All kidding aside, what would have happened to human society if such key advances as fire, agriculture, and the wheel had become jealously and perpetually guarded properties?
Societies which did became something for acheologists of the descendents of the societies which didn't to study:)
In many cases 20 years is more than enough. Consider the average (either mode or mean) commercial life of a book, song, movie, etc.
I'm not an author or an artist, and like most people I get paid for today's work once rather than getting paid over and over and over for the rest of my life.
Even in the publishing and entertainment industries most people are paid in the former way.
I really don't like the idea of a perpetual copyright. Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material.
If this is the idea "too long" is also a problem. A limited time means they have an incentive to create new works, regardless of the sucess or failure of their current works.
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs.
Most likely the Wood Workers Association of America would be insisting that everyone paid a fee everytime they sat on a chair. Probably also cursing pet owners who's dogs and cats sat on chairs.
In exchange for you making your creations public. Society has to benefit, but it was also recognized that without copyright there would be less incentive to work on certain things.
Actually this is completly unproven. Indeed it's hard to find any way of actually testing if this is actually the case.
So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.
Of course life of author plus the average human life span is hardly "limited" for all practical purposes.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society.
Using the "life plus X years metric" also places a strain on the actual mechanics of copyright (as do retroactive extensions of term) in that it is impossible to know when something will enter the public domain. There is also a very good possibility that copyright will persist long after no copies still exist. (Especially for works which are not deposited in Copyright Libraries, even quite a few which are since such libraries are currently faced with the inability to actually store everything which is published. Possibly not even being able to store all unpopular works...)
IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society.
It isn't even that, IP is the fiction that pretending ideas are like physical objects is a sensible idea.
Copyright infringement is a economic crime. So, the punishment should be of an economic nature --- a fine.
The problem is that often when this is done the monetary value claimed is far in excess of even the retail price of the "content" involved. You only have to look at the RIAA threats to sue people...
It's better than the 15 minutes of ads the theater plays, often going well past the show's starting time in order to sell us more stuff (There are (overly priced and smaller portioned) snacks available in the lobby!),
As well as making sure you don't "smuggle" your own food and drink in.
You're right. It is, of course, in the best interest of the RIAA to go and start a land war in Asia. That can only be good, right?
Unless the RIAA has somehow aquired a decent army it might be in the interests of the rest of the planet for them to start a war. Just so long as whoever they attacked kept them after the war was over...
I agree - the reasons Ultra remained secret don't generally apply to (e.g.) 9/11 or Moon Landing conspiracies, which would also necessarily have thousands of people in the know.
9/11 is not a good example, because the "official explanation" is a conspiracy theory. In fact there arn't many non conspiracy theories which claim to explain the events of the day, let alone a remotly credible one. Indeed the whole "war on terror" is justified by conspiracy theories..
Well, I don't give any particular credence to any of the individual theories (I'm not an expert on the subject, or any related subject) but some have speculated that it was a faction within our government that assassinated JFK, that Ruby would have suffered even worse had he not executed Harvey and so on. If it's true, then those people are probably still profiting from the assassination and they should be found and imprisoned, and their ill-gotten goods taken away.
If these people were to exist they'd have every reason to ensure that either the truth didn't come out...
Why do US politicians insist on contorted interpretations to make stuff fit the existing constitution, rather than just doing the honest thing and *changing* the damn constitution when they consider that justified ?
Because actually changing the US Constitution is a complex process, involving a large number of people, it only takes one of them to say "why do we need to do this in the first place?"
Article I section 8 of the US Constitution "The Congress shall have power"... "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;"
This does not actually oblige Congress to do anything, just allows them. It is also modified by "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." i.e. any use of copyright, patent (or anything from A1, S8) can be used to do anything Ammendment 1 explicitally forbids Congress from doing.
Think about one-click... Now think back to the days (if anyone is old enough to remember) where you "opened an account" with the local grocer, and just said "put it on my account" and paid later, like once a month. How much different is one-click to that really?
This would also be "prior art" for store credit cards and possibly even general credit cards. The fundermental idea of a merchent giving a line of credit to a regular customer is probably thousands of years old. Converting many small transactions into one transaction also has the side effect that both parties needed to carry less "small change", it might even be essential if the cost per item is less than the smallest coin available.
Actually, the problem is worse. A patent troll can submit hundreds of software patents and have no implementation or even a plan for implementation for any of them.
Not having an actual product is the perfect position for a patent troll. Since nobody can accuse them of patent infringement, except possible via "business model" patents...
The problem is that, unlike actual inventions, a patent troll can quickly submit hundreds of software patents. Nowadays, you've got everybody and their dog, from Microsoft to Sun to Amazon applying for patents.
A "patent troll" still needs to have quite a bit of money. So individuals and small companies can't "play". Even the archetypal "back garden/yard shed inventor" might have to struggle to raise the money to get one patent. Which in the current environment may be useless anyway.
I am perfectly happy to have eBay send ad content to my computer. I'm also perfectly happy to have my computer ignore that content. Their markup interpreted by my computer.
Which is the way the web is ment to work in the first place. What gets displayed and how it is displayed being entirely down to the browser, all the site can do is ask the browser nicely to render a certain way.
What they did is the best they could do. Manifacturers/retailers/importers get back the money and they can pass the savings on to their future customers.
Of course they won't, since it's not how business works, but that's a completely different matter.
Since this "functions like a tax" then maybe the better thing to have done with it would have been to give it to the Canadian Government, like other taxes...
I've never understood why so many people accept, without any kind of proof, the canard that being able to restrict someone else's development of an idea is somehow going to "encourage" innovation.
Even if you could prove that for copyright in a certain form (and term) that dosn't prove that copyright in general will do this.
but I haven't met anyone who has been able to point me to any kind of study showing that such an effect is true (and I've read several studies showing that IP laws tend to retard innovation in a society).
There are plenty of things which are only beneficial in certain circumstances, quite often "too much" can be more harmful than "too little" (or even none at all.) This can apply from anything to overdoses of drugs/nutrients to overtightened bolts.
At first glance, it seems to make more sense that you'd encourage societal innovation by giving ideas as large a spread through society as possible, not by using mechanisms that restrict them.
Copyright came into existance with the development of machines which could produce copies cheaply if you wanted many identical copies. In more recent times not only have machines been developed which can produce cheap copies on a one off/small number of copies basis there has also been a divorce between "content" and "media".
The current importance of intellectual property is completely artificial, and is hurting the rate of innovation in the US (and the other countries that follow the US's lead). If the legislation defining IP hadn't ever been concocted, then the marketplace would've developed in a much more natural and sustainable way, where the value of goods & services would have a much more direct correlation with the resources, skill & labor used to provide them.
It's difficult to know how things might be different, since music and video recordings have only ever existed within this legal framework.
In the grand scheme of things, chasing down KIDS who share mp3's just doesn't seem as important as establishing Federal guidelines for voting machines.
It would probably be a better idea to eliminate them entirely. How about "legalise drugs, ban voting machines" as a radical idea?
How about they work on something more useful like preventative measures for identity theft. I'm not talking about the consumer level, but rather the banking industry. There are banks I will not do business with because of their track record losing data unencrypted off of UPS trucks, etc. How about retail chains who have employees steal checking accounts and make new checks with their name on it! Fraud is much worse than a little copyright infringement.
IIRC "corporate crime" of all kinds is a major problem, with too little law enforcement.
It was 30Kw IIRC, still no mean feat given the weight constraints.
No it was 30W, which is actually quite a bit of power for something intended to be soft landed on the Moon. Where your only practical power source is however many photovoltaic cells the thing can carry with it.
When your computer power supply is rate for 300 W, that means that it doesn't use more than 300 J of energy every second.
It may well mean that it can supply no more than 300J of electrical energy. Though as the sum of the maximum power ratings of each of its outputs. In order to do this it has to take in more than 300W. This extra energy typically appears as heat.
Watts is not energy over time. Watts is Amps times volts.
Watts are a measure of power. The units of power are energy per period of time. One Watt is the same as one Joule per second. The Volts times Amps (or Amps Squared times Ohms or Ohms over Volts squared) applies only to electrical energy. Even if the machine in question is entirely electrically driven you still have kenetic and gravitational potential energy to consider.
Slashdot Mirror
All kidding aside, what would have happened to human society if such key advances as fire, agriculture, and the wheel had become jealously and perpetually guarded properties?
:)
Societies which did became something for acheologists of the descendents of the societies which didn't to study
20 years' copyright protection is enough.
In many cases 20 years is more than enough. Consider the average (either mode or mean) commercial life of a book, song, movie, etc.
I'm not an author or an artist, and like most people I get paid for today's work once rather than getting paid over and over and over for the rest of my life.
Even in the publishing and entertainment industries most people are paid in the former way.
I really don't like the idea of a perpetual copyright. Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material.
If this is the idea "too long" is also a problem. A limited time means they have an incentive to create new works, regardless of the sucess or failure of their current works.
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs.
Most likely the Wood Workers Association of America would be insisting that everyone paid a fee everytime they sat on a chair. Probably also cursing pet owners who's dogs and cats sat on chairs.
In exchange for you making your creations public. Society has to benefit, but it was also recognized that without copyright there would be less incentive to work on certain things.
Actually this is completly unproven. Indeed it's hard to find any way of actually testing if this is actually the case.
So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.
Of course life of author plus the average human life span is hardly "limited" for all practical purposes.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society.
Using the "life plus X years metric" also places a strain on the actual mechanics of copyright (as do retroactive extensions of term) in that it is impossible to know when something will enter the public domain. There is also a very good possibility that copyright will persist long after no copies still exist. (Especially for works which are not deposited in Copyright Libraries, even quite a few which are since such libraries are currently faced with the inability to actually store everything which is published. Possibly not even being able to store all unpopular works...)
IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society.
It isn't even that, IP is the fiction that pretending ideas are like physical objects is a sensible idea.
Does this mean that we can look forward to most of Microsoft disappearing under a volcanic erruption sometime soon?
Copyright infringement is a economic crime. So, the punishment should be of an economic nature --- a fine.
The problem is that often when this is done the monetary value claimed is far in excess of even the retail price of the "content" involved. You only have to look at the RIAA threats to sue people...
In other news the crackers apologise for taking so long and say that they expect the next updates to be available at least 3 weeks before...
It's better than the 15 minutes of ads the theater plays, often going well past the show's starting time in order to sell us more stuff (There are (overly priced and smaller portioned) snacks available in the lobby!),
As well as making sure you don't "smuggle" your own food and drink in.
You're right. It is, of course, in the best interest of the RIAA to go and start a land war in Asia. That can only be good, right?
Unless the RIAA has somehow aquired a decent army it might be in the interests of the rest of the planet for them to start a war. Just so long as whoever they attacked kept them after the war was over...
I agree - the reasons Ultra remained secret don't generally apply to (e.g.) 9/11 or Moon Landing conspiracies, which would also necessarily have thousands of people in the know.
9/11 is not a good example, because the "official explanation" is a conspiracy theory. In fact there arn't many non conspiracy theories which claim to explain the events of the day, let alone a remotly credible one.
Indeed the whole "war on terror" is justified by conspiracy theories..
Well, I don't give any particular credence to any of the individual theories (I'm not an expert on the subject, or any related subject) but some have speculated that it was a faction within our government that assassinated JFK, that Ruby would have suffered even worse had he not executed Harvey and so on. If it's true, then those people are probably still profiting from the assassination and they should be found and imprisoned, and their ill-gotten goods taken away.
If these people were to exist they'd have every reason to ensure that either the truth didn't come out...
Why do US politicians insist on contorted interpretations to make stuff fit the existing constitution, rather than just doing the honest thing and *changing* the damn constitution when they consider that justified ?
Because actually changing the US Constitution is a complex process, involving a large number of people, it only takes one of them to say "why do we need to do this in the first place?"
Article I section 8 of the US Constitution "The Congress shall have power" ... "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;"
This does not actually oblige Congress to do anything, just allows them. It is also modified by "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." i.e. any use of copyright, patent (or anything from A1, S8) can be used to do anything Ammendment 1 explicitally forbids Congress from doing.
Think about one-click... Now think back to the days (if anyone is old enough to remember) where you "opened an account" with the local grocer, and just said "put it on my account" and paid later, like once a month. How much different is one-click to that really?
This would also be "prior art" for store credit cards and possibly even general credit cards.
The fundermental idea of a merchent giving a line of credit to a regular customer is probably thousands of years old. Converting many small transactions into one transaction also has the side effect that both parties needed to carry less "small change", it might even be essential if the cost per item is less than the smallest coin available.
Actually, the problem is worse. A patent troll can submit hundreds of software patents and have no implementation or even a plan for implementation for any of them.
Not having an actual product is the perfect position for a patent troll. Since nobody can accuse them of patent infringement, except possible via "business model" patents...
The problem is that, unlike actual inventions, a patent troll can quickly submit hundreds of software patents. Nowadays, you've got everybody and their dog, from Microsoft to Sun to Amazon applying for patents.
A "patent troll" still needs to have quite a bit of money. So individuals and small companies can't "play". Even the archetypal "back garden/yard shed inventor" might have to struggle to raise the money to get one patent. Which in the current environment may be useless anyway.
I am perfectly happy to have eBay send ad content to my computer. I'm also perfectly happy to have my computer ignore that content. Their markup interpreted by my computer.
Which is the way the web is ment to work in the first place. What gets displayed and how it is displayed being entirely down to the browser, all the site can do is ask the browser nicely to render a certain way.
What they did is the best they could do. Manifacturers/retailers/importers get back the money and they can pass the savings on to their future customers. Of course they won't, since it's not how business works, but that's a completely different matter.
Since this "functions like a tax" then maybe the better thing to have done with it would have been to give it to the Canadian Government, like other taxes...
I've never understood why so many people accept, without any kind of proof, the canard that being able to restrict someone else's development of an idea is somehow going to "encourage" innovation.
Even if you could prove that for copyright in a certain form (and term) that dosn't prove that copyright in general will do this.
but I haven't met anyone who has been able to point me to any kind of study showing that such an effect is true (and I've read several studies showing that IP laws tend to retard innovation in a society).
There are plenty of things which are only beneficial in certain circumstances, quite often "too much" can be more harmful than "too little" (or even none at all.) This can apply from anything to overdoses of drugs/nutrients to overtightened bolts.
At first glance, it seems to make more sense that you'd encourage societal innovation by giving ideas as large a spread through society as possible, not by using mechanisms that restrict them.
Copyright came into existance with the development of machines which could produce copies cheaply if you wanted many identical copies. In more recent times not only have machines been developed which can produce cheap copies on a one off/small number of copies basis there has also been a divorce between "content" and "media".
The current importance of intellectual property is completely artificial, and is hurting the rate of innovation in the US (and the other countries that follow the US's lead). If the legislation defining IP hadn't ever been concocted, then the marketplace would've developed in a much more natural and sustainable way, where the value of goods & services would have a much more direct correlation with the resources, skill & labor used to provide them.
It's difficult to know how things might be different, since music and video recordings have only ever existed within this legal framework.
In the grand scheme of things, chasing down KIDS who share mp3's just doesn't seem as important as establishing Federal guidelines for voting machines.
It would probably be a better idea to eliminate them entirely. How about "legalise drugs, ban voting machines" as a radical idea?
How about they work on something more useful like preventative measures for identity theft. I'm not talking about the consumer level, but rather the banking industry. There are banks I will not do business with because of their track record losing data unencrypted off of UPS trucks, etc. How about retail chains who have employees steal checking accounts and make new checks with their name on it! Fraud is much worse than a little copyright infringement.
IIRC "corporate crime" of all kinds is a major problem, with too little law enforcement.
It was 30Kw IIRC, still no mean feat given the weight constraints.
No it was 30W, which is actually quite a bit of power for something intended to be soft landed on the Moon. Where your only practical power source is however many photovoltaic cells the thing can carry with it.
When your computer power supply is rate for 300 W, that means that it doesn't use more than 300 J of energy every second.
It may well mean that it can supply no more than 300J of electrical energy. Though as the sum of the maximum power ratings of each of its outputs.
In order to do this it has to take in more than 300W. This extra energy typically appears as heat.
Watts is not energy over time. Watts is Amps times volts.
Watts are a measure of power. The units of power are energy per period of time. One Watt is the same as one Joule per second. The Volts times Amps (or Amps Squared times Ohms or Ohms over Volts squared) applies only to electrical energy. Even if the machine in question is entirely electrically driven you still have kenetic and gravitational potential energy to consider.