It would be handy if people posting responses to this could indicate if they have ever created anything from which they gained a financial return due to copyright laws. I write stuff and generate income from the fact that the law gives me the right to control its copying in return for money. If that law is repealed I will find other ways to spend my time/earn money. I suspect other people will feel and act in the same way. Of course some people will do it for the love of it. Me I quite like going to folk clubs where people do it for the love of the art. Not sure if that is all the creative content I want in my life though.
"It was not until half-way through the year that he told me that I was failing due to being the first one done and not showing my work. The realization point was when I received a 20 out of 100 on a 5 question test. He told me he marked me off 80 points for not explaining to him how I got the answer."
It took you half-way through the year before noticing you were being told to show how you worked out the question, or did the prof say, "don't bother showing how you worked it out, just give me the answer"?
There has been little disaagreement about falling standards in education since the word education was first invented. Take any point in history and there was a section of the population who agreed that standards in education are falling. They tended to be the same section of the population who noticed that the world was going to hell in a handbasket/cart. Doesn't actually mean anything.
Absolutely, if grades are going up it must mean that exams are getting easier, it absolutly cannot mean that teaching methods are getting better or students are studying harder. You can tell in a similar way that the mile has got shorter in the last 50 years ago. Way back when, absolutly nobody could run it in under 4 minutes, but these days lots of people can do it. People have defnintly not improved their training techniques. They really ought to adjust measuring equipment to allow for this shorter mile, and of course Mt Everest has got lower..... yaddda yadda
"It's an often lamented fact that the BBC wiped hundreds of 1960s episodes of its era-defining music show Top of the Pops, including early Beatles performances, and many other popular programmes."
At a time when video tape was very expensive and it made sense to re-use the tape rather than loading a huge amount onto the cost of each apparently ephemeral program. This "lamented fact" seems to be utterly irrelevent to the main "story" that the Register is reporting, but it does add a nice up front negative spin to everything.
You appear to take the view that copyright is driven purely by the creators desire for income. It can also be viewed as societies way of giving creators a reason to create, and so society benefits (as well as the creator) because new material is produced. Are you against the idea of copyright itself?
"I get no royalties from software I wrote 10 years ago (even though it is still used everyday)."
Thats the agreement you entered into. Other people write software, retain the copyright and continue to generate revenue on new sales of existing work.
I continue to sell books I wrote several years ago. I wrote them, I sell them directly as pdf files via the web, there is no "industry" between me and the end user. The possibility of people paying for new material I write motivates me to write. If the law did not give me control over the copying I would feel far less inclined to write. If creative people do not have that financial motivation creative endevour would tend towards those who are independently wealthy, very committed or have wealthy patrons.
Are you are against the idea of people who create having control over the copying of that material. That is not the current legal status quo in most of the world.
"with mass-reproducible art forms - music, photography, print, film, industries were created which took copyright away from the content creators"
Or to look at it another way, with mass-producible art forms, e.g. CD audio recordings it allowed musicians to create high quality products using their own resources for which they could retain copyright and sell directly to their public, i.e. via the web or at gigs. These people would invest considerable amounts of their own time and money in this creative endevour and it is a reasonable idea that they should be able to control its reproduction to gain financially.
When I last looked at Lyx it required an X server under Win32. When I looked just now there appeared to be an "experimental" version for Win32 that did not require X. When I looked at it under Linux it did not look slick, professional or inviting. (Though possibly an improvement over hacking latex with a hammer chisel and bash prompt). Or I could consider the OOo range that has the backing of several multi billion dollar corporations behind it and around 100 million downloads and it mimics the interface I and a squillion other people are familiar with.
From the perspective of Joe Q Non Programmer they may as well be as different as a Microwave and a Washing Machine. I'm a programmer by career and when I looked at LaTex I decided life wasn't long enough. Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are PHd students. For a PhD student the complexity and learning curve of LaTex may be trivial, for the other 99.999 percent of humanity, some alternative is needed.
In my experience OOO is rather good at long(ish) documents, e.g. 50,000 words or around 200 A4 pages. There is a world of people who need to create this type of documents but are never, ever ever going to use Tex or similar. Hmm, actually I'm one of them.
I have used OO.org for creating 50K work plus documents for commercial purposes. Have you used MS Word for creating such documents for commercial purposes?
Yes a closed source program that is downloadable as part of the Google pack. So your code goes into a FREE application and into a proprietry application. If you can live with the Sun executives get fat off all those Google pack downloads its not such a downside to contributing to OpenOffice.org.
"could come to my house, pick up any old screwdriver (or indeed the anarchist cookbook, which I have a copy of lying somewhere in a BBS archive), and declare that I probably planned to do something illegal with this"
Not unless you had showed some sign of intent. That is how the law is supposed to work. Of course you can argue about the vagueness of the idea of showing intent but that is how it is supposed to work.
"Doesn't this mean they can pretty much charge anyone for having any kind of information relating to Bus/train/airplane times? Software Vulnerabilities? Google Earth?"
No, in practice it seems to mean not anyone, but people with a darker skin complexion in posession of this type material.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be handy if people posting responses to this could indicate if they have ever created anything from which they gained a financial return due to copyright laws. I write stuff and generate income from the fact that the law gives me the right to control its copying in return for money. If that law is repealed I will find other ways to spend my time/earn money. I suspect other people will feel and act in the same way. Of course some people will do it for the love of it. Me I quite like going to folk clubs where people do it for the love of the art. Not sure if that is all the creative content I want in my life though.
Yea, unlike the west who have never had genocidal leaders, gas ovens, gulags, crusades, carpet bombing .....
"It was not until half-way through the year that he told me that I was failing due to being the first one done and not showing my work. The realization point was when I received a 20 out of 100 on a 5 question test. He told me he marked me off 80 points for not explaining to him how I got the answer."
It took you half-way through the year before noticing you were being told to show how you worked out the question, or did the prof say, "don't bother showing how you worked it out, just give me the answer"?
There has been little disaagreement about falling standards in education since the word education was first invented. Take any point in history and there was a section of the population who agreed that standards in education are falling. They tended to be the same section of the population who noticed that the world was going to hell in a handbasket/cart. Doesn't actually mean anything.
Absolutely, if grades are going up it must mean that exams are getting easier, it absolutly cannot mean that teaching methods are getting better or students are studying harder. You can tell in a similar way that the mile has got shorter in the last 50 years ago. Way back when, absolutly nobody could run it in under 4 minutes, but these days lots of people can do it. People have defnintly not improved their training techniques. They really ought to adjust measuring equipment to allow for this shorter mile, and of course Mt Everest has got lower..... yaddda yadda
I suspect the Russians were saying that for quite a few years when they were up to their necks in Afghanistan.
In what way could Java (or net) infect a machine? Infect implies something that runs without your agreement.
"The Beatles are culturally significant?"
There were not seen as such at the time.
"It's an often lamented fact that the BBC wiped hundreds of 1960s episodes of its era-defining music show Top of the Pops, including early Beatles performances, and many other popular programmes."
At a time when video tape was very expensive and it made sense to re-use the tape rather than loading a huge amount onto the cost of each apparently ephemeral program. This "lamented fact" seems to be utterly irrelevent to the main "story" that the Register is reporting, but it does add a nice up front negative spin to everything.
So you do agree with the idea of creators being able to control copying, you are just quibbling amount of time that permission is granted.
You appear to take the view that copyright is driven purely by the creators desire for income. It can also be viewed as societies way of giving creators a reason to create, and so society benefits (as well as the creator) because new material is produced. Are you against the idea of copyright itself?
"I get no royalties from software I wrote 10 years ago (even though it is still used everyday)."
Thats the agreement you entered into. Other people write software, retain the copyright and continue to generate revenue on new sales of existing work.
I continue to sell books I wrote several years ago. I wrote them, I sell them directly as pdf files via the web, there is no "industry" between me and the end user. The possibility of people paying for new material I write motivates me to write. If the law did not give me control over the copying I would feel far less inclined to write. If creative people do not have that financial motivation creative endevour would tend towards those who are independently wealthy, very committed or have wealthy patrons.
Are you are against the idea of people who create having control over the copying of that material. That is not the current legal status quo in most of the world.
"with mass-reproducible art forms - music, photography, print, film, industries were created which took copyright away from the content creators"
Or to look at it another way, with mass-producible art forms, e.g. CD audio recordings it allowed musicians to create high quality products using their own resources for which they could retain copyright and sell directly to their public, i.e. via the web or at gigs. These people would invest considerable amounts of their own time and money in this creative endevour and it is a reasonable idea that they should be able to control its reproduction to gain financially.
When I last looked at Lyx it required an X server under Win32. When I looked just now there appeared to be an "experimental" version for Win32 that did not require X. When I looked at it under Linux it did not look slick, professional or inviting. (Though possibly an improvement over hacking latex with a hammer chisel and bash prompt). Or I could consider the OOo range that has the backing of several multi billion dollar corporations behind it and around 100 million downloads and it mimics the interface I and a squillion other people are familiar with.
From the perspective of Joe Q Non Programmer they may as well be as different as a Microwave and a Washing Machine. I'm a programmer by career and when I looked at LaTex I decided life wasn't long enough. Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are PHd students. For a PhD student the complexity and learning curve of LaTex may be trivial, for the other 99.999 percent of humanity, some alternative is needed.
In my experience OOO is rather good at long(ish) documents, e.g. 50,000 words or around 200 A4 pages. There is a world of people who need to create this type of documents but are never, ever ever going to use Tex or similar. Hmm, actually I'm one of them.
"It's worth pointing out that LaTeX is not only more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than Word"
It's worth pointing out that A washing machine is more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than microwave oven.
I have used OO.org for creating 50K work plus documents for commercial purposes. Have you used MS Word for creating such documents for commercial purposes?
How much do you earn each year?
Yes a closed source program that is downloadable as part of the Google pack. So your code goes into a FREE application and into a proprietry application. If you can live with the Sun executives get fat off all those Google pack downloads its not such a downside to contributing to OpenOffice.org.
Do you regularly create and manipulate 200+ page documents in MS Word?
"Britain is a police state. No doubt about that."
That's an insult to people who actually do live in police states.
"could come to my house, pick up any old screwdriver (or indeed the anarchist cookbook, which I have a copy of lying somewhere in a BBS archive), and declare that I probably planned to do something illegal with this"
Not unless you had showed some sign of intent. That is how the law is supposed to work. Of course you can argue about the vagueness of the idea of showing intent but that is how it is supposed to work.
"Doesn't this mean they can pretty much charge anyone for having any kind of information relating to Bus/train/airplane times? Software Vulnerabilities? Google Earth?"
No, in practice it seems to mean not anyone, but people with a darker skin complexion in posession of this type material.
But allies can turn into enemies.