"Why Oz? Chalk one up for government-funded research. A federal center developed the bioplastic and transferred the patent to Plantic. A scientific consulting firm took it from there, selling investors on the idea and hiring a management team."
"Transferred." So... does that mean that Plantic paid money? Made a royalty deal? Transferring the patent implies Plantic now controls it, instead of just getting a license to it. That means no competition from anyone else. What are Australian citizens getting out of the use of their tax dollars besides the right to benefit Plantic twice (once with the patent, once when buying their products)?
The group's lawyer, Jonathan Band, said the Minnesota ruling would also disrupt normal business operations at Yahoo! and other companies while having a "chilling effect" on their subscribers, who could be concerned that a constant police presence would impinge on their privacy rights.
So the question is whether you trust the government or Yahoo less. Either we have Yahoo and similar companies eagerly submitting to laws invading our privacy (while doing it for their own ends as well) or we have law enforcement staring over their shoulders while they do it. Not exactly a choice I like having to make.
Psychiatrists say emotional responses that sometimes cause us to misinterpret others' intent may paradoxically ensure that machines never equal humanity's perceptive skills. How we feel about other people suggests how they affect others
See, this is what happens when you submit an reference implementation instead of a specification. Now to be fully compatible, any emotion perceiver has to have the same bugs as the original human version. And even if the human model gets fixed by its vendor, there's still an enormous installed base that we're going to be supporting for years.
Rep. Boucher... who called... to talk with me about... our right to the fair use of the content that we buy. This constitutional right,... has already been severely damaged by the DMCA... and could be obliterated by a new bill introduced by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings.
Repeat after me. Fair use is NOT a Constitutional right. It's barely even a legal right; as far as I know, its only explicit legal standing is in the Audio Home Recording Act. What it IS is a doctrine that is generally respected by the courts but as far as I know, there have been no rulings stating that Congress cannot take away fair use if they so choose. We have fair use today because Congress has so far not done so, and has codified fair use in the AHRA and perhaps a couple other laws. If it were a Constitutional right, Congress wouldn't be able to take it away or severely restrict it like they seem bent on doing.
Matthew Gerson, vice president for public policy at Vivendi Universal, which produces and sells both music (Universal Music Group) and movies (Universal Studios), is quick to dispute such predictions. "We know that if we build a safe, consumer-friendly site that has all the bells and whistles and features that music fans want, it will flourish," he says. "My hunch is that fans will have no trouble paying for the music that they love and compensating the artists who bring it to them -- established stars as well as the new voices the labels introduce year after year."
So they get it but don't get it. They concede that we'll probably do the right thing and pay the service, but they're still trying to paint users as being criminals. They acknowledge that they haven't provided the sort of service that users want and would pay for, but continue to state (elsewhere, not in this article) that we're only using the post-Napster services because we want to take without paying. They know that music lovers want to hear "new voices," implicitly agreeing that we're not getting that from traditional distribution models, but they still push lowest common denominator music as their highest priority.
I guess I should just be glad that they are making this much of a public acknowledgment and hope that these small steps continue.
One thing I liked about this piece was the position that we should assume people are going to do the right thing, in general. The recording and movie industries have pointed to illicit file trading networks as being proof that people will do the wrong thing (i.e., copying copyrighted works without authorization), but that's an invalid conclusion because there are many valid reasons why people would use those services. If those industries came up with a mechanism for providing the same convenience, breadth, and freedom of use (as in burning, copying to work, etc.) of mp3s or divX files and people were STILL copying works without authorization (and most importantly) to the demonstrable detriment of their deserved profits, I would stand with them in condemning these criminals. But they've never given us the benefit of the doubt in that. They're comparing something that was free, illegal, convenient, diverse, and easy against something that often costs an unreasonable amount, is legal, can be inconvenient, is often bland and generic, and can be troublesome to deal with, but focusing ONLY on the distinction of price and legality in determining what motivates those of us who use the service. Any rational thinker knows that when comparing two dissimilar things, you factor out as many variables as possible, and when there are some you can't get rid of, you fully qualify your conclusions.
A government can fund research work on BFP, UNIX, and still have commercial companies in their country start off around that type of work
If my tax dollars pay for the development of software or other "intellectual property," I want to be able to get at it (unless, of course, there's national security concerns). And I don't want anyone to be able to take the fruits of that labor and build on top of it while offering nothing in exchange back to me, the taxpayer who funded it. In fact, I've been intending for some time to write to my elected representatives to have them introduce legislation mandating that the fruits of federally funded research must be returned to the public, with obvious exceptions for national research, etc. That means that university research funded by the feds cannot be patented and hoarded by the professors who decide to go private without their compensating me in some way. That may mean a GPL-style license or paying back some of the investment. But it probably really means something I haven't thought of.
Think about it - the whole point of the free market is that the cost of goods and services will reach the level that people are willing to pay for them. If more and more people are downloading, copying or otherwise getting their music for free, it appears that the market is saying that music is overpriced. Thus, the price should fall to a level which people are prepared to pay. (Note that there is no guarantee that this level is not zero)
That's a logical leap that's not justified. Just because people are obtaining what normally costs $$$ for free doesn't mean it should cost $$. An example of this is cable. Even when cable prices are fairly justifiable (an extra $10 for HBO when an evening movie costs $7.75 for one person), people are still stealing it. That doesn't mean that HBO is charging too much.
The mistake I see in your argument is that you are equating illegal acquisition of copyrighted works with normal methods of acquisition (rationalizations that the music vendors are soulless profiteers notwithstanding). Free music clearly has no future. Obtaining this freely isn't the market at work. It's not sticking the supply and demand curves together and finding where they meet because the file sharing services aren't suppliers.
By outlawing the methods by which people obtain music for free, you are in effect attempting to artificially keep the price of music higher than the market wants it to be, thus making the market less free.
<soapbox>
Anyone who knows law and economics will tell you that capitalism only works with strong laws protecting buyers and sellers. If the whole world were like the streets of Hong Kong, markets wouldn't function. There would be too much anarchy. There's no legal right to profit in and of itself, but there are and should be legal rights to protect the profit from some things (copying an author's work and selling it as your own). Other things that aren't legally protected are just the way it should be (writing a better book than you on the same topic). These are generally pragmatic choices with an eye fixed on the greatest good provided to both buyers and sellers. Where the system is breaking down is in the increased focus on the good of the latter at the expense of the former.
To summarize: OSS is a bad thing because if free software is available no one will want to pay for software, which will drive programmers out of work. OSS is good in that it establishes competition for Microsoft, but that competition is better done through litigation or other commercial software.
That doesn't even come into the picture. The really obvious response is this: if free software is available, the price of software will drop until it reaches an equilibrium. It won't drop below the cost of producing the software because otherwise nobody will produce software. This is basic capitalism, and Mundie's statements to the contrary are patently ludicrous. The market will support as many programmers are necessary to produce the product they're willing to pay for, no matter what the license. Anyone arguing for some kind of regulation (a campaign for which Mundie seems to be laying the groundwork) against this model is basically arguing for protection against an efficient market. There are two options here: Microsoft's closed model needs extra-market protection against open source because open source is more efficient, or Microsoft's model is more efficient. If the Mundie believed that, there would be no need for this sort of FUD.
My girlfriend, my former roommate, my former roommate's wife, and other friends of mine all want a Tivo after seeing mine in action. Not one of them wants to pay $300 for one. Not one of them thought it was anything special until they actually used it for a few days or weeks. Then they were hooked.
People who know the advantages of PVRs are sold on them; Time Warner cable in my area is pimping HBO on demand, no doubt partly as a response to PVRs. It's a much easier sell for Time Warner because the metaphor it fits into is different than that of a PVR, even though they do the exact same thing. The video-on-demand from the cable company aligns with people's familiarity with webpages or movie rentals. PVRs get classified with VCRs. When I tried to describe my Tivo to the above people, they all thought it was just a fancy VCR and that I had more money than sense. I'm guessing that this is the common case.
In general, this points to a real problem with good design, which is something that most people here would be familiar with: it's hard to sell because the advantages are so fuzzy. Take, say, the interiors of cars. Some manufacturers are far superior to others in terms of making their dials readable, making the driver's seat properly adjustable to people of varying shapes and sizes, making it easy to change radio stations without risking an accident, and so on. But could you imagine Toyota having a commercial selling that? Well, I guess you could, because VW has been doing some of those, but the vast majority of auto ads focus on quantifiable things, like horsepower, gas mileage, reliability, interior space, a checklist of luxury options, and so forth.
Same thing with electronics. How much power your receiver can put out. How many CDs your jukebox can hold. Etc. But the design aspect isn't so obvious there. A poorly designed remote control is a fantastic pain. A well designed remote control just disappears into your hand and you don't think about it anymore. That's the advantage that good design has, and (getting back on topic) the advantage that a PVR has over a VCR. You abstract away from times and channels and just focus on shows. That's a big step, but it doesn't sound very impressive; you have to see it in action.
Oh yeah, and price. They need to make it cheaper. But like any other consumer electronics device, if they manage to sell it, gradually increasing (or not so gradual, like with DVD) economies of scale and improved technology should eventually bring the prices down far enough for it to become common. But until you get the demand up, it's moot. Right now there are low sales because people are saying "Why do I want that?" To succeed, they need to move to "I can't afford that" as their primary sales inhibitor because costs are constantly dropping through little effort on their (PVR manufacturers) part.
This is true. And they knew that people's opinions of right and wrong would inevitably change over time. Which is why we have the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished the slavery that was allowed by the original Constitution and Bill of Rights. So if Congress wants to go ahead and ignore the "limited" part of that article, guess what? To make it "right," we need an Amendment. Could you imagine a 28th Amendment stating what is effectively true today:
Congress shall have the Power....
To grant exclusive rights and complete control to Authors and Inventers to their respective Writings and Inventions for as long as they wish to maintain these rights.
And that just won't fly. Either they should obey the law of the land as it is written or they should change it. The slavery argument is a false analogy.
PS - I used "right" because that's what it said there. Since it was qualified with "secure" and "exclusive" it seemed to be clear enough.
And it's really irritating how Congress continues to ignore it:
To
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
[emphasis added, of course]
Clearly the existence of intellectual property was not intended by the framers. The above (to me) pretty strongly implies that their feeling was that granting such exclusive rights to ideas was an evil necessary to encourage the generation of new ideas. If you asked them, they would say to make the "limited time" as short as possible. Intellectual property isn't one of those inalienable rights an inventor is entitled to, but rather a license granted by Congress as a reward for their innovation. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there is an inherent right to ownership of ideas. To rephrase Proudhon: Intellectual property is theft.
There are tons of free p2p services out there, admittedly none as good as Napster was in it's day, but free none the less.
Uh, yeah they are. Napster was never very good. Even while it was still around, it got to the point that its only advantage was name recognition. They didn't even have the advantage of their large user base since they partitioned. Audiogalaxy for one was superior in features pre-Napster shutdown and is even more so now.
Not to mention, that's exactly the problem people have with the DMCA, etc./.-ers have been saying for years that "It's not the technology, it's how you use it" to justify the existence of DeCSS, and so forth. Fair enough, but now the shoe is on the other foot. If airlines used facial recognition software to compare your face against:
1) your registered passport picture
2) a terrorist database
To make sure you were who you said you were and weren't one of the terrorists, and then threw that information away immediately, well, that sounds like no intrusion at all on my civil liberties.
How about this as a method of normalizing alignment: every week, go through all the registered users' alignments, divide by some constant (say, 2), and add another constant (say, 1/2). This gives users a chance to "rehabilitate", but also doesn't give posters who've been inactive for a while good default scores. This sort of exponential decay would encourage posters to be consistently good. The down side is that it would punish those who post irregularly, but are always good. That could be solved by decay of average moderation, rather than the total amount of moderation, plus judicious selection of the constants. A few test cases would probably work to determine those better.
This is probably a better sort of guideline for commercializing open source software than the article posted yesterday. It should give pause to those who think that it's practical for corporations to open source everything immediately. The JWZ comment about open source not being "pixie dust" comes to mind. On the other hand, that there are significant positive developments strengthens the position that commercial software can also be open source. If nothing else, it should serve as a mini-case study for others that are planning to do something similar so they can avoid some of the problems that Mozilla encountered.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why Oz? Chalk one up for government-funded research. A federal center developed the bioplastic and transferred the patent to Plantic. A scientific consulting firm took it from there, selling investors on the idea and hiring a management team."
"Transferred." So... does that mean that Plantic paid money? Made a royalty deal? Transferring the patent implies Plantic now controls it, instead of just getting a license to it. That means no competition from anyone else. What are Australian citizens getting out of the use of their tax dollars besides the right to benefit Plantic twice (once with the patent, once when buying their products)?
So the question is whether you trust the government or Yahoo less. Either we have Yahoo and similar companies eagerly submitting to laws invading our privacy (while doing it for their own ends as well) or we have law enforcement staring over their shoulders while they do it. Not exactly a choice I like having to make.
See, this is what happens when you submit an reference implementation instead of a specification. Now to be fully compatible, any emotion perceiver has to have the same bugs as the original human version. And even if the human model gets fixed by its vendor, there's still an enormous installed base that we're going to be supporting for years.
Repeat after me. Fair use is NOT a Constitutional right. It's barely even a legal right; as far as I know, its only explicit legal standing is in the Audio Home Recording Act. What it IS is a doctrine that is generally respected by the courts but as far as I know, there have been no rulings stating that Congress cannot take away fair use if they so choose. We have fair use today because Congress has so far not done so, and has codified fair use in the AHRA and perhaps a couple other laws. If it were a Constitutional right, Congress wouldn't be able to take it away or severely restrict it like they seem bent on doing.
So they get it but don't get it. They concede that we'll probably do the right thing and pay the service, but they're still trying to paint users as being criminals. They acknowledge that they haven't provided the sort of service that users want and would pay for, but continue to state (elsewhere, not in this article) that we're only using the post-Napster services because we want to take without paying. They know that music lovers want to hear "new voices," implicitly agreeing that we're not getting that from traditional distribution models, but they still push lowest common denominator music as their highest priority.
I guess I should just be glad that they are making this much of a public acknowledgment and hope that these small steps continue.
One thing I liked about this piece was the position that we should assume people are going to do the right thing, in general. The recording and movie industries have pointed to illicit file trading networks as being proof that people will do the wrong thing (i.e., copying copyrighted works without authorization), but that's an invalid conclusion because there are many valid reasons why people would use those services. If those industries came up with a mechanism for providing the same convenience, breadth, and freedom of use (as in burning, copying to work, etc.) of mp3s or divX files and people were STILL copying works without authorization (and most importantly) to the demonstrable detriment of their deserved profits, I would stand with them in condemning these criminals. But they've never given us the benefit of the doubt in that. They're comparing something that was free, illegal, convenient, diverse, and easy against something that often costs an unreasonable amount, is legal, can be inconvenient, is often bland and generic, and can be troublesome to deal with, but focusing ONLY on the distinction of price and legality in determining what motivates those of us who use the service. Any rational thinker knows that when comparing two dissimilar things, you factor out as many variables as possible, and when there are some you can't get rid of, you fully qualify your conclusions.
If my tax dollars pay for the development of software or other "intellectual property," I want to be able to get at it (unless, of course, there's national security concerns). And I don't want anyone to be able to take the fruits of that labor and build on top of it while offering nothing in exchange back to me, the taxpayer who funded it. In fact, I've been intending for some time to write to my elected representatives to have them introduce legislation mandating that the fruits of federally funded research must be returned to the public, with obvious exceptions for national research, etc. That means that university research funded by the feds cannot be patented and hoarded by the professors who decide to go private without their compensating me in some way. That may mean a GPL-style license or paying back some of the investment. But it probably really means something I haven't thought of.
That's a logical leap that's not justified. Just because people are obtaining what normally costs $$$ for free doesn't mean it should cost $$. An example of this is cable. Even when cable prices are fairly justifiable (an extra $10 for HBO when an evening movie costs $7.75 for one person), people are still stealing it. That doesn't mean that HBO is charging too much.
The mistake I see in your argument is that you are equating illegal acquisition of copyrighted works with normal methods of acquisition (rationalizations that the music vendors are soulless profiteers notwithstanding). Free music clearly has no future. Obtaining this freely isn't the market at work. It's not sticking the supply and demand curves together and finding where they meet because the file sharing services aren't suppliers.
By outlawing the methods by which people obtain music for free, you are in effect attempting to artificially keep the price of music higher than the market wants it to be, thus making the market less free.
<soapbox>
Anyone who knows law and economics will tell you that capitalism only works with strong laws protecting buyers and sellers. If the whole world were like the streets of Hong Kong, markets wouldn't function. There would be too much anarchy. There's no legal right to profit in and of itself, but there are and should be legal rights to protect the profit from some things (copying an author's work and selling it as your own). Other things that aren't legally protected are just the way it should be (writing a better book than you on the same topic). These are generally pragmatic choices with an eye fixed on the greatest good provided to both buyers and sellers. Where the system is breaking down is in the increased focus on the good of the latter at the expense of the former.
</soapbox>
That doesn't even come into the picture. The really obvious response is this: if free software is available, the price of software will drop until it reaches an equilibrium. It won't drop below the cost of producing the software because otherwise nobody will produce software. This is basic capitalism, and Mundie's statements to the contrary are patently ludicrous. The market will support as many programmers are necessary to produce the product they're willing to pay for, no matter what the license. Anyone arguing for some kind of regulation (a campaign for which Mundie seems to be laying the groundwork) against this model is basically arguing for protection against an efficient market. There are two options here: Microsoft's closed model needs extra-market protection against open source because open source is more efficient, or Microsoft's model is more efficient. If the Mundie believed that, there would be no need for this sort of FUD.
My girlfriend, my former roommate, my former roommate's wife, and other friends of mine all want a Tivo after seeing mine in action. Not one of them wants to pay $300 for one. Not one of them thought it was anything special until they actually used it for a few days or weeks. Then they were hooked.
People who know the advantages of PVRs are sold on them; Time Warner cable in my area is pimping HBO on demand, no doubt partly as a response to PVRs. It's a much easier sell for Time Warner because the metaphor it fits into is different than that of a PVR, even though they do the exact same thing. The video-on-demand from the cable company aligns with people's familiarity with webpages or movie rentals. PVRs get classified with VCRs. When I tried to describe my Tivo to the above people, they all thought it was just a fancy VCR and that I had more money than sense. I'm guessing that this is the common case.
In general, this points to a real problem with good design, which is something that most people here would be familiar with: it's hard to sell because the advantages are so fuzzy. Take, say, the interiors of cars. Some manufacturers are far superior to others in terms of making their dials readable, making the driver's seat properly adjustable to people of varying shapes and sizes, making it easy to change radio stations without risking an accident, and so on. But could you imagine Toyota having a commercial selling that? Well, I guess you could, because VW has been doing some of those, but the vast majority of auto ads focus on quantifiable things, like horsepower, gas mileage, reliability, interior space, a checklist of luxury options, and so forth.
Same thing with electronics. How much power your receiver can put out. How many CDs your jukebox can hold. Etc. But the design aspect isn't so obvious there. A poorly designed remote control is a fantastic pain. A well designed remote control just disappears into your hand and you don't think about it anymore. That's the advantage that good design has, and (getting back on topic) the advantage that a PVR has over a VCR. You abstract away from times and channels and just focus on shows. That's a big step, but it doesn't sound very impressive; you have to see it in action.
Oh yeah, and price. They need to make it cheaper. But like any other consumer electronics device, if they manage to sell it, gradually increasing (or not so gradual, like with DVD) economies of scale and improved technology should eventually bring the prices down far enough for it to become common. But until you get the demand up, it's moot. Right now there are low sales because people are saying "Why do I want that?" To succeed, they need to move to "I can't afford that" as their primary sales inhibitor because costs are constantly dropping through little effort on their (PVR manufacturers) part.
And that just won't fly. Either they should obey the law of the land as it is written or they should change it. The slavery argument is a false analogy.
PS - I used "right" because that's what it said there. Since it was qualified with "secure" and "exclusive" it seemed to be clear enough.
[emphasis added, of course]
Clearly the existence of intellectual property was not intended by the framers. The above (to me) pretty strongly implies that their feeling was that granting such exclusive rights to ideas was an evil necessary to encourage the generation of new ideas. If you asked them, they would say to make the "limited time" as short as possible. Intellectual property isn't one of those inalienable rights an inventor is entitled to, but rather a license granted by Congress as a reward for their innovation. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there is an inherent right to ownership of ideas. To rephrase Proudhon: Intellectual property is theft.
There are tons of free p2p services out there, admittedly none as good as Napster was in it's day, but free none the less.
Uh, yeah they are. Napster was never very good. Even while it was still around, it got to the point that its only advantage was name recognition. They didn't even have the advantage of their large user base since they partitioned. Audiogalaxy for one was superior in features pre-Napster shutdown and is even more so now.
Not to mention, that's exactly the problem people have with the DMCA, etc. /.-ers have been saying for years that "It's not the technology, it's how you use it" to justify the existence of DeCSS, and so forth. Fair enough, but now the shoe is on the other foot. If airlines used facial recognition software to compare your face against:
1) your registered passport picture
2) a terrorist database
To make sure you were who you said you were and weren't one of the terrorists, and then threw that information away immediately, well, that sounds like no intrusion at all on my civil liberties.
How about this as a method of normalizing alignment: every week, go through all the registered users' alignments, divide by some constant (say, 2), and add another constant (say, 1/2). This gives users a chance to "rehabilitate", but also doesn't give posters who've been inactive for a while good default scores. This sort of exponential decay would encourage posters to be consistently good. The down side is that it would punish those who post irregularly, but are always good. That could be solved by decay of average moderation, rather than the total amount of moderation, plus judicious selection of the constants. A few test cases would probably work to determine those better.
This is probably a better sort of guideline for commercializing open source software than the article posted yesterday. It should give pause to those who think that it's practical for corporations to open source everything immediately. The JWZ comment about open source not being "pixie dust" comes to mind. On the other hand, that there are significant positive developments strengthens the position that commercial software can also be open source. If nothing else, it should serve as a mini-case study for others that are planning to do something similar so they can avoid some of the problems that Mozilla encountered.