I don't know enough about either side of the argument to figure it out. I did assume they "just already have it" and are banking on the movie bringing in more then they spend (that is, an investment of sorts).
*sigh*
This is what happens when people grow up playing MMOs that have NPC-driven economies. Unless your entire business is brand-new, MONEY COMES FROM CUSTOMERS.
On the other hand, technology is really lowering the bar. When we look at the level of stuff people are producing to put on youtube, there is definitely some hope. That and as said, social media and sites like kickstarter are nibbling away at what I see as the two big hurtles: exposure and financing.
Technology hasn't just moved the bar, it's fundamentally changed the playground. Pre-computer, it wasn't physically possible for people to form collective patronages to create works that could be distributed for free in the public domain, because cost-free distribution couldn't exist.
Now that it does, the entire concept of copyright is basically providing a monopoly right to sell something that no longer has any intrinsic value. This is not a condition that has ever existed before.
The only thing to nibble away at is people's habitual attachment to that now-obsolete model.
Copyrights may annoy copycats, but the existence of copyrights in their current form do not stop anyone from creating new ideas.
You are put in danger by publishing anything that a sack of lawyers might later decide is too similar to something their client has published within the past several generations. If you don't see that as a chilling effect, you haven't tried to create anything lately.
And just to keep things relevant to the topic, producing an actual episode of a TV show from a fucking manuscript is ABSOLUTELY creating something new. The manuscript DID NOT come with sets, props, actors, acting performances, direction, visual effects, music, video editing, audio editing, foley, stunt-work, any of that shit. And yet, because the dialogue came from a particular script, none of that can be done, ever.
Sure, they could do all of those things with an original script. But what they WANT to do is Star Trek, because they think Star Trek is cool. They're inspired to do those things by Star Trek. Coming up with something that's
1) similarly cool, but 2) not a parody, because they want to do a serious take on it, and 3) sufficiently different from Star Trek that it's not lawyerable...is way, way more difficult than it should be, and it's that difficult entirely because of 3).
Your idea of promoting artistic endeavors means giving artists shortcuts by "borrowing" public domain work.
That's how creativity works: you alter, recombine, and change things you've been exposed to. Copyright does encourage people to be clever about it, but that doesn't mean that good things can't be derived closely from public domain works. Unless you believe that no good movies have ever been based off of Shakespeare, fairy tales, mythology, or novels written a hundred years ago.
Humans are recombinant memetic mutation engines. We generally have to start with memes to mutate. "new original ideas" are a phantom, a myth. Only new works based on those ideas are real.
If the path of least resistance is simply taking someone else's IP and making some changes and reselling it, you don't think media corporations would almost exclusively be doing that now instead of trying to create new original ideas?
I take it they've never heard of Disney under that rock you've been living under? Seriously, though -- what you just described is NEARLY ALL media corporations are doing right now. John Carter of Mars. Battleship. Hunger Games. Wrath of the Titans. 21 Jump Street. That is the path of least resistance, and it's how things are already working. Do you know why? Because COPYRIGHT IS WHAT MAKES THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE PROFITABLE, that's why! You don't have to convince the public to patronize the creation of your neato new thing, because you've already taken their money by selling them copies of your last thing. And what's the safest bet as to what they'll give you money for next time? whatever they gave you money for before, that's what!
Setting aside the awfully cute assumption you've made that Warner Brothers actually pays royalties to book authors without getting sued first, it would depend a lot on how long ago I wrote the best-selling book. I, for one, don't expect to be paid forever for something I did a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice, and I wouldn't turn the money down, but I also wouldn't go around thinking I was entitled to it. What have I done lately?
In fact, now that I think about it, if I was working on a new book and thought I could get it polished and shipped by the time the movie came out, I'd be totally cool with it. Because I could put "by Fned, author of [BEST SELLING BOOK], now a major motion picture" on the paperback cover and shelf-end standie and get a lot of extra promo for the book.
Even if the movie sucked, people would be interested in the book, and if they liked it they'd be interested in my new stuff. They might even contribute to my Kickstarter to publish my next thing.
Do you really want a world where it's OK to publish someone else's work against their objections?
"Published?" They weren't selling copies of the script, they were making a Phase II episode out of it. That's a "derivative work", not "publishing."
Now, if you're asking if some of us want to live in a world where it's OK to make new works derivative of 40-year-old prior art, then the answer is OF COURSE WE FUCKING DO.
You do know that new studies show that mercury in tuna and other fish is non-toxic, as it is bound up into an insoluble salt with selenium, right?
You know that completely depends on the fish, right? Not just the species, but the individual fish Tuna overall have more selenium than mercury, but since mercury is environmental and bioaccumulative, the fish you're actually eating could have out-of-spec levels.
People still get diagnosed with mercury poisoning from fish consumption from time to time. It happens.
The rivers were polluted because no-one owned them, so there was no-one to prevent them from being polluted.
'Cause nobody who owns a river would eeeeeeever pollute it.
There is no child labour because of industrial revolution and capitalism, which increased productivity of the population to the point, when parents didn't have to send their kids to work.
So, why wasn't your much vaunted gov't there to protect them when they tried to exercise their freedoms?
They weren't doing anything, as the government was comparitively small and weak back then. As referenced directly in the post you responded to without reading all the words.
Really? Then why are American corporations measuring their success in terms of "profit per employee" lately? Last time anybody did that was prior to the Civil War...
Back when Henry Ford revolutionized industry, he realized right away that it was no one else's responsibility to hire potential customers. So the real question is: with so many people making stuff they can't possibly afford to buy, who the fuck is supposed to buy it?
That's the real reason behind the current economic collapse -- a culture of companies that are all trying to squeeze out a little extra profit by hiring people that can't quite afford the product they're producing. The result is more wealth, sure, but when everyone starts doing it, everyone has fewer customers. More wealth X fewer customers = reduced profits. So they try to squeeze harder, and they start using slave-labor metrics to guide their decisions, and the economy continues to become more and more suceptible to disruption as fewer and fewer people actually have the power to make choices in it. Seriously, what's the difference between Soviet bureaucrats and today's wealthy capitalists? Either way you've got 1% of the population planning the economy.
How is it carbon neutral, since the gas that gets released after that burning is Carbon dioxide.
Because every carbon molecule in a plant came from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Seriously. See that tree? The one that's all gigantic and solid? that motherfucker is MADE OF AIR. Mind-blowing, isn't it?
So when a plant burns or decomposes or whatever, and releases CO2 or methane or whateverthefuck into the atmosphere, it's really just returning what it borrowed years or decades ago.
This is different from pulling carbon that's been sequestered for half a billion years and then oxidizing it.
I genuinely don't believe pirates become customers.
FTFY. Man, you're coming thick and fast with the logical errors today. I mean, I'm pretty sure that people who've later bought stuff they copied first, are pretty convinced that they, themselves, exist. Just because you don't think you know any of those people doesn't mean they're figments of your imagination.
Measure it yourself! A cubit is one forearm. Put your hand on your forearm with the edge of your hand against your wrist, and then again where the edge of your thumb was. Should be close to ~2 hands-breadths per cubit.
So, the vessel was 20 hands-breadths across on the inside, which is how you'd bother to measure it if you wanted to know what could fit inside it, and 30 around the outside edge, which is just about the only way you could measure it with a string prior to the invention of masking tape, making the diameter at the outside 21 hands-breadths, which gives us a Biblical value for Pi at: 2.857. Erm.
Okay, so maybe they measured the circumference INSIDE and the rim-to-rim OUTSIDE, which is batshit insane but yields a much more believable 3.157.
When you refer to the "original" you are really talking about the master studio copy of the performance. _Everything_ else is a copy.
You said it: the master studio copy is a copy of the performance. It has no intrinsic value whatsoever. The performance has value, and the master studio copy is only valuable in that it provides access to the performance after the fact (which would otherwise only be possible with a time machine). Creation is valuable, and access is valuable, but copies are not. Back in the days of analog copies, access and copies were inseparably tied together, so selling access by selling copies was a great idea. But on a computer, access and copies aren't exactly the same thing anymore; as long as you have access, you can create and destroy copies at will without creating or destroying any value. As a result, selling copies has gone from being a great idea to being a really stupid idea, and not everyone has figured that out yet.
Since you appear to need it spelled out, the value is in the entertainment and enjoyment provided by the copy.
Incorrect. Value is in the entertainment and enjoyment provided by ACCESS TO THE DATA IN THE COPY. The copy itself has no discrete value whatsoever separate from the cost of it's medium and the effectiveness of its access.
As I've repeated a million fucking times on here, inside Computerland, creation has value, and access has value, but copies do not. So why are they still trying to sell us copies?
I think I can put this in simpler terms.
Could you try putting it in smarter ones?
Two people wish to be entertained for two and a half minutes. They both inexplicably love Sanjaya. Person A buys a track from Google Music. Person B copies the track from person A. They both independently listen to the music and are entertained. They have both received _value_. Person A paid $1 to receive that value.
Incorrect. Person A paid $1 to encourage further works by the same artist (lacking any sane business model through which to do so directly), or because he's afraid he might get punished for copying it for free. If he paid $1 for any other reason, he's an idiot, because what he bought isn't worth anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know enough about either side of the argument to figure it out. I did assume they "just already have it" and are banking on the movie bringing in more then they spend (that is, an investment of sorts).
*sigh*
This is what happens when people grow up playing MMOs that have NPC-driven economies. Unless your entire business is brand-new, MONEY COMES FROM CUSTOMERS.
On the other hand, technology is really lowering the bar. When we look at the level of stuff people are producing to put on youtube, there is definitely some hope. That and as said, social media and sites like kickstarter are nibbling away at what I see as the two big hurtles: exposure and financing.
Technology hasn't just moved the bar, it's fundamentally changed the playground. Pre-computer, it wasn't physically possible for people to form collective patronages to create works that could be distributed for free in the public domain, because cost-free distribution couldn't exist.
Now that it does, the entire concept of copyright is basically providing a monopoly right to sell something that no longer has any intrinsic value. This is not a condition that has ever existed before.
The only thing to nibble away at is people's habitual attachment to that now-obsolete model.
So of the 3 species in your vision, I think they are the species most likely to be picking daisies.
It's a false front to get us to trust them with our killer robots. Don't be fooled! They're complete bastards when humans aren't watching.
That's a baseless claim.
That's a strong statement, and sadly misguided.
Copyrights may annoy copycats, but the existence of copyrights in their current form do not stop anyone from creating new ideas.
You are put in danger by publishing anything that a sack of lawyers might later decide is too similar to something their client has published within the past several generations. If you don't see that as a chilling effect, you haven't tried to create anything lately.
And just to keep things relevant to the topic, producing an actual episode of a TV show from a fucking manuscript is ABSOLUTELY creating something new. The manuscript DID NOT come with sets, props, actors, acting performances, direction, visual effects, music, video editing, audio editing, foley, stunt-work, any of that shit. And yet, because the dialogue came from a particular script, none of that can be done, ever.
Sure, they could do all of those things with an original script. But what they WANT to do is Star Trek, because they think Star Trek is cool. They're inspired to do those things by Star Trek. Coming up with something that's
1) similarly cool, but ...is way, way more difficult than it should be, and it's that difficult entirely because of 3).
2) not a parody, because they want to do a serious take on it, and
3) sufficiently different from Star Trek that it's not lawyerable
Your idea of promoting artistic endeavors means giving artists shortcuts by "borrowing" public domain work.
That's how creativity works: you alter, recombine, and change things you've been exposed to. Copyright does encourage people to be clever about it, but that doesn't mean that good things can't be derived closely from public domain works. Unless you believe that no good movies have ever been based off of Shakespeare, fairy tales, mythology, or novels written a hundred years ago.
Humans are recombinant memetic mutation engines. We generally have to start with memes to mutate. "new original ideas" are a phantom, a myth. Only new works based on those ideas are real.
If the path of least resistance is simply taking someone else's IP and making some changes and reselling it, you don't think media corporations would almost exclusively be doing that now instead of trying to create new original ideas?
I take it they've never heard of Disney under that rock you've been living under? Seriously, though -- what you just described is NEARLY ALL media corporations are doing right now. John Carter of Mars. Battleship. Hunger Games. Wrath of the Titans. 21 Jump Street. That is the path of least resistance, and it's how things are already working. Do you know why? Because COPYRIGHT IS WHAT MAKES THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE PROFITABLE, that's why! You don't have to convince the public to patronize the creation of your neato new thing, because you've already taken their money by selling them copies of your last thing. And what's the safest bet as to what they'll give you money for next time? whatever they gave you money for before, that's what!
At least in most cases, you still need "the big guys" to make "the big money".
When a production company sets a budget for a director to produce a film, where does that money come from?
Think hard. I'm sure you'll figure out the answer soon.
(Hint: "They just... already had it, somehow..." is not the correct answer)
Greed, pure and simple. "If we can't use it, nobody can"
Pride, Envy, Sloth, and Wrath, yes, but not Greed so much.
Setting aside the awfully cute assumption you've made that Warner Brothers actually pays royalties to book authors without getting sued first, it would depend a lot on how long ago I wrote the best-selling book. I, for one, don't expect to be paid forever for something I did a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice, and I wouldn't turn the money down, but I also wouldn't go around thinking I was entitled to it. What have I done lately?
In fact, now that I think about it, if I was working on a new book and thought I could get it polished and shipped by the time the movie came out, I'd be totally cool with it. Because I could put "by Fned, author of [BEST SELLING BOOK], now a major motion picture" on the paperback cover and shelf-end standie and get a lot of extra promo for the book.
Even if the movie sucked, people would be interested in the book, and if they liked it they'd be interested in my new stuff. They might even contribute to my Kickstarter to publish my next thing.
Do you really want a world where it's OK to publish someone else's work against their objections?
"Published?" They weren't selling copies of the script, they were making a Phase II episode out of it. That's a "derivative work", not "publishing."
Now, if you're asking if some of us want to live in a world where it's OK to make new works derivative of 40-year-old prior art, then the answer is OF COURSE WE FUCKING DO.
but I can see why they'd want to protect ownership of a valuable property.
Me too, but what the fuck does ownership of property have to do with copyright?
(SPOILER ALERT: "Nothing.")
Oh, we definitely have the technology to solve those problems, we just recognize that it's morally wrong to do so.
I'm INTERESTED in your IDEAS and want to SUBSCRIBE to your NEWSLETTER
You do know that new studies show that mercury in tuna and other fish is non-toxic, as it is bound up into an insoluble salt with selenium, right?
You know that completely depends on the fish, right? Not just the species, but the individual fish Tuna overall have more selenium than mercury, but since mercury is environmental and bioaccumulative, the fish you're actually eating could have out-of-spec levels.
People still get diagnosed with mercury poisoning from fish consumption from time to time. It happens.
The rivers were polluted because no-one owned them, so there was no-one to prevent them from being polluted.
'Cause nobody who owns a river would eeeeeeever pollute it.
There is no child labour because of industrial revolution and capitalism, which increased productivity of the population to the point, when parents didn't have to send their kids to work.
"Shit, nobody's sending their kids to work anymore. Quick! Write up some child labor laws to make it look like we deserve the credit!"
So, why wasn't your much vaunted gov't there to protect them when they tried to exercise their freedoms?
They weren't doing anything, as the government was comparitively small and weak back then. As referenced directly in the post you responded to without reading all the words.
This is usually done not through hiring slaves.
Really? Then why are American corporations measuring their success in terms of "profit per employee" lately? Last time anybody did that was prior to the Civil War...
Back when Henry Ford revolutionized industry, he realized right away that it was no one else's responsibility to hire potential customers. So the real question is: with so many people making stuff they can't possibly afford to buy, who the fuck is supposed to buy it?
That's the real reason behind the current economic collapse -- a culture of companies that are all trying to squeeze out a little extra profit by hiring people that can't quite afford the product they're producing. The result is more wealth, sure, but when everyone starts doing it, everyone has fewer customers. More wealth X fewer customers = reduced profits. So they try to squeeze harder, and they start using slave-labor metrics to guide their decisions, and the economy continues to become more and more suceptible to disruption as fewer and fewer people actually have the power to make choices in it. Seriously, what's the difference between Soviet bureaucrats and today's wealthy capitalists? Either way you've got 1% of the population planning the economy.
How is it carbon neutral, since the gas that gets released after that burning is Carbon dioxide.
Because every carbon molecule in a plant came from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Seriously. See that tree? The one that's all gigantic and solid? that motherfucker is MADE OF AIR. Mind-blowing, isn't it?
So when a plant burns or decomposes or whatever, and releases CO2 or methane or whateverthefuck into the atmosphere, it's really just returning what it borrowed years or decades ago.
This is different from pulling carbon that's been sequestered for half a billion years and then oxidizing it.
I genuinely don't believe pirates become customers.
FTFY. Man, you're coming thick and fast with the logical errors today. I mean, I'm pretty sure that people who've later bought stuff they copied first, are pretty convinced that they, themselves, exist. Just because you don't think you know any of those people doesn't mean they're figments of your imagination.
Pirates are not always customers
FTFY. Go learn some set theory, fake nerd.
"...here in Ohio, you're paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas, 2-1/2 times what it cost when George Bush took office."
"...But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further."
I fail to see any hypocrisy here.
Measure it yourself! A cubit is one forearm. Put your hand on your forearm with the edge of your hand against your wrist, and then again where the edge of your thumb was. Should be close to ~2 hands-breadths per cubit.
So, the vessel was 20 hands-breadths across on the inside, which is how you'd bother to measure it if you wanted to know what could fit inside it, and 30 around the outside edge, which is just about the only way you could measure it with a string prior to the invention of masking tape, making the diameter at the outside 21 hands-breadths, which gives us a Biblical value for Pi at: 2.857. Erm.
Okay, so maybe they measured the circumference INSIDE and the rim-to-rim OUTSIDE, which is batshit insane but yields a much more believable 3.157.
No, it says three.
No, it doesn't. It gives a very specific ratio of 30:10, which is two significant digits (identical to 3.0:1.0)
This lesson brought to you by decimal places, which you SHOULDA OUGHTA LEARNT IN GRADE SCHOOL.
...giant women with inadequate blood circulation to the brain, inch tall men, ants the size of SUVs...
?
O wait I got the movie and the country mixed up again
The Mayans were probably not having a significant impact on their own weather
Or, y'know, they were.
(I smell some green cultist with an agenda).
Or, y'know, scientists.
The reality of the Mayan collapse was based on the confluence of population growth and soil depletion.
Or, y'know, not that. YMMV.
They already did: "Memetics."
Not anyone. A lot of us have understood how stupid they are from the get go.
Don't be inane.
You first.
When you refer to the "original" you are really talking about the master studio copy of the performance. _Everything_ else is a copy.
You said it: the master studio copy is a copy of the performance. It has no intrinsic value whatsoever. The performance has value, and the master studio copy is only valuable in that it provides access to the performance after the fact (which would otherwise only be possible with a time machine). Creation is valuable, and access is valuable, but copies are not. Back in the days of analog copies, access and copies were inseparably tied together, so selling access by selling copies was a great idea. But on a computer, access and copies aren't exactly the same thing anymore; as long as you have access, you can create and destroy copies at will without creating or destroying any value. As a result, selling copies has gone from being a great idea to being a really stupid idea, and not everyone has figured that out yet.
Since you appear to need it spelled out, the value is in the entertainment and enjoyment provided by the copy.
Incorrect. Value is in the entertainment and enjoyment provided by ACCESS TO THE DATA IN THE COPY. The copy itself has no discrete value whatsoever separate from the cost of it's medium and the effectiveness of its access.
As I've repeated a million fucking times on here, inside Computerland, creation has value, and access has value, but copies do not. So why are they still trying to sell us copies?
I think I can put this in simpler terms.
Could you try putting it in smarter ones?
Two people wish to be entertained for two and a half minutes. They both inexplicably love Sanjaya. Person A buys a track from Google Music. Person B copies the track from person A. They both independently listen to the music and are entertained. They have both received _value_. Person A paid $1 to receive that value.
Incorrect. Person A paid $1 to encourage further works by the same artist (lacking any sane business model through which to do so directly), or because he's afraid he might get punished for copying it for free. If he paid $1 for any other reason, he's an idiot, because what he bought isn't worth anything.