Everyone knows that copyright (and other IP) laws are a balance. Maybe we could restore some of that balance if they were applied across the board. Let's require the same level of "protection" for our own personal data that the corps demand for their content:
all personal data must be put in some special encrypted file format, with tags which say who it belongs to and a "license" for accessing it legally.
a PDAA (personal data access association) might arrange licenses to purchase use of personal data. It will be copyrighted for 150 years of course.
The hardware that telemarketers, customer databases, marketing depts. use must have built in protection to respect the limits in the above file formats.
federal raids and frequent audits to make sure no one is accessing the data without a license.
I'd personally like to make a statement which must be viewed and acknowledged each time any of my data is accessed. I might license my data for a bit more in exchange for disabling this feauture.
criminal penalties, pressure on the rest of the world to adopt similar laws, etc. need to be included.
Sounds too burdensome? Takes away the rights of businessess?
Well.. maybe we can work out a cross-licensing agreement.
That means they'll have to go out of their way to tweak with the kernel. It should be easy to throw up a disclaimer. Think of this: even Micorosoft includes tools for editing registries, with the standard boilerplate.
and to cite some examples (from slashdot) consider this:
Person A loves the shiny new imacs with the transparent skins and mac os x bubbles. Sure, he pays more for fewer cycles.
Person B like the design of the hardware and the bsd command prompt, but chooses not to buy it because he's turned off by the mac "community"'s perceived lack of technical savvy.
Person C likes all the features of linux but decides to run a bsd os because he hates Stallman or linux zealotry.
All of these are in some sense irrational decisions, but they really aren't. The point is to enjoy yourself, and "extraneous" factors come into the picture all the time. The point of the cycles or features is, in the end, just another factor which adds to your pleasure in using a system.
Probably too late to be of any use, but I tracked something down. I first heard this while listening to NPR a while ago, so that isn't too helpful. A friend of mine corroborated this from a book on slang he was reading. Online sources show varying histories, some claiming the word started in the 60's and some at the turn of the century. My friend with the slang book gave me the following reference:
http://www.m-w.com/lighter/flap/flaphome.htm
An excerpt:
"It seems fairly certain that phat is fat, and fat is by no means new slang;
in the second half of the 1990s it seems to have passed its zenith of
popularity and to have begun the slide towards disuse and probably
eventually-re-use. The playful if affected "ph" spelling (also seen, for
example, in hip-hop spellings of phunky or Phar Side) is nothing new. Young
people in the 1920s spelled "rats" as "Rhatz!" and shortened "that's too
bad" to "stoo bad." Similarly, the young in the 1960s read magazines that
loved "tuff," intentionally called themselves "freeks" and considered the
spelling of "Amerika" to be a political statement. Nor are the young the
only slang-speakers to play with spelling. Earlier in this century
typesetters referred to type that was easily set as being phat--and, neatly
enough, type that was difficult to set was lean--just going to show that
others have played here before. Indeed, in 1885, the Post Express Printing
Company in Rochester, New York, published the "Phat Boy's Birds-Eye Map of
the Saint Lawrence River" with a drawing of a corpulent boy. The temptation
to play with the "ph" spelling has been with us for more than a century."
The undergrads at Stanford, for instance, are required to pay about $8000/quarter tuition, in addition to about $900/month room and board. What they get for that room and board money is (the plans vary) two meals a day and half of a small room with a sink and a closet. Many students --depending on their seniority-- are required to live in these rat holes.
You seem to think they are eating caviar and lounging in spas.
For all that money, they damn well better get gold plated 1MB/s bandwidth. Instead, the optical ring around campus is already stopped up on high traffic times, and download speeds are routinely around 5-6Kbytes/second.
You say they're spoiled, I say they're getting screwed.
And to those who laud schools which firewall out IM clients, or who complain about use of pr0n, remember: it's not like the terminal at your work. These people live on campus. They're adults, and they are paying a lot more per unit of square foot than 90% of the (non-student) slashdot crowd. Let them use the internet and download whatever the hell they want in their off-times. Just like you do, even though you are paying less.
...I'm not going to say that unistrokes weren't innovative either.
Well, I will. The problem is that people confuse the word "new" with the word "innovation". I don't think something should get a patent just because it solves a problem which didn't exist before. PDAs weren't possible for a lot of hardware reasons until recently. The input method, while clever, is something that any intelligent person could develop if asked to solve the problem. Put ten engineers in isolation chambers and give them two weeks to try to find efficient ways to input data into a handheld computer and 7 of them will come up with something similar to xerox's patent. Ask ten engineers to triple battery life and they wont do it in years. If one of them does, they'll deserve the patent they get. That's innovation. This isn't.
I would rate it "obvious" -- not informative, but the poster I was replying to was wrong and so I pointed out the obvious thing. Blatantly incorrect? Yes, Linus + friends have copyrights on linux. My bad. The thread was discussing user's rights, so I was focused on what a user can do with linux. Namely, right of first sale is not abridged, no EULA, but the name "linux" is a trademark. Thanks for pointing out the copyright thing. I am not responsible for how others moderate my rants. Read with caution.
..for some reason I've been in a time freeze. Have yet to buy presents, too. But I think the general point stands, in that security has taken a back seat to marketing with release dates of software. When major bugs are found in linux, they are fixed and a new version is released (sometimes a week within a previous version). Putting pressure on the security crowd to keep holes secret just gives MS more time to delay and reinforces the primacy of marketing. This is not just an MS problem. But MS has been at the forefront in trying to keep on lid on vulnerabilities.
EULA = "End User License Agreement". They are a way of taking away user's first sale rights. The GPL does not try to foist any license agreement on end users. In fact it states
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works.
So you are confusing a license to redistribute something (which is required for all copyrighted works) with a license to use a copyrighted work. Microsoft has the latter in the form of EULA. Linux doesn't. Microsoft has the former in the form of often secret agreements with OEMs. Linux has the former with the publicly available GPL. Apples and oranges.
"Linux" as a trademark is owned by Linus. Not the software.
The GNU affects you only if you wish to redistribute GNU copyrighted software. It is not an EULA, and no one is "licensed" to use or install GNU Software. Anyone can install/configure/run/modify it however they want.
This is for those who are sympathetic to the MS responsible reporting policies:
The flaw, discovered five weeks ago threatened to undermine widespread adoption of Microsoft's latest windows software...
The company sold 25 million copies of Windows XP in the two weeks after it hit stores Oct. 25...
The company released a free fix thursday.
So beyond consideration that MS delay releasing XP until this hole is fixed. The best thing to do is keep it secret (responsible reporting) until they get around to writing the patch sometime. In fact, the biggest threat here is that it will "undermine the adoption" of XP -- i.e. they might not sell as many copies if people know there is a huge hole in the OS. No mention of threat to users, etc.
For reference, look at the motorola exploit in the jargon file.
I wonder how many times this has to happen before people are convinced that making bugs available and publicly releasing exploit code is the only way that the big vendors will make security a top priority.
my friend, deductions. Businesses are taxed on their profits. People are taxed on their revenue. Imagine how much you'd pay if you were only taxed on the money you didn't spend...
The hackers were apparently not completely successful, for neither the Great Dome nor Building 10 managed to vanish into the realm of shadows."
Fool! That works only on mortals. Bombadil did not vanish when he put on the ring, and I'm assuming that Sauron didn't either, since he used his powers to take human form, and his power was in the ring.
The real question is, in which category does MIT fall?
From your chopping and cutting definition comes the general term "to hack" or "a hack" -- namely someone who uses blunt force to achieve their aims. Writers who are "hacks" pound away at their typewriters "cranking out" stories or "hacking away" at deadlines. The phrase isn't specialized to programmers, and there's no reason why the general public should be ignorant of it's more subtle meanings. There really has been a propaganda campaign portraying technically literate people as anarchists who wield uncanny powers and should be mistrusted. And no, it has nothing to do with axes, but with control of information which some poeple have the skills to bypass.
But I like the trolls. They are an important part of slashdot. Moderation lets people skip them if they like, and if you feel like it, you can see all sorts of ascii art, Jon Katz bashing, and some hilarious slams.
On the other hand, a lot of the "insightful" comments are just ones that a lot of slashdotters agree with. "Insightful" should mean something you haven't thought of before. "Informative" should be some facts or urls which took longer than five seconds on google to find. I have no idea for an "interesting" criteria, and am not sure why it's there. I guess in those rare cases when you tell a bizarre and relevant story involving turkish customs inspectors -- that might be "interesting".
Oh -- and "offtopic" -- that's this post right here.
what about the other kind of economic discrimination: advertising. Advertisors influence the content of a site. Also, if you're trying to peddle a product or spice up you're corporate image -- you don't exactly want your ad to appear next to an in-depth four part study on homelessness. Finally, ads are geared to a target market which is usually affluent, so there is economic discrimination built in, too. I think advertising is the number one cause of all of the superficial, feel good, smiling prattle in the big media. Subscription is a pretty good way to go in terms of avoiding bias and paying the bills.
say "access to everyone". I used the roads analogy. Is there an I-xx near everyone? No. But in most places, yes. In the urban centers where 70% of us live it will be great. Think roads. Think the armies of construction and cable workers which are already employed laying stuff to your house or repatching the road that goes to your driveway. What if they laid some optic cable, the next time they reasphalted that road?
But..yeah, it is wishful thinking. Problem is, almost all people I talk to think it's a good idea. Even a majority of fiscal conservatives think that this is a legitimate infrastructure expense. Also, I can't think of too many corporate entities who are opposed to it. Boggles my mind why it's not being done.
is a great book on that time period. It's mostly source texts from the Aurora -- a leading newspaper in the (then) capital of Philadelphia. The editors were arrested under the sedition laws which Adams signed. The book also describes the arguments between the camps of Adams and Jefferson. Paine belonged to the latter. Basically, a populist: he wanted a single house of representatives. In Common Sense he cited many biblical quotes against monarchies. No senate or president. Power to the people. Adams especially hated Paine's polemics against kings, and tried to write his own pamphlet to counteract the politics in Common Sense. He was convinced -- along with Hamilton, Madison, and Washington (our first millionaire) -- that democracy was a horrible form of government, and that the main job of govt was to ensure that the masses don't get powerful, while at the same time preventing a dictatorship. Hence the divide and conquer strategy which is our constitution. As originally implemented, only the House of representatives was elected. The senate was appointed by the states, and the presidency by "electors" who were the "better men" (ie. rich) in each states. In fact, after the revolution, the property requirements for voting in Massachussetts doubled.
So there are these two camps, one side a bit radical and arguing for a popular republic -- the other wanted to model itself on England. Their genius was to involve a large number of common people into the system of govt. -- but with the stakes against them. They gave an outlet for individuals to protest and have some influence, but mostly dealth with the business at hand.
I'd suggest reading Federalist paper no. 10 for Madison's views on keeping "factions" in check. Like it or not, Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson were outmanoeuvred during the earliest and most formative parts of our history. Sure, Paine's Common Sense rallied the troops and Jefferson's speeches moved the tradesmen during the revolution -- but the dominant voices during the constitutional convention belonged to people such as Madison who claimed "[this] country ought to be run by those who own it." Hey...maybe there is an analogy with the internet.
Re:How is 28 years less than reasonable?
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If I write a book today, and someone is entertained by it in 40 years time, why shouldn't I still be rewarded?
You make it sound as if some sugarplump(C) fairy were to descend and drop coins onto your pillow. This "reward" of yours depends on a powerful and undemocratic IP regime. Sklyarov (a Russian) is in jail for violating a U.S. law. There are ongoing efforts to "subtract" functionality from computers. Harry Potter fan sites are shut down, The Church of Scientology has shutdown websites which criticize its practices and quote from Hubbard's diary entries. Rock fans can't post lyrics of their favorite songs. The right of first sale is being undermined, Internet protocols, file formats, data standards (i.e. CD) are being deliberately broken. ISP's are being harassed with lawyer-spam cease-and-desist notices. Individual users, who often can't afford a lawyer, are bullied into shutting down legal websites. Linking to "circumvention" material is now outlawed. Biographies are surpressed because the family (which inherits the "rights" of the subject) threaten to sue authos who excerpt letters or journals. All to protect the copyright regime. See, most of the world doesn't think in terms of you getting "a reward" -- they understand that they are being screwed.
And instead of dreaming of coins rattling on your pillow, you should be on their side.
The commons is important. Shakespeare would not have written half his stuff if similar IP laws were enforced then. He "borrowed" almost all of his plot lines from recently published books or histories. And he didn't buy "the rights" to those works -- he just used them. Be glad he did. When we have a large and growing commons from which authors can draw, it improves literature.
Also, almost all (say 90%) of revenues from median books are made in the first 2 years of publication. If there was no copyright which lasted more than 2 years, we would keep 90% of the money which currently flows to artists. If that number is extended to, say, 10 years, then over 99% of book revenue would be protected. But there would be additional revenue from the new works which are not possible due to a shrinking commons. There would be additional revenue from new distribution models. If data formats and hardware remain open and functional, then even the little guys might stand a chance of self publishing without registering for some XYZcorp "bookGuard" which costs thousands of dollars. More authors, more books, at least as much money as today.
Finally, the problem here with the self-styled "content-providers" I talk to is not that they really believe they are being ripped off or that they will make less money in a world with less copyrights. They just have a basic and fundamental issue with anyone enjoying or benefitting from their work without them getting paid. So I surf to some guys homepage, and he has some photos of flowers and a beach. At the bottom, he writes, (c) blah blah. Now, fantasies aside, either no one will download those pics and pass them around, or someone will and wont pay him for it. Either way he's not getting paid. But it hurts this web "author" that someone somewhere is enjoying his work for free. Imagine if everyone took that approach? What if the gardener copyrighted his contribution to that beach scene? And the guys who cleaned up the trash? How about the architect of the light house in the background -- why shouldn't he be cut in on the action? Perhaps we should wear devices on our eyes to prevent us from enjoying the fruits of others' labor -- without an instantaneous micropayment being sent to their bank account.
Do you see my point? You are not entitled to a cash reward for all instances of people enjoying your work. There must be limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows that copyright (and other IP) laws are a balance. Maybe we could restore some of that balance if they were applied across the board. Let's require the same level of "protection" for our own personal data that the corps demand for their content:
all personal data must be put in some special encrypted file format, with tags which say who it belongs to and a "license" for accessing it legally.
a PDAA (personal data access association) might arrange licenses to purchase use of personal data. It will be copyrighted for 150 years of course.
The hardware that telemarketers, customer databases, marketing depts. use must have built in protection to respect the limits in the above file formats.
federal raids and frequent audits to make sure no one is accessing the data without a license.
I'd personally like to make a statement which must be viewed and acknowledged each time any of my data is accessed. I might license my data for a bit more in exchange for disabling this feauture.
criminal penalties, pressure on the rest of the world to adopt similar laws, etc. need to be included.
Sounds too burdensome? Takes away the rights of businessess?
Well.. maybe we can work out a cross-licensing agreement.
They'll still get the standard binaries, right?
That means they'll have to go out of their way to tweak with the kernel. It should be easy to throw up a disclaimer. Think of this: even Micorosoft includes tools for editing registries, with the standard boilerplate.
insightful AC post duplicated here for wider availability. Mod parent up, so I wont have to burn more karma points like this:
This is the most politically correct (as in Slashdot-politically correct) post I have ever seen! Kudos to you, thoughtless meat popsicle!
your sig! Now I understand the reason for the auto update feature.
and to cite some examples (from slashdot) consider this:
Person A loves the shiny new imacs with the transparent skins and mac os x bubbles. Sure, he pays more for fewer cycles.
Person B like the design of the hardware and the bsd command prompt, but chooses not to buy it because he's turned off by the mac "community"'s perceived lack of technical savvy.
Person C likes all the features of linux but decides to run a bsd os because he hates Stallman or linux zealotry.
All of these are in some sense irrational decisions, but they really aren't. The point is to enjoy yourself, and "extraneous" factors come into the picture all the time. The point of the cycles or features is, in the end, just another factor which adds to your pleasure in using a system.
Probably too late to be of any use, but I tracked something down. I first heard this while listening to NPR a while ago, so that isn't too helpful. A friend of mine corroborated this from a book on slang he was reading. Online sources show varying histories, some claiming the word started in the 60's and some at the turn of the century. My friend with the slang book gave me the following reference:
http://www.m-w.com/lighter/flap/flaphome.htm
An excerpt:
"It seems fairly certain that phat is fat, and fat is by no means new slang;
in the second half of the 1990s it seems to have passed its zenith of
popularity and to have begun the slide towards disuse and probably
eventually-re-use. The playful if affected "ph" spelling (also seen, for
example, in hip-hop spellings of phunky or Phar Side) is nothing new. Young
people in the 1920s spelled "rats" as "Rhatz!" and shortened "that's too
bad" to "stoo bad." Similarly, the young in the 1960s read magazines that
loved "tuff," intentionally called themselves "freeks" and considered the
spelling of "Amerika" to be a political statement. Nor are the young the
only slang-speakers to play with spelling. Earlier in this century
typesetters referred to type that was easily set as being phat--and, neatly
enough, type that was difficult to set was lean--just going to show that
others have played here before. Indeed, in 1885, the Post Express Printing
Company in Rochester, New York, published the "Phat Boy's Birds-Eye Map of
the Saint Lawrence River" with a drawing of a corpulent boy. The temptation
to play with the "ph" spelling has been with us for more than a century."
mr. trudging through snow uphill both ways..
The undergrads at Stanford, for instance, are required to pay about $8000/quarter tuition, in addition to about $900/month room and board. What they get for that room and board money is (the plans vary) two meals a day and half of a small room with a sink and a closet. Many students --depending on their seniority-- are required to live in these rat holes.
You seem to think they are eating caviar and lounging in spas.
For all that money, they damn well better get gold plated 1MB/s bandwidth. Instead, the optical ring around campus is already stopped up on high traffic times, and download speeds are routinely around 5-6Kbytes/second.
You say they're spoiled, I say they're getting screwed.
And to those who laud schools which firewall out IM clients, or who complain about use of pr0n, remember: it's not like the terminal at your work. These people live on campus. They're adults, and they are paying a lot more per unit of square foot than 90% of the (non-student) slashdot crowd. Let them use the internet and download whatever the hell they want in their off-times. Just like you do, even though you are paying less.
Phat actually dates back to the 1920's.
Since when did Hillary Rosen kill 5,000 people?
I think that was about the same time when Napster users engaged in burning ships and murdering sailors.
...I'm not going to say that unistrokes weren't innovative either.
Well, I will. The problem is that people confuse the word "new" with the word "innovation". I don't think something should get a patent just because it solves a problem which didn't exist before. PDAs weren't possible for a lot of hardware reasons until recently. The input method, while clever, is something that any intelligent person could develop if asked to solve the problem. Put ten engineers in isolation chambers and give them two weeks to try to find efficient ways to input data into a handheld computer and 7 of them will come up with something similar to xerox's patent. Ask ten engineers to triple battery life and they wont do it in years. If one of them does, they'll deserve the patent they get. That's innovation. This isn't.
I would rate it "obvious" -- not informative, but the poster I was replying to was wrong and so I pointed out the obvious thing. Blatantly incorrect? Yes, Linus + friends have copyrights on linux. My bad. The thread was discussing user's rights, so I was focused on what a user can do with linux. Namely, right of first sale is not abridged, no EULA, but the name "linux" is a trademark. Thanks for pointing out the copyright thing. I am not responsible for how others moderate my rants. Read with caution.
..for some reason I've been in a time freeze. Have yet to buy presents, too. But I think the general point stands, in that security has taken a back seat to marketing with release dates of software. When major bugs are found in linux, they are fixed and a new version is released (sometimes a week within a previous version). Putting pressure on the security crowd to keep holes secret just gives MS more time to delay and reinforces the primacy of marketing. This is not just an MS problem. But MS has been at the forefront in trying to keep on lid on vulnerabilities.
The GPL is a EULA..
EULA = "End User License Agreement". They are a way of taking away user's first sale rights. The GPL does not try to foist any license agreement on end users. In fact it states
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works.
So you are confusing a license to redistribute something (which is required for all copyrighted works) with a license to use a copyrighted work. Microsoft has the latter in the form of EULA. Linux doesn't. Microsoft has the former in the form of often secret agreements with OEMs. Linux has the former with the publicly available GPL. Apples and oranges.
"Linux" as a trademark is owned by Linus. Not the software.
The GNU affects you only if you wish to redistribute GNU copyrighted software. It is not an EULA, and no one is "licensed" to use or install GNU Software. Anyone can install/configure/run/modify it however they want.
This is for those who are sympathetic to the MS responsible reporting policies:
The flaw, discovered five weeks ago threatened to undermine widespread adoption of Microsoft's latest windows software...
The company sold 25 million copies of Windows XP in the two weeks after it hit stores Oct. 25...
The company released a free fix thursday.
So beyond consideration that MS delay releasing XP until this hole is fixed. The best thing to do is keep it secret (responsible reporting) until they get around to writing the patch sometime. In fact, the biggest threat here is that it will "undermine the adoption" of XP -- i.e. they might not sell as many copies if people know there is a huge hole in the OS. No mention of threat to users, etc.
For reference, look at the motorola exploit in the jargon file.
I wonder how many times this has to happen before people are convinced that making bugs available and publicly releasing exploit code is the only way that the big vendors will make security a top priority.
my friend, deductions. Businesses are taxed on their profits. People are taxed on their revenue. Imagine how much you'd pay if you were only taxed on the money you didn't spend...
The hackers were apparently not completely successful, for neither the Great Dome nor Building 10 managed to vanish into the realm of shadows."
Fool! That works only on mortals. Bombadil did not vanish when he put on the ring, and I'm assuming that Sauron didn't either, since he used his powers to take human form, and his power was in the ring.
The real question is, in which category does MIT fall?
randomly looking at a dictionary:)
From your chopping and cutting definition comes the general term "to hack" or "a hack" -- namely someone who uses blunt force to achieve their aims. Writers who are "hacks" pound away at their typewriters "cranking out" stories or "hacking away" at deadlines. The phrase isn't specialized to programmers, and there's no reason why the general public should be ignorant of it's more subtle meanings. There really has been a propaganda campaign portraying technically literate people as anarchists who wield uncanny powers and should be mistrusted. And no, it has nothing to do with axes, but with control of information which some poeple have the skills to bypass.
But I like the trolls. They are an important part of slashdot. Moderation lets people skip them if they like, and if you feel like it, you can see all sorts of ascii art, Jon Katz bashing, and some hilarious slams.
On the other hand, a lot of the "insightful" comments are just ones that a lot of slashdotters agree with. "Insightful" should mean something you haven't thought of before. "Informative" should be some facts or urls which took longer than five seconds on google to find. I have no idea for an "interesting" criteria, and am not sure why it's there. I guess in those rare cases when you tell a bizarre and relevant story involving turkish customs inspectors -- that might be "interesting".
Oh -- and "offtopic" -- that's this post right here.
what about the other kind of economic discrimination: advertising. Advertisors influence the content of a site. Also, if you're trying to peddle a product or spice up you're corporate image -- you don't exactly want your ad to appear next to an in-depth four part study on homelessness. Finally, ads are geared to a target market which is usually affluent, so there is economic discrimination built in, too. I think advertising is the number one cause of all of the superficial, feel good, smiling prattle in the big media. Subscription is a pretty good way to go in terms of avoiding bias and paying the bills.
say "access to everyone". I used the roads analogy. Is there an I-xx near everyone? No. But in most places, yes. In the urban centers where 70% of us live it will be great. Think roads. Think the armies of construction and cable workers which are already employed laying stuff to your house or repatching the road that goes to your driveway. What if they laid some optic cable, the next time they reasphalted that road?
But..yeah, it is wishful thinking. Problem is, almost all people I talk to think it's a good idea. Even a majority of fiscal conservatives think that this is a legitimate infrastructure expense. Also, I can't think of too many corporate entities who are opposed to it. Boggles my mind why it's not being done.
over documentation's License? Sheesh.
How 'bout just more documentation. Has the man page entry for logout been written yet?
is a great book on that time period. It's mostly source texts from the Aurora -- a leading newspaper in the (then) capital of Philadelphia. The editors were arrested under the sedition laws which Adams signed. The book also describes the arguments between the camps of Adams and Jefferson. Paine belonged to the latter. Basically, a populist: he wanted a single house of representatives. In Common Sense he cited many biblical quotes against monarchies. No senate or president. Power to the people. Adams especially hated Paine's polemics against kings, and tried to write his own pamphlet to counteract the politics in Common Sense. He was convinced -- along with Hamilton, Madison, and Washington (our first millionaire) -- that democracy was a horrible form of government, and that the main job of govt was to ensure that the masses don't get powerful, while at the same time preventing a dictatorship. Hence the divide and conquer strategy which is our constitution. As originally implemented, only the House of representatives was elected. The senate was appointed by the states, and the presidency by "electors" who were the "better men" (ie. rich) in each states. In fact, after the revolution, the property requirements for voting in Massachussetts doubled.
So there are these two camps, one side a bit radical and arguing for a popular republic -- the other wanted to model itself on England. Their genius was to involve a large number of common people into the system of govt. -- but with the stakes against them. They gave an outlet for individuals to protest and have some influence, but mostly dealth with the business at hand.
I'd suggest reading Federalist paper no. 10 for Madison's views on keeping "factions" in check. Like it or not, Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson were outmanoeuvred during the earliest and most formative parts of our history. Sure, Paine's Common Sense rallied the troops and Jefferson's speeches moved the tradesmen during the revolution -- but the dominant voices during the constitutional convention belonged to people such as Madison who claimed "[this] country ought to be run by those who own it." Hey...maybe there is an analogy with the internet.
If I write a book today, and someone is entertained by it in 40 years time, why shouldn't I still be rewarded?
You make it sound as if some sugarplump(C) fairy were to descend and drop coins onto your pillow. This "reward" of yours depends on a powerful and undemocratic IP regime. Sklyarov (a Russian) is in jail for violating a U.S. law. There are ongoing efforts to "subtract" functionality from computers. Harry Potter fan sites are shut down, The Church of Scientology has shutdown websites which criticize its practices and quote from Hubbard's diary entries. Rock fans can't post lyrics of their favorite songs. The right of first sale is being undermined, Internet protocols, file formats, data standards (i.e. CD) are being deliberately broken. ISP's are being harassed with lawyer-spam cease-and-desist notices. Individual users, who often can't afford a lawyer, are bullied into shutting down legal websites. Linking to "circumvention" material is now outlawed. Biographies are surpressed because the family (which inherits the "rights" of the subject) threaten to sue authos who excerpt letters or journals. All to protect the copyright regime. See, most of the world doesn't think in terms of you getting "a reward" -- they understand that they are being screwed.
And instead of dreaming of coins rattling on your pillow, you should be on their side.
The commons is important. Shakespeare would not have written half his stuff if similar IP laws were enforced then. He "borrowed" almost all of his plot lines from recently published books or histories. And he didn't buy "the rights" to those works -- he just used them. Be glad he did. When we have a large and growing commons from which authors can draw, it improves literature.
Also, almost all (say 90%) of revenues from median books are made in the first 2 years of publication. If there was no copyright which lasted more than 2 years, we would keep 90% of the money which currently flows to artists. If that number is extended to, say, 10 years, then over 99% of book revenue would be protected. But there would be additional revenue from the new works which are not possible due to a shrinking commons. There would be additional revenue from new distribution models. If data formats and hardware remain open and functional, then even the little guys might stand a chance of self publishing without registering for some XYZcorp "bookGuard" which costs thousands of dollars. More authors, more books, at least as much money as today.
Finally, the problem here with the self-styled "content-providers" I talk to is not that they really believe they are being ripped off or that they will make less money in a world with less copyrights. They just have a basic and fundamental issue with anyone enjoying or benefitting from their work without them getting paid. So I surf to some guys homepage, and he has some photos of flowers and a beach. At the bottom, he writes, (c) blah blah. Now, fantasies aside, either no one will download those pics and pass them around, or someone will and wont pay him for it. Either way he's not getting paid. But it hurts this web "author" that someone somewhere is enjoying his work for free. Imagine if everyone took that approach? What if the gardener copyrighted his contribution to that beach scene? And the guys who cleaned up the trash? How about the architect of the light house in the background -- why shouldn't he be cut in on the action? Perhaps we should wear devices on our eyes to prevent us from enjoying the fruits of others' labor -- without an instantaneous micropayment being sent to their bank account.
Do you see my point? You are not entitled to a cash reward for all instances of people enjoying your work. There must be limits.
whatever happened th channel.nytimes ? That used to be the sweetest link since it had no ads. Has it been nixed? moved?