I don't know if you're playing devil's advocate here or not. Anyway:
Yes, but copyright is a question of balance between authors' interests and consumers' interests. (And author's interests are extended only to help guarantee that the work gets produced in the first place - ultimately, it all comes down to the public interest.) Specifically, it is most in consumers' interest to have a work in the public domain as soon as possible.
Life of the author plus seventy years seems to shift this balance far too far towards the authors. Also, one can't help but be suspicious when the lobbies for copyright extension include so many large and organized media companies, and the opposition is somewhat ragtag and not nearly as well-financed.
Besides that, it's worth mentioning that the question of what motivates authors and artists to produce work is very far from having a clear answer. My own opinion is that it has a lot more to do with love of their field and desire for fame than it does with leaving their children a healthy inheritance -- they could probably expect better results on that front if they went into, say, accounting.
One thing I wonder about, though, is books. What if a novel equivalent of napster appeared (please excuse the pun:-)? How would authors make money then? Through publicly reading their works? I don't think so. I can't think of a mechanism whereby authors could continue to make cash, which is why I would be much more scared of the internet if I were a novelist rather than a musician.
As it so happens, I posted an essay on Advogato a few months ago that explores questions like this in great depth. If you want to make money, but forcing people to pay a price per-copy isn't an option, there are lots of other approaches at your disposal; public performance is one, but not the only one. Summarizing what I said about authors: things'll only change big-time if e-books become a preferred way to read. If this happens, authors'll likely have to rely on donations from their readership and grants to pursue authoring full time. This isn't really as outlandish as it sounds, provided the idea of offering such donations can be ingrained as a cultural norm. (I don't think this'll be all that difficult; public TV and radio stations seem to do okay for themselves.)
And now that you mention it, picking up speakers' fees for lecturing or reading works aloud could be a piece of the pie for authors, though probably not as big a hunk as live performance would be for musicians.
You know, you really would think that with all the noise they're making about it, IBM would be a great place to do Linux/open source work.
The answer, at least in my experience (a summer internship over the summer of '99 plus some recruitment attempts thereafter) is that there is the perfect job or internship for you somewhere in that company, but don't expect to be put in touch with the right people about it by HR.
Matt Hiller, GCC Engineer, the Red Hat formerly known as Cygnus, Sunnyvale, CA
This is really funny. I was at Tuesday's symposium, and Carl Kaplan was the moderator for the panel discussion that included Greg Goeckner, and at one point in the discussion he directly asked Goeckner, "Would the MPAA sue if the New York Times linked to DeCSS?" The audience was amused; after the laugh died down, Goeckner waffled.
Jan Nieuwenhuizen's already made many intelligent comments on MIDI and its relation to notation software, so I won't retread what he's already mentioned...
But yeah - Lilypond is an excellent package -- I say this just as a user, not an author.
If it weren't an excellent package I wouldn't have started writing Denemo to be a GUI frontend to it. http://denemo.sourceforge.net/, as Jan's been mentioning. Any of you interested in music notation are encouraged to download it, to play with it, and contribute!
As for the comments on Rosegarden and kooBase/Brahms - I don't mean to start a flame war with Chris Cannam (Rosegarden) or Jan Wuerthner (Brahms), but at this point Denemo's at least as complete an environment for doing music notation, though it's not a sequencer. (Nor is it intended ever to be one, though anybody's more than welcome to adapt it for use as the score editor for a larger sequencing package. It's an offer that I've already made to the GSeq folks, in fact, though I can't guarantee them much help if they decide to.)
I've done a good amount of thinking on what the real opinion of the folks in government must be, and this is what I've been able to come up with:
They want to avoid a situation where by default all e-mail, filesystems, etc. will be protected with strong encryption. In the current state of affairs, people can encrypt all this material, but they have to be smart enough to know it. The ones that aren't smart enough become easier to investigate.
One of the key principles of playing a strategic game of chess is never to assume or hope that your opponent will blunder; instead, a chess player is supposed to rely on the strength of her own moves rather than the weakness of her opponent's. Which just goes to show you that chess and law enforcement are very different pursuits.
If Microsoft were to implement a plan like this on a large scale while providing no other (reasonably priced) options, the resentment that it'd cause would be incredible.
Fortunately, OSS'll be providing an alternative at an exceedingly reasonable price.
A move like this by any large proprietary company would only be good for free software.
With regards to copy-protection crackers: I've always found the term "warez doodz" -- capitalize as you see fit -- fits that niche pretty nicely.
Flawed premise and flawed benefit-analysis
on
The Myth of QWERTY
·
· Score: 1
"The Winter 1993 issue of Delta Pi Epsilon carried a study done by Dr. Scot Ober called 'Relative Efficiencies of the Standard and Dvorak Simplified Keyboards'. The study was extensive, and here are some of his conclusions:
In QWERTY, 31% of typing is done on the home row. In Dvorak, 70%. In addition, The Dvorak layout has 35% more right-hand reaches, 63% more same-row reaches, 45% more alternate-hand reaches, and 37% less finger travel than the QWERTY layout."
(Dvorak international FAQ.)
So where does this guy get off saying that QWERTY favors combinations that shift from one side of the keyboard to the other? Precisely the opposite is true.
Or simply contrast the number of qwerty words that must be typed with one hand compared with the number of such dvorak words. (This information is at the fingertips of anyone who knows how to grep/usr/dict/words.) The difference there is an order of magnitude in dvorak's favor.
He is on target in saying that the fastest dvorak typers aren't any faster than the fastest qwerty typers. He misses a key point, though - speed isn't the only issue. Many people (myself included) find the dvorak layout to be vastly more comfortable. And the jury's still out on whether it helps prevent repetitive-stress injury, but it seems unlikely that a layout that involves 37% less finger-motion wouldn't be better in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Point of information: mice are incontinent. No bladder control whatsoever. Reference here. It's no wonder that some mouse pee got inside the computer.
I don't know if you're playing devil's advocate here or not. Anyway:
Yes, but copyright is a question of balance between authors' interests and consumers' interests. (And author's interests are extended only to help guarantee that the work gets produced in the first place - ultimately, it all comes down to the public interest.) Specifically, it is most in consumers' interest to have a work in the public domain as soon as possible.
Life of the author plus seventy years seems to shift this balance far too far towards the authors. Also, one can't help but be suspicious when the lobbies for copyright extension include so many large and organized media companies, and the opposition is somewhat ragtag and not nearly as well-financed.
Besides that, it's worth mentioning that the question of what motivates authors and artists to produce work is very far from having a clear answer. My own opinion is that it has a lot more to do with love of their field and desire for fame than it does with leaving their children a healthy inheritance -- they could probably expect better results on that front if they went into, say, accounting.
As it so happens, I posted an essay on Advogato a few months ago that explores questions like this in great depth. If you want to make money, but forcing people to pay a price per-copy isn't an option, there are lots of other approaches at your disposal; public performance is one, but not the only one. Summarizing what I said about authors: things'll only change big-time if e-books become a preferred way to read. If this happens, authors'll likely have to rely on donations from their readership and grants to pursue authoring full time. This isn't really as outlandish as it sounds, provided the idea of offering such donations can be ingrained as a cultural norm. (I don't think this'll be all that difficult; public TV and radio stations seem to do okay for themselves.)
And now that you mention it, picking up speakers' fees for lecturing or reading works aloud could be a piece of the pie for authors, though probably not as big a hunk as live performance would be for musicians.
You know, you really would think that with all the noise they're making about it, IBM would be a great place to do Linux/open source work.
The answer, at least in my experience (a summer internship over the summer of '99 plus some recruitment attempts thereafter) is that there is the perfect job or internship for you somewhere in that company, but don't expect to be put in touch with the right people about it by HR.
Matt Hiller, GCC Engineer, the Red Hat formerly known as Cygnus, Sunnyvale, CA
This is really funny. I was at Tuesday's symposium, and Carl Kaplan was the moderator for the panel discussion that included Greg Goeckner, and at one point in the discussion he directly asked Goeckner, "Would the MPAA sue if the New York Times linked to DeCSS?" The audience was amused; after the laugh died down, Goeckner waffled.
Looks like it's gonna get put to the test now. :-)
Jan Nieuwenhuizen's already made many intelligent comments on MIDI and its relation to notation software, so I won't retread what he's already mentioned...
But yeah - Lilypond is an excellent package -- I say this just as a user, not an author.
If it weren't an excellent package I wouldn't have started writing Denemo to be a GUI frontend to it. http://denemo.sourceforge.net/, as Jan's been mentioning. Any of you interested in music notation are encouraged to download it, to play with it, and contribute!
As for the comments on Rosegarden and kooBase/Brahms - I don't mean to start a flame war with Chris Cannam (Rosegarden) or Jan Wuerthner (Brahms), but at this point Denemo's at least as complete an environment for doing music notation, though it's not a sequencer. (Nor is it intended ever to be one, though anybody's more than welcome to adapt it for use as the score editor for a larger sequencing package. It's an offer that I've already made to the GSeq folks, in fact, though I can't guarantee them much help if they decide to.)
I knew it'd be nothing but trouble when I saw at LinuxWorld yesterday that the VA Linux and Andover.net pavilions were so close to each other. :)
I've done a good amount of thinking on what the real opinion of the folks in government must be, and this is what I've been able to come up with:
They want to avoid a situation where by default all e-mail, filesystems, etc. will be protected with strong encryption. In the current state of affairs, people can encrypt all this material, but they have to be smart enough to know it. The ones that aren't smart enough become easier to investigate.
One of the key principles of playing a strategic game of chess is never to assume or hope that your opponent will blunder; instead, a chess player is supposed to rely on the strength of her own moves rather than the weakness of her opponent's. Which just goes to show you that chess and law enforcement are very different pursuits.
In addition to X 4 and KDE 2, don't forget ReiserFS (to be used in the next version of SuSE, IIRC).
I dunno; at first I thought the same thing, but then I realized that I'm at work on an NT box...
Go figure.
Matt
Hear, hear!
If Microsoft were to implement a plan like this on a large scale while providing no other (reasonably priced) options, the resentment that it'd cause would be incredible.
Fortunately, OSS'll be providing an alternative at an exceedingly reasonable price.
A move like this by any large proprietary company would only be good for free software.
With regards to copy-protection crackers: I've always found the term "warez doodz" -- capitalize as you see fit -- fits that niche pretty nicely.
"The Winter 1993 issue of Delta Pi Epsilon carried a study done by Dr. Scot Ober called 'Relative Efficiencies of the Standard and Dvorak Simplified Keyboards'. The study was extensive, and here are some of his conclusions:
/usr/dict/words.) The difference there is an order of magnitude in dvorak's favor.
In QWERTY, 31% of typing is done on the home row. In Dvorak, 70%. In addition, The Dvorak layout has 35% more right-hand reaches, 63% more same-row reaches, 45% more alternate-hand reaches, and 37% less finger travel than the QWERTY layout."
(Dvorak international FAQ.)
So where does this guy get off saying that QWERTY favors combinations that shift from one side of the keyboard to the other? Precisely the opposite is true.
Or simply contrast the number of qwerty words that must be typed with one hand compared with the number of such dvorak words. (This information is at the fingertips of anyone who knows how to grep
He is on target in saying that the fastest dvorak typers aren't any faster than the fastest qwerty typers. He misses a key point, though - speed isn't the only issue. Many people (myself included) find the dvorak layout to be vastly more comfortable. And the jury's still out on whether it helps prevent repetitive-stress injury, but it seems unlikely that a layout that involves 37% less finger-motion wouldn't be better in that regard.