"badly running OSX on the crappiest hardware on earth"
Frankly, I dont think Apple cares about people running OSX on crap hardware at all.
What Apple is worried about is people successfully running OSX on better and cheaper hardware without any problems. What Apple is worried about is getting a repeat of the old Mac clone days with associated collapse of profit margins.
The image works to keep the current margin up for as long as people see the products as distinct and irreplaceable, but if consumers are suddenly able to, for all intents and purposes, get a 'cheaper, shinier and better "Mac"', the percieved extra value will alter.
"This advances technology as well as culture much faster than it otherwise would."
Yep, that's what is quickly becoming the worlds most parrotted unsubstantiated claim, with more and more indications, ranging from the rapid ascendance of opensource through the economic rules of free market competition, suggesting that it's blatantly false.
I suggest that competition, communications and the free exchange of ideas drive the advance of science, technology and the arts. I suggest that intellectual monopoly legislation not only does not serve its purpose, it actively slows the advance down through removing competetive pressure and the introduction of barriers for information combination.
The actual situation however was that prior to 'copyright' the English crown granted a monopoly on the ownership and use of printing to the Stationers guild who would censor according to the crowns desires, with the intent of stopping the spread of Protestant Reformation. Police would seize and burn and illegal books and imprison any unlicensed printer.
After the english civil war, partly fought over the crowns misuse of monopolies, the monopoly expired and the market was flooded by cheaper texts from Scotland and Ireland, and the publishers had to spend several years of lobbying until they got parliament to create the statute of Anne, the first modern incarnation of copyright, which gave them some of their monopoly rights back.
So. The authors have always gotten the shaft; from the beginning to the end the system has been intended to benefit the publishers and the government, not the authors or the public.
Not only that, as the total pool of funding is related to consumers disposable income, it's an incentive to make sure _you_ are the _only_ winner, suppressing any other possible winners.
"so I'm ready to kick in some coin fifty years after the film was made just to make sure that more movies keep coming down the pike."
Unfortunately, at the levels of efficiency in the media industry, what your money goes to will most likely be an execs coke habit, not new art.
Like you, I have absolutely no objection to paying for creativity. I do have an objection to that money being wasted on useless unwanted MTV videos, overmarketing, payola, coke and parties. That's money that _would_ have gone to support creativity in a more appropriately designed system, but now _doesnt_, essentially taking the funds away from what makes your life better.
Copyright basically is a publicly funded incentive system. It would be difficult to imagine the public and political fury should any other such system suffer from this level of gross misuse of funding. The intellectual property system needs to be torn up from the ground and reconstructed to benefit the creative talent, the consumers, and for the production capacity and distribution systems to function appropriately in a competetive environment according to market rules.
Copyright, as a monopoly, is by definition not 'rightful' income. That's the whole point of a monopoly; by exclusively controlling the supply you dont have to worry about competition, and you can exact a price above market value.
The intellectual property systems are inherently flawed and simply cannot accomodate their stated purpose; not surprising, considering they were originally mainly intended as a way to control the spread of information and create a milking cow for friends of the crown, in exchange for money or services. The monopoly design of the systems serve this purpose perfectly.
A system specifically designed to create an extra income for authors or others would be far better accomplished by attribution rights, wherein the authors incentive was mediated through the government, like any other such incentive. Authors could get paid according to the level of use; they could have a max payout per work, and publishers or others generating revenue from the distribution or inclusion of works would simply list what they'd used. This would eliminate the inherent conflict and move the problem into the usual realm of public interest, where most incentive systems are.
"But, so long as the education is accurate, can you think of a better thing than a population who understands copyright law"
I suspect that they're not planning on teaching the subject from an economics, information sciences, social sciences or other scientific point of view.
Think "The Gospel according to our beloved prophets of Monopoly, the RIAA and MPAA".
"I undersand your sentiment, but you're completely wrong."
Actually, he's completely right. Competition in the economic sense and as the justification of and reason for the efficiency of a capitalistic free market economy is narrow competition with quality and price, driving efficiency of resource allocation.
You can 'compete' in other ways, as a game of 'winning' or 'losing', but as you step out of pure economic competition you are actively damaging the economy and the wealth of your society as a whole by actively preventing the creation, and availability, of value at optimum resource cost.
In its economic implications, it's no less harmful than actually running around damaging public property, it's just less traceable and immediately obvious, as missed opportunity costs are difficult to calculate.
"And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited. You don't "own" that work, just the physical representation of it."
If you buy a chair and then make another one just like it, you own that chair. The amount of non-physical descriptive properties of an object, or the tools and utilities available that can copy the object make no difference to the essense.
A work is the property of the creator, but the creator of a specific instance of an object is the person creating the physical copy. You built the second chair, by what logic should someone else own it? By what logic should someone else have claim to ownership to a physical copy of a DVD you made? Because of the use of tools that make it easier?
Better hope those powertools never get a higher level of automation, or we'll get DRM'ed furniture and powerdrills that will refuse to drill holes in certain patterns.
"And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited."
Yes, because _your_ rights to your own property are restricted for the duration of the monopoly right. Once the monopoly right ceases, you have full property rights to every aspect of that particular copy, including full rights to any and all descriptive properties, and you can sell that copy as much as you want, just as you can refuse to sell it. You own the copy, you own the content, if yours is the only copy, you can set the price for making another copy to anything you want, 'public domain' or not. All rights have reverted to their natural property state, so while you can set your price, you cant prevent anyone you sell the copy to to also make and sell copies.
Despite the intellectual monopoly industries desire to claim ownership to the actual content, the fact still remains that they only own the temporary monopoly over copying that content. The essense of property ownership remains intact with the instantiation of physical property, and the copying monopoly is merely a reduction in your property rights, and a reduction of the value of your property.
Finally, if we, as a society, want and need an extra incentive for the creation of descriptive properties, then we can damn well pay for it outright like any other form of government incentive. The idea of monopoly rights to specific aspects of objects is neither compatible with a free market, nor with property rights in general, nor with an efficient diversion of resources for any public good.
"As soon as more production comes on line, these will be cheaper than LP's because they're cheaper to make".
Oh, the CD's were probably cheaper to make, but the recordings are state protected intellectual monopolies. Pricing is set as a function of what the customers can pay, not as a function of production cost enforced by competition. Revenue when you have monopoly control is maximized when a higher number of customers are unable to afford the product, so that the more surplus capital the consumers have, the higher the price will rise.
See Wikipedia entry for Monopoly (specifically the monopoly pricing section) for further detail, and Deadweight_loss for the economic implications of it.
"If Yahoo would have decided to miss this business opportunity on moral grounds it would have been eaten alive by the shareholders."
Unless the executives argue that the loss of business due to bad publicity for being complicit in the repression will create a greater long term financial loss.
Companies cooperating with regimes in offensive ways can find it coming back to bite them in the ass fifty years later. Making more sales in a specific country right now may not make sense if it leads to a percentage of a population avoiding your products for the rest of their lives. And when you start helping throw reporters in jail, you've really ensured you're going to get it every way and sideways until the end of journalism.
I, as a shareholder, am not certain that I would place a whole lot of trust in an executive that fails to consider the effects of such issues on the value of my assets.
"Software engineering is language-neutral. If you can do it in pseudocode, you can do it in Lisp, C, Pascal, even (heaven forbid) Visual Basic."
Indeed. You dont learn a language, which is just basically a syntax and keywords, you learn abstract concepts like iterations, paralellization, recursiveness, object orientation, etc.
The task ahead decides what concepts are needed for the job, the range of suitable languages is decided by what concepts are needed, performance and development speed needs.
Eventually you barely need to know what language you're in anymore, you can pick up the syntax from the surrounding code, and infer from there, and pick it up from reference works or a google search if there's something unclear.
Of course, the next step after that may, or may not, be the loony bin.:)
I suspect that while it would certainly be possible to do that, you'd either end up with code that has to be just-in-time compiled for whatever CPU, which would incur a high overhead and you'd get horrific cache problems and kill more or less all hardware optimization, or you'd have to more or less specifically recompile and tie binaries and execution instances to/for each CPU, rather like the Sidecar and similar emulation-board variations out there.
In the end, with current hardware structure, you just wouldnt gain much from it. You'd be better off having one machine of each kind and networking them, then using some bytecode language and cluster software to spread execution around. You wouldnt get all the hardware issues, and with a fast network you'd probably get close to the bus speed you could get out of a hybrid hardware anyway.
And, of course, for raw speed, you'd be better off with code compiled and optimized for the specific platform, taking advantage of the CPU hardware.
Take a look on wikipedia for "parable of the broken window", and "opportunity costs"/"hidden cost".
As a quick and dirty explanation; imagine that the cost of oil in the US was optimal, ie, no cartel, the cost falling towards the cost of production plus free-market profit.
Now imagine that the money people spend on gas was that much less, that they had the difference to spend on other things.
Now imagine they spent that money on other things instead.
That money would finance the creation of other things in the US economy.
That difference of things as a representation of wealth, available after the transaction, in the US economy represents the total damage caused to the US economy by the cartel. Instead of having the gas _and_ the other things, which free market efficiency would have allowed, we now only have the gas.
"Your analogy lacks any logic because noone needs to produce air."
Noone currently needs to produce air because the production and distribution of air isnt restricted and there's no scarcity. That does not change the fact that we _could_ restrict it, for example, by artificially limiting its availability, or by assigning air rights to owners of plants, etc.
Do you, or do you not, think that would actually create an economic benefit, and increase wealth as a whole, wether or not it creates extra employment in a whole new air industry?
"Over time, we've found that the free market with working competition is the best solution for almost every form of good."
Without a doubt. In a free market, prices tend to fall to follow the cost of production, and create an incentive to enter the market if there is a large difference between cost of production and price, thus creating higher supply, and falling prices.
Unfortunately, and you're on the right trail there, the free market requires that the products be interchangeable. As the whole point of IP legislation is to prevent that interchangability, and the whole foundation for the extra cost of IP, is to prevent the free market from working, you dont get those effects. Supply does not increase to fill demand; prices instead rise to curtail demand (and as an aside, a black market economy gets formed to partially fill the void). You have the artificial scarcity.
It's not a free market. It's the opposite.
"Government subsidies to artists?"
Copyright and IP in general is essentially a subsidy. The exception from competing in the free market is comparable to a taxation right; the money comes from what is in its essense a 'monopoly tax' imposed on the consumers of such goods. That the government isnt the go-between is what is the exception.
"Copyrights and patent are not the common standard?"
Monopoly grants is not the common standard as far as government subsidies go. Most such government incentives in democracies take the form where the government imposes taxes, has mandatory social systems, or offers tax breaks, and then the division of resources is done by the government. This offers several advantages such as some form of democratic control over the budget, a political pressure not to increase the incentive levels beyond reason, some forms of controls over the effects on the economy and the level of resource diversion, etc.
The monopoly grant systems have their birth in far less democratic systems, tracing their heritage to medieval guilds and aristocracy, when those criteria were not at all interesting, and in fact, the more circumspect the crown could be in obtaining its kickbacks and asserting its control, the better.
"You're telling me there's so many other great incentive systems, well present them."
Ok, here's a quick one. Exchange copyright for attribution rights. Prices for IP heavy material should fall to a fraction of what it is today, near their cost of production and distribution. Impose a blanket percentage tax over all IP heavy material, similar to a VAT, and distribute dividends over attribution owners, according to some optimum scheme.
Suddenly, the incentive for distribution and production becomes to do it as efficiently as possible, or the free market will ensure someone else does it better. The incentive for the original creator becomes to see their work distributed as widely as possible, as that should increase their dividends. They also have an incentive for others to include their material, as that would also give them attribution rights, and others would have an incentive to add as much of their own as possible, as that would give them more.
Tada, a few short lines, and you have a system much better geared towards creating an actual incentive compatible with a free market.
Personally, my point of view over the last decade and a half has gone from being fairly pro-copyright, to being against the monopoly form of copyrights, yes. I find the economic and freedom related arguments far too compelling.
However, I support attribution rights, and I would probably support a non-monopoly attribution based incentive system for promoting creative endeavors.
"The only thing that has changed is the barriers related to reproduction of copyrighted material have been significantly reduced, in some cases almost to zero."
So, if the barriers related to reproducing, say, hammers, were dropped to zero, should we forbid the reproduction of hammers?
As long as the the economic overhead caused by the artificial scarcity is small in comparison the the optimal situation, there hasnt been that much damage caused. The real problem arises from a variety of issues that have come together over the last decade. The fall of reproduction costs, combined with the fall of distribution, the rise available capital for spending in that area, etc, have conspired to create a situation where consumers are paying many, many, many times what it would optimally cost to produce and distribute the information.
In a free market, prices would fall to adjust, releasing that extra capital to finance other production. In a monopoly market, prices instead rise to follow available capital which controls the optimum revenue level. Then costs tend to follow the revenue level, as there is little competetive pressure to hold them down.
The larger that difference grows, between optimum and actual resource usage, the larger the amount of wealth _that could otherwise have been produced_ is now lost to the economy.
And now I havent even gotten into the economic aspects of the combinatory nature of information, and the wealth not created because of currently restricted and slowed cross-seeding.
"Information cannot be sold, it lacks the fundamental characteristics for it to be so."
Reproduction, copies of information, cannot be usefully sold as it lacks scarcity. That essentially puts it outside of the functional realm of property; any scarcity is purely artificial, and introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole. Creating artificial scarcity is more or less the economic equal of wholesale destruction of wealth and property.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole. And as an aside, in comparison with countries where the citizens were not forced to pay for bottled air, workers would cost more, with predictable effects...
You're right, of course, the propaganda blanket attempts to throughly confuse the issues. Artificial scarcity is unacceptable, and extra incentive systems must build on methods compatible with a free market. It's not like it's hard to do, there are any number of incentive systems that governments around the world use for various purposes. The monopoly systems of copyright and patents are grotesque abberations, not the common standard.
Well, unfortunately, that's not quite the case. They're not doing "anything", they're following the rules.
Which makes it rather obvious that the rules create only an extra incentive for being greedy, devoid of morals and interested in nothing but furthering your ambitions.
Now, unless you'd like to classify greed, lack of morals and ambition as 'progress of science and useful arts', that puts the patent system in clear violation of the constitutional foundation upon which it rests.
Something which, perhaps, has needed some clarification, but which the patent troll makes exceedingly clear.
"Not because of (really, more despite) the positions"
That's one of the fundamental problems with winner-take-all systems. With a parliamentary democracy, you might have a hands-off party with religion, a hands-off party without it, one big-government-with-religion, etc. The fragmentation lines between parties tend to overlap with voter fragmentation and follow the higher number of dimensions in politics, rather than just one single left-right.
Of course, there are other disadvantages, like the constant bickering, positioning and coalition forming, but in the end, I suspect you end up with a healthier system the closer the available choices can reflect the voter base.
Of course, it's far more likely that someone else will come up with and patent the same solution, or a necessary substep of your solution, five weeks before you publish your solution, in which case you will not even be allowed to sell, or even build upon, your hard work and investment.
This even more effectively forces you out of the market for your own product.
"You spend a lot of time and money and effort on it before you have anything at all."
Whatever we can accomplish on our own pales in comparison with the other six billion monkeys and their ancestors efforts. The myth of the sole inventor or creator was passe when the internet came along. Development is an incremental synthesis of need, knowledge and inspiration. The driving factor is the distribution and dissemination of information, every new idea built on more and more older ideas. Exclusivity merely slows down the rate at which the evolution of ideas can happen; the higher the rate of idea turnover, the more ideas each idea build upon, the more exclusivity slows innovation down.
The 'inventor' needs unhindered access to everything needed to create the new far more than he needs exclusivity.
Imagine a situation where you tried to write software, but you would not be allowed to use anything invented in the last 20 years. How innovative and relevant do you think you'd be, basing your work on technology from 1985, no matter how exclusive rights you'd get?
No, use that fine mind of yours and come up with a way to allow both unlimited unhindered access to all developments, while still providing for _payment_, not exclusivity, for incremental inventors, and you could have a workable solution.
There are various ways to accomplish that goal, you just need to drop the idea that any particular owner of an inventive step should have the ability to coerce payment by having the right to hinder any other particular inventor from using specific methods or ideas.
"The only way your company can protect itself is to use them"
Not really. They can also publish to ensure prior art.
"If the company doesn't get patents, it is acting against the interests of its shareholders"
Not necessarily. Patents are not a defense against patent trolls, and the litigation costs may not necessarily make them profitable. In fact, a vast majority of the patents in the system never, ever, make their holders a dime. That makes most of them a pure loss.
Avoiding pure losses isnt acting against the interests of its shareholders.
Even further, in the case that you actually do somehow aquire a patent that will generate revenue, if you build a dependency on state protected monopoly revenue into your company you effectively ensure that your organization will not be competetive.
And frankly, as a shareholder, I'd rather have my investments in companies that can survive without government help.
"They've now got to focus on mindshare and administrative ease"
And price, price, price.
Frankly, I dont know many ESX users who havent been swearing over the price, which has more or less made it just barely cost effective in many situations.
While I've been an avid VMware fan, they've lost me because of that. Despite their moves in the right direction, it's simply too little too late. Even with GSX free, I find Xen a vastly more interesting option.
So many companies tend to underestimate the level of negative mindshare they can build when they abuse their position and gouge their customers.
Yep, that's exactly what the restriction in the GPLv3 is intended to prevent. It's hardly a philosophical change of direction, more like a clarification. The GPL has never been intended to allow freeriders who want to use and benefit from GPL code while at the same time preventing others from doing the same thing.
"I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work and content to move into the digital age"
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work, and chairs to move into the digital age, there has to be chairs rights management so nobody can copy a chair at home.
Oh, wait, that's not 'the market'. What you actually must have meant was 'for monopolists to allow humanity to move forward and reap the benefits from the digital age, they must retain the ability to enforce artificial scarcity in the interest of keeping revenues up in a situation where the laws of supply and demand would otherwise eradicate their ability to profit at their current levels of inefficiency'.
Slashdot Mirror
"badly running OSX on the crappiest hardware on earth"
Frankly, I dont think Apple cares about people running OSX on crap hardware at all.
What Apple is worried about is people successfully running OSX on better and cheaper hardware without any problems. What Apple is worried about is getting a repeat of the old Mac clone days with associated collapse of profit margins.
The image works to keep the current margin up for as long as people see the products as distinct and irreplaceable, but if consumers are suddenly able to, for all intents and purposes, get a 'cheaper, shinier and better "Mac"', the percieved extra value will alter.
And that spells even worse shit.
"This advances technology as well as culture much faster than it otherwise would."
Yep, that's what is quickly becoming the worlds most parrotted unsubstantiated claim, with more and more indications, ranging from the rapid ascendance of opensource through the economic rules of free market competition, suggesting that it's blatantly false.
I suggest that competition, communications and the free exchange of ideas drive the advance of science, technology and the arts. I suggest that intellectual monopoly legislation not only does not serve its purpose, it actively slows the advance down through removing competetive pressure and the introduction of barriers for information combination.
Yes, that would be the propaganda.
The actual situation however was that prior to 'copyright' the English crown granted a monopoly on the ownership and use of printing to the Stationers guild who would censor according to the crowns desires, with the intent of stopping the spread of Protestant Reformation. Police would seize and burn and illegal books and imprison any unlicensed printer.
After the english civil war, partly fought over the crowns misuse of monopolies, the monopoly expired and the market was flooded by cheaper texts from Scotland and Ireland, and the publishers had to spend several years of lobbying until they got parliament to create the statute of Anne, the first modern incarnation of copyright, which gave them some of their monopoly rights back.
So. The authors have always gotten the shaft; from the beginning to the end the system has been intended to benefit the publishers and the government, not the authors or the public.
"It's an incentive to create *a* winner."
Not only that, as the total pool of funding is related to consumers disposable income, it's an incentive to make sure _you_ are the _only_ winner, suppressing any other possible winners.
"so I'm ready to kick in some coin fifty years after the film was made just to make sure that more movies keep coming down the pike."
Unfortunately, at the levels of efficiency in the media industry, what your money goes to will most likely be an execs coke habit, not new art.
Like you, I have absolutely no objection to paying for creativity. I do have an objection to that money being wasted on useless unwanted MTV videos, overmarketing, payola, coke and parties. That's money that _would_ have gone to support creativity in a more appropriately designed system, but now _doesnt_, essentially taking the funds away from what makes your life better.
Copyright basically is a publicly funded incentive system. It would be difficult to imagine the public and political fury should any other such system suffer from this level of gross misuse of funding. The intellectual property system needs to be torn up from the ground and reconstructed to benefit the creative talent, the consumers, and for the production capacity and distribution systems to function appropriately in a competetive environment according to market rules.
"what I see as rightful income"
Copyright, as a monopoly, is by definition not 'rightful' income. That's the whole point of a monopoly; by exclusively controlling the supply you dont have to worry about competition, and you can exact a price above market value.
The intellectual property systems are inherently flawed and simply cannot accomodate their stated purpose; not surprising, considering they were originally mainly intended as a way to control the spread of information and create a milking cow for friends of the crown, in exchange for money or services. The monopoly design of the systems serve this purpose perfectly.
A system specifically designed to create an extra income for authors or others would be far better accomplished by attribution rights, wherein the authors incentive was mediated through the government, like any other such incentive. Authors could get paid according to the level of use; they could have a max payout per work, and publishers or others generating revenue from the distribution or inclusion of works would simply list what they'd used. This would eliminate the inherent conflict and move the problem into the usual realm of public interest, where most incentive systems are.
"This is a pretty high-end project"
A high end project wouldn't confuse frontend with backend and try to cram storage, encoding and display into a single box.
With a networked setup you could get far more storage and several silent and discrete frontends and still have money left over.
So, nope, not a high-end project. Either it's a salespitch, or it's a project by someone with more money than sense or experience.
"But, so long as the education is accurate, can you think of a better thing than a population who understands copyright law"
I suspect that they're not planning on teaching the subject from an economics, information sciences, social sciences or other scientific point of view.
Think "The Gospel according to our beloved prophets of Monopoly, the RIAA and MPAA".
"I undersand your sentiment, but you're completely wrong."
Actually, he's completely right. Competition in the economic sense and as the justification of and reason for the efficiency of a capitalistic free market economy is narrow competition with quality and price, driving efficiency of resource allocation.
You can 'compete' in other ways, as a game of 'winning' or 'losing', but as you step out of pure economic competition you are actively damaging the economy and the wealth of your society as a whole by actively preventing the creation, and availability, of value at optimum resource cost.
In its economic implications, it's no less harmful than actually running around damaging public property, it's just less traceable and immediately obvious, as missed opportunity costs are difficult to calculate.
"And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited. You don't "own" that work, just the physical representation of it."
If you buy a chair and then make another one just like it, you own that chair. The amount of non-physical descriptive properties of an object, or the tools and utilities available that can copy the object make no difference to the essense.
A work is the property of the creator, but the creator of a specific instance of an object is the person creating the physical copy. You built the second chair, by what logic should someone else own it? By what logic should someone else have claim to ownership to a physical copy of a DVD you made? Because of the use of tools that make it easier?
Better hope those powertools never get a higher level of automation, or we'll get DRM'ed furniture and powerdrills that will refuse to drill holes in certain patterns.
"And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited."
Yes, because _your_ rights to your own property are restricted for the duration of the monopoly right. Once the monopoly right ceases, you have full property rights to every aspect of that particular copy, including full rights to any and all descriptive properties, and you can sell that copy as much as you want, just as you can refuse to sell it. You own the copy, you own the content, if yours is the only copy, you can set the price for making another copy to anything you want, 'public domain' or not. All rights have reverted to their natural property state, so while you can set your price, you cant prevent anyone you sell the copy to to also make and sell copies.
Despite the intellectual monopoly industries desire to claim ownership to the actual content, the fact still remains that they only own the temporary monopoly over copying that content. The essense of property ownership remains intact with the instantiation of physical property, and the copying monopoly is merely a reduction in your property rights, and a reduction of the value of your property.
Finally, if we, as a society, want and need an extra incentive for the creation of descriptive properties, then we can damn well pay for it outright like any other form of government incentive. The idea of monopoly rights to specific aspects of objects is neither compatible with a free market, nor with property rights in general, nor with an efficient diversion of resources for any public good.
"As soon as more production comes on line, these will be cheaper than LP's because they're cheaper to make".
Oh, the CD's were probably cheaper to make, but the recordings are state protected intellectual monopolies. Pricing is set as a function of what the customers can pay, not as a function of production cost enforced by competition. Revenue when you have monopoly control is maximized when a higher number of customers are unable to afford the product, so that the more surplus capital the consumers have, the higher the price will rise.
See Wikipedia entry for Monopoly (specifically the monopoly pricing section) for further detail, and Deadweight_loss for the economic implications of it.
"If Yahoo would have decided to miss this business opportunity on moral grounds it would have been eaten alive by the shareholders."
Unless the executives argue that the loss of business due to bad publicity for being complicit in the repression will create a greater long term financial loss.
Companies cooperating with regimes in offensive ways can find it coming back to bite them in the ass fifty years later. Making more sales in a specific country right now may not make sense if it leads to a percentage of a population avoiding your products for the rest of their lives. And when you start helping throw reporters in jail, you've really ensured you're going to get it every way and sideways until the end of journalism.
I, as a shareholder, am not certain that I would place a whole lot of trust in an executive that fails to consider the effects of such issues on the value of my assets.
"Software engineering is language-neutral. If you can do it in pseudocode, you can do it in Lisp, C, Pascal, even (heaven forbid) Visual Basic."
:)
Indeed. You dont learn a language, which is just basically a syntax and keywords, you learn abstract concepts like iterations, paralellization, recursiveness, object orientation, etc.
The task ahead decides what concepts are needed for the job, the range of suitable languages is decided by what concepts are needed, performance and development speed needs.
Eventually you barely need to know what language you're in anymore, you can pick up the syntax from the surrounding code, and infer from there, and pick it up from reference works or a google search if there's something unclear.
Of course, the next step after that may, or may not, be the loony bin.
I suspect that while it would certainly be possible to do that, you'd either end up with code that has to be just-in-time compiled for whatever CPU, which would incur a high overhead and you'd get horrific cache problems and kill more or less all hardware optimization, or you'd have to more or less specifically recompile and tie binaries and execution instances to/for each CPU, rather like the Sidecar and similar emulation-board variations out there.
In the end, with current hardware structure, you just wouldnt gain much from it. You'd be better off having one machine of each kind and networking them, then using some bytecode language and cluster software to spread execution around. You wouldnt get all the hardware issues, and with a fast network you'd probably get close to the bus speed you could get out of a hybrid hardware anyway.
And, of course, for raw speed, you'd be better off with code compiled and optimized for the specific platform, taking advantage of the CPU hardware.
Take a look on wikipedia for "parable of the broken window", and "opportunity costs"/"hidden cost".
As a quick and dirty explanation; imagine that the cost of oil in the US was optimal, ie, no cartel, the cost falling towards the cost of production plus free-market profit.
Now imagine that the money people spend on gas was that much less, that they had the difference to spend on other things.
Now imagine they spent that money on other things instead.
That money would finance the creation of other things in the US economy.
That difference of things as a representation of wealth, available after the transaction, in the US economy represents the total damage caused to the US economy by the cartel. Instead of having the gas _and_ the other things, which free market efficiency would have allowed, we now only have the gas.
"Your analogy lacks any logic because noone needs to produce air."
Noone currently needs to produce air because the production and distribution of air isnt restricted and there's no scarcity. That does not change the fact that we _could_ restrict it, for example, by artificially limiting its availability, or by assigning air rights to owners of plants, etc.
Do you, or do you not, think that would actually create an economic benefit, and increase wealth as a whole, wether or not it creates extra employment in a whole new air industry?
"Over time, we've found that the free market with working competition is the best solution for almost every form of good."
Without a doubt. In a free market, prices tend to fall to follow the cost of production, and create an incentive to enter the market if there is a large difference between cost of production and price, thus creating higher supply, and falling prices.
Unfortunately, and you're on the right trail there, the free market requires that the products be interchangeable. As the whole point of IP legislation is to prevent that interchangability, and the whole foundation for the extra cost of IP, is to prevent the free market from working, you dont get those effects. Supply does not increase to fill demand; prices instead rise to curtail demand (and as an aside, a black market economy gets formed to partially fill the void). You have the artificial scarcity.
It's not a free market. It's the opposite.
"Government subsidies to artists?"
Copyright and IP in general is essentially a subsidy. The exception from competing in the free market is comparable to a taxation right; the money comes from what is in its essense a 'monopoly tax' imposed on the consumers of such goods. That the government isnt the go-between is what is the exception.
"Copyrights and patent are not the common standard?"
Monopoly grants is not the common standard as far as government subsidies go. Most such government incentives in democracies take the form where the government imposes taxes, has mandatory social systems, or offers tax breaks, and then the division of resources is done by the government. This offers several advantages such as some form of democratic control over the budget, a political pressure not to increase the incentive levels beyond reason, some forms of controls over the effects on the economy and the level of resource diversion, etc.
The monopoly grant systems have their birth in far less democratic systems, tracing their heritage to medieval guilds and aristocracy, when those criteria were not at all interesting, and in fact, the more circumspect the crown could be in obtaining its kickbacks and asserting its control, the better.
"You're telling me there's so many other great incentive systems, well present them."
Ok, here's a quick one. Exchange copyright for attribution rights. Prices for IP heavy material should fall to a fraction of what it is today, near their cost of production and distribution. Impose a blanket percentage tax over all IP heavy material, similar to a VAT, and distribute dividends over attribution owners, according to some optimum scheme.
Suddenly, the incentive for distribution and production becomes to do it as efficiently as possible, or the free market will ensure someone else does it better. The incentive for the original creator becomes to see their work distributed as widely as possible, as that should increase their dividends. They also have an incentive for others to include their material, as that would also give them attribution rights, and others would have an incentive to add as much of their own as possible, as that would give them more.
Tada, a few short lines, and you have a system much better geared towards creating an actual incentive compatible with a free market.
Personally, my point of view over the last decade and a half has gone from being fairly pro-copyright, to being against the monopoly form of copyrights, yes. I find the economic and freedom related arguments far too compelling.
However, I support attribution rights, and I would probably support a non-monopoly attribution based incentive system for promoting creative endeavors.
"The only thing that has changed is the barriers related to reproduction of copyrighted material have been significantly reduced, in some cases almost to zero."
So, if the barriers related to reproducing, say, hammers, were dropped to zero, should we forbid the reproduction of hammers?
As long as the the economic overhead caused by the artificial scarcity is small in comparison the the optimal situation, there hasnt been that much damage caused. The real problem arises from a variety of issues that have come together over the last decade. The fall of reproduction costs, combined with the fall of distribution, the rise available capital for spending in that area, etc, have conspired to create a situation where consumers are paying many, many, many times what it would optimally cost to produce and distribute the information.
In a free market, prices would fall to adjust, releasing that extra capital to finance other production. In a monopoly market, prices instead rise to follow available capital which controls the optimum revenue level. Then costs tend to follow the revenue level, as there is little competetive pressure to hold them down.
The larger that difference grows, between optimum and actual resource usage, the larger the amount of wealth _that could otherwise have been produced_ is now lost to the economy.
And now I havent even gotten into the economic aspects of the combinatory nature of information, and the wealth not created because of currently restricted and slowed cross-seeding.
"Information cannot be sold, it lacks the fundamental characteristics for it to be so."
Reproduction, copies of information, cannot be usefully sold as it lacks scarcity. That essentially puts it outside of the functional realm of property; any scarcity is purely artificial, and introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole. Creating artificial scarcity is more or less the economic equal of wholesale destruction of wealth and property.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole. And as an aside, in comparison with countries where the citizens were not forced to pay for bottled air, workers would cost more, with predictable effects...
You're right, of course, the propaganda blanket attempts to throughly confuse the issues. Artificial scarcity is unacceptable, and extra incentive systems must build on methods compatible with a free market. It's not like it's hard to do, there are any number of incentive systems that governments around the world use for various purposes. The monopoly systems of copyright and patents are grotesque abberations, not the common standard.
"will do anything"
Well, unfortunately, that's not quite the case. They're not doing "anything", they're following the rules.
Which makes it rather obvious that the rules create only an extra incentive for being greedy, devoid of morals and interested in nothing but furthering your ambitions.
Now, unless you'd like to classify greed, lack of morals and ambition as 'progress of science and useful arts', that puts the patent system in clear violation of the constitutional foundation upon which it rests.
Something which, perhaps, has needed some clarification, but which the patent troll makes exceedingly clear.
"Not because of (really, more despite) the positions"
That's one of the fundamental problems with winner-take-all systems. With a parliamentary democracy, you might have a hands-off party with religion, a hands-off party without it, one big-government-with-religion, etc. The fragmentation lines between parties tend to overlap with voter fragmentation and follow the higher number of dimensions in politics, rather than just one single left-right.
Of course, there are other disadvantages, like the constant bickering, positioning and coalition forming, but in the end, I suspect you end up with a healthier system the closer the available choices can reflect the voter base.
Of course, it's far more likely that someone else will come up with and patent the same solution, or a necessary substep of your solution, five weeks before you publish your solution, in which case you will not even be allowed to sell, or even build upon, your hard work and investment.
This even more effectively forces you out of the market for your own product.
"You spend a lot of time and money and effort on it before you have anything at all."
Whatever we can accomplish on our own pales in comparison with the other six billion monkeys and their ancestors efforts. The myth of the sole inventor or creator was passe when the internet came along. Development is an incremental synthesis of need, knowledge and inspiration. The driving factor is the distribution and dissemination of information, every new idea built on more and more older ideas. Exclusivity merely slows down the rate at which the evolution of ideas can happen; the higher the rate of idea turnover, the more ideas each idea build upon, the more exclusivity slows innovation down.
The 'inventor' needs unhindered access to everything needed to create the new far more than he needs exclusivity.
Imagine a situation where you tried to write software, but you would not be allowed to use anything invented in the last 20 years. How innovative and relevant do you think you'd be, basing your work on technology from 1985, no matter how exclusive rights you'd get?
No, use that fine mind of yours and come up with a way to allow both unlimited unhindered access to all developments, while still providing for _payment_, not exclusivity, for incremental inventors, and you could have a workable solution.
There are various ways to accomplish that goal, you just need to drop the idea that any particular owner of an inventive step should have the ability to coerce payment by having the right to hinder any other particular inventor from using specific methods or ideas.
"The only way your company can protect itself is to use them"
Not really. They can also publish to ensure prior art.
"If the company doesn't get patents, it is acting against the interests of its shareholders"
Not necessarily. Patents are not a defense against patent trolls, and the litigation costs may not necessarily make them profitable. In fact, a vast majority of the patents in the system never, ever, make their holders a dime. That makes most of them a pure loss.
Avoiding pure losses isnt acting against the interests of its shareholders.
Even further, in the case that you actually do somehow aquire a patent that will generate revenue, if you build a dependency on state protected monopoly revenue into your company you effectively ensure that your organization will not be competetive.
And frankly, as a shareholder, I'd rather have my investments in companies that can survive without government help.
"They've now got to focus on mindshare and administrative ease"
And price, price, price.
Frankly, I dont know many ESX users who havent been swearing over the price, which has more or less made it just barely cost effective in many situations.
While I've been an avid VMware fan, they've lost me because of that. Despite their moves in the right direction, it's simply too little too late. Even with GSX free, I find Xen a vastly more interesting option.
So many companies tend to underestimate the level of negative mindshare they can build when they abuse their position and gouge their customers.
Yep, that's exactly what the restriction in the GPLv3 is intended to prevent. It's hardly a philosophical change of direction, more like a clarification. The GPL has never been intended to allow freeriders who want to use and benefit from GPL code while at the same time preventing others from doing the same thing.
"I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work and content to move into the digital age"
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work, and chairs to move into the digital age, there has to be chairs rights management so nobody can copy a chair at home.
Oh, wait, that's not 'the market'. What you actually must have meant was 'for monopolists to allow humanity to move forward and reap the benefits from the digital age, they must retain the ability to enforce artificial scarcity in the interest of keeping revenues up in a situation where the laws of supply and demand would otherwise eradicate their ability to profit at their current levels of inefficiency'.
That's pretty much the opposite of 'the market'.