the point when it comes to the production of intanglible materials; copies of music, software or movies are in their nature non-scarce resources, employing hundreds of thousands of people manufacturing, distributing and accounting for those copies is as bad for the economy as counting the air we breath.
Of course, I'm purposely ignoring the production of the original copy (or the air), because to solve that issue is an entirely different problem (as would the production of air be, in case we were faced with a scarcity (in which case I'd suggest that the above described accounting system would not be the most efficient way to deal with a scarcity of air)).
"However what you're talking about now is competition for similar (but different) products."
No. I'm talking about the specific monopoly of each and every instance of a copyrighted work. Each and every one of them is a monopoly, exacting monopoly rent in that thin product segment.
The damage of monopolies isnt that you cannot make alternate products (you could make steel instead of aluminium, you could make coal instead of oil, you could take a car instead of the rail, etc), but that they increase the price of a specific product far above the competetive production cost, thus preventing the maximization of wealth in the economy. Having hundreds of thousands of unique monopolies still exacts the damage on the economy, despite partially overlapping in use.
"Copyright law exists to create an incentive for people to make a living by creating art"
The most common excuse for copyright law is that some claim it creates an incentive. This ignores the fact that there are other vastly more appropriate ways to incentivize creativity; you'd do far better simply slapping a mandatory instantiation royalty on the revenue of selling copies and forwarding the money directly to the artists and creators, and letting the distribution and marketing battle it out in the marketplace, thus bypassing the areas in which most of the monopoly damage is accrued (and thus allowing artists and creators the same amount of money as now, but at approximately a tenth of the end-user cost).
The last few decades have shown the fallacy of copyright as an incentive; the development of free software and other free culture has shown that without the monopoly rights of copyright the development rate and cost is vastly improved as compared to the proprietary vendors.
"the product is separate from the medium on which it is delivered."
All products contain an element of specific organization and embodiment in a medium. The idea and design of a hammer are elements of its embodiment. Yet, if you see a hammer you can make another just like it.
The fact that the intanglible properties of information are fixated in a medium is no difference in essence; it's just a matter of degree. If we invented matter-copiers, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have people trying to argue that nobody should be allowed to copy material objects as it'd destroy their revenue stream.
"well, some guy in china is actually feeding himself on the effort."
Not particularly well tho, and not in a particular long-term or humanity improving fashion. The dollars paid for 'producing' the 'gold' is money not spent buying some other item instead, so is it better spent this way?
To phrase it in another fashion; if you had a program that did a useful thing but had a bug that required you press every button on the keyboard five thousand times for the useful thing to occur, would you a) outsource the buttonpressing to China or b) demand that the supplier of the program actually fixed the bug? And which case, as a whole, would make humanity better off?
Paying for people to waste time in a particularly elaborate way of typing an sql statement to update a non-scarce database row misdirects economic resources in a insidously damaging fashion. The exact same 'wealth' could have been created by the millisecond of work it takes to simply update the database and spending actual money and resources to create real scarce wealth, such as food, clothing, etc instead. The economy as a whole thus loses wealth as compared to the optimum producing solution. With no more input of resources we could have _both_ instead of just one of the desired things.
Personally I think the MMORPGs should just get it over with and create graded scales of difficulty for separate servers. Range it from no-holds-barred duping-allowed, here's your item-creation-tool, through 'normal' to 'every-item-is-unique' servers.
Rather like sports. It's not like you can hire a Chinese guy to play a game for you and have them pause the game and let you step in and score the goal. If you want to play, you play in your division.
"If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies."
And if you were only allowed to buy telephones from AT&T, more people would pay more for AT&T phones. If you were only allowed to breathe metered air from Standard Air Corp, people would be spending a whole lot more for air.
The question is wether paying more for AT&T phones and metered air benefits the economy and market at a whole. Or if a free market could produce better phones cheaper without the monopoly. And if air could maybe be provided to everyone without a high overhead if you dont have hundreds of thousands of people employed to account for everyones breathing...
Yes, denying AT&T a monopoly on phones, and not creating an air monopoly means those companies (or potential companies) will be employing fewer people and they'd 'lose' a lucruative source of income. Allowing them the monopoly, however, means that the ones paying for it will be unable to pay for some other service, costing jobs in _other_ sectors instead. Implementing tranfer systems as monopoly rights is no different from other forms of taxation; it shifts money from one sector to another. The question is wether it's the most efficient way to accompish the purpose and produce the desired good. And frankly, anyone who's read a public filing for any company involved in the IP industries would say no.
The failure of monopolies to produce competetive products cannot be used as a justification for maintaining or strengthening monopoly enforcement.
"It doesn't take into account the likelihood of a challenging test to create social pressure that influences people to self-filter."
Mmm. I'm not sure that would be a desireable feature; that'd bias the test situation in favour of arrogant idiots. For some professions confidence may be more desireable than knowledge (marketing?), but for a doctor I think one would prefer someone being reluctantly right than someone being confidently wrong.
"I don't sign blank checks"
It's a bit easier to write another check than to write another software project.
Mainly the weirdness is due to the changed way the GPL is used these days tho. Originally the FSF was the sole copyright holder to many of the GPL licensed projects (and they require copyright assignment on included code); for them to release code and giving second-hand recepients the option to update the license without the cooperation of middle-men makes perfect sense.
For other projects requiring copyright assignment there is no real weirdness (altho, of course, requiring copyright assignment may make casual contributors reluctant to contribute, depending on how much they trust you). The weirdness surfaces when you mix multi-sourced GPL code and the only option for license changes becomes the 'or-later' clause. In that case, I'd say that the FSF is pretty much the only organization I'd trust with the blank check.
"Now, if you come back and say "global warming is a huge problem", you'll get more press, the organization that funded you gets more money, you get even more grants to do your research."
And then you have organizations like the IPCC, whose mission is, and I quote "The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
An organization explicitly intended to assess the dangers of human-induced climate change claiming there's a danger coming from human-induced climate change.
Say it aint so.
So basically we end up with two camps of which neither can be trusted.
Personally I really dont give a shit wether it's human-induced or not. It really doesnt matter anymore, the credibility of both camps is shot, and the issue so heavily politicised and so nebulous that it's impossible to get a straight answer.
So forget it.
What would be interesting would be if either camp started using the models to figure out a useful way to combat warming effects. Forget reducing emissions, that just goes back to the pointless debate, it's a long term issue and it will work itself out eventually anyway. Try more practical or radical ideas instead. What if we quit particle filtering coal power plants (hey, a whole lot of the warming issue started when we tightened emissions regulations, ever thought the _skewed_ handling of emissions is part of the problem)? Can we reduce incoming heat? What if we increase cloud seeding effects to reflect sunlight instead? Is it possible to create clouds by shooting particle cannons through the atmosphere, particularly if global warming causes increased water vapour pressure? The grounding of planes after 9/11 indicated a large increased temperature variance caused by the lack of plane vapour trails, what would increasing/decreasing that effect do? What about spewing out finely granulated calcium? That could combat acid rain as well.
Fire the debating teams and start hiring some engineering scientists who can actually look at a problem and _solve_ it instead of whining about whose to blame.
"Heavily populated areas with broadband access"
Then again, other countries, like Sweden or Finland with a far lower population density than the US still have a higher broadband penetration.
"Seriously, what kind of loser/sucker pays real money of in-game money anyway?"
Heh, if I were running an MMORPG and saw out-of-game transactions going on I'd run irregular devaluations/random drop rate changes with the money supply just to screw with the minds of the traders.
Face it, in-game money is a non-scarce resource. The devs can create a bazillion plat with a database change. If players desperately need to obtain gold, then that's a balance/economy problem that needs to be adressed by the devs, so the players need to complain about it. Buying the gold merely worsens the problem.
I mean, if it were some other closed-source program and the vendor told you to pay someone else to fix/work around a bug, would you buy that program from the vendor again? (of course, considering the situation with Windows and viruses, maybe that's not such a good question...)
Dont forget newspaper and TV media. Parents are definitely the first failure in responsibility (as in, taking care of their kids mental health), but I'll bet the media hype around the incidents is what's placed that particular way of blowing themselves and everyone around them away on the top ten checklist of ways to go out in a bang.
Sometimes I think news media should get a mandatory death-equality legislation. Ie, for every word written about death by terrorism, murder/suicide, etc, they should have to publish as many words about other causes of death in accurate proportions. For every word about WTC, 20 about traffic death, even more about cancer and heart diseases. For every word about Columbine or anything else, several thousand about the more common but less splatter/outrage media friendly causes.
At the very least it might generate a more sensible distribution of funds and attention. And bury articles about insignificant assholes like suicide murderers in an avalanche of death not even the most horrific deliberate human atrocities can rival.
Mmm, ought to teach me to write complicated sentances :). Reread it. I was referring to patent trolls and various other 'IP' parasites that the 'freedom fighters' fight. The Free software crowds may respect a desire to be left alone and just write code and support yourself, but various segments in the proprietary 'IP' business will find ways to get at you no matter what you do.
As long as 'intellectual property' remain implemented as legalized monopoly rights, for a private entrepreneur there really is no hiding on the sidelines trying to ignore the legal and political issues.
" '2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)' Only if it's LGPL."
With an added caveat; you can statically link the code with an LGPL library, but _you have to provide the option for the recepient to dynamically link should they so desire_. Include an unsupported dynamically linked binary, or perhaps better, object files so the recepient can relink statically against another version (again, you dont have to support that, just provide the option).
This is so that if the libraries are changed and upgraded, security bugs fixed, etc, the user isnt stuck having to use that particular statically linked version.
"'Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?' You can do whatever you want with BSD code"
As long as it's only BSD code, of course. Depending on the definition of 'BSD-based boxes', they can perfectly well include GPL, LGPL, or code under any other license. Anything you link against or in any other way include you have to check for licenses, wether it's Free, free or proprietary software.
And of course, no matter how careful you are with licenses, you can get legally nuked when the USPTO with its usual competence level grants a patent on "putting obfuscated code linked with free software on an embedded device" (or whatever your device is supposed to do).
You may just want to do your job and make a living, but those the 'freedom fighters' are trying to protect you from have no interest in your wishes. They want your money if you're lucky. Or they want you off the market if you're not.
"If Torvalds doesn't like that, he should have picked a difference license."
IIRC, he did at first, but was talked into using the GPL. Of course, had he picked a different license it's dubious that Linux would have gained any significant traction in the end.
For all of Linus's abilities as a technical project leader, his judgement and track record on license issues hasnt exactly been spotless.
RMS, however, has been exceedingly clear on exactly what his purpose with the FSF has been, and has been so utterly consistent in his views on freedom that I'd as soon expect the sun to rise in the west as RMS to accept proprietarization in any form.
And heck, most everyone who has read anything about the FSF and places code they're writing under the GPL knows exactly what they're doing, and place it under the GPL for exactly that reason. This is not a reaction to some events' that RMS 'and some others' are philosophically opposed to. This is the natural evolution of the GPL to cope with attempted violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the GPL.
Having knowingly placed code under the GPL myself, I'd expect nothing less than for the FSF to continue protecting everyones right to freely use, modify, run and distribute that code and the code of any derivatives.
I'd say it's more like:
GPL2 License: Use our code, but give back your code too.
GPL3 License: Use our code, but give back your code too. And quit trying to get cute, smartarse.
"I think v3 makes the GPL less attractive to companies"
Hardly. It makes trying to do end runs around the license less attractive. For those who intend to honor the letter and spirit of the GPL it makes no real difference.
For honest companies recieving and using GPL code it serves to protect them against further submerged litigation mines. The only ones hurt are those intent on breaking the rules.
"A company can't put time and money into helping a project when a competitor can then just use those changes"
Yes they can. The time lead and expertise is enough to compete very well in an industry with rapid product turnover. They're getting _most of their code for free_, remember? The only resources they have to invest are their edge above the baseline.
The competetive free market isnt about protecting ROI while you sit twiddling your thumbs. It's about allowing profit until cutthroat competition will catches up, thus enforcing a constant equilibrium of forced continous improvement or risking lost profits.
The GPL enforces this cycle of rapid competitive improvements and subsequent baseline merges. This enforced free market, this protection from market control and monopoly inefficiency is what enables free software, just like a free market, to compete with, and even outcompete the protected markets with a fraction of the investment and resources.