The answer to all your questions is "Money". The people trying to market stevia in the USA can't get enough money together to get it approved because they don't have patents on it (and thus won't be obscenely profitable) and the manufacturers of existing patented artifical sweeterners lobby against it because it would undercut their massive patent-supported fixed prices on artifical sweeteners. Now, it's possible that there really is some hidden health hazard in stevia, but the fact that it's legal in japan makes that seem unlikely to me.
Sounds not unlike the efforts of drug companies to make it difficult for people to import their products into the US. It's even possible that in some cases the US and Canadian versions of drugs are produced in the same factory...
You can never stop someone technically knowledgeable enough to mod the code themselves... if they are determined enough to be a dick, that is. The thing is, most people don't know how to do it, and most of those who do don't want to be dicks.
All it requires is for one person to publish either an altered piece of software or a program to do the alterations to a standard build.
What you have left is a small numbers of sociopathic fucks who aren't worth worrying about. If a client comes pre-modded for joe-numbnuts to ignore ratios... ban it.
Assuming you can tell the difference between a modified client and a standard one.
If I was a betting man, I'd bet that just holding the severed finger between the thumb and forefinger on the hand (in effect presenting a six fingered hand) would let you in more often than not, even with a fairly "vigilant" guard.
It's probably possible to come up with a mechanism for putting the fake finger print on your own fingers, latex, PVA or similar.
A guard beside a finger print scanner will probably prevent someone walking up carrying a dead body,
The guard had better be armed, since anyone who can walk around carrying a dead body is likely to be strong enough to also throw the guard some distance.
nearly as pointess as the questions on the green visa waiver form, eg "have you been involved in genocide between 1933 and 1945 in nazi germany?".
Especially given that "been involved" is rather generic (e.g. it includes survivors) and some of the most notorious camps wern't actually in Germany. Wonder what they'd do if someone said "yes" with a date of birth after the war ended...
That's part of the reason the FDA tries to prevent stevia http://www.stevia.net/fda.htm, a naturally sweet, no-calorie herb, from being marketed in the US as a sweetener. It's a heck of a lot safer than Splenda (which, by the way, has the same health concerns as Nutrasweet got lambasted for a few years back), but the sugar sellers don't want the competition.
Also it can't be patented. Unlike any new artificial sweeteners which may be invented. Of course the most ironic thing would be if someone were to produce a "low-calorie" sweetener which also acted as a drug to promote weight gain...
It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.
Your explanation of the behaviour is not quite correct. In a unix type filesystem there is an entity known as an "inode". The inode holds just about all the information on a file, except for it's name. A unix directory is a file which contains mappings of file names to inodes. (A side effect of doing things this way is that it is trivial to have multiple names for the same file.) One of the fields in an inode is the "link count". Deleting a file name will reduce by one the link count. When a file is in use there is an additional link count is kept of how many times it has been opened. Any file locking is done against the inode. Only when both link counts are zero will the file be removed.
Microsoft recommends rebooting periodically for best performance.
Which implies some kind of memory leak or fragmentation somewhere within the OS.
However on systems both at home and work using XP it seems that over time, as software is installed or removed, the system becomes slower. What causes this I don't know.
The Windows registry appears quite "good" at gathering all sorts of junk. Both from applications which don't clean after removal or upgrade and the OS itself. e.g. even when Windows XP is set to automatically delete cached profiles it still retains registry keys pointing to them. After any length of time the registry is likely to be littered with keys which point to objects which no longer exist. It also probably dosn't help that some of these can use filenames mangled to fit the 8.3 naming convention either.
Not being able to install and run malware should not be because it's inconvenient to install and run any software.
That's sort of thing is fine for servers, but for there to be a Desktop Linux, you'd need this. Otherwise it's too hard for normal users.
In the case of a large proportion, possibly even the majority, of desktop machines the ability for end users to install arbitary software is undesirable. Windows has mechanisms to make this more difficult there are also third party addons to Windows. In an enterprise environment unapproved software may be considered "malware" even if it does nothing malicious. Hacking an ATM into being a Jukebox might make an ammusing story on Slashdot, but not everyone will see the funny side...
So if I got this right, in recent years our rights were outright ignored, all this while in the name of the fight against terror even more legislation hindering our rights were regularly called for.
With there being little to no evidence that this increase in legislation will actually do anything to make terrorism less likely. Maybe rights hindering legislation isn't the best way to address the issue in the first place, even if it is maybe it isn't the general public who should be having their rights hindered.
And now I'm supposed to feel better because of THREE recents cases where judges actually did their jobs?
Together with an unknown number of cases where judges didn't. Together with the problem that judges generally arn't those holding people in custody in the first place.
Remember, there are a lot of Books in the Bible. Some of the older ones (Old Testament) have a lot of stuff about smiting and even killing or enslaving your enemies.
It all depends upon what part of the Bible the church you attend wants to focus on. There's as much legitimacy in focusing on God's Rightous Wrath as there is in focusing on Jesus Forgiving.
If they are calling themselves "Christians" it might make sense to concentrate on what Jesus (the man, Rabbi, Son of God, Prophet, etc they supposedly follow) said and did. In several places Jesus condems Torah derived laws (or the extreme interpretations of these around in his time).
The police originally classified it as a hate crime, then the press reported that it was downgraded it to aggrivated battery. There were no witnesses. The pickup truck was aggressively tailing him, so he stops, and when they get out (one with a metal pipe or such object), he gets out. In the middle of nowhere.
It's not unknown for "hate crimes" to be "own goals", self inflicted or otherwise bogus. Of course those advocating special "hate crime" laws go to great lengths to downplay and excuse cases where things are not what they appear to be.
The most recent noteworthy news from Rome is that they have found a reasonable way to make science and christianity work together. If a super-being set off the universe a long, long time ago, setting the rules of physics, evolution and chemistry, then they don't see anything inconsistent with the bible.
Now suddenly the "war" between creationists and evolutionists is defused. Good. Science is not inconsistent with the bible. Good.
Except that Creationists are more likely to be native to the US than to the Vatican.
You're missing the forest for the flower pots. The point of the article wasn't to praise our nation's finest inventors. It was to point out that the government's criteria for recognizing our nation's great inventions is really pretty broken.
It's the criteria used by governments, corporate lobbiests, advocates of making more things patentable. In all these cases quantity appears to matter far more than quality.
Yet more conclusive proof of the USPTO's utter incompetence, from the people who brought you "Contradictory Patents Teach Us To Get Along" and "Everyone's Got A Little Prior Art Sometimes, That Doesn't Mean We Go Around Invalidating Patents"
Maybe someone needs to fine patents for "method of finding patent holders" or "method of ranking patent holders"...
This is more bad news. I dread the day when there will be 50 different versions of Windows out there.
There are already, if you take into account the various malware combinations which can be present.
Some will have MP, some will have IM, some will have IE... what's a developer to do? We will be forced to bundle all of these service-level applications with our installer. The poor user will end up with 5 different browsers, instant messengers, media players,
A "service-level application", isn't really a web browser, instant messenger or media player in the first place. The title more meanifully applies to something like a rendering engine even a "bot".
constantly answering the "Firefox is not your default browser" questions.
Why should your application need a specific web browser or a specific media player in the first place? Even if your application actually does have a good reason for only using MSIE as a web browser or only using MS Media player to play sound or video files it is perfectly possible to do this without making any changes to file associations. A developer who insists that these sort of things be changed before their app will work is IMHO either lazy or incompetent.
This type of decision, in my opinion, is very bad for the industry,
It would be "bad" for developers because they'd have to make decisions they currently ignore when developing exclusivly for MS Windows.
and especially bad for the end users.
The current system is not exactly good for either end users or administrators. Including things like "IE must be the default browser" and "the user must have admin privs in order to run this program". The former is a user annoyance, the latter equates to operating Windows XP with the security model of Windows 3.
Copyright can then be renewed for a further twenty years, on payment of, say, a 1,000GBP registration fee each year
You need to add a clause stating that the fee will increase anually according to either the average RPI or the average Bank of England base rate for the year, whichever is the greatest.
As for whether it is legimitate to enforce copyright 70 years after an author's death, it seems clear that any reasonable economic analysis would conclude that the marginal incentive provided to authors by this absurd protection doesn't influence their output of creative work,
Which raises the question of how we got into this state of affairs in the first place.
It could be argued that publishers are more likely to support struggling writers if they can collect money for 70 years after the death of the author,
A similar argument has been advanced for doubling the mechanical recording copyright protection from 50 to 100 years
but where is the evidence that 10, 20, 30...years after the author's death
Where is the evidence that this "X years after author's death" has any relevence to anything at all?
wouldn't provide exactly the same incentives to publishers to hunt for the next JK Rowling?
Publishers (in just about every field) are notoriously bad at judging what their readers, listeners and viewers want. With the largest ones tending to be conservative in what they will publish. They would tend to see the "next JK Rowling" as somthing similar to "Harry Potter". Which readers would tend to see as some kind of "cheap knockoff".
So, Brown's been doing popular things wherever possible. He was very big on the whole debt-cancellation move during the summer, for instance. He's trying to look as good as possible to voters. He's not likely to endorse law changes along the lines of 'hey, people I'd like to have vote for me at the next election: you're not allowed to copy CDs to your iPods!'
He wouldn't have to endose any law changes to do that. Since that is the state of the law as it stands. It would take a change in the law for people to be allowed to copy CDs onto iPods. Anyway only people in Dunfermline East can vote for him...
This move also probably ties in with the announcement earlier this year that they were going to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 years to 100 years
Spun as something to improve music. But, once you looked a little deeper, something to help the record companies maintain their position of dominance in the music publishing market.
If the copyright laws necessary for an author to create a particular work are very onerous, the harm caused by these laws may outweigh any benefit we gain from the work itself being created.
Where is the evidence of authors (especially unpublished) authors are demanding such onerous laws? Most of the demand appears to come from publishers or the descendents of sucessful authors.
I for one would rather have sensible copyright laws than the next Harry Potter book,
Where has J K Rowling stated that she would stop all work on the 7th book if copyright laws were to be changed? For all anyone knows she'd complete the series even if she never received another Knut for it...
There is. It is called a salary. If you want to earn a living from writing, get a job with a writing house (newspaper, website, cartoon creator, etc).
Where is it stated that a writer, poet, musician, etc must earn their main income from doing that? For one thing it would prevent older people who are in reciept of a pension doing such creative things...
They'll pay you a salary in exchange for your creativity. They will take on the costs and risks of trying to make a profit.
Though probably with some restrictions about what you can and can't do.
Creating content is not enough to make a product. I'm working on an article regarding the death of copyright -- and the more I research it by querying succesful authors/musicians/writers, the more I realize that copyright has absolutely no effect on creation
It's hard to see how current copyright can encourage creation since people just don't tend to think in terms of "70 years after I die". It's possible that a copyright term of 10-20 years might have some effect, becuase that is a timescale people can understand. But the biggest hurdle for most people is getting "known", regardless of if they are "The Beatles", "George Lucas", "Joanne Rowling" or whoever.
What you are saying here is: someone like JKR should spend 2 years writing a book, get it published
The real problem for most aspiring authors is getting published in the first place. There as a huge amount of luck responsible for Harry Potter ever getting published at all. There are plenty of examples of highly sucessful creative works which almost vanished into oblivian.
and then sit back and watch the Chinese print off a gazzilion copies of her work a week later without her profiting one cent.
They wouldn't need to just print them they'd also need to ship them around the planet and get book sellers to buy outside their usual channels. The profit margins with books tend to be too small for "book piracy", at least when it comes to fiction books.
There has to be reward for work.
Where has J K Rowling ever stated that forgotten all about the idea of Harry Potter if copyright law didn't exist in its current form? When it comes to exercises of creativity motivations appear to be a lot more complex than some remote possibility of monetery reward.
So, exactly how are we supposed to create new pharmaceuticals in your brave new IP-less world?
It's something of a false dicotomy to assume that the only possibility is the status quo (ever increasing and abused IP laws) or the elimination of any IP.
Do we eliminate the massive costs associated with testing and just let people fend for themselves (and companies too, since presumably you'd support suing any company that still puts out a risky product)?
Is the current system of regulation entirely about avoiding risky products? Things like preventing drugs being imported into the US from Canada appear to have more to do with allowing price differentiation than safety.
How can a company spend millions or billions of dollars on new research if the only saleable end product is a pill that can be copied in under a day by production houses that do no research at all?
IIRC pharmaceutical companies currently spend more on marketing (including directly to the public) than they do on research.
Should all future medical and pharmaceutical funding come purely from the government?
If this does a better job of finding and testing clinically useful pharmacuticals then the answer would have to be "yes". Remember also that things like the "War on Drugs" also restrict what pharmacutical drugs are available.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to all your questions is "Money". The people trying to market stevia in the USA can't get enough money together to get it approved because they don't have patents on it (and thus won't be obscenely profitable) and the manufacturers of existing patented artifical sweeterners lobby against it because it would undercut their massive patent-supported fixed prices on artifical sweeteners. Now, it's possible that there really is some hidden health hazard in stevia, but the fact that it's legal in japan makes that seem unlikely to me.
Sounds not unlike the efforts of drug companies to make it difficult for people to import their products into the US. It's even possible that in some cases the US and Canadian versions of drugs are produced in the same factory...
You can never stop someone technically knowledgeable enough to mod the code themselves... if they are determined enough to be a dick, that is. The thing is, most people don't know how to do it, and most of those who do don't want to be dicks.
All it requires is for one person to publish either an altered piece of software or a program to do the alterations to a standard build.
What you have left is a small numbers of sociopathic fucks who aren't worth worrying about. If a client comes pre-modded for joe-numbnuts to ignore ratios... ban it.
Assuming you can tell the difference between a modified client and a standard one.
If I was a betting man, I'd bet that just holding the severed finger between the thumb and forefinger on the hand (in effect presenting a six fingered hand) would let you in more often than not, even with a fairly "vigilant" guard.
It's probably possible to come up with a mechanism for putting the fake finger print on your own fingers, latex, PVA or similar.
A guard beside a finger print scanner will probably prevent someone walking up carrying a dead body,
The guard had better be armed, since anyone who can walk around carrying a dead body is likely to be strong enough to also throw the guard some distance.
nearly as pointess as the questions on the green visa waiver form, eg "have you been involved in genocide between 1933 and 1945 in nazi germany?".
Especially given that "been involved" is rather generic (e.g. it includes survivors) and some of the most notorious camps wern't actually in Germany. Wonder what they'd do if someone said "yes" with a date of birth after the war ended...
That's part of the reason the FDA tries to prevent stevia http://www.stevia.net/fda.htm, a naturally sweet, no-calorie herb, from being marketed in the US as a sweetener. It's a heck of a lot safer than Splenda (which, by the way, has the same health concerns as Nutrasweet got lambasted for a few years back), but the sugar sellers don't want the competition.
Also it can't be patented. Unlike any new artificial sweeteners which may be invented.
Of course the most ironic thing would be if someone were to produce a "low-calorie" sweetener which also acted as a drug to promote weight gain...
Ermmm... correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Windows' success based on Window 95/98, which were both buggy POS's (except for 98SE)?
:)
With 98SE being followed up by what is often refered to as "Windows Many Errors"
It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.
Your explanation of the behaviour is not quite correct. In a unix type filesystem there is an entity known as an "inode". The inode holds just about all the information on a file, except for it's name. A unix directory is a file which contains mappings of file names to inodes. (A side effect of doing things this way is that it is trivial to have multiple names for the same file.) One of the fields in an inode is the "link count". Deleting a file name will reduce by one the link count. When a file is in use there is an additional link count is kept of how many times it has been opened. Any file locking is done against the inode. Only when both link counts are zero will the file be removed.
Microsoft recommends rebooting periodically for best performance.
Which implies some kind of memory leak or fragmentation somewhere within the OS.
However on systems both at home and work using XP it seems that over time, as software is installed or removed, the system becomes slower. What causes this I don't know.
The Windows registry appears quite "good" at gathering all sorts of junk. Both from applications which don't clean after removal or upgrade and the OS itself. e.g. even when Windows XP is set to automatically delete cached profiles it still retains registry keys pointing to them.
After any length of time the registry is likely to be littered with keys which point to objects which no longer exist. It also probably dosn't help that some of these can use filenames mangled to fit the 8.3 naming convention either.
Not being able to install and run malware should not be because it's inconvenient to install and run any software.
That's sort of thing is fine for servers, but for there to be a Desktop Linux, you'd need this. Otherwise it's too hard for normal users.
In the case of a large proportion, possibly even the majority, of desktop machines the ability for end users to install arbitary software is undesirable. Windows has mechanisms to make this more difficult there are also third party addons to Windows.
In an enterprise environment unapproved software may be considered "malware" even if it does nothing malicious. Hacking an ATM into being a Jukebox might make an ammusing story on Slashdot, but not everyone will see the funny side...
So if I got this right, in recent years our rights were outright ignored, all this while in the name of the fight against terror even more legislation hindering our rights were regularly called for.
With there being little to no evidence that this increase in legislation will actually do anything to make terrorism less likely. Maybe rights hindering legislation isn't the best way to address the issue in the first place, even if it is maybe it isn't the general public who should be having their rights hindered.
And now I'm supposed to feel better because of THREE recents cases where judges actually did their jobs?
Together with an unknown number of cases where judges didn't. Together with the problem that judges generally arn't those holding people in custody in the first place.
Remember, there are a lot of Books in the Bible. Some of the older ones (Old Testament) have a lot of stuff about smiting and even killing or enslaving your enemies.
It all depends upon what part of the Bible the church you attend wants to focus on. There's as much legitimacy in focusing on God's Rightous Wrath as there is in focusing on Jesus Forgiving.
If they are calling themselves "Christians" it might make sense to concentrate on what Jesus (the man, Rabbi, Son of God, Prophet, etc they supposedly follow) said and did. In several places Jesus condems Torah derived laws (or the extreme interpretations of these around in his time).
The police originally classified it as a hate crime, then the press reported that it was downgraded it to aggrivated battery.
There were no witnesses. The pickup truck was aggressively tailing him, so he stops, and when they get out (one with a metal pipe or such object), he gets out. In the middle of nowhere.
It's not unknown for "hate crimes" to be "own goals", self inflicted or otherwise bogus. Of course those advocating special "hate crime" laws go to great lengths to downplay and excuse cases where things are not what they appear to be.
The most recent noteworthy news from Rome is that they have found a reasonable way to make science and christianity work together. If a super-being set off the universe a long, long time ago, setting the rules of physics, evolution and chemistry, then they don't see anything inconsistent with the bible.
Now suddenly the "war" between creationists and evolutionists is defused. Good. Science is not inconsistent with the bible. Good.
Except that Creationists are more likely to be native to the US than to the Vatican.
You're missing the forest for the flower pots. The point of the article wasn't to praise our nation's finest inventors. It was to point out that the government's criteria for recognizing our nation's great inventions is really pretty broken.
It's the criteria used by governments, corporate lobbiests, advocates of making more things patentable. In all these cases quantity appears to matter far more than quality.
Yet more conclusive proof of the USPTO's utter incompetence, from the people who brought you "Contradictory Patents Teach Us To Get Along" and "Everyone's Got A Little Prior Art Sometimes, That Doesn't Mean We Go Around Invalidating Patents"
Maybe someone needs to fine patents for "method of finding patent holders" or "method of ranking patent holders"...
This is more bad news. I dread the day when there will be 50 different versions of Windows out there.
... what's a developer to do? We will be forced to bundle all of these service-level applications with our installer. The poor user will end up with 5 different browsers, instant messengers, media players,
There are already, if you take into account the various malware combinations which can be present.
Some will have MP, some will have IM, some will have IE
A "service-level application", isn't really a web browser, instant messenger or media player in the first place. The title more meanifully applies to something like a rendering engine even a "bot".
constantly answering the "Firefox is not your default browser" questions.
Why should your application need a specific web browser or a specific media player in the first place? Even if your application actually does have a good reason for only using MSIE as a web browser or only using MS Media player to play sound or video files it is perfectly possible to do this without making any changes to file associations.
A developer who insists that these sort of things be changed before their app will work is IMHO either lazy or incompetent.
This type of decision, in my opinion, is very bad for the industry,
It would be "bad" for developers because they'd have to make decisions they currently ignore when developing exclusivly for MS Windows.
and especially bad for the end users.
The current system is not exactly good for either end users or administrators. Including things like "IE must be the default browser" and "the user must have admin privs in order to run this program". The former is a user annoyance, the latter equates to operating Windows XP with the security model of Windows 3.
We have these things called "death certificates", which have a person's name and date of death on them.
:)
Of course authors never use psudonyms and are always considerate enough to only die in their home country
Copyright can then be renewed for a further twenty years, on payment of, say, a 1,000GBP registration fee each year
You need to add a clause stating that the fee will increase anually according to either the average RPI or the average Bank of England base rate for the year, whichever is the greatest.
As for whether it is legimitate to enforce copyright 70 years after an author's death, it seems clear that any reasonable economic analysis would conclude that the marginal incentive provided to authors by this absurd protection doesn't influence their output of creative work,
Which raises the question of how we got into this state of affairs in the first place.
It could be argued that publishers are more likely to support struggling writers if they can collect money for 70 years after the death of the author,
A similar argument has been advanced for doubling the mechanical recording copyright protection from 50 to 100 years
but where is the evidence that 10, 20, 30...years after the author's death
Where is the evidence that this "X years after author's death" has any relevence to anything at all?
wouldn't provide exactly the same incentives to publishers to hunt for the next JK Rowling?
Publishers (in just about every field) are notoriously bad at judging what their readers, listeners and viewers want. With the largest ones tending to be conservative in what they will publish. They would tend to see the "next JK Rowling" as somthing similar to "Harry Potter". Which readers would tend to see as some kind of "cheap knockoff".
So, Brown's been doing popular things wherever possible. He was very big on the whole debt-cancellation move during the summer, for instance. He's trying to look as good as possible to voters. He's not likely to endorse law changes along the lines of 'hey, people I'd like to have vote for me at the next election: you're not allowed to copy CDs to your iPods!'
He wouldn't have to endose any law changes to do that. Since that is the state of the law as it stands. It would take a change in the law for people to be allowed to copy CDs onto iPods. Anyway only people in Dunfermline East can vote for him...
This move also probably ties in with the announcement earlier this year that they were going to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 years to 100 years
Spun as something to improve music. But, once you looked a little deeper, something to help the record companies maintain their position of dominance in the music publishing market.
If the copyright laws necessary for an author to create a particular work are very onerous, the harm caused by these laws may outweigh any benefit we gain from the work itself being created.
Where is the evidence of authors (especially unpublished) authors are demanding such onerous laws? Most of the demand appears to come from publishers or the descendents of sucessful authors.
I for one would rather have sensible copyright laws than the next Harry Potter book,
Where has J K Rowling stated that she would stop all work on the 7th book if copyright laws were to be changed? For all anyone knows she'd complete the series even if she never received another Knut for it...
There is. It is called a salary. If you want to earn a living from writing, get a job with a writing house (newspaper, website, cartoon creator, etc).
Where is it stated that a writer, poet, musician, etc must earn their main income from doing that? For one thing it would prevent older people who are in reciept of a pension doing such creative things...
They'll pay you a salary in exchange for your creativity. They will take on the costs and risks of trying to make a profit.
Though probably with some restrictions about what you can and can't do.
Creating content is not enough to make a product. I'm working on an article regarding the death of copyright -- and the more I research it by querying succesful authors/musicians/writers, the more I realize that copyright has absolutely no effect on creation
It's hard to see how current copyright can encourage creation since people just don't tend to think in terms of "70 years after I die". It's possible that a copyright term of 10-20 years might have some effect, becuase that is a timescale people can understand.
But the biggest hurdle for most people is getting "known", regardless of if they are "The Beatles", "George Lucas", "Joanne Rowling" or whoever.
What you are saying here is: someone like JKR should spend 2 years writing a book, get it published
The real problem for most aspiring authors is getting published in the first place.
There as a huge amount of luck responsible for Harry Potter ever getting published at all. There are plenty of examples of highly sucessful creative works which almost vanished into oblivian.
and then sit back and watch the Chinese print off a gazzilion copies of her work a week later without her profiting one cent.
They wouldn't need to just print them they'd also need to ship them around the planet and get book sellers to buy outside their usual channels. The profit margins with books tend to be too small for "book piracy", at least when it comes to fiction books.
There has to be reward for work.
Where has J K Rowling ever stated that forgotten all about the idea of Harry Potter if copyright law didn't exist in its current form?
When it comes to exercises of creativity motivations appear to be a lot more complex than some remote possibility of monetery reward.
So, exactly how are we supposed to create new pharmaceuticals in your brave new IP-less world?
It's something of a false dicotomy to assume that the only possibility is the status quo (ever increasing and abused IP laws) or the elimination of any IP.
Do we eliminate the massive costs associated with testing and just let people fend for themselves (and companies too, since presumably you'd support suing any company that still puts out a risky product)?
Is the current system of regulation entirely about avoiding risky products? Things like preventing drugs being imported into the US from Canada appear to have more to do with allowing price differentiation than safety.
How can a company spend millions or billions of dollars on new research if the only saleable end product is a pill that can be copied in under a day by production houses that do no research at all?
IIRC pharmaceutical companies currently spend more on marketing (including directly to the public) than they do on research.
Should all future medical and pharmaceutical funding come purely from the government?
If this does a better job of finding and testing clinically useful pharmacuticals then the answer would have to be "yes".
Remember also that things like the "War on Drugs" also restrict what pharmacutical drugs are available.