"They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing,"
Uh-huh. And how's that working out for the GDP growth rate of China vs. the more monopoly hugging economies?
"Instant dilution of brand power."
Because huge resources spent on the production of commercials which people jump through hoops to avoid is desireable in the economy?
Or, wait, wasn't the whole point of the free market was to ensure the most optimized production of desireable products, not to create maximum desire for artificially limited products.
Activists such as these (and everyone else who complains about drug prices) just needs to get over the fact that SCIENCE IS EXPENSIVE, and that someone has to pay for it."
Sure, I'll get over it the day the pharmaceuticals are actually spending their money on research.
You do realize that not even 20% of the pharm money is spent on R&D, right? Go take a look at any public pharmcorps financial reports.
You do realize that means we could get _five_ times the current amount of R&D if we scrapped patents and just outright _paid_ for the R&D? Or the same level we have today, for a fifth of the cost?
So, tell me again, why are we publically financing expensive marketing campaigns and protected pharmcorp beurocracies?
"This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote,"
Not only that; the fact that Gracenote also sued customers who tried to switch to CDDB, as well as their attempts to hinder any and all competition through frivolous patent trolls suits drew a rather seedy picture.
The guy in tfa may not have had anything to do with it, and the people responsible for those actions may be gone, but a fact that behooves any profit-at-all-costs buisnessmen to remember before pissing everyone off would be that shitstains dont wash out of the corporate clothing without a pretty serious detergent. Fancy words from some guy arent it.
"If the market was a "real" free market, then why wouldn't companies be able to restrict supply as much as they like?"
They can, but the only effect from that in a competetive market is that their competitors step in and provide that supply instead.
"Nothing about a free market guarantees that there will be competitors making compatible equipment."
A free market guarantees that there will be an economic incentive for competitors to enter a market when demand outstrips supply. While there might very well be incompatible equipment, the natural course of the market is to correct such deficiencies. As you can see by the numbers of emulators for various platforms and drives for compatibility between various equipment. Except as when such actions are prohibited with legal means or the demand is too low.
"So, you are arguing that the PS3 should be more expensive? That would not be a good business strategy."
Not when you have a market lock in your equipment and need to create a consumer group who will provide you with revenue, no. The sales price of the PS3 isnt the whole price, remember. The rest comes later. (Which incidentally also drives the whole rediculously anti-market litigation circus around modchips etc).
In a free market, you wouldnt get that lock; you'd have to recoup the cost of sales up front (compare non-encumbered equipment like plasma/lcd screens). With the advent of ebaying, it's arguable that the low introduction price serves no purpose anymore anyway. If Sony wants a queue they could just as well hire the chinese to stand in line themselves.
"The early adopters would realize that there would never be a big enough market at that price to have an ecosystem of games and accessories and other support."
Here you see another reason why free markets drive compatibility; proprietary systems are a pain to create such an ecosystem for. Compare with the free PC market; vendors dont have to introduce at below-price to build market, consumers dont have to worry they're dumping money into a soon-to-be-dead platform.
"How is intellectual property stopping any company from releasing a game console that competes with the PS3?"
Capitalism? This has nothing to do with capitalism. The problems here stem from two things; the artificial scarcity derived from copyright and exclusive licensing, and the non-market pricing of the products.
In a real free market, there would be any number of producers making consoles capable of playing the games in question; you dont see people fighting in queues for the newest Dell PC.
In a real free market, the price would follow the demand curve; creating stronger incentives for other producers to enter the market when profits are high, and driving down costs of production. Now we have ebaying elderly chinese filling the gap, which hardly increases the production rate.
This isnt any form of free market failure; this one can be squarely blamed on the state protectionism scheme called intellectual 'property'.
On the other hand, most positive contributions can be ascribed to the previous management. Hovsepian, the guy behind the deal, is the CEO now. The current 'Novell' may not at all be the same as the last one.
And with Novells long, proprietary, history it has quite some legacy to overcome.
"It does nothing about *usage* rights. There's a brief mention in the preamble, but that's all."
The implicit intent is clear enough tho. It's a thin line Novell is walking, and in my opinion they're solidly on the wrong side of it. Word games and pretense about verbal commitments not being licenses are of dubious value in a court.
"This causes a problem though. IMHO, Microsoft must sue the *users*, not the distributors."
While it isnt impossible, that would have implications far beyond the software industry; if the courts allowed patent suits against end users using their own property in general, you basically couldnt take a shit without risking getting sued for any possible patents covering your toilet. Human society would grind to a halt.
Serious exploitation of that particular defect in the patent system would be even worse than the trolls and get the law changed faster than you could say 'patent reform'.
"I think the best response would be for IBM to sue Ballmer personally"
File a patent for using tranquilizers to lower wear and tear on office inventory, get an injunction against Ballmer and watch him run amok with the chairs...
"I may well be wrong, but I don't remember there being any "licensing" in this deal."
Oh, that's right, Microsoft is 'frobbing' the IP rights to Novell. Or was it 'blorghing' them?
Either Microsoft's legal counsel are idiots, or they've been smoking Darl. You can call a license whatever you like, but a license is a license and courts tend to take a dim view of the parties playing them for fools.
"Once they've made all the other distros illegal..."
For any GPL software SuSE distributes they must either forward any specific rights they think are needed, or they must cease distributing the GPL software. The GPL explicitly prevents partial rights from accompanying it. If there is a case where MS tries to claim infringement, but Novell say's they're not affected due to the agreement, then Novell loses it's right to distribute the software under the GPL instead.
I doubt Novell were thinking at all. As far as any GPLed code is concerned, the agreement is worse than worthless; if Novell thinks they're distributing GPL code that needs extra rights granted, then they must forward those extra rights to any and all recipients, or they cannot distribute the code at all.
"but I can choose whether I want to buy the CD or download a song from iTunes."
But (apart from illegal alternatives) you cant chose to not pay the copyright 'tax' cost. You are already paying, wether you buy from iTunes or you buy a CD.
"why should I pay a tax to the music industry?"
The most equitable suggestions I've seen tax sales revenue related to the material in question. IE, the product tax is on the CD, the advertizement on the webdownload, etc. _You_, specifically, are not taxed, the one generating revenue from the sales of the actual material is. It would more or less replace the whole 'signing' part of the IP industry, and automatically guarantee you'd get paid if someone made money off your work.
Coincidentally, such a system also scales over different distribution forms; it doesnt matter if it's on physical media, download, performed or transmitted onto your fillings; as it's the revenue that's taxed, it remains constant.
"With copyrighted products, even DRM'd ones, I choose where to spend my money."
So you do with, for example, tobacco, gas and alcohol tax.
Just because copyright revenue isnt reported as a specific taxation doesnt change its nature.
"What you are suggesting is good old-fashioned forcible redistribution."
Just like intellectual 'property' is a form if forcible redistribution. Again, it's the sales point that exacts the revenue (as monopoly pricing) from the consumers, and distributes it through the owner/distribution chain (which takes most of it), after which a few crumbs are left for the final recipient. Short-circuiting the system by letting the sales point pay a percentage on revenue, bypassing the chain and paying directly to the recepients would be far less wasteful.
"A sentence to a lifetime of boredom strikes fear in the hearts of very few men who would follow..."
In case you didnt notice, fear of getting killed doesnt usually stop dictators from being nasty. In fact, it mostly tends to encourage them to clean up better, and to be more through in even more atrocities.
Just take a look at what Saddam was sentanced for; retaliating against an assassination attempt by one of the current Shiite political parties. Do you think his death sentance is preventing the current Iraqi politicians and their security apparatus from sending out deathsquads against people they dont like? Want to make a bet which side of the noose they'll be on after the next power shift, and for what atrocities?
"Martyrs are rarely found hanging from the gallows."
Oh, right, so that must be why they're not doing a crucifiction.
Martyrs are merely focal points for particular movements; what Saddam does or who he is hardly matters in the context. His supporters will see him as representing the former secular modernized Iraq that's now fallen to the fundamentalists the US put in charge, rather than the ruthless killer of political opponents. The cause then becomes the martyr and the martyr the cause; allowing the simplified psychological dynamics of a personalized cause over the more abstract issues. And with the significant advantage for the members that a martyrized bastard wont engage in any new nastiness.
Copyright is essentially a taxation right and the effect it has on the economy is comparable to other forms of taxation. The whole issue is much easier to analyze if you simply consider the above-market price exacted through monopoly pricing to be a form of VAT. For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT, and $1 to production (and theoretical free market pricing) cost.
It's neither worse nor better than the disease, it's the same disease with another name.
As such, it becomes a simple question of wether the current form of public financing of the IP industries is the most efficient way, or wether the public would be better served by incorporating the IP systems within the ordinary state budgets.
Imagine if we took the total amount of money spent by consumers on music today and funnelled that directly to the creators and artists instead, cutting out all expensive marketing, music exec coke habits, overly complicated distribution, and leaving those parts to the free market rather than the current monopoly schemes. Without costing consumers and taxpayers any more than today, those resources could finance many, many more artists and creators.
"What I ment was, our nonchalance towards the usual causes of death come from how common it is"
So, now take that insight and apply it to the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the mideast in general, and contemplate approximately how useful military force is for creating stable non-violent societies and citizens.
Of course, at that point we can also expect to see the EU Directorates get into a fullscale civil war between the DG Markt, Comp, InfSo and some others, over wether IP law is in any form compatible with anti-trust and a competetive market.
"That's the problem with systems as mind-bogglingly complex as the ocean: you can't count on current trends continuing."
It really isnt that complex. In some places, two decades ago, you could go out and fish for a few hours from, or nearby the shore, and have enough fish to eat for a week. In those exact same places you can now fish for a week and not have a single fish.
I mean, this isnt some nebulous long-term effect; if you're ever fishing for sport in areas affected, it's quite noticable, and within the timeframe of 'your dad took you fishing and it was fun and you got fish, now you can take your kids and fish for seaweed and jellyfish'.
"That's easy for me to say, though, as my family's well-being isn't tied to my success as a fisherman."
Yes, well, I really pity anyone whose well-being is tied to being a fisherman. Many will be faced with the unpalatable choice of failing because of regulation or failing because there simply is no fish to catch. For many, success just isnt on the menu anymore. Just like fish.
Why not simply go all the way? YouTube paying IP 'VAT' of 25-30% on sales revenue, registering number of downloads per work, and then letting a government agency handle the payouts to the creators of works instead. No more difficult producer versus distributor versus customer relationship remaining; it becomes just another ordinary system of the (more or less) democratic state, with a budget, where you can argue for or against tax raises or cuts, where you can argue for or against the levels of payouts to creators, etc.
Get rid of the whole idea of 'monopoly rights'; they're an abberant artifact from an age of nobles, kings and merchant guilds. IP is just another state-run incentive system, and as such it needs to be brought into this century. Or even last century.
"can't just erase the current distribution contracts and copyright laws"
Expecting government run welfare programs like copyright to remain unchanged and in place indefinitely isn't particularly realistic. If you're signing away the rights to your welfare check for the next several years to some media conglomerate, well, then neither you nor they should be surprised if the reasons for handing out that check at all are reevaluated.
Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
Of course, the actual breakdown would probably be more like 0.05% customers, 0.45% teenagers mistyping youtube, and 99.5% people who've heard utubes complaints and head over to the site to see what they're about, wonder what they do in more detail, or just want to see if the poor webserver is slow or not.
Personally, I doubt they'l get much out of a lawsuit; their own public complaints have generated vastly more traffic (and 'free' publicity) than any random misdirected traffic.
"I can't see how revenue will be generated to produce programming."
The key to solving that problem lies in a simple realization; we already are paying for it.
Intellectual 'property', which is the foundation for all these various schemes for extracting the resources out of the economy, is essense a convoluted form of taxation, and a particularly ineffecient one at that.
Personally, I think the only long term solution to the problem is to remove the monopoly rights as a whole, allow anyone to reproduce and/or broadcast (same thing, essentially) and derive financing for the underlying contents by simply directly taxing the revenue from sales of such reproductions and/or broadcasts, eliminating the financial coupling between production and distribution.
"but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes)."
The value of the support is directly related to the level of development. As a customer, once you are hit by a bug, you'd presumably want to get it fixed, and the closer to the development the support provider is, the better they will be at fixing the bugs.
Would you pay Oracle for a support contract, only to find out they're not going to fix your bugs, they'll wait until the upstream does it? Or that they'll fix them bug, but the next resync with upstream will reintroduce it? Or even worse bugs, if the upstream produces incompatible fixes?
Can you even imagine the nightmare of trying to maintain a patch tree while engaged in hostilities towards the upstream? Can you imagine the havoc they could wreck on your patches? Would you volunteer to maintain patches when any upstream change will mean a total reject of your patches, or even worse, subtle changes in variable names and uses that do everything from cause crashes to corrupting data? There's a reason people fork OSS projects.
From what Ellison spouts it sounds like Oracle wants a free ride and has just failed to notice you cant get a free ride. Either Oracle will have to fork completely, or they'll have to maintain an amicable relationship with Red Hat. Which probably means carrying their own weight. Which means that Red Hat gains as much free patches from Oracle as Oracle does from them.
"This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat."
Oracle offers a subset of Red Hat support at a slight discount. Red Hat offers replacements for much of Oracles stack at a minute fraction of the price. I fail to see why Red Hat would be the one that has anything to be worried about.
"Oracle can..and they probably will. This is why any business model based on open source is so difficult."
Not really. Take a look at what Ellison said:
"Each time Red Hat comes out with new code we'll synchronize with that version. We will add our bug fixes to current, future and back releases."
Anyone who's been doing opensource for any decent time knows that constantly repatching and resyncing against the upstream is even worse than patching in the first place. Patches break, they get incompatible changes, the sources diverge, etc. You want to stay as close to the upstream as possible, preferably getting your changes merged into the upstream branch.
Now imagine having a hostile relationship with your upstream provider.
You wont have a patch applying cleanly, ever. And if you wanted to take the hostilities further, can you even imagine the level of havoc the upstream could wreck on your code, by intentionally tailoring specific changes that wont actually break your patch so much as make it do something entirely different?
Essentially, the freeloading leech approach simply doesnt work. Either you have to pull your own weight, fork and do it all yourself, or you'll have to have a fairly amicable relationship of give and take with the upstream.
The only way I can see this working for Oracle would be if they specifically took the database side, provided services for it, and amicably fixed all Oracle/database related bugs and submitted them upstream to RedHat. I'm not exactly sure that would have any downside for RedHat tho; they lose a painful segment of vendor specific support, lose the fingerpointing, and get the fixes for free, allowing them to sell Oracle related support with the marketing that Oracle fixed any bugs for us...
One has to wonder at Mr. Greenbaums analysis. Red Hat is used to not owning exclusive IP and competing on a level playing field. Oracle isn't; it's whole operation is used to the protection of exclusivity. I fail to see any dangerous position.
I wonder if Larry has really thought this through; offering Red Hats patches developed for Red Hats customers but two days later isnt a compelling sales argument so what will Oracle do when Oracles customers report bugs to Oracle? Report the bugs to Red Hat and hope they fix them? Or fix them themselves, and submit the patches upstream to Red Hat? Either their customers risk being left high and dry, or Oracle will be doing Red Hats work for them, just as much as the other way around.
"I can't see Larry going after people who attack the GPL"
But maybe we'll see Larry going after the GPL, once he realizes that Red Hat can freeload right back at him.
Slashdot Mirror
"They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing,"
Uh-huh. And how's that working out for the GDP growth rate of China vs. the more monopoly hugging economies?
"Instant dilution of brand power."
Because huge resources spent on the production of commercials which people jump through hoops to avoid is desireable in the economy?
Or, wait, wasn't the whole point of the free market was to ensure the most optimized production of desireable products, not to create maximum desire for artificially limited products.
Activists such as these (and everyone else who complains about drug prices) just needs to get over the fact that SCIENCE IS EXPENSIVE, and that someone has to pay for it."
Sure, I'll get over it the day the pharmaceuticals are actually spending their money on research.
You do realize that not even 20% of the pharm money is spent on R&D, right? Go take a look at any public pharmcorps financial reports.
You do realize that means we could get _five_ times the current amount of R&D if we scrapped patents and just outright _paid_ for the R&D? Or the same level we have today, for a fifth of the cost?
So, tell me again, why are we publically financing expensive marketing campaigns and protected pharmcorp beurocracies?
"This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote,"
Not only that; the fact that Gracenote also sued customers who tried to switch to CDDB, as well as their attempts to hinder any and all competition through frivolous patent trolls suits drew a rather seedy picture.
The guy in tfa may not have had anything to do with it, and the people responsible for those actions may be gone, but a fact that behooves any profit-at-all-costs buisnessmen to remember before pissing everyone off would be that shitstains dont wash out of the corporate clothing without a pretty serious detergent. Fancy words from some guy arent it.
"If the market was a "real" free market, then why wouldn't companies be able to restrict supply as much as they like?"
They can, but the only effect from that in a competetive market is that their competitors step in and provide that supply instead.
"Nothing about a free market guarantees that there will be competitors making compatible equipment."
A free market guarantees that there will be an economic incentive for competitors to enter a market when demand outstrips supply. While there might very well be incompatible equipment, the natural course of the market is to correct such deficiencies. As you can see by the numbers of emulators for various platforms and drives for compatibility between various equipment. Except as when such actions are prohibited with legal means or the demand is too low.
"So, you are arguing that the PS3 should be more expensive? That would not be a good business strategy."
Not when you have a market lock in your equipment and need to create a consumer group who will provide you with revenue, no. The sales price of the PS3 isnt the whole price, remember. The rest comes later. (Which incidentally also drives the whole rediculously anti-market litigation circus around modchips etc).
In a free market, you wouldnt get that lock; you'd have to recoup the cost of sales up front (compare non-encumbered equipment like plasma/lcd screens). With the advent of ebaying, it's arguable that the low introduction price serves no purpose anymore anyway. If Sony wants a queue they could just as well hire the chinese to stand in line themselves.
"The early adopters would realize that there would never be a big enough market at that price to have an ecosystem of games and accessories and other support."
Here you see another reason why free markets drive compatibility; proprietary systems are a pain to create such an ecosystem for. Compare with the free PC market; vendors dont have to introduce at below-price to build market, consumers dont have to worry they're dumping money into a soon-to-be-dead platform.
"How is intellectual property stopping any company from releasing a game console that competes with the PS3?"
Try releasing a PS3 clone and see.
"If anything blame capitalism, that's right."
Capitalism? This has nothing to do with capitalism. The problems here stem from two things; the artificial scarcity derived from copyright and exclusive licensing, and the non-market pricing of the products.
In a real free market, there would be any number of producers making consoles capable of playing the games in question; you dont see people fighting in queues for the newest Dell PC.
In a real free market, the price would follow the demand curve; creating stronger incentives for other producers to enter the market when profits are high, and driving down costs of production. Now we have ebaying elderly chinese filling the gap, which hardly increases the production rate.
This isnt any form of free market failure; this one can be squarely blamed on the state protectionism scheme called intellectual 'property'.
On the other hand, most positive contributions can be ascribed to the previous management. Hovsepian, the guy behind the deal, is the CEO now. The current 'Novell' may not at all be the same as the last one.
And with Novells long, proprietary, history it has quite some legacy to overcome.
"It does nothing about *usage* rights. There's a brief mention in the preamble, but that's all."
The implicit intent is clear enough tho. It's a thin line Novell is walking, and in my opinion they're solidly on the wrong side of it. Word games and pretense about verbal commitments not being licenses are of dubious value in a court.
"This causes a problem though. IMHO, Microsoft must sue the *users*, not the distributors."
While it isnt impossible, that would have implications far beyond the software industry; if the courts allowed patent suits against end users using their own property in general, you basically couldnt take a shit without risking getting sued for any possible patents covering your toilet. Human society would grind to a halt.
Serious exploitation of that particular defect in the patent system would be even worse than the trolls and get the law changed faster than you could say 'patent reform'.
"I think the best response would be for IBM to sue Ballmer personally"
File a patent for using tranquilizers to lower wear and tear on office inventory, get an injunction against Ballmer and watch him run amok with the chairs...
"I may well be wrong, but I don't remember there being any "licensing" in this deal."
Oh, that's right, Microsoft is 'frobbing' the IP rights to Novell. Or was it 'blorghing' them?
Either Microsoft's legal counsel are idiots, or they've been smoking Darl. You can call a license whatever you like, but a license is a license and courts tend to take a dim view of the parties playing them for fools.
"Once they've made all the other distros illegal..."
For any GPL software SuSE distributes they must either forward any specific rights they think are needed, or they must cease distributing the GPL software. The GPL explicitly prevents partial rights from accompanying it. If there is a case where MS tries to claim infringement, but Novell say's they're not affected due to the agreement, then Novell loses it's right to distribute the software under the GPL instead.
"Not sure what Novell are thinking of here."
I doubt Novell were thinking at all. As far as any GPLed code is concerned, the agreement is worse than worthless; if Novell thinks they're distributing GPL code that needs extra rights granted, then they must forward those extra rights to any and all recipients, or they cannot distribute the code at all.
"but I can choose whether I want to buy the CD or download a song from iTunes."
But (apart from illegal alternatives) you cant chose to not pay the copyright 'tax' cost. You are already paying, wether you buy from iTunes or you buy a CD.
"why should I pay a tax to the music industry?"
The most equitable suggestions I've seen tax sales revenue related to the material in question. IE, the product tax is on the CD, the advertizement on the webdownload, etc. _You_, specifically, are not taxed, the one generating revenue from the sales of the actual material is. It would more or less replace the whole 'signing' part of the IP industry, and automatically guarantee you'd get paid if someone made money off your work.
Coincidentally, such a system also scales over different distribution forms; it doesnt matter if it's on physical media, download, performed or transmitted onto your fillings; as it's the revenue that's taxed, it remains constant.
"With copyrighted products, even DRM'd ones, I choose where to spend my money."
So you do with, for example, tobacco, gas and alcohol tax.
Just because copyright revenue isnt reported as a specific taxation doesnt change its nature.
"What you are suggesting is good old-fashioned forcible redistribution."
Just like intellectual 'property' is a form if forcible redistribution. Again, it's the sales point that exacts the revenue (as monopoly pricing) from the consumers, and distributes it through the owner/distribution chain (which takes most of it), after which a few crumbs are left for the final recipient. Short-circuiting the system by letting the sales point pay a percentage on revenue, bypassing the chain and paying directly to the recepients would be far less wasteful.
"But it would cost me more than today"
As a mandatory percentage of sales revenue, it wouldnt. If you're not paying today you wouldnt be paying any more...
"but then I want to know which artist get my money."
The one generating the revenue, of course.
"A sentence to a lifetime of boredom strikes fear in the hearts of very few men who would follow..."
In case you didnt notice, fear of getting killed doesnt usually stop dictators from being nasty. In fact, it mostly tends to encourage them to clean up better, and to be more through in even more atrocities.
Just take a look at what Saddam was sentanced for; retaliating against an assassination attempt by one of the current Shiite political parties. Do you think his death sentance is preventing the current Iraqi politicians and their security apparatus from sending out deathsquads against people they dont like? Want to make a bet which side of the noose they'll be on after the next power shift, and for what atrocities?
"Martyrs are rarely found hanging from the gallows."
Oh, right, so that must be why they're not doing a crucifiction.
Martyrs are merely focal points for particular movements; what Saddam does or who he is hardly matters in the context. His supporters will see him as representing the former secular modernized Iraq that's now fallen to the fundamentalists the US put in charge, rather than the ruthless killer of political opponents. The cause then becomes the martyr and the martyr the cause; allowing the simplified psychological dynamics of a personalized cause over the more abstract issues. And with the significant advantage for the members that a martyrized bastard wont engage in any new nastiness.
Copyright is essentially a taxation right and the effect it has on the economy is comparable to other forms of taxation. The whole issue is much easier to analyze if you simply consider the above-market price exacted through monopoly pricing to be a form of VAT. For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT, and $1 to production (and theoretical free market pricing) cost.
It's neither worse nor better than the disease, it's the same disease with another name.
As such, it becomes a simple question of wether the current form of public financing of the IP industries is the most efficient way, or wether the public would be better served by incorporating the IP systems within the ordinary state budgets.
Imagine if we took the total amount of money spent by consumers on music today and funnelled that directly to the creators and artists instead, cutting out all expensive marketing, music exec coke habits, overly complicated distribution, and leaving those parts to the free market rather than the current monopoly schemes. Without costing consumers and taxpayers any more than today, those resources could finance many, many more artists and creators.
"What I ment was, our nonchalance towards the usual causes of death come from how common it is"
So, now take that insight and apply it to the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the mideast in general, and contemplate approximately how useful military force is for creating stable non-violent societies and citizens.
Of course, at that point we can also expect to see the EU Directorates get into a fullscale civil war between the DG Markt, Comp, InfSo and some others, over wether IP law is in any form compatible with anti-trust and a competetive market.
"That's the problem with systems as mind-bogglingly complex as the ocean: you can't count on current trends continuing."
It really isnt that complex. In some places, two decades ago, you could go out and fish for a few hours from, or nearby the shore, and have enough fish to eat for a week. In those exact same places you can now fish for a week and not have a single fish.
I mean, this isnt some nebulous long-term effect; if you're ever fishing for sport in areas affected, it's quite noticable, and within the timeframe of 'your dad took you fishing and it was fun and you got fish, now you can take your kids and fish for seaweed and jellyfish'.
"That's easy for me to say, though, as my family's well-being isn't tied to my success as a fisherman."
Yes, well, I really pity anyone whose well-being is tied to being a fisherman. Many will be faced with the unpalatable choice of failing because of regulation or failing because there simply is no fish to catch. For many, success just isnt on the menu anymore. Just like fish.
"Second, licensing should be automatic."
Why not simply go all the way? YouTube paying IP 'VAT' of 25-30% on sales revenue, registering number of downloads per work, and then letting a government agency handle the payouts to the creators of works instead. No more difficult producer versus distributor versus customer relationship remaining; it becomes just another ordinary system of the (more or less) democratic state, with a budget, where you can argue for or against tax raises or cuts, where you can argue for or against the levels of payouts to creators, etc.
Get rid of the whole idea of 'monopoly rights'; they're an abberant artifact from an age of nobles, kings and merchant guilds. IP is just another state-run incentive system, and as such it needs to be brought into this century. Or even last century.
"can't just erase the current distribution contracts and copyright laws"
Expecting government run welfare programs like copyright to remain unchanged and in place indefinitely isn't particularly realistic. If you're signing away the rights to your welfare check for the next several years to some media conglomerate, well, then neither you nor they should be surprised if the reasons for handing out that check at all are reevaluated.
Of course, the actual breakdown would probably be more like 0.05% customers, 0.45% teenagers mistyping youtube, and 99.5% people who've heard utubes complaints and head over to the site to see what they're about, wonder what they do in more detail, or just want to see if the poor webserver is slow or not.
Personally, I doubt they'l get much out of a lawsuit; their own public complaints have generated vastly more traffic (and 'free' publicity) than any random misdirected traffic.
"I can't see how revenue will be generated to produce programming."
The key to solving that problem lies in a simple realization; we already are paying for it.
Intellectual 'property', which is the foundation for all these various schemes for extracting the resources out of the economy, is essense a convoluted form of taxation, and a particularly ineffecient one at that.
Personally, I think the only long term solution to the problem is to remove the monopoly rights as a whole, allow anyone to reproduce and/or broadcast (same thing, essentially) and derive financing for the underlying contents by simply directly taxing the revenue from sales of such reproductions and/or broadcasts, eliminating the financial coupling between production and distribution.
"but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes)."
The value of the support is directly related to the level of development. As a customer, once you are hit by a bug, you'd presumably want to get it fixed, and the closer to the development the support provider is, the better they will be at fixing the bugs.
Would you pay Oracle for a support contract, only to find out they're not going to fix your bugs, they'll wait until the upstream does it? Or that they'll fix them bug, but the next resync with upstream will reintroduce it? Or even worse bugs, if the upstream produces incompatible fixes?
Can you even imagine the nightmare of trying to maintain a patch tree while engaged in hostilities towards the upstream? Can you imagine the havoc they could wreck on your patches? Would you volunteer to maintain patches when any upstream change will mean a total reject of your patches, or even worse, subtle changes in variable names and uses that do everything from cause crashes to corrupting data? There's a reason people fork OSS projects.
From what Ellison spouts it sounds like Oracle wants a free ride and has just failed to notice you cant get a free ride. Either Oracle will have to fork completely, or they'll have to maintain an amicable relationship with Red Hat. Which probably means carrying their own weight. Which means that Red Hat gains as much free patches from Oracle as Oracle does from them.
"This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat."
Oracle offers a subset of Red Hat support at a slight discount. Red Hat offers replacements for much of Oracles stack at a minute fraction of the price. I fail to see why Red Hat would be the one that has anything to be worried about.
"Oracle can..and they probably will. This is why any business model based on open source is so difficult."
Not really. Take a look at what Ellison said:
"Each time Red Hat comes out with new code we'll synchronize with that version. We will add our bug fixes to current, future and back releases."
Anyone who's been doing opensource for any decent time knows that constantly repatching and resyncing against the upstream is even worse than patching in the first place. Patches break, they get incompatible changes, the sources diverge, etc. You want to stay as close to the upstream as possible, preferably getting your changes merged into the upstream branch.
Now imagine having a hostile relationship with your upstream provider.
You wont have a patch applying cleanly, ever. And if you wanted to take the hostilities further, can you even imagine the level of havoc the upstream could wreck on your code, by intentionally tailoring specific changes that wont actually break your patch so much as make it do something entirely different?
Essentially, the freeloading leech approach simply doesnt work. Either you have to pull your own weight, fork and do it all yourself, or you'll have to have a fairly amicable relationship of give and take with the upstream.
The only way I can see this working for Oracle would be if they specifically took the database side, provided services for it, and amicably fixed all Oracle/database related bugs and submitted them upstream to RedHat. I'm not exactly sure that would have any downside for RedHat tho; they lose a painful segment of vendor specific support, lose the fingerpointing, and get the fixes for free, allowing them to sell Oracle related support with the marketing that Oracle fixed any bugs for us...
One has to wonder at Mr. Greenbaums analysis. Red Hat is used to not owning exclusive IP and competing on a level playing field. Oracle isn't; it's whole operation is used to the protection of exclusivity. I fail to see any dangerous position.
I wonder if Larry has really thought this through; offering Red Hats patches developed for Red Hats customers but two days later isnt a compelling sales argument so what will Oracle do when Oracles customers report bugs to Oracle? Report the bugs to Red Hat and hope they fix them? Or fix them themselves, and submit the patches upstream to Red Hat? Either their customers risk being left high and dry, or Oracle will be doing Red Hats work for them, just as much as the other way around.
"I can't see Larry going after people who attack the GPL"
But maybe we'll see Larry going after the GPL, once he realizes that Red Hat can freeload right back at him.