Have got so good, you mean. Violating state protected monopoly rights and contribution to the creation of more wealth in the economy is hardly a heinous crime.
Yes, extensions do, but the fundamental aspect (the copy, in copyright), is the most damaging part.
"And you just know that Slashdotters would sill complain if they could make copies freely but not broadcast"
Probably, yeah. That can be structurally dealt with tho; you could simply apply a percentage fee to revenue generating activities (which is essentially how it's done today). Ie, torrent trackers would have to pay from advertising revenue (not to mention that you could get vastly improved for-pay or commercialized trackers that would generate more revenue).
The key is, you dont have to prevent copying to gather economic incentives off those who actually generate a revenue stream off the music.
Once you separate the _copy_ right from revenue rights to IP, you're free from all the painful micromanagement of individual copies, and you can get back to the actual issue; what level of incentive do we need to promote creativity, what are we willing to pay for it, where is it most equitable to collect the funding and how do we divide the funding to maximize creative production?
The various per-play fees are usually separate from the essential 'copyright'. You can skip the reproduction monopoly rights without removing per-play fees; ie, even if you can freely make copies one could structure fees around the public performance of works.
Monopoly revenue will steadily grow as it absorbs any excess wealth. IE, if other things become cheaper, the monopoly segments will grab the extra disposable income by simply raising prices. So over a longer term and with variations in disposable income you can get changes (which, coincidentally, is also why region coding and price discrimination is desireable for the industry).
And like someone else said, this is a matter of opportunity costs; those 11% of GDP is 11% of GDP not spent elsewhere, so if the IP industries are excessively inefficient and the same products could be produced cheaper, the economy could contain _both_ the consumer value of the IP _and_ whatever else the consumer would buy for that money. IE, supporting waste becomes a net loss to the actual wealth of the economy as a whole.
"doesn't look to me like an argument based on economic benefit"
Really, in the end, I'm entirely convinced it does. In the end, what it comes down to is that production with free competition will simply create more wealth than monopolies for the same amount of resources. I have yet to see any serious arguments manage to dispute that, and successfully disputing it would pretty much invalidate the entire foundation of free market capitalism.
Serious objections tend to be based around the financing side, but they tend to miss alternative financing methods (socialized financing is really an entirely separate issue from competetive production, altho the IP industries like to pretend, for marketing purposes, that their system isnt actually a social financing system).
Less serious objections tend to involve straight out lies or at the very least misdirections around, like you noted, misapplied concepts of value (essentially, a more correct labelling of the money flow would be to say that the sector equals a taxation effect of 11% of GDP, for which we get very a very low employment or social value). And as I said earlier, they tend to miss the fact that those 11% tax-equivalents would otherwise be employed in other areas of the economy.
So in the end, the cultural and moral benefits are one thing, but even the economic interest is better served by allowing free competition in the IP areas.
"Seen the budgets of the average Hollywood flick or EA game?"
When you have a monopoly you will never decrease costs. Hollywood flicks and EA games cost much to produce _because_ of copyright, not the other way around.
"All of the big budget works would go away."
All the big budget works will get cheaper. That's the entire point of competition in free market capitalism.
I mean, even Lucas pointed that out recently when he said TV series were much better to produce than movies, largely because they can reuse much more.
Waste is not a benefit to the economy, and if there is anything monopoly rights are good at protecting it's waste.
Missed the digital revolution, eh? Creative endeavors have never in history been as cheap as they are now.
The fact that the megacorps works costs is because monopolies drives costs like there's no end to revenue. There are examples where platinum selling artists with a finished recording cant get their company to release the new album because they wouldnt be able to make a profit on it. Can you even imagine how you could fail to make a profit off that?
"Say goodbye to movies for a start, as well as games."
There has never been as much high-quality low to zero budget movies as there are now. Nor games (which are moving over to service structures anyway). Without copyright it would be even easier to share models and footage to create entirely new works, ushering in a new era of rapidly evolving content.
"No more orchestras, all those musicians want paying."
You're kidding, right? Orchestras, if you're looking at the classical type, _are_ playing non-copyrighted material. Somehow they appear to get paid anyway, eh?
You need to calculate the economy over the entire segment. As a segment with monopolistic competition, the revenue extraction is more or less maximized, ie, you pretty much cannot get more total money out of the consumers for the specific product segment. It's just a question of how the money is split and divided, and how it's spent. As a much larger part of the copyright-intensive megacorps revenue gets wasted on things like marketing and administration, this money does not go directly to finance more artists and composers.
This means that while we're getting those for whom the previous method works, we're only getting a fraction of the total possible for-pay or for-sustenance art that we could get with the money we're paying today. And that's even ignoring the streamlining and cultural poverty inherent in having an industry driven by a strong economic interest in a tightly controlled common-denominator pop culture.
"How much would the record companies pay the artists if they couldn't own the intellectual property at all?"
As that would mean the record companies would have far less money to push 'their' material, and far less control of distribution channels, and far less financial resources to spend on payola, that would mean that non-RIAA artists got a far larger share of the radio/cd-tax/other royalty money, and a far greater exposure.
Without copyright, the total costs in the whole industry would fall, creating a much more level playing field for the long tail. More of the consumer money would remain available for spending on direct-to-artist material and concerts, as less is needed to finance marketing, videos, launches and coke snorting races for RIAA execs.
In the end, a whole lot of artists and creators would get a whole lot more than they're getting today.
To go beyond that, if you want more money to artists, heck, if we can have a blank cd tax, why not apply a recorded-cd-tax on the distribution channels if you're still afraid the artists would lose out? Say, artists and creators get a mandatory 50% of final sales price (which, without copyright and with competition in the sales and distribution channels, should fall to around a dollar or two for a cd)? Then we could start talking about a system that actually benefitted the artists.
"they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market."
Exactly. And here you see the exact same problems in the non-free-market sectors of western economies. You see it in the copyright industries, ranging from RIAA/MPAA, you see it in failures like Microsoft wasting billions doing their own five-year-plan command economy with LongHorn (while the free market OSS segment kept happily and rapidly evolving in the meantime, spending a fraction of the resources), you see it in the patent covered pharmaceutical industries, etc.
"and let problems develop that shouldn't"
Eh, well, um... I'm not that sure we're such shining examples when it comes to pollution and problems. Shit companies like Monsanto, a posterboy for corporate death penalty that should have been dischartered thirty years ago, and their cronies in various government agencies, with coverups, decades of knowingly poisoning land and people, and to quote wikipedia, 'Monsanto was found guilty of "negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage" Under Alabama law the rare claim of outrage requires "conduct so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in civilized society"' (found guilty, thirty years after the lawsuit started, note) are certainly on par with the worst of the communists on the 'problem' scale.
"so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall."
Dont underestimate the level of mismanagement in the SU.:) Look up Lysenkoism to see approximately how disasterously political management could screw a complete field of science and the whole agricultural sector for several decades. And wonder at how we could fail to comprehensively beat these guys and outcompete them fifty years ago.
"So, it appears that supposed "blind luck" and those "craptacular market failures" are doing pretty well, at least to better your life."
So, approximately how much better computers, how much cheaper and better clothes, how many more and better medicines, how much more art do you think we'd have if we actually had a more extensive real functional free market capitalism, eh?
Outcompeting a communist economy isnt a huge feat. The fact that it took the west the better part of a century to actually accomplish it, frequently even lagging behind, is a sad comment on the state of affairs in the western market.
"to criticize capitalism."
Mmm, I think you need to reread my comment. I'm not criticizing capitalism, I'm criticizing the large parts of western economy where we dont have anything like free market capitalism. When they both have the power of state granted monopolies, a five year plan from the Party representatives aint that different from the five year plan from the PharmaceuticalCorp board. Or a five year plan from Steve Ballmer.
Now, try to envision someone attempting to impose a five year plan on an opensource collection like GNU/Linux, say, GnuHorn to be released in five years with a database filesystem, etc, etc, marketingspeak, etc... and note the difference between 'rigid command economy' and 'free market evolution' within a very small slice of a sector in our economy.
Indeed. The irony when more-or-less communist regimes adopt free market solutions like open source while supposedly capitalist countries revel in state-granted monopoly production is palpable.
Looking at the economic history of communism and western economies it's more blind luck and communist incompetence and mismanagement than actual free markets that had the western democracies outperforming the soviet block eventually and for long enough to matter. Our own craptacular market failures like intellectual monopolies could very well have been enough to tip the balance the other way (and, heck, are part of what is tipping the balance the other way compared to China (despite Chinas own economic deficiencies)).
All the problems you name are intrinsic to the current patent system. The system is inherently unbalanced, a completely unbudgeted system where those who hand out the temporary monopolies are not fiscally responsible for the ultimate cost to the economy. As there are no fiscal constraints, quantity of granted patents has become the main interest of the system participants, which in turn grows the rest of the problem in a non-linear fashion.
Personally, I think the whole system has to be scrapped and replaced with a mediated non-monopoly system. Give the patent office a budget. Have them pay out the incentives, and gather statistics on patents used (ie, instead of the current system where you pay the patent holder, you merely report your product is using the patent, and the patent office pays out to the holder). The whole litigation and conflict issue is removed in one strike. There is no longer any reason to _not_ use patented inventions, nor is there any reason to fail to report your use (and any failure can be assumed to be an honest mistake as it doesnt actually cost you anything).
This would in turn would result in the patenting outfits being more geared towards being pure R&D outfits; they would no longer have to carry the weight of litigation, and organizations that are actually _good_ at the business of business (ie, producing, marketing and distributing) could pick and choose the most useful end products.
Next benefit, as the system is budgeted and has to be fully finananced, the patent holders have a much more obvious interest in not having an unbalanced amount of patents granted; each holders payout would have to be scaled down the more (widely used) patents are granted. Further, the system could (not that it would have to) be tuned to pay out more useful levels of incentives, to keep _more_ people gainfully paid for R&D, (especially since it would no longer have to finance legal, administrative and marketing organization). It would also suddenly fall within the realm of researchable and analysable economics; this amount of budget gives this amount of research, and doesnt actually hinder other research, ie, no more making up numbers of the top of patent lobbyists heads.
Such a restructuring also carries a huge further benefit; new and supposedly improved products would no longer carry a further innovation cost and the improvements would be adopted in the economy much, much faster (see, for example, the benefits of having new drugs or more environmentally friendly energy systems be cheaper than their older counterparts).
The most difficult part of such a reform is deciding how to finance it. The fundamental key to solving that issue is by realizing we're already paying for it, so the economy is already taxed by the system, even tho it's hidden. Some costs are less hidden like high costs we're paying for medicines, but we're also paying through other products being more expensive, which in turn makes local industry and labour more costly. We're paying through expensive litigation which makes us less competetive.
Once you realize we're already paying for the current system it's just a question of choosing a better method of paying for it, and selecting a level of financing more in line with a justifiable budget. Personally, I'd tend to be partial to a generalized innovation VAT of a percent or two, as that's closest to where we see the costs today. Preferably modulated in a way to put disincentives on products we _dont_ want and incentives on products we _do_ want (ie, you might even give newer more efficient items an exemption (as per their use of newer patented methods) for a year or two to even further incentivize their adoption in the economy, thus speeding up development).
"And I would also want the teacher to be able to present alternative theories"
Alternative theories are fine in science class, as long as they have a scientific basis and conform to scientific principles.
I dont see any demands that evolution or other theories with a scientific basis, be presented as an alternative in church, nor requirements that the vast host of philosophical theories around the concept and nature of creation and existence be presented as alternatives at any religious function, so why the desire to present non-scientific theories in science education?
There are any number of non-scientific theories about creation and evolution going all the way to philosophical possibilities like existence being layered simulations. They're perfectly fine for philosophy or religion classes, but they are simply incompatible with the very nature of a science class.
'How rational is it to decide "We'd rather sell one at $18 than 3 for $10 each"'
Unfortunately, if you look at it from their perspective, it's entirely rational. Their model is built around maximizing revenue on a per-album basis (see monopoly price setting). Selling _more_ albums means selling more varied albums, which in turn dilutes the efficiency of marketing, fractures the market, spreads more money to the producing segments like artists and composers, entails more risk, and which all have to share play time on the radio.
As each album and song is its own little monopoly, and they all 'compete' (see monopolistic competition) for more or less the same dollar in the pocket of the consumer, even with the other albums in the labels catalogue, they maximize their profits if there was only one album (minimizing per-unit production costs) and it cost all the dollars available for spending on entertainment. Of course, even the media corps cant quite accomplish that, nor control peoples taste to that extent, so we got the best they could do in the form of a grossly limited and tightly controlled 'pop' culture.
Of course, no matter what they do, they're doomed. Social music network sites are vastly superior in mediating music fitting personalized taste, with in turn will utterly fracture the market, destroying that model, drm or no drm.
You mistake cause and effect. Patents, like all monopolies, result in extremely inefficient organisations. The pharmaceutical industry is no exception; the vast (80%) of patent derived revenue goes to marketing, administration and (compared to the pharma-cloners) inefficient production (a cost structure vastly different from other less protected industries, where the cost-to-produce is the major part of the price).
Patents are not necessary because the costs are high; the costs are high because patent protection make them so. We'd get five times as much medical research done for the same cost to the economy as we have today if we outright just paid for it, and let the cloners do the production competetively.
So, yes, we can have it both ways. The current model is simply grossly inappropriate and wastes such amounts of resources that it has to be torn down and restructured from scratch to make it possible.
"but we still know originality when we hear it and see it"
Or we know originality when we dont hear and see the sources.
As the patent office has been so apt at demonstrating, a failure to find the sources and an unfamiliarity with the subject is easily mistaken for originality.
It's not really eveb a question of derivatives or plagiarism, it's merely the fact that when you have five billion monkeys banging along from more or less the same starting point, quite a lot of them are bound to hit the same keys by pure chance. And the human mind combines and extrapolates much less randomly than pure chance.
Great minds may think alike, and these days we have a lot of great minds, and a far more level starting point with the rapid and free flow of information.
Because the revenues of the pharmas are derived from a state-granted monopoly right; functionally equivalent to a taxation system. Such a system should not be funding anything but the actual intended ends.
"If you don't market, you don't sell. PERIOD."
So you mean people get sick and need medicine because of the marketing. Well, if marketing is such a health risk, maybe it's time to do something drastic about it...
On a more serious note tho, this is merely an engineering problem. Combining the patient with the best medicine for those symptoms is easily accomplished with a searchable database.
"because the risk is so insanely high, with small chance for reward"
Which is why it's a bad proposition to make a business of the sector at all. Restructure the whole system, simply dedicate a certain level of funds to research, and then let the cost effective copycats handle the production. They certainly manage to produce (and sell, and make a profit off) the medicines without having the cost structure of large pharma. If you want a competetive research system, structure it as a bounty system for specific drugs, or lowest-bidder research, etc.
"But it's not just a simple matter of greedy pharmaceuticals taking advantage of the helpless."
No, it's a simple matter of a grossly misapplied economic system. The idea that handing out monopoly rights is a useful way to divert money to a certain activity has been a failure of massive proportions and is costing us far too much.
"I trust many big companies because they provide quality products and never tried to screw me"
Personally, I distrust many big companies because they tend to engage in coverups, market spin, anticompetetive/anticonsumer legal actions and anticompetetive lobbying. The quality of the products has nothing to do with it; anyone can have a bad day, month, or even year in production. I can easily forgive that. The distrust comes when they lie about it.
"I trust even more small companies"
Small companies are typically far less likely to systematically and successfully engage in actions that make them objects of distrust. Perhaps it's due to the stronger sense of personal responsibility in smaller businesses, or it's just that they dont have the spare time and money to spend on being nasty, or they dont have as much internal politicking and cover-your-assishness to drive people to unethical activities.
"Dell isn't in my white list,"
Nor mine.
In this case I'm actually doubtful it's a Dell problem though. I've simply seen _far_ too many grounding 'problems' with all sorts of equipment, ultimately traced back to the fact that these days you've often got a whole bunch of different ground potentials in the various installations in your average house or appartment. Radiator/sink ground != electrical ground != cable ground != telephone ground, and you can easily get a grounding difference between 50 and 100 volts between them. Once you start connecting them together (or putting your feet on your radiator while touching your computer, or touching your tv-attached stereo while holding the plug from the computer), you'll get familiar with the problem. Painfully if you're unlucky, but usually not dangerously so, and more commonly you'll note the ground loop noise in the stereo and dark/bright moving lines on the TV.
"so the RIAA can't just use a function of the worth of a consumer's dollar"
To maximize reveneue, the pricing on monopoly goods is done as a function of disposable income (which is why you see 'regions' and constant attempts to curtail parallel imports in monopoly intensive industries). Cost of production only needs to be factored in to the price if you have competition (and the only competition in this case is 'piracy', so without 'piracy' the price would quite likely be even higher).
So, as long as we keep the current construct of intellectual monopoly legislation, they very much can and will use that function. Lowered costs of production mean only more profit, and more money to spend on controlling the distribution and publicity channels.
The RIAA corps arent interested in you buying more music. They're interested in you paying lots for _their_ music.
If you buy _more_ music, the revenue stream gets diluted. The cost to produce per unit sold becomes a larger part of the total revenue of each unit sold, and they get less profit. More music means more varied music taste and music exposure, in turn leading to less per-unit income off radio stations, etc. Less revenue per unit means less marketing capital, means less power to push independents off the air and off the shelves. Less control. Less money to those who control the market channels, and a larger piece of the pie to more of the actual artists and composers.
Not at all in the RIAA corps interest.
"Basic economics."
Basic free market economics. But the intellectual monopoly industries are nothing like a free market.
The fact is that the digital revolution has cut production costs for professionally produced music down the level that basically anyone who can afford a halfway decent used car can afford to make their own professionally produced album. The internet revolution has cut distribution costs down to zero. On a free and competetive market, the pricing of music would reflect that, and the prices would fall down to maybe a dollar per CD, and far less for the most widely produced CD's.
As long as we allow the monopoly rights to remain, this gain of wealth will remain unrealized, and we'll see far less music than we should, far more marketing (and its even less savoury accompanying corruption a payola and lobbying) than we should, and a much poorer culture than we should.
Globalization makes things cheaper if they're exposed to competition. Monopoly rights products are not priced on a competetive marketplace; their prices follow the consumer side disposable income, ergo they get more expensive if consumers have more money to spend.
Basically, globalization in combination with monopoly rights are the monopoly holders wet dream; it allows them to cut costs by moving production to low-income countries, while not being forced to cut prices as the low-income producers (or anyone else) are not allowed to compete in the highly capitalized market place. Hence, it's the perfect way to accumulate capital and separate the western consumers from their wealth as fast as possible.
"If you have not saved your userid (and thus have to enter it, as you would at a phishing site)"
Unfortunately, that still doesnt help much; a trojan would have access to the cookie, and the phishing site could forward the security questions, faking lost or expired cookies (if it didnt just use cross-site scripting exploits to get it).
"If you can come up with something better, I'm all ears."
Well, it isnt easy to make the system foolproof, that's for sure. In a worst-case scenario (which is altogether far too common these days) you can assume that the user has been trojaned, the sources and destinations of any packet is suspect. You cant be sure what the bank is sending is what the user is seeing. You cant be sure that what the user types is what goes to the bank, and not what the trojan converts it to.
The only method I can think of that would make online banking secure even in that situation involve having an external device which can calculate a cryptographically secure checksum for a particular transaction which you'd have to enter for the bank to validate the transaction (and which would only be valid for those amounts and those accounts at this time), but that would be a pain (as you'd have to manually enter the relevant data into the external device too).
Basically it's a tough problem, but I get really annoyed when banks and others (certificates are a good example) try to sell a false sense of security. Either accept some things just arent secure, and allow people to deal with that (by checking their statements, running their virus scanners, etc), or implement more secure methods. I can understand the motivation, they want to fire all their tellers and dont want people to object to online banking for security reasons, but they simply have to make a choice here; if you cant make/afford a truly secure system, then use the savings to reimburse the customers who got cleaned out.
Actually, I'd suggest 'if you read this and believe this in any way makes you safe from phising you should take your banking offline'.
This scheme is worthless. Once the user enters his username the bank discloses the picture. There's nothing stopping a phishing site or trojan from immediately using the username to obtain the correct picture and displaying it to the user. IE, the explaining text should say 'if you recognize your SiteKey you still have no idea wether or not it's safe to enter your passcode'.
Whoever thought this up obviously missed a few computer security classes.
Actually, it's entirely true. Take a look at the financials of your average pharmaceutical. They spend less than 20% of revenue on R&D, 40% is marketing and administration, and 40% cost of production and distribution. Some have profits that are twice what they spend on R&D.
That, of course, means we'd get five times the R&D for the same money we're paying today if we paid for it outright rather than granting monopolies. Or we'd get the same level of R&D at a fifth of the price.
Slashdot Mirror
"have got so bad"
Have got so good, you mean. Violating state protected monopoly rights and contribution to the creation of more wealth in the economy is hardly a heinous crime.
Vandalism is quite a bit worse tho.
"copyright also covers"
Yes, extensions do, but the fundamental aspect (the copy, in copyright), is the most damaging part.
"And you just know that Slashdotters would sill complain if they could make copies freely but not broadcast"
Probably, yeah. That can be structurally dealt with tho; you could simply apply a percentage fee to revenue generating activities (which is essentially how it's done today). Ie, torrent trackers would have to pay from advertising revenue (not to mention that you could get vastly improved for-pay or commercialized trackers that would generate more revenue).
The key is, you dont have to prevent copying to gather economic incentives off those who actually generate a revenue stream off the music.
Once you separate the _copy_ right from revenue rights to IP, you're free from all the painful micromanagement of individual copies, and you can get back to the actual issue; what level of incentive do we need to promote creativity, what are we willing to pay for it, where is it most equitable to collect the funding and how do we divide the funding to maximize creative production?
The various per-play fees are usually separate from the essential 'copyright'. You can skip the reproduction monopoly rights without removing per-play fees; ie, even if you can freely make copies one could structure fees around the public performance of works.
"that the figure is steadily growing"
Monopoly revenue will steadily grow as it absorbs any excess wealth. IE, if other things become cheaper, the monopoly segments will grab the extra disposable income by simply raising prices. So over a longer term and with variations in disposable income you can get changes (which, coincidentally, is also why region coding and price discrimination is desireable for the industry).
And like someone else said, this is a matter of opportunity costs; those 11% of GDP is 11% of GDP not spent elsewhere, so if the IP industries are excessively inefficient and the same products could be produced cheaper, the economy could contain _both_ the consumer value of the IP _and_ whatever else the consumer would buy for that money. IE, supporting waste becomes a net loss to the actual wealth of the economy as a whole.
"doesn't look to me like an argument based on economic benefit"
Really, in the end, I'm entirely convinced it does. In the end, what it comes down to is that production with free competition will simply create more wealth than monopolies for the same amount of resources. I have yet to see any serious arguments manage to dispute that, and successfully disputing it would pretty much invalidate the entire foundation of free market capitalism.
Serious objections tend to be based around the financing side, but they tend to miss alternative financing methods (socialized financing is really an entirely separate issue from competetive production, altho the IP industries like to pretend, for marketing purposes, that their system isnt actually a social financing system).
Less serious objections tend to involve straight out lies or at the very least misdirections around, like you noted, misapplied concepts of value (essentially, a more correct labelling of the money flow would be to say that the sector equals a taxation effect of 11% of GDP, for which we get very a very low employment or social value). And as I said earlier, they tend to miss the fact that those 11% tax-equivalents would otherwise be employed in other areas of the economy.
So in the end, the cultural and moral benefits are one thing, but even the economic interest is better served by allowing free competition in the IP areas.
"Seen the budgets of the average Hollywood flick or EA game?"
When you have a monopoly you will never decrease costs. Hollywood flicks and EA games cost much to produce _because_ of copyright, not the other way around.
"All of the big budget works would go away."
All the big budget works will get cheaper. That's the entire point of competition in free market capitalism.
I mean, even Lucas pointed that out recently when he said TV series were much better to produce than movies, largely because they can reuse much more.
Waste is not a benefit to the economy, and if there is anything monopoly rights are good at protecting it's waste.
"many kinds of work cost a lot of money."
Missed the digital revolution, eh? Creative endeavors have never in history been as cheap as they are now.
The fact that the megacorps works costs is because monopolies drives costs like there's no end to revenue. There are examples where platinum selling artists with a finished recording cant get their company to release the new album because they wouldnt be able to make a profit on it. Can you even imagine how you could fail to make a profit off that?
"Say goodbye to movies for a start, as well as games."
There has never been as much high-quality low to zero budget movies as there are now. Nor games (which are moving over to service structures anyway). Without copyright it would be even easier to share models and footage to create entirely new works, ushering in a new era of rapidly evolving content.
"No more orchestras, all those musicians want paying."
You're kidding, right? Orchestras, if you're looking at the classical type, _are_ playing non-copyrighted material. Somehow they appear to get paid anyway, eh?
"we're better off having copyright laws."
You need to calculate the economy over the entire segment. As a segment with monopolistic competition, the revenue extraction is more or less maximized, ie, you pretty much cannot get more total money out of the consumers for the specific product segment. It's just a question of how the money is split and divided, and how it's spent. As a much larger part of the copyright-intensive megacorps revenue gets wasted on things like marketing and administration, this money does not go directly to finance more artists and composers.
This means that while we're getting those for whom the previous method works, we're only getting a fraction of the total possible for-pay or for-sustenance art that we could get with the money we're paying today. And that's even ignoring the streamlining and cultural poverty inherent in having an industry driven by a strong economic interest in a tightly controlled common-denominator pop culture.
"How much would the record companies pay the artists if they couldn't own the intellectual property at all?"
As that would mean the record companies would have far less money to push 'their' material, and far less control of distribution channels, and far less financial resources to spend on payola, that would mean that non-RIAA artists got a far larger share of the radio/cd-tax/other royalty money, and a far greater exposure.
Without copyright, the total costs in the whole industry would fall, creating a much more level playing field for the long tail. More of the consumer money would remain available for spending on direct-to-artist material and concerts, as less is needed to finance marketing, videos, launches and coke snorting races for RIAA execs.
In the end, a whole lot of artists and creators would get a whole lot more than they're getting today.
To go beyond that, if you want more money to artists, heck, if we can have a blank cd tax, why not apply a recorded-cd-tax on the distribution channels if you're still afraid the artists would lose out? Say, artists and creators get a mandatory 50% of final sales price (which, without copyright and with competition in the sales and distribution channels, should fall to around a dollar or two for a cd)? Then we could start talking about a system that actually benefitted the artists.
"they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market."
:) Look up Lysenkoism to see approximately how disasterously political management could screw a complete field of science and the whole agricultural sector for several decades. And wonder at how we could fail to comprehensively beat these guys and outcompete them fifty years ago.
Exactly. And here you see the exact same problems in the non-free-market sectors of western economies. You see it in the copyright industries, ranging from RIAA/MPAA, you see it in failures like Microsoft wasting billions doing their own five-year-plan command economy with LongHorn (while the free market OSS segment kept happily and rapidly evolving in the meantime, spending a fraction of the resources), you see it in the patent covered pharmaceutical industries, etc.
"and let problems develop that shouldn't"
Eh, well, um... I'm not that sure we're such shining examples when it comes to pollution and problems. Shit companies like Monsanto, a posterboy for corporate death penalty that should have been dischartered thirty years ago, and their cronies in various government agencies, with coverups, decades of knowingly poisoning land and people, and to quote wikipedia, 'Monsanto was found guilty of "negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage" Under Alabama law the rare claim of outrage requires "conduct so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in civilized society"' (found guilty, thirty years after the lawsuit started, note) are certainly on par with the worst of the communists on the 'problem' scale.
"so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall."
Dont underestimate the level of mismanagement in the SU.
"So, it appears that supposed "blind luck" and those "craptacular market failures" are doing pretty well, at least to better your life."
So, approximately how much better computers, how much cheaper and better clothes, how many more and better medicines, how much more art do you think we'd have if we actually had a more extensive real functional free market capitalism, eh?
Outcompeting a communist economy isnt a huge feat. The fact that it took the west the better part of a century to actually accomplish it, frequently even lagging behind, is a sad comment on the state of affairs in the western market.
"to criticize capitalism."
Mmm, I think you need to reread my comment. I'm not criticizing capitalism, I'm criticizing the large parts of western economy where we dont have anything like free market capitalism. When they both have the power of state granted monopolies, a five year plan from the Party representatives aint that different from the five year plan from the PharmaceuticalCorp board. Or a five year plan from Steve Ballmer.
Now, try to envision someone attempting to impose a five year plan on an opensource collection like GNU/Linux, say, GnuHorn to be released in five years with a database filesystem, etc, etc, marketingspeak, etc... and note the difference between 'rigid command economy' and 'free market evolution' within a very small slice of a sector in our economy.
"So, how's a dose of reality for a spin?"
Indeed. The irony when more-or-less communist regimes adopt free market solutions like open source while supposedly capitalist countries revel in state-granted monopoly production is palpable.
Looking at the economic history of communism and western economies it's more blind luck and communist incompetence and mismanagement than actual free markets that had the western democracies outperforming the soviet block eventually and for long enough to matter. Our own craptacular market failures like intellectual monopolies could very well have been enough to tip the balance the other way (and, heck, are part of what is tipping the balance the other way compared to China (despite Chinas own economic deficiencies)).
All the problems you name are intrinsic to the current patent system. The system is inherently unbalanced, a completely unbudgeted system where those who hand out the temporary monopolies are not fiscally responsible for the ultimate cost to the economy. As there are no fiscal constraints, quantity of granted patents has become the main interest of the system participants, which in turn grows the rest of the problem in a non-linear fashion.
Personally, I think the whole system has to be scrapped and replaced with a mediated non-monopoly system. Give the patent office a budget. Have them pay out the incentives, and gather statistics on patents used (ie, instead of the current system where you pay the patent holder, you merely report your product is using the patent, and the patent office pays out to the holder). The whole litigation and conflict issue is removed in one strike. There is no longer any reason to _not_ use patented inventions, nor is there any reason to fail to report your use (and any failure can be assumed to be an honest mistake as it doesnt actually cost you anything).
This would in turn would result in the patenting outfits being more geared towards being pure R&D outfits; they would no longer have to carry the weight of litigation, and organizations that are actually _good_ at the business of business (ie, producing, marketing and distributing) could pick and choose the most useful end products.
Next benefit, as the system is budgeted and has to be fully finananced, the patent holders have a much more obvious interest in not having an unbalanced amount of patents granted; each holders payout would have to be scaled down the more (widely used) patents are granted. Further, the system could (not that it would have to) be tuned to pay out more useful levels of incentives, to keep _more_ people gainfully paid for R&D, (especially since it would no longer have to finance legal, administrative and marketing organization). It would also suddenly fall within the realm of researchable and analysable economics; this amount of budget gives this amount of research, and doesnt actually hinder other research, ie, no more making up numbers of the top of patent lobbyists heads.
Such a restructuring also carries a huge further benefit; new and supposedly improved products would no longer carry a further innovation cost and the improvements would be adopted in the economy much, much faster (see, for example, the benefits of having new drugs or more environmentally friendly energy systems be cheaper than their older counterparts).
The most difficult part of such a reform is deciding how to finance it. The fundamental key to solving that issue is by realizing we're already paying for it, so the economy is already taxed by the system, even tho it's hidden. Some costs are less hidden like high costs we're paying for medicines, but we're also paying through other products being more expensive, which in turn makes local industry and labour more costly. We're paying through expensive litigation which makes us less competetive.
Once you realize we're already paying for the current system it's just a question of choosing a better method of paying for it, and selecting a level of financing more in line with a justifiable budget. Personally, I'd tend to be partial to a generalized innovation VAT of a percent or two, as that's closest to where we see the costs today. Preferably modulated in a way to put disincentives on products we _dont_ want and incentives on products we _do_ want (ie, you might even give newer more efficient items an exemption (as per their use of newer patented methods) for a year or two to even further incentivize their adoption in the economy, thus speeding up development).
"And I would also want the teacher to be able to present alternative theories"
Alternative theories are fine in science class, as long as they have a scientific basis and conform to scientific principles.
I dont see any demands that evolution or other theories with a scientific basis, be presented as an alternative in church, nor requirements that the vast host of philosophical theories around the concept and nature of creation and existence be presented as alternatives at any religious function, so why the desire to present non-scientific theories in science education?
There are any number of non-scientific theories about creation and evolution going all the way to philosophical possibilities like existence being layered simulations. They're perfectly fine for philosophy or religion classes, but they are simply incompatible with the very nature of a science class.
'How rational is it to decide "We'd rather sell one at $18 than 3 for $10 each"'
Unfortunately, if you look at it from their perspective, it's entirely rational. Their model is built around maximizing revenue on a per-album basis (see monopoly price setting). Selling _more_ albums means selling more varied albums, which in turn dilutes the efficiency of marketing, fractures the market, spreads more money to the producing segments like artists and composers, entails more risk, and which all have to share play time on the radio.
As each album and song is its own little monopoly, and they all 'compete' (see monopolistic competition) for more or less the same dollar in the pocket of the consumer, even with the other albums in the labels catalogue, they maximize their profits if there was only one album (minimizing per-unit production costs) and it cost all the dollars available for spending on entertainment. Of course, even the media corps cant quite accomplish that, nor control peoples taste to that extent, so we got the best they could do in the form of a grossly limited and tightly controlled 'pop' culture.
Of course, no matter what they do, they're doomed. Social music network sites are vastly superior in mediating music fitting personalized taste, with in turn will utterly fracture the market, destroying that model, drm or no drm.
"makes patents necessary"
You mistake cause and effect. Patents, like all monopolies, result in extremely inefficient organisations. The pharmaceutical industry is no exception; the vast (80%) of patent derived revenue goes to marketing, administration and (compared to the pharma-cloners) inefficient production (a cost structure vastly different from other less protected industries, where the cost-to-produce is the major part of the price).
Patents are not necessary because the costs are high; the costs are high because patent protection make them so. We'd get five times as much medical research done for the same cost to the economy as we have today if we outright just paid for it, and let the cloners do the production competetively.
So, yes, we can have it both ways. The current model is simply grossly inappropriate and wastes such amounts of resources that it has to be torn down and restructured from scratch to make it possible.
"but we still know originality when we hear it and see it"
Or we know originality when we dont hear and see the sources.
As the patent office has been so apt at demonstrating, a failure to find the sources and an unfamiliarity with the subject is easily mistaken for originality.
It's not really eveb a question of derivatives or plagiarism, it's merely the fact that when you have five billion monkeys banging along from more or less the same starting point, quite a lot of them are bound to hit the same keys by pure chance. And the human mind combines and extrapolates much less randomly than pure chance.
Great minds may think alike, and these days we have a lot of great minds, and a far more level starting point with the rapid and free flow of information.
"Why is this such a bad thing?"
Because the revenues of the pharmas are derived from a state-granted monopoly right; functionally equivalent to a taxation system. Such a system should not be funding anything but the actual intended ends.
"If you don't market, you don't sell. PERIOD."
So you mean people get sick and need medicine because of the marketing. Well, if marketing is such a health risk, maybe it's time to do something drastic about it...
On a more serious note tho, this is merely an engineering problem. Combining the patient with the best medicine for those symptoms is easily accomplished with a searchable database.
"because the risk is so insanely high, with small chance for reward"
Which is why it's a bad proposition to make a business of the sector at all. Restructure the whole system, simply dedicate a certain level of funds to research, and then let the cost effective copycats handle the production. They certainly manage to produce (and sell, and make a profit off) the medicines without having the cost structure of large pharma. If you want a competetive research system, structure it as a bounty system for specific drugs, or lowest-bidder research, etc.
"But it's not just a simple matter of greedy pharmaceuticals taking advantage of the helpless."
No, it's a simple matter of a grossly misapplied economic system. The idea that handing out monopoly rights is a useful way to divert money to a certain activity has been a failure of massive proportions and is costing us far too much.
"How about they just put their music on eMusic"
Please, no. Then I'd have to start riaa-radar filtering eMusic artists to avoid EMI.
The jackbooted thugs of the RIAA may be doing what they can to corrupt the politicians, but I'll be damned if I'm going to help finance them.
"I trust many big companies because they provide quality products and never tried to screw me"
Personally, I distrust many big companies because they tend to engage in coverups, market spin, anticompetetive/anticonsumer legal actions and anticompetetive lobbying. The quality of the products has nothing to do with it; anyone can have a bad day, month, or even year in production. I can easily forgive that. The distrust comes when they lie about it.
"I trust even more small companies"
Small companies are typically far less likely to systematically and successfully engage in actions that make them objects of distrust. Perhaps it's due to the stronger sense of personal responsibility in smaller businesses, or it's just that they dont have the spare time and money to spend on being nasty, or they dont have as much internal politicking and cover-your-assishness to drive people to unethical activities.
"Dell isn't in my white list,"
Nor mine.
In this case I'm actually doubtful it's a Dell problem though. I've simply seen _far_ too many grounding 'problems' with all sorts of equipment, ultimately traced back to the fact that these days you've often got a whole bunch of different ground potentials in the various installations in your average house or appartment. Radiator/sink ground != electrical ground != cable ground != telephone ground, and you can easily get a grounding difference between 50 and 100 volts between them. Once you start connecting them together (or putting your feet on your radiator while touching your computer, or touching your tv-attached stereo while holding the plug from the computer), you'll get familiar with the problem. Painfully if you're unlucky, but usually not dangerously so, and more commonly you'll note the ground loop noise in the stereo and dark/bright moving lines on the TV.
"so the RIAA can't just use a function of the worth of a consumer's dollar"
To maximize reveneue, the pricing on monopoly goods is done as a function of disposable income (which is why you see 'regions' and constant attempts to curtail parallel imports in monopoly intensive industries). Cost of production only needs to be factored in to the price if you have competition (and the only competition in this case is 'piracy', so without 'piracy' the price would quite likely be even higher).
So, as long as we keep the current construct of intellectual monopoly legislation, they very much can and will use that function. Lowered costs of production mean only more profit, and more money to spend on controlling the distribution and publicity channels.
"Make it cheap and I will buy much more of it."
The RIAA corps arent interested in you buying more music. They're interested in you paying lots for _their_ music.
If you buy _more_ music, the revenue stream gets diluted. The cost to produce per unit sold becomes a larger part of the total revenue of each unit sold, and they get less profit. More music means more varied music taste and music exposure, in turn leading to less per-unit income off radio stations, etc. Less revenue per unit means less marketing capital, means less power to push independents off the air and off the shelves. Less control. Less money to those who control the market channels, and a larger piece of the pie to more of the actual artists and composers.
Not at all in the RIAA corps interest.
"Basic economics."
Basic free market economics. But the intellectual monopoly industries are nothing like a free market.
The fact is that the digital revolution has cut production costs for professionally produced music down the level that basically anyone who can afford a halfway decent used car can afford to make their own professionally produced album. The internet revolution has cut distribution costs down to zero. On a free and competetive market, the pricing of music would reflect that, and the prices would fall down to maybe a dollar per CD, and far less for the most widely produced CD's.
As long as we allow the monopoly rights to remain, this gain of wealth will remain unrealized, and we'll see far less music than we should, far more marketing (and its even less savoury accompanying corruption a payola and lobbying) than we should, and a much poorer culture than we should.
Globalization makes things cheaper if they're exposed to competition. Monopoly rights products are not priced on a competetive marketplace; their prices follow the consumer side disposable income, ergo they get more expensive if consumers have more money to spend.
Basically, globalization in combination with monopoly rights are the monopoly holders wet dream; it allows them to cut costs by moving production to low-income countries, while not being forced to cut prices as the low-income producers (or anyone else) are not allowed to compete in the highly capitalized market place. Hence, it's the perfect way to accumulate capital and separate the western consumers from their wealth as fast as possible.
"If you have not saved your userid (and thus have to enter it, as you would at a phishing site)"
Unfortunately, that still doesnt help much; a trojan would have access to the cookie, and the phishing site could forward the security questions, faking lost or expired cookies (if it didnt just use cross-site scripting exploits to get it).
"If you can come up with something better, I'm all ears."
Well, it isnt easy to make the system foolproof, that's for sure. In a worst-case scenario (which is altogether far too common these days) you can assume that the user has been trojaned, the sources and destinations of any packet is suspect. You cant be sure what the bank is sending is what the user is seeing. You cant be sure that what the user types is what goes to the bank, and not what the trojan converts it to.
The only method I can think of that would make online banking secure even in that situation involve having an external device which can calculate a cryptographically secure checksum for a particular transaction which you'd have to enter for the bank to validate the transaction (and which would only be valid for those amounts and those accounts at this time), but that would be a pain (as you'd have to manually enter the relevant data into the external device too).
Basically it's a tough problem, but I get really annoyed when banks and others (certificates are a good example) try to sell a false sense of security. Either accept some things just arent secure, and allow people to deal with that (by checking their statements, running their virus scanners, etc), or implement more secure methods. I can understand the motivation, they want to fire all their tellers and dont want people to object to online banking for security reasons, but they simply have to make a choice here; if you cant make/afford a truly secure system, then use the savings to reimburse the customers who got cleaned out.
"If you don't read this..."
Actually, I'd suggest 'if you read this and believe this in any way makes you safe from phising you should take your banking offline'.
This scheme is worthless. Once the user enters his username the bank discloses the picture. There's nothing stopping a phishing site or trojan from immediately using the username to obtain the correct picture and displaying it to the user. IE, the explaining text should say 'if you recognize your SiteKey you still have no idea wether or not it's safe to enter your passcode'.
Whoever thought this up obviously missed a few computer security classes.
"That's actually not true at all."
Actually, it's entirely true. Take a look at the financials of your average pharmaceutical. They spend less than 20% of revenue on R&D, 40% is marketing and administration, and 40% cost of production and distribution. Some have profits that are twice what they spend on R&D.
That, of course, means we'd get five times the R&D for the same money we're paying today if we paid for it outright rather than granting monopolies. Or we'd get the same level of R&D at a fifth of the price.