Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
"Surely it'd be more efficient to keep distribution cost low"
Currently there is no incentive to keep 'distribution costs' low, as there is no competition allowed. You cant buy Band X playing Song Y from company a, or company b or company c, you can only buy it from company a, ie, no competition. That's a large part of the problem; most of the actual cost on the end product is accrued in the distribution chains in the forms of evereything from marketing and payola through extraneous but tied in products (MTV videos, etc). As the consumers cannot obtain the product without these costs, a large part of the capital spent does not, in fact, go to the intended recipient (even with many high income artists), but gets eaten by costs far before that.
"media/duplication (before the content is added)"
After content is added. The whole point is to restore and enforce market competition on the post-creative process, while still funneling money into creative, but infinitely duplicatable, arts.
"And again, the problem with just giving money to the new creators..."
Assuming the system is so overfinanced that someone throwing out a few half-arsed tracks would actually reach a payout point. Conceivably, you'd tie the payments to a certain degree of distribution, just like today, and with cut-off points at the top and bottom. If that guy with the half-assed track gets his track copied and sold half a million times, it probably wasnt that half-assed, and he probably should get paid to create more. Likewise, if a currently big artist releases crap, and it doesnt get copied and sold, well, then they probably shouldnt get jack.
"Then buy another one that's only a few percent faster."
As far as I can tell, AM2 will be a merge of the desktop sockets, which means you'll eventually have a fairly large range of performances.
If AM2 reclaims the same kind of staying power that socket A had, this also means you get the capacity to do cascade upgrades once you have a few systems. Stick a new CPU in your desktop? You dont stick the old one in a box, you move it to the server, which gets faster... and your old server CPU can be moved to the media frontend, which also gets faster... etc.
"Every time I've done an upgrade, it's been a whole system upgrade. And then, I only do it every 5 years or so. Is there really a need to stay on the bleeding edge all the time that I'm missing?"
Mmm, if that's how you do it, you probably wont benefit, no. In fact, it's far better to _never_ stay on the bleeding edge; bleeding edgers always get hosed by the price/performance ratio, and someone spending half of what you spend every 2.5 years will probably have a higher average performance over time on his systems, and twice as many systems. And again, once you reach the number of systems and component standardization needed for rolling upgrades, that's when you really start getting the payoff...
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
"What, equally?"
Yes? No? Maybe? Why 75 years? Why amount X?
Feel free to set up the criteria, and construct a system based on what it's _supposed to do_.
The purpose of a creative incentive system would, of course, be to maximize the number and quality of people able and willing to support themselves by creative work, at the highest level of efficiency for the cost to society. As such, you probably would want a sliding scale that maxes out at a fairly good living for the most popular works, to maximize the production of desireable works. However, when some get more, others would by necessity get less, which means you'd need a cutoff point where it's probably better to have two, or three fairly good creative people working than one very good person getting enough money to snort coke until they cant write anymore.
"In which case, how do you keep track of how many people have what"
If the copying of works isnt illegal there would be no disincentive to register copying. Considering this isnt a new problem, and it's already handled for various broadcast media, it's not like there arent a whole slew of methods to solve that.
'how much brand equity "Sun Microsystems" carries among a whole generation of 25+ year old geeks'
Unfortunately, most of that brand equity has been eaten away by half a decade during which you'd rather be compiling on your desktop than on the server, and trying to answer embarrasing questions why the devs get better performance out of their java code on their laptop than on the expensive app server.
You know, five years ago those 25+ yearers would form a queue when machines got decommissioned and handed out. These days you'd have to pay people to take them.
"easy to understand overview book about the differences between Linux and Windows"
Try pasting your words into google and see if it doesnt help... It's usually vastly superior to the slashdot comment window at finding what you want...:)
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"want to be able to make a living from it."
Yes, well, I'll betcha there's a bunch of people who'd like to be able to make a living from posting slashdot comments. That doesnt mean it's in the public interest to finance it.
If they 'love making music', to be utterly and horrifically frank, they'd still do it without copyright, and a free market would be better spending resources on other things, as the music would get done _anyway_. You dont get paid for doing what you want, no matter how much you'd like to, you get paid for doing what someone else wants. Only if you're very lucky do they coincide.
It's the laws of supply and demand, and with anything that's infinitely duplicatable at near zero cost, the supply outpaces the demand fairly soon; there are only so many hours per day to listen to music, and it's not a resource that needs repeated production (while touring and performing music actually is, which makes it vastly more suitable to make money from in a market economy).
That said, I personally do think it's in the public interest to finance the arts beyond what the true market value is. But it should be done not through monopoly rights on works, but through levies off those profiting from the duplication, fixation in media, performance and distribution of those materials. IE, let anyone and everyone copy, perform, sell, and do whatever they want with copyrighted material (keeping attribution intact), but tax the revenue of the record companies, bands and orchestras performing live, CD duplicators, etc, and divide the revenue among the original creators so they can spend more time creating.
"The reason we have patents is so that the knowledge created during the invention process becomes publicly documented."
Oh, I know. I was just commenting on wether it was useful for small inventors or not.
You do point out the one single good aspect of the patent system tho, but which is also the one single aspect that is rapidly collapsing, as the patent system cannot keep up with todays more efficient distribution of knowledge with the availability of the internet. You see the problem when you actually have lawyers telling technicians not to look at patents because they'll only expose themselves to willful infringement claims...
"Any ideas of a better system for doing that?"
Sure. Instead of getting monopoly rights when registering a patent, you'd get attributive incentive rights. If the invention comes in use, the inventor would get a payout from the patent office (wether used by himself or someone else). Scaled per value, per unit, whatever, you go ahead and use your imagination.
In such a system the patent office and patent holders, would have in their own interest that the system didnt overgrant, or the budget would be blown and the incentives would shrink. The amount of budget would be under democratic control, just like any other incentive system (and dont make the mistake of thinking that patents cost the economy nothing; take a look at pharmaceutical expenses and the cost of health insurance systems, for example. Patents may be an indirect taxaion of an economy, but they are a taxation nonetheless).
"Monopoly rights server the public domain, which gets free access to patented technology after a very short monopoly term."
Unless, of course, the technology would have been in the public domain _anyway_...
"Sometimes they can be helpful to the little guy."
A system where the system working is the exception isnt very useful. Contrast it with an attributive system which guaranteed you'd get an incentive payout if your invention was used, wether you produced it yourself, or someone else did.
You'd just have to invent and register the invention like now, but instead of getting a monopoly right to exploit it, you get the rights to the inventive incentive for the invention. The big agro's could take the idea and run with it and beat you to the market, and you'd still get paid the incentive. But nobody could prevent the actual use of the invention, nor would the system enforce an antagonistic relationship between the inventor and the users of the invention.
"The question is not is it innovative now, was it innovative (not obvious) when Tivo filed for the patent in 1999 (IIRC)?"
It was obvious in the late 1980's, when digital video editing became available. It just wasnt practical due to the hardware limitations. In 1999 it was a nobrainer.
I'm sure writing a graphics driver is very complex, but fixing bugs in one isnt.
There have been several times that things have worked with OSS drivers that dont work with the proprietary ones. For example, try running NVidias proprietary drivers on a system with a Xen kernel. If you manage to get them to build and load at all, after hitting the big powerbutton on your now dead machine, try running the opensource drivers.
Proprietary drivers are often much worse than their OSS equivalents, and graphics drivers arent that much of an exception. Access to documentation being equal, I'd bet you the OSS version would be more stable every time.
But hey, I'm sure the proprietary driver would be much better 'optimized' for Quake and 3dmark.
"Problem is, Burst did it years BEFORE Quicktime, Akaimi or anyone else."
And lots of other people did it before Burst. Caching and loadbalancing are intrinsic to the field of network services.
"And when did ALL patents become bad?"
At approximately the same time that any coercive government backed monopoly became bad.
"Without patents, there would be no small inventors,"
That is utter bullshit. If we needed a system specifically encouraging small inventors, we'd put a system specifically encouraging small inventors in place. Like attribution rights and incentives, where the government would pay out a stipend for a specific invention, or something similar. It's trivial to create a system much better suited to harnessing the innovative talent, because almost _any_ system would be superior to monopoly rights.
Monopoly rights serve only those who can use capital and legal clout as leverage, most notably those who already have money and relations to power, and they're solidly stacked against anyone else.
"As for Mozilla, I don't think they had a business model until Google fortuitously came along.... Google's motivation is to ensure that there's a stable, cross-platform browser with the necessary functionality to enable their apps."
Mozilla, like much commercialized open-source, has no real profit-driven business model, they have a negative loss-driven business model. It's simply far cheaper and less fraught with risk for many companies and individuals to chip in on a common project than to drive one on their own, wether for freedom/insurance or tangential revenue reasons. The licensing on such projects usually guarantees the future option of diverging, should the common project no longer suit the interests of the company anymore, giving the company the desireable room to maneuver, while at the same time presenting much less of a target to competitors and potential competitors.
"Sudo allows you to grant access to specific users for specific commands,"
Perhaps a nitpick, but be _very_ careful with that slight misconception. The correct statement would be:
Sudo allows you to grant root (or other) UID to specific users for specific commands.
On the surface it appears a slight distinction, but it means that seemingly innocent commands like vi or more lets users do shell escapes to obtain root shells, cat with sudo priviliges can allow them to overwrite passwd, etc.
Basically, while using sudo, it's safest to assume that any user granted access as root for any command through sudo can obtain general root priviliges, should they so desire.
Of course, that also negates much of the stated purpose of patents, as they accomplish no dissemination of knowledge or repository to build upon, but rather serves only as a registry of landgrabs.
"Lawyers act as an important abstraction layer in the process."
Frankly, I'd suggest that the lawyers _are_ the process, and in fact that any innovation has become secondary and redundant. Lawyers can handle the application filing on their own, translating random ideas into patent legalese, sit back and sue.
"This is like saying the mechanisms of a specific electronic calculator shouldn't be patented because man had already invented the abacus."
Actually, it's like saying that adding one plus one on the calculator shouldnt be patented just because it could be done with a calculator instead of an abacus.
Tivo, while nice, just isnt particularly innovative. It's simply the packaging of various other technologies that just recently became practical for applying in this particular fashion. The ideas have been there forever, it just wasnt very practical when you'd have to maintain a server farm and pay as much as your house cost just to record TV on a computer.
Any truly "tech savvy" person can pretty much use whatever is available. Nothing in Windows is conceptually unique or special, so anyone who's run half a dozen other operating systems the last decade would easily be capable of doing whatever was needed with Windows as well, provided the appropriate search tools and documentation.
Personally, I've found feigning utter and complete ignorance when it comes to Windows is much more sociable than telling people to Type. Your. Fscking. Question. In. To. Google. Your. Self. I'm. Not. Your. Nanny. Does wonders for my mood, and lets me actually do what I'm employed to do.
"The coffee I bought at Starbucks this morning didn't come with usage restrictions, and neither will any media I consume or use."
I can only say the same. It's not as if I dont have weeks of TV programming recorded on the myth, several years worth of things I cant find the time to do anyway, not to mention decades worth of literature I have yet to read. And probably centuries of web content. And all of it is increasing faster than I can ever keep up.
If it has DRM, it gets an immediate junk priority. Why the hell should I pay to get my time wasted? I dont have enough as it is, so for all I care, any DRM pusher is free to shove their product where the sun dont shine.
"This way the drug companies can patent the fruits of their multi-million dollar investments."
Of course, the drug companies are actually wasting most of their money on administration and marketing, only between 15-20% actually goes to R&D. And if you take into account the efficiency of an organization largely protected from competition for a century, I'll betcha the pharmaceuticals would be able to do the same research they do today at about a fifth of the current R&D cost, if they had to compete.
So frankly, I dont see a reason that drug companies should be protected from the market either. As we can cut the drug costs by 80% by having the insurance companies and state insurances financing the R&D directly, I suggest we do just that and cut the pharms out of the loop, and let generics manufacture the unprotected drugs instead.
The patent system is what creates the monopoly right of exclusion, which is the problem. Without the exclusive legal right, there would be nothing to apply the excessive legal power to.
Patents, had they actually been a system intended to stimulate and reward innovation, could have been constructed as an actual payout or tax writeoff, just like most other state-run incentive systems. But if you look at their history it's fairly apparent that encouraging innovation has always just been an excuse; monopoly control is the name of the game, free market be damned, from the time there was a monopoly on salt to today.
"but it guarantees control over how the work can be used."
While I can certainly sympathize, to put it bluntly, that control is not in the interest of humanity. We all do things we wish wouldn't benefit those things we find despicable, but the transaction cost to the economy of adding permission tags to every single object and unit of currency would be far too high. Imagine a world where you wouldnt be allowed to use a dialysis machine because one of the creators didnt like writers?
And really, in the end the only real control we have over our own creations is to keep them private. Which wouldnt be any different anyway.
"I know several creators who have stopped releasing anything other..."
Perhaps so, but in an attributional system, the work would have to retain an edition history, so it would be entirely apparent who did what, and personally, if I liked your creator friends writing, I most certainly would order a copy of the exact edition your friend had written. And as no publisher would hold exclusive rights to publish the works, I suspect the availability of no-frills, printing-only services wouldnt be a problem.
Of course, conversely, a really great editor/writer could easily set up business picking up crap manuscripts with good story ideas and rewrite them in a palatable form, creating a derivative work where both he and the original author gets paid part.
"Suppose, for instance, this guy drops the name due to the expenses and someone else picks it up..."
Frankly, the guy might be best off getting Dlink to set up an NTP server of their own and redirect the name to that one (or, worst case, point the current adress at pool.ntp.org). That way the damage should at least be minimized and he can transition to a new name in an orderly fashion.
"Copyright law certainly does encourage creation of works"
You mean, extra economic incentive may encourage the creation of works.
Copyright law, however, also creates a disincentive through monopoly rights, which prevents the rapid creation and evolution and functional/form migration of derivative works, and another disincentive in the form of encouraging economic control over distribution channels.
Wether copyright as a whole (or, in fact, any IP) is a net benefit or not to society is proving extremely dubious, and is really a moot issue; the construction of monopoly rights is not a necessity for an economic incentive.
You could just as well have a system where the attributed author has no monopoly rights, but still gets paid by levies off the duplication channel (the ones who make money creating the copies), and gets partial payments for derivative works, etc.
"the battery life while playing ogg tracks was abysmal."
Did you try out anything like the iRiver iFP-799? Ogg capable, 40 hours battery life, runs on regular AA batteries, so they're cheap and you can have a few dozen along if you're trekking the Andes or something.
Slashdot Mirror
"Surely it'd be more efficient to keep distribution cost low"
Currently there is no incentive to keep 'distribution costs' low, as there is no competition allowed. You cant buy Band X playing Song Y from company a, or company b or company c, you can only buy it from company a, ie, no competition. That's a large part of the problem; most of the actual cost on the end product is accrued in the distribution chains in the forms of evereything from marketing and payola through extraneous but tied in products (MTV videos, etc). As the consumers cannot obtain the product without these costs, a large part of the capital spent does not, in fact, go to the intended recipient (even with many high income artists), but gets eaten by costs far before that.
"media/duplication (before the content is added)"
After content is added. The whole point is to restore and enforce market competition on the post-creative process, while still funneling money into creative, but infinitely duplicatable, arts.
"And again, the problem with just giving money to the new creators..."
Assuming the system is so overfinanced that someone throwing out a few half-arsed tracks would actually reach a payout point. Conceivably, you'd tie the payments to a certain degree of distribution, just like today, and with cut-off points at the top and bottom. If that guy with the half-assed track gets his track copied and sold half a million times, it probably wasnt that half-assed, and he probably should get paid to create more. Likewise, if a currently big artist releases crap, and it doesnt get copied and sold, well, then they probably shouldnt get jack.
"Then buy another one that's only a few percent faster."
As far as I can tell, AM2 will be a merge of the desktop sockets, which means you'll eventually have a fairly large range of performances.
If AM2 reclaims the same kind of staying power that socket A had, this also means you get the capacity to do cascade upgrades once you have a few systems. Stick a new CPU in your desktop? You dont stick the old one in a box, you move it to the server, which gets faster... and your old server CPU can be moved to the media frontend, which also gets faster... etc.
"Every time I've done an upgrade, it's been a whole system upgrade. And then, I only do it every 5 years or so. Is there really a need to stay on the bleeding edge all the time that I'm missing?"
Mmm, if that's how you do it, you probably wont benefit, no. In fact, it's far better to _never_ stay on the bleeding edge; bleeding edgers always get hosed by the price/performance ratio, and someone spending half of what you spend every 2.5 years will probably have a higher average performance over time on his systems, and twice as many systems. And again, once you reach the number of systems and component standardization needed for rolling upgrades, that's when you really start getting the payoff...
"What, equally?"
Yes? No? Maybe? Why 75 years? Why amount X?
Feel free to set up the criteria, and construct a system based on what it's _supposed to do_.
The purpose of a creative incentive system would, of course, be to maximize the number and quality of people able and willing to support themselves by creative work, at the highest level of efficiency for the cost to society. As such, you probably would want a sliding scale that maxes out at a fairly good living for the most popular works, to maximize the production of desireable works. However, when some get more, others would by necessity get less, which means you'd need a cutoff point where it's probably better to have two, or three fairly good creative people working than one very good person getting enough money to snort coke until they cant write anymore.
"In which case, how do you keep track of how many people have what"
If the copying of works isnt illegal there would be no disincentive to register copying. Considering this isnt a new problem, and it's already handled for various broadcast media, it's not like there arent a whole slew of methods to solve that.
'how much brand equity "Sun Microsystems" carries among a whole generation of 25+ year old geeks'
Unfortunately, most of that brand equity has been eaten away by half a decade during which you'd rather be compiling on your desktop than on the server, and trying to answer embarrasing questions why the devs get better performance out of their java code on their laptop than on the expensive app server.
You know, five years ago those 25+ yearers would form a queue when machines got decommissioned and handed out. These days you'd have to pay people to take them.
Nevermind 1984, can you say ID targetted explosive devices?
RFID identification that could be read from afar would be every single hitmans and political terrorists wet dream.
The very idea that anyone the least concerned with security would fail to realize the ways such things could be exploited speaks volumes.
"easy to understand overview book about the differences between Linux and Windows"
:)
Try pasting your words into google and see if it doesnt help... It's usually vastly superior to the slashdot comment window at finding what you want...
"want to be able to make a living from it."
Yes, well, I'll betcha there's a bunch of people who'd like to be able to make a living from posting slashdot comments. That doesnt mean it's in the public interest to finance it.
If they 'love making music', to be utterly and horrifically frank, they'd still do it without copyright, and a free market would be better spending resources on other things, as the music would get done _anyway_. You dont get paid for doing what you want, no matter how much you'd like to, you get paid for doing what someone else wants. Only if you're very lucky do they coincide.
It's the laws of supply and demand, and with anything that's infinitely duplicatable at near zero cost, the supply outpaces the demand fairly soon; there are only so many hours per day to listen to music, and it's not a resource that needs repeated production (while touring and performing music actually is, which makes it vastly more suitable to make money from in a market economy).
That said, I personally do think it's in the public interest to finance the arts beyond what the true market value is. But it should be done not through monopoly rights on works, but through levies off those profiting from the duplication, fixation in media, performance and distribution of those materials. IE, let anyone and everyone copy, perform, sell, and do whatever they want with copyrighted material (keeping attribution intact), but tax the revenue of the record companies, bands and orchestras performing live, CD duplicators, etc, and divide the revenue among the original creators so they can spend more time creating.
"The reason we have patents is so that the knowledge created during the invention process becomes publicly documented."
Oh, I know. I was just commenting on wether it was useful for small inventors or not.
You do point out the one single good aspect of the patent system tho, but which is also the one single aspect that is rapidly collapsing, as the patent system cannot keep up with todays more efficient distribution of knowledge with the availability of the internet. You see the problem when you actually have lawyers telling technicians not to look at patents because they'll only expose themselves to willful infringement claims...
"Any ideas of a better system for doing that?"
Sure. Instead of getting monopoly rights when registering a patent, you'd get attributive incentive rights. If the invention comes in use, the inventor would get a payout from the patent office (wether used by himself or someone else). Scaled per value, per unit, whatever, you go ahead and use your imagination.
In such a system the patent office and patent holders, would have in their own interest that the system didnt overgrant, or the budget would be blown and the incentives would shrink. The amount of budget would be under democratic control, just like any other incentive system (and dont make the mistake of thinking that patents cost the economy nothing; take a look at pharmaceutical expenses and the cost of health insurance systems, for example. Patents may be an indirect taxaion of an economy, but they are a taxation nonetheless).
"Monopoly rights server the public domain, which gets free access to patented technology after a very short monopoly term."
Unless, of course, the technology would have been in the public domain _anyway_...
"Sometimes they can be helpful to the little guy."
A system where the system working is the exception isnt very useful. Contrast it with an attributive system which guaranteed you'd get an incentive payout if your invention was used, wether you produced it yourself, or someone else did.
You'd just have to invent and register the invention like now, but instead of getting a monopoly right to exploit it, you get the rights to the inventive incentive for the invention. The big agro's could take the idea and run with it and beat you to the market, and you'd still get paid the incentive. But nobody could prevent the actual use of the invention, nor would the system enforce an antagonistic relationship between the inventor and the users of the invention.
"The question is not is it innovative now, was it innovative (not obvious) when Tivo filed for the patent in 1999 (IIRC)?"
It was obvious in the late 1980's, when digital video editing became available. It just wasnt practical due to the hardware limitations. In 1999 it was a nobrainer.
"you are NOT going to be running monitors / GUI's on a 20 server cluster."
You ever run Oracle Reports? I distinctly remember it needed not only a DISPLAY, it needed a _window manager_ running to work. Gha.
"Oracle's market is not Linux desktops however."
Mmm. One can wonder. Maybe they need a cluster of virtual framebuffers with virtual window managers for that grid...
I'm sure writing a graphics driver is very complex, but fixing bugs in one isnt.
There have been several times that things have worked with OSS drivers that dont work with the proprietary ones. For example, try running NVidias proprietary drivers on a system with a Xen kernel. If you manage to get them to build and load at all, after hitting the big powerbutton on your now dead machine, try running the opensource drivers.
Proprietary drivers are often much worse than their OSS equivalents, and graphics drivers arent that much of an exception. Access to documentation being equal, I'd bet you the OSS version would be more stable every time.
But hey, I'm sure the proprietary driver would be much better 'optimized' for Quake and 3dmark.
"Problem is, Burst did it years BEFORE Quicktime, Akaimi or anyone else."
And lots of other people did it before Burst. Caching and loadbalancing are intrinsic to the field of network services.
"And when did ALL patents become bad?"
At approximately the same time that any coercive government backed monopoly became bad.
"Without patents, there would be no small inventors,"
That is utter bullshit. If we needed a system specifically encouraging small inventors, we'd put a system specifically encouraging small inventors in place. Like attribution rights and incentives, where the government would pay out a stipend for a specific invention, or something similar. It's trivial to create a system much better suited to harnessing the innovative talent, because almost _any_ system would be superior to monopoly rights.
Monopoly rights serve only those who can use capital and legal clout as leverage, most notably those who already have money and relations to power, and they're solidly stacked against anyone else.
"As for Mozilla, I don't think they had a business model until Google fortuitously came along. ... Google's motivation is to ensure that there's a stable, cross-platform browser with the necessary functionality to enable their apps."
Mozilla, like much commercialized open-source, has no real profit-driven business model, they have a negative loss-driven business model. It's simply far cheaper and less fraught with risk for many companies and individuals to chip in on a common project than to drive one on their own, wether for freedom/insurance or tangential revenue reasons. The licensing on such projects usually guarantees the future option of diverging, should the common project no longer suit the interests of the company anymore, giving the company the desireable room to maneuver, while at the same time presenting much less of a target to competitors and potential competitors.
"Sudo allows you to grant access to specific users for specific commands,"
Perhaps a nitpick, but be _very_ careful with that slight misconception. The correct statement would be:
Sudo allows you to grant root (or other) UID to specific users for specific commands.
On the surface it appears a slight distinction, but it means that seemingly innocent commands like vi or more lets users do shell escapes to obtain root shells, cat with sudo priviliges can allow them to overwrite passwd, etc.
Basically, while using sudo, it's safest to assume that any user granted access as root for any command through sudo can obtain general root priviliges, should they so desire.
"Inventors should never look at patents."
Of course, that also negates much of the stated purpose of patents, as they accomplish no dissemination of knowledge or repository to build upon, but rather serves only as a registry of landgrabs.
"Lawyers act as an important abstraction layer in the process."
Frankly, I'd suggest that the lawyers _are_ the process, and in fact that any innovation has become secondary and redundant. Lawyers can handle the application filing on their own, translating random ideas into patent legalese, sit back and sue.
"This is like saying the mechanisms of a specific electronic calculator shouldn't be patented because man had already invented the abacus."
Actually, it's like saying that adding one plus one on the calculator shouldnt be patented just because it could be done with a calculator instead of an abacus.
Tivo, while nice, just isnt particularly innovative. It's simply the packaging of various other technologies that just recently became practical for applying in this particular fashion. The ideas have been there forever, it just wasnt very practical when you'd have to maintain a server farm and pay as much as your house cost just to record TV on a computer.
Any truly "tech savvy" person can pretty much use whatever is available. Nothing in Windows is conceptually unique or special, so anyone who's run half a dozen other operating systems the last decade would easily be capable of doing whatever was needed with Windows as well, provided the appropriate search tools and documentation.
Personally, I've found feigning utter and complete ignorance when it comes to Windows is much more sociable than telling people to Type. Your. Fscking. Question. In. To. Google. Your. Self. I'm. Not. Your. Nanny. Does wonders for my mood, and lets me actually do what I'm employed to do.
"The coffee I bought at Starbucks this morning didn't come with usage restrictions, and neither will any media I consume or use."
I can only say the same. It's not as if I dont have weeks of TV programming recorded on the myth, several years worth of things I cant find the time to do anyway, not to mention decades worth of literature I have yet to read. And probably centuries of web content. And all of it is increasing faster than I can ever keep up.
If it has DRM, it gets an immediate junk priority. Why the hell should I pay to get my time wasted? I dont have enough as it is, so for all I care, any DRM pusher is free to shove their product where the sun dont shine.
"This way the drug companies can patent the fruits of their multi-million dollar investments."
Of course, the drug companies are actually wasting most of their money on administration and marketing, only between 15-20% actually goes to R&D. And if you take into account the efficiency of an organization largely protected from competition for a century, I'll betcha the pharmaceuticals would be able to do the same research they do today at about a fifth of the current R&D cost, if they had to compete.
So frankly, I dont see a reason that drug companies should be protected from the market either. As we can cut the drug costs by 80% by having the insurance companies and state insurances financing the R&D directly, I suggest we do just that and cut the pharms out of the loop, and let generics manufacture the unprotected drugs instead.
"I wouldn't be so quick..."
The patent system is what creates the monopoly right of exclusion, which is the problem. Without the exclusive legal right, there would be nothing to apply the excessive legal power to.
Patents, had they actually been a system intended to stimulate and reward innovation, could have been constructed as an actual payout or tax writeoff, just like most other state-run incentive systems. But if you look at their history it's fairly apparent that encouraging innovation has always just been an excuse; monopoly control is the name of the game, free market be damned, from the time there was a monopoly on salt to today.
"but it guarantees control over how the work can be used."
While I can certainly sympathize, to put it bluntly, that control is not in the interest of humanity. We all do things we wish wouldn't benefit those things we find despicable, but the transaction cost to the economy of adding permission tags to every single object and unit of currency would be far too high. Imagine a world where you wouldnt be allowed to use a dialysis machine because one of the creators didnt like writers?
And really, in the end the only real control we have over our own creations is to keep them private. Which wouldnt be any different anyway.
"I know several creators who have stopped releasing anything other..."
Perhaps so, but in an attributional system, the work would have to retain an edition history, so it would be entirely apparent who did what, and personally, if I liked your creator friends writing, I most certainly would order a copy of the exact edition your friend had written. And as no publisher would hold exclusive rights to publish the works, I suspect the availability of no-frills, printing-only services wouldnt be a problem.
Of course, conversely, a really great editor/writer could easily set up business picking up crap manuscripts with good story ideas and rewrite them in a palatable form, creating a derivative work where both he and the original author gets paid part.
"Suppose, for instance, this guy drops the name due to the expenses and someone else picks it up..."
Frankly, the guy might be best off getting Dlink to set up an NTP server of their own and redirect the name to that one (or, worst case, point the current adress at pool.ntp.org). That way the damage should at least be minimized and he can transition to a new name in an orderly fashion.
"Copyright law certainly does encourage creation of works"
You mean, extra economic incentive may encourage the creation of works.
Copyright law, however, also creates a disincentive through monopoly rights, which prevents the rapid creation and evolution and functional/form migration of derivative works, and another disincentive in the form of encouraging economic control over distribution channels.
Wether copyright as a whole (or, in fact, any IP) is a net benefit or not to society is proving extremely dubious, and is really a moot issue; the construction of monopoly rights is not a necessity for an economic incentive.
You could just as well have a system where the attributed author has no monopoly rights, but still gets paid by levies off the duplication channel (the ones who make money creating the copies), and gets partial payments for derivative works, etc.
"the battery life while playing ogg tracks was abysmal."
Did you try out anything like the iRiver iFP-799? Ogg capable, 40 hours battery life, runs on regular AA batteries, so they're cheap and you can have a few dozen along if you're trekking the Andes or something.