Well, i was addressing the original assertion - piracy will continue if no-one profits from it, but aside from that, I pretty much agree with everything you said.
However, a few points:
Fortunately most adults understand that you need to pay people if you want them to keep making cool stuff, and are even willing to pay a reasonable price for quality content, so there is hope.
I see that a lot in older people. But I find the sentiment less common among those who grew up not even understanding there was such a thing as copyright. It's why piracy doesn't upset me all that much, but the idea that people aren't willing to accept that what they're doing is wrong bothers me a lot.
We all do things we acknowledge are morally wrong (except those who are emotionally 10 year-olds - *everything* they do is morally justified in their own head). But that also means there's an ethical nudge in the direction of proper behaviour when the cost isn't so (relatively) high. If you don't believe it's wrong at all, then there's no reason to *ever* go legit.
The other point is that I have no objection to minimal copy protection. Copy protection, even stuff that is easily circumvented, provides a discouragement factor to the most casual of copying. I do remember a friend assuming that if it wasn't copy protected, then that must mean that the publisher was explicitly giving permission for it to be pirated. I suspect that attitude is not all that uncommon.
If there's some difference between the purchased and the pirated product, it also provides some incentive for people to purchase something rather than get it from a friend.
Of course, I am no fan of draconian copyright protection.
> I'm going to start my own company to prove that free culture can be profitable for creators.
It's not *impossible* to be able to survive providing free culture, but honestly, I hope you don't have anyone depending upon you for income, because the odds are not in your favor. Best of luck, anyway.
However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist. You might be able to make it as a businessman / artist on the side, but if fundamentally you can't get paid for your art, but only for your {merchandise, stage presence, likability, etc.}, then the market fundamentally changes, and probably not in a good way.
One thing becomes clear, like free-to-play games, the vast majority of money comes from a few real patrons with deep pockets. For artists who actually need to support themselves and, heaven forbid, a family, you survive not by producing work true to you, but by pleasing those few patrons upon which your livelihood depends.
I think the artistic community is *far* better served with a democratic model where a large number of people pay a little rather than a few people paying a lot. Artists still need to serve a community, but can draw upon a much larger group, and is dependent on no single customer.
A 28 year copyright term would probably not hurt productivity significantly.
I find the whole lengthening of copyright fairly obnoxious and would be fine with something reasonable (max 28 years or artists lifetime?).
But its use as as justification for piracy of recently produced stuff is near ludicrous. It's like justifying robbing someone because of US foreign policy.
Actually, if *no one* can profit from it? Then yes it will. (Okay, it would be highly diminished.)
Luckily, there are a *lot* of ways to profit from piracy. Provide bandwidth, blank CD's, blank diskettes, blank tapes, hard drives, computers, video players, on-site advertising, virus/worm infection vectors, etc., etc., etc.
Is the next stop how the drug trade would be undiminished if no-one made any money off of that?
Indeed, the idea the absurd idea that artists might make based on what spoke to them, and if it appealed to enough people, allow them not starve, is an absurd misstep in history. Anyone with a brain knows that in order for artists to produce, they must produce only what appeals to those with money and power to patronize them, for *that* is the only way for an artists to survive.
No wonder the quality of the arts has dropped in the last 100 years. Time for this historical aberration to end.
That might be reasonable, if you weren't paid in the first place. In which case, you'd be working damn hard to make certain the house stood up long enough that you didn't starve to death. Might improve the build quality of most new houses!
> I think yes, because I think artists are internally driven to produce.
Once they're no longer living in their parents basement, they're also driven to eat.
If you don't want to make provisions for your content creators to be paid, expect your music to be like the musician in the coffee shop, your books to be like fan-fic, and your movies to be closer to YouTube videos. Not all are terrible and some are excellent, but for most consumers, not a match for what they enjoy today.
I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.
Real security costs a lot in both in productivity and in dollars.
Customers, for the most part, are unable to tell the difference between a supplier that has good security and bad security. (And yes, some high cost suppliers have terrible security, there's no guarantee that better price means better security).
Guess which companies can offer a cheaper product?
From observation, I'd say that most suppliers who took security seriously have gone under. Everybody promises excellent security, so from the customer perspective, they're identical, and thus naturally the customer chooses the cheapest. If there's a security issue, then the customer gets ticked, and switches to another low-cost supplier.
And of course, the same applies whether the customer is a business or an end-user. When was the last time you checked the on-line security of the store where you went shopping? The only survival strategy is to go cheap, and pray you don't get unlucky.
(Of course, the reality is a somewhat more nuanced, but the pressures are absolutely in the direction I describe.)
> your info is only as secure as the computer systems at the retailer/processor.
Actually, this is *not* the case. The man in the middle could steal your PIN, but without physical access to the card (i.e. stealing it) or a completely incompetent back end implementation, he can't recreate a successful transaction. In other words, the cards cannot be skimmed (by any tech we have now).
The cards are a lot more costly ($5 instead of pennies), and it won't stop someone stealing your card. But it's been very successful in stopping large scale skimming operations, which are the majority of fraud.
Thanks for the reply. I'll admit I'm mystified. Even a bad implementation would have taken a lot of effort to break (make a clone EMV chip for less than $10K? Maybe now, but then?) and the fact that the date changed would pretty much be an indication that a cryptogram wasn't sent at all in the fraudulent transactions.
My suspicion: The magstripe got skimmed even if the original trans was EMV. If the ABM design was like our Canadian ABM designs, you can still get your card skimmed when you put it in (it eats the whole card, even for EMV). It's simply that the mag-stripe info is useless unless you go to the States (and you can bet that Canadian banks are paranoid about ATM fraud coming from the States...) If it was early in the switchover, it would be easy to find mag-stripe only terminals.
I'm incredibly curious how they managed to skim an EMV card. I've never heard of that being done and I would have thought that would be big news. (Unless the card was using static authentication, which apparently a few UK banks did when they first implemented EMV - EMV was an incredibly rushed job (when first implemented) in Europe, as they were just sinking beneath a tidal wave of fraud.)
Duplicate transactions don't work, because the cryptogram is unique (unless the bank disabled the transaction counter, but that would be idiotic.)
Of course, the fraudsters can steal the card and observe the PIN, but that's not the sort of thing that organized crime can do to steal millions, which is the real threat.
Now of course, if they simply skimmed the mag-stripe off your EMV card, that's a different matter. That won't be fixable until mag-stripe only ATMs are disallowed your bank's inter-bank networks, as in Canada.
The fact that EMV (chip & pin) is not perfectly secure is *massively* less of a problem than credit/debit card skimming.
ATM fraud has been squeezed out of pretty much the rest of the world and is migrating to the USA in droves. When Canada switched, ATM fraud basically killed organized rings. These rings are reluctantly moving to the US (a draconian justice system does have *some* upside) and along with an small army of engineers working on whisper thin skimmers and business ideas like ATM fraud franchises, things look pretty scary if the US doesn't switch.
The downside is, unlike Canada, there's no single inter-branch network like Canada that can kick members off who don't upgrade. Instead there's thousands of banks who may not want the expense of switching to EMV. And as long as there are any mag-stripe only ATMs on the network you belong to, you're vulnerable to having your cards skimmed. So, the US will have it much tougher. (POS fraud is not nearly as big a problem. It's pretty hard to get $100K out of one POS terminal using 2,000 cards without the operator getting suspicious. And then you take a massive loss fencing the goods. ATM is what organized crime goes after.)
On the upside, the US is on the forefront of real-time risk assessment of transactions. They're getting better and better at assessing suspicious transactions. Still, there'll be more and more false positives as fraud goes up, so remember to carry multiple cards...
> He's a contractor, why does he care if the original designer gets the credit?
Bingo. I generally do my best to make certain that the permanent workers get credit where it's possible to do so. If there's a permanent worker who is completely incompetent, then I'll simply refrain from praising them to management. Praise is not a zero sum game, bosses are not usually idiots, and a cordial work environment where people are happy to see and help each other is worth its weight in gold.
It's simply self-interest to endeavor to make everybody look good, and permanent co-workers will return the favor when the next job is available.
> I have found that what makes a good school here in a California school district is the PRINCIPAL
I'll second that sentiment.
My son's primary school had a bullying problem bad enough that it made the papers. The principal retired and a new principal brought in. Within a two years, it was a different school, and within three, she was getting the pick of teachers across Toronto any time there was a vacancy because teachers were desperate to work with a principal that was active, knew every student's name and personality, and most importantly of all, supported the teachers when parents were being difficult.
It took an amazing amount of work on her part, but she *made* the school. (The excellent teachers made the classrooms.) Watching her stand-down parents who wanted to make excuses for their child's bullying was eye-opening.
I was stunned when the grade 6 graduation speech by the students praised her specifically and at length for making them feel safe. When I went through primary school, the only students who even knew the principal's name were the troublemakers...
You are vastly more optimistic than I am. First, when a firm enters a totally new market, their odds of success are somewhat higher than a newcomer (better capitalization, better name recognition), but not *much* better. Lots of firms *could* have been Apple, but only 1 in a million succeeded. For a firm like Kodak, blessed with insane insight, I'd give it a 1 in 1,000 chance. Throw a multi-billion dollar company away on that chance? Not good management.
Now, more likely, they might have ended up like the camera division of the top two camera manufacturers together. In other words, still a shadow (in terms of profit) of what they were before (albeit still alive).
Once again, rational managers of successful companies keep milking for as long as possible. The number of firms that can successfully re-invent themselves is miniscule. (Well, less than 0.5% rounding down:-)). We all look at the successes, because they're around us. But let's remember the few hundred thousand firms that *don't* make it.
Agreed, but that *still* would have resulted in a much smaller company than Kodak at its prime, which is my point.
I don't know how many CEOs would have the guts to walk into the boardroom and say "it doesn't look like it now, but in five years, we're screwed. So we're going to spend all of our R+D to get people to stop paying us money (i.e. buying film, etc.). If we're successful (in a market segment we know nothing about), we'll be 1/10 our current size. If we're unsuccessful, we'll be dead in 2-3 years. And yes, to be successful, we'll need total buy-in from all levels of the company."
I do, however, know how many CEOs would still have their job after giving that pitch.
> Well, to be fair, Kodak screwed themselves as well... they pretty much invented digital photography, but utterly failed to capitalize on it.
Well, yes and no. If Kodak had forged ahead in the digital revolution, they might be around now, but 1/10th the size, and more importantly, they might have started their destruction many years earlier.
Most disruptive technologies are things that massively shrink the number of dollars coming into the market. People don't buy much more X, they just pay 1/10 the price. When that's the decision you're facing, it often doesn't make sense to lead the charge to disintegrate your market. Far batter to eke out a few more years as a major player and then go down in flames than survive as a shell of the former company.
How many CEOs are congratulated in taking a billion dollar company and bravely leading it into becoming a $100 million dollar company? If they hold on for five years before the little fish get sufficient funding and mind-share and then retire, they can easily be thought of as the decent CEOs who retired before "that idiot who lost the company" took the reigns.
Another who understands that "deflation" is simply a conspiracy by the Trilateral Illuminati, who meet in Davos each year to develop new methods of sapping our vital bodily fluids.
Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.
Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.
This reminds me of my youngest in grade 1 in tears at his math homework.
What is 1 + 1?
He scrawled 2.
How did you arrive at this answer?
"I just added them. But that's not what the teacher wants. Waah!"
I tried for 10 minutes to tease out the mental process from him, but he was well beyond using representational systems to add numbers. At this point, he just *knew*. Furthermore, my pathologically honest child could not lie at that age, so pretending he put two items together and counted them was right out.
So I pulled out my first year math text which was mostly "God gives you zero and the successor function and 450 pages from now we prove calculus", and copied the appropriate paragraph or two.
Teacher never said anything about it, and I didn't see another quite so insane question that year.
Sorry, I should have quoted the relevant line I was responding to.
Congrats, Cory. You've gotten on Slashdot several times in the past few weeks. Remember: it's important to keep your name in the news so that you can sell more books. Too bad your analysis is overly simplistic.
Cory's service to the community is not in providing nuanced analysis of issues. It's using his fame to bring issues to light that would simply be ignored by the more mainstream community.
We've got dozens of people with blogs to provide cogent, deep analysis. We've got precious few people with enough name recognition that they can get important issues put on the agenda.
I love in-depth policy analysis, but I'm well aware it's the kiss of death if you want to actually get things done in the real world. Simply put, nuance makes things too complicated for those who have only the slightest of interest in issues that we consider important - and they're the ones that make the decisions.
You're sounding awfully bitter that a moderate number of people with limited amounts of time and energy pay more attention to Cory Doctorow than they do to you or me.
Why? Outsourcing news filtering to those we've given some authority to is not a crime. It's how we function.
Personally, I outsource my filtering to newpapers, TV, friends, family, experts who happen to get media coverage, etc...
What I will say, however, is that the public sector has to follow a LOT of byzantine rules around procurement
They do, and it's precisely *because* they have to be scrupulously fair that there are these byzantine rules. Such rules are what happen when you attempt to codify every aspect of a transaction so that there is no conceivable way that any party can be favored by the purchaser, etc. And of course, when someone *does* find a way to do something bad within the rules, the answer is more rules.
Fewer rules means trusting human judgement. Trust in human judgment means that there *will* be the occasional misuse of funds. And misuse of funds means that someone will be blamed for not having rules to prevent the problem in the first place. (The idea that the cost of preventing a crisis can easily be more than the crisis itself something few voters can understand.)
So in the end, we get exactly what the public demands - enough rules that compliance doubles the cost of everything, but a level of fraud and graft (which might have added 10% to the price) that is much lower than the private sector.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, i was addressing the original assertion - piracy will continue if no-one profits from it, but aside from that, I pretty much agree with everything you said.
However, a few points:
Fortunately most adults understand that you need to pay people if you want them to keep making cool stuff, and are even willing to pay a reasonable price for quality content, so there is hope.
I see that a lot in older people. But I find the sentiment less common among those who grew up not even understanding there was such a thing as copyright. It's why piracy doesn't upset me all that much, but the idea that people aren't willing to accept that what they're doing is wrong bothers me a lot.
We all do things we acknowledge are morally wrong (except those who are emotionally 10 year-olds - *everything* they do is morally justified in their own head). But that also means there's an ethical nudge in the direction of proper behaviour when the cost isn't so (relatively) high. If you don't believe it's wrong at all, then there's no reason to *ever* go legit.
The other point is that I have no objection to minimal copy protection. Copy protection, even stuff that is easily circumvented, provides a discouragement factor to the most casual of copying. I do remember a friend assuming that if it wasn't copy protected, then that must mean that the publisher was explicitly giving permission for it to be pirated. I suspect that attitude is not all that uncommon.
If there's some difference between the purchased and the pirated product, it also provides some incentive for people to purchase something rather than get it from a friend.
Of course, I am no fan of draconian copyright protection.
> I'm going to start my own company to prove that free culture can be profitable for creators.
It's not *impossible* to be able to survive providing free culture, but honestly, I hope you don't have anyone depending upon you for income, because the odds are not in your favor. Best of luck, anyway.
However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist. You might be able to make it as a businessman / artist on the side, but if fundamentally you can't get paid for your art, but only for your {merchandise, stage presence, likability, etc.}, then the market fundamentally changes, and probably not in a good way.
One thing becomes clear, like free-to-play games, the vast majority of money comes from a few real patrons with deep pockets. For artists who actually need to support themselves and, heaven forbid, a family, you survive not by producing work true to you, but by pleasing those few patrons upon which your livelihood depends.
I think the artistic community is *far* better served with a democratic model where a large number of people pay a little rather than a few people paying a lot. Artists still need to serve a community, but can draw upon a much larger group, and is dependent on no single customer.
A 28 year copyright term would probably not hurt productivity significantly.
I find the whole lengthening of copyright fairly obnoxious and would be fine with something reasonable (max 28 years or artists lifetime?).
But its use as as justification for piracy of recently produced stuff is near ludicrous. It's like justifying robbing someone because of US foreign policy.
Actually, if *no one* can profit from it? Then yes it will. (Okay, it would be highly diminished.)
Luckily, there are a *lot* of ways to profit from piracy. Provide bandwidth, blank CD's, blank diskettes, blank tapes, hard drives, computers, video players, on-site advertising, virus/worm infection vectors, etc., etc., etc.
Is the next stop how the drug trade would be undiminished if no-one made any money off of that?
Indeed, the idea the absurd idea that artists might make based on what spoke to them, and if it appealed to enough people, allow them not starve, is an absurd misstep in history. Anyone with a brain knows that in order for artists to produce, they must produce only what appeals to those with money and power to patronize them, for *that* is the only way for an artists to survive.
No wonder the quality of the arts has dropped in the last 100 years. Time for this historical aberration to end.
That might be reasonable, if you weren't paid in the first place. In which case, you'd be working damn hard to make certain the house stood up long enough that you didn't starve to death. Might improve the build quality of most new houses!
> I think yes, because I think artists are internally driven to produce.
Once they're no longer living in their parents basement, they're also driven to eat.
If you don't want to make provisions for your content creators to be paid, expect your music to be like the musician in the coffee shop, your books to be like fan-fic, and your movies to be closer to YouTube videos. Not all are terrible and some are excellent, but for most consumers, not a match for what they enjoy today.
I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.
> You say it like this is a new thing though. It's not.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
+1 Insightful
Real security costs a lot in both in productivity and in dollars.
Customers, for the most part, are unable to tell the difference between a supplier that has good security and bad security. (And yes, some high cost suppliers have terrible security, there's no guarantee that better price means better security).
Guess which companies can offer a cheaper product?
From observation, I'd say that most suppliers who took security seriously have gone under. Everybody promises excellent security, so from the customer perspective, they're identical, and thus naturally the customer chooses the cheapest. If there's a security issue, then the customer gets ticked, and switches to another low-cost supplier.
And of course, the same applies whether the customer is a business or an end-user. When was the last time you checked the on-line security of the store where you went shopping? The only survival strategy is to go cheap, and pray you don't get unlucky.
(Of course, the reality is a somewhat more nuanced, but the pressures are absolutely in the direction I describe.)
> your info is only as secure as the computer systems at the retailer/processor.
Actually, this is *not* the case. The man in the middle could steal your PIN, but without physical access to the card (i.e. stealing it) or a completely incompetent back end implementation, he can't recreate a successful transaction. In other words, the cards cannot be skimmed (by any tech we have now).
The cards are a lot more costly ($5 instead of pennies), and it won't stop someone stealing your card. But it's been very successful in stopping large scale skimming operations, which are the majority of fraud.
Thanks for the reply. I'll admit I'm mystified. Even a bad implementation would have taken a lot of effort to break (make a clone EMV chip for less than $10K? Maybe now, but then?) and the fact that the date changed would pretty much be an indication that a cryptogram wasn't sent at all in the fraudulent transactions.
My suspicion: The magstripe got skimmed even if the original trans was EMV. If the ABM design was like our Canadian ABM designs, you can still get your card skimmed when you put it in (it eats the whole card, even for EMV). It's simply that the mag-stripe info is useless unless you go to the States (and you can bet that Canadian banks are paranoid about ATM fraud coming from the States...) If it was early in the switchover, it would be easy to find mag-stripe only terminals.
I'm incredibly curious how they managed to skim an EMV card. I've never heard of that being done and I would have thought that would be big news. (Unless the card was using static authentication, which apparently a few UK banks did when they first implemented EMV - EMV was an incredibly rushed job (when first implemented) in Europe, as they were just sinking beneath a tidal wave of fraud.)
Duplicate transactions don't work, because the cryptogram is unique (unless the bank disabled the transaction counter, but that would be idiotic.)
Of course, the fraudsters can steal the card and observe the PIN, but that's not the sort of thing that organized crime can do to steal millions, which is the real threat.
Now of course, if they simply skimmed the mag-stripe off your EMV card, that's a different matter. That won't be fixable until mag-stripe only ATMs are disallowed your bank's inter-bank networks, as in Canada.
The fact that EMV (chip & pin) is not perfectly secure is *massively* less of a problem than credit/debit card skimming.
ATM fraud has been squeezed out of pretty much the rest of the world and is migrating to the USA in droves. When Canada switched, ATM fraud basically killed organized rings. These rings are reluctantly moving to the US (a draconian justice system does have *some* upside) and along with an small army of engineers working on whisper thin skimmers and business ideas like ATM fraud franchises, things look pretty scary if the US doesn't switch.
The downside is, unlike Canada, there's no single inter-branch network like Canada that can kick members off who don't upgrade. Instead there's thousands of banks who may not want the expense of switching to EMV. And as long as there are any mag-stripe only ATMs on the network you belong to, you're vulnerable to having your cards skimmed. So, the US will have it much tougher. (POS fraud is not nearly as big a problem. It's pretty hard to get $100K out of one POS terminal using 2,000 cards without the operator getting suspicious. And then you take a massive loss fencing the goods. ATM is what organized crime goes after.)
On the upside, the US is on the forefront of real-time risk assessment of transactions. They're getting better and better at assessing suspicious transactions. Still, there'll be more and more false positives as fraud goes up, so remember to carry multiple cards...
> He's a contractor, why does he care if the original designer gets the credit?
Bingo. I generally do my best to make certain that the permanent workers get credit where it's possible to do so. If there's a permanent worker who is completely incompetent, then I'll simply refrain from praising them to management. Praise is not a zero sum game, bosses are not usually idiots, and a cordial work environment where people are happy to see and help each other is worth its weight in gold.
It's simply self-interest to endeavor to make everybody look good, and permanent co-workers will return the favor when the next job is available.
> I have found that what makes a good school here in a California school district is the PRINCIPAL
I'll second that sentiment.
My son's primary school had a bullying problem bad enough that it made the papers. The principal retired and a new principal brought in. Within a two years, it was a different school, and within three, she was getting the pick of teachers across Toronto any time there was a vacancy because teachers were desperate to work with a principal that was active, knew every student's name and personality, and most importantly of all, supported the teachers when parents were being difficult.
It took an amazing amount of work on her part, but she *made* the school. (The excellent teachers made the classrooms.) Watching her stand-down parents who wanted to make excuses for their child's bullying was eye-opening.
I was stunned when the grade 6 graduation speech by the students praised her specifically and at length for making them feel safe. When I went through primary school, the only students who even knew the principal's name were the troublemakers...
You are vastly more optimistic than I am. First, when a firm enters a totally new market, their odds of success are somewhat higher than a newcomer (better capitalization, better name recognition), but not *much* better. Lots of firms *could* have been Apple, but only 1 in a million succeeded. For a firm like Kodak, blessed with insane insight, I'd give it a 1 in 1,000 chance. Throw a multi-billion dollar company away on that chance? Not good management.
Now, more likely, they might have ended up like the camera division of the top two camera manufacturers together. In other words, still a shadow (in terms of profit) of what they were before (albeit still alive).
Once again, rational managers of successful companies keep milking for as long as possible. The number of firms that can successfully re-invent themselves is miniscule. (Well, less than 0.5% rounding down :-)). We all look at the successes, because they're around us. But let's remember the few hundred thousand firms that *don't* make it.
Agreed, but that *still* would have resulted in a much smaller company than Kodak at its prime, which is my point.
I don't know how many CEOs would have the guts to walk into the boardroom and say "it doesn't look like it now, but in five years, we're screwed. So we're going to spend all of our R+D to get people to stop paying us money (i.e. buying film, etc.). If we're successful (in a market segment we know nothing about), we'll be 1/10 our current size. If we're unsuccessful, we'll be dead in 2-3 years. And yes, to be successful, we'll need total buy-in from all levels of the company."
I do, however, know how many CEOs would still have their job after giving that pitch.
> Well, to be fair, Kodak screwed themselves as well... they pretty much invented digital photography, but utterly failed to capitalize on it.
Well, yes and no. If Kodak had forged ahead in the digital revolution, they might be around now, but 1/10th the size, and more importantly, they might have started their destruction many years earlier.
Most disruptive technologies are things that massively shrink the number of dollars coming into the market. People don't buy much more X, they just pay 1/10 the price. When that's the decision you're facing, it often doesn't make sense to lead the charge to disintegrate your market. Far batter to eke out a few more years as a major player and then go down in flames than survive as a shell of the former company.
How many CEOs are congratulated in taking a billion dollar company and bravely leading it into becoming a $100 million dollar company? If they hold on for five years before the little fish get sufficient funding and mind-share and then retire, they can easily be thought of as the decent CEOs who retired before "that idiot who lost the company" took the reigns.
Another who understands that "deflation" is simply a conspiracy by the Trilateral Illuminati, who meet in Davos each year to develop new methods of sapping our vital bodily fluids.
Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.
Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.
This reminds me of my youngest in grade 1 in tears at his math homework.
What is 1 + 1?
He scrawled 2.
How did you arrive at this answer?
"I just added them. But that's not what the teacher wants. Waah!"
I tried for 10 minutes to tease out the mental process from him, but he was well beyond using representational systems to add numbers. At this point, he just *knew*. Furthermore, my pathologically honest child could not lie at that age, so pretending he put two items together and counted them was right out.
So I pulled out my first year math text which was mostly "God gives you zero and the successor function and 450 pages from now we prove calculus", and copied the appropriate paragraph or two.
Teacher never said anything about it, and I didn't see another quite so insane question that year.
Sorry, I should have quoted the relevant line I was responding to.
Congrats, Cory. You've gotten on Slashdot several times in the past few weeks. Remember: it's important to keep your name in the news so that you can sell more books. Too bad your analysis is overly simplistic.
Cory's service to the community is not in providing nuanced analysis of issues. It's using his fame to bring issues to light that would simply be ignored by the more mainstream community.
We've got dozens of people with blogs to provide cogent, deep analysis. We've got precious few people with enough name recognition that they can get important issues put on the agenda.
I love in-depth policy analysis, but I'm well aware it's the kiss of death if you want to actually get things done in the real world. Simply put, nuance makes things too complicated for those who have only the slightest of interest in issues that we consider important - and they're the ones that make the decisions.
You're sounding awfully bitter that a moderate number of people with limited amounts of time and energy pay more attention to Cory Doctorow than they do to you or me.
Why? Outsourcing news filtering to those we've given some authority to is not a crime. It's how we function.
Personally, I outsource my filtering to newpapers, TV, friends, family, experts who happen to get media coverage, etc...
What I will say, however, is that the public sector has to follow a LOT of byzantine rules around procurement
They do, and it's precisely *because* they have to be scrupulously fair that there are these byzantine rules. Such rules are what happen when you attempt to codify every aspect of a transaction so that there is no conceivable way that any party can be favored by the purchaser, etc. And of course, when someone *does* find a way to do something bad within the rules, the answer is more rules.
Fewer rules means trusting human judgement. Trust in human judgment means that there *will* be the occasional misuse of funds. And misuse of funds means that someone will be blamed for not having rules to prevent the problem in the first place. (The idea that the cost of preventing a crisis can easily be more than the crisis itself something few voters can understand.)
So in the end, we get exactly what the public demands - enough rules that compliance doubles the cost of everything, but a level of fraud and graft (which might have added 10% to the price) that is much lower than the private sector.