Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental stores.
Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
If Amazon is effectively positioning itself as the entire supply chain from author to reader, a lot of middlemen are going to get cut out, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing if they no longer serve a useful purpose but cream a bit off the top anyway.
However, given that Amazon have little credible competition for two major sales channels (on-line ordering of paper books, and distribution of e-books), there is a very real danger here that this series of events will follow:
Amazon will become an effective monopoly publisher and distributor in many countries.
Books with good quality content and good production values will then become a thing of the past, because quality costs a lot to produce, readers can't examine the books before they've paid for it the way they can in a bricks 'n' mortar book store, and not enough people will exercise any legal right of return they may have to make a difference to the policy.
More and more people will move to e-book readers because paper books just aren't nice any more.
It will no longer be possible to buy a book, lend it to a friend, or pass it on to your kids, because you will only ever be licensed to have the content, and Amazon can pull it right back out of your e-book reader any time they wish.
Rather like DRM and AAA games, we are in danger of being left with no-one producing good work that you can simply pay for and enjoy any more, just mediocrity with strings attached.
If all you're doing is trivial HTML, a bit of CSS for formatting, and maybe the occasonal effect with jQuery, sure, it all works much the same. But then if that's all you're doing, why do you need to update to the latest and greatest browser every five minutes?
I have spent much of the past few days trying to track down browser portability bugs with some software I work on, because we finally reached the point where you just couldn't run it properly on the latest version of anyone's browser without some sort of workaround or customisation. It was running quite happily a year ago.
One problem at a time, I've been confirming what we already suspected: all of these problems are down to regressions or arbitrary behaviour changes in the browsers and/or the extensions they use that are supposed to be backward compatible but just aren't in reality, and most of the breakage our customers see is because someone auto-updated something on their machine and broke it.
(I'm just waiting for someone now to pipe up with a holier-than-thou "So have you filed a bug report yet?" comment. If you're about to be that guy, please go annoy someone else. People pay me to write software, not to spend the next week or more producing minimal test cases for everyone in the browser industry who screwed up and then another couple of days trying to navigate yet another project's absurdly complicated bug reporting system. And right now, I have at least one confirmed bug against every major browser and several common extensions/plug-ins/JS libraries, so that "everyone in the browser industry" wasn't so much hyperbole as raw frustration.)
Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we just reviewed our browser support policy for one of our clients, and I'm afraid Firefox has now joined Chrome on the "not supported" list. We aren't developing a public web site, we're developing control software for equipment that clients pay very large sums of money for. If we say we support a particular browser, that comes with serious strings attached, and that in turn means there has to be a stable version with reasonably long-term support expected that we can test against before we're willing to sign our names under a support contract for it.
Forgive me for not replying to your entire post point by point, but I think that would get too long. I will address a few of the most important points, though.
Firstly, I would gently remind you that we are discussing UK copyright law here, not US. What is and isn't precedent in the US is irrelevant; as you have noted yourself, we have different rules in the UK/Europe.
Secondly, you appear to have read the words "business model" and failed to suppress a common knee-jerk reaction associated with Big Media dinosaurs that predate the Internet. Please read the rest of my sentence, and then read your reply, and then consider how in practice one would achieve the result you want, and then consider that you have just condemned the most likely method.
Thirdly, I apologise for not providing more details, but please understand that there are multiple scenarios where (a) there is original, creative data (not just a database, something that required serious work that no-one has ever made before) and (b) there are many ways to present that data (and presenting the data in different ways is a direct benefit to the interested public) and (c) freely copying enough of those ways will damage or negate the value of the rest, and finally (d) registering them in a way that takes "no more than a few minutes" each is the kind of administrative burden that kills start-ups before they get going, because a few minutes multiplied by hundreds or thousands of cases rapidly becomes a full-time job just doing red tape.
I apologise for being somewhat cryptic here, but I'm in Cambridge, UK, where there are many tech/new media start-ups, and I have privileged information about some of them, which I don't want to accidentally disclose on a public forum for obvious reasons. You may choose not to believe me, though you may also observe that I have no reason to lie, but in any case I'm not going to go any further for the sake of making a point on Slashdot. As a moderately close analogy, consider what would happen if a musical composer were required to register every recording of his composition that he or anyone associated with him ever made in order to guarantee the exclusive rights that composers enjoy today, or if a font studio had to register every demonstration page they ever made using a new font to secure the exclusive rights on the font files themselves.
Anyway, these start-ups are using new technologies to do interesting things that no-one has ever done before, and they are being founded and/or funded on the basis of a copyright system as set out in law today, and in particular, their efficiency relies on the presumption of copyright being held by default by the artist. I think that is sufficient to negate any arguments about how copyright as an incentive doesn't work and to call into question the argument that new works would still be created and distributed in the same quantity and quality under a registration regime.
As I said, advocating a centralised database and mandatory registration [un-sic] in order to secure copyright might work for the kind of middleman player that publishes or promotes a few major works, but it totally fails to account for these alternative business models, and those are where a lot of innovation is potentially going to happen in the next few years as we learn how to take advantage of all this wonderful technology we've built. If you cut off that evolution before it has a chance to find a reasonable balance between incentivising creation/distribution and minimising the limitations on the public, then you will simply kill all those start-ups I described overnight, or at the very least severely hurt their growth if they have enough reserves to fund the burden you're placing on them. Then no-one will benefit from the innovative work they are doing, which is hardly in the public interest, and contrary to the very purpose of copyright.
I'm a contractor, so I've worked on quite a few projects within a relatively short space of time. Few of them block prefetching techniques in practice as far as I know, but several of them keep quite careful metrics about user download performance, particularly those serving multimedia content of one kind or another, and they are certainly healthy enough for their intended user bases without prefetching.
I'm not arguing that prefetching should always be disabled, BTW, just pointing out a possible reason why some content providers might choose to do so. This is an industry where big players literally remove all of the unnecessary spaces from their HTML files or serve "broken" content with missing closing tags, because a small reduction in file sizes multiplied by a large number of visitors can still equal a significant amount of extra hardware and/or bandwidth you don't have to pay for.
Obviously that sort of argument doesn't apply to most smaller sites, but then I guess most smaller sites wouldn't know or care about blocking prefetching either.
Have you considered how much of an overhead mandatory regulation would introduce for businesses that offer many different ways to present the same set of underlying data? Maybe the data itself is valuable, requiring significant effort and/or investment to create/collect/organise. Maybe offering to present it in different ways according to the user's needs is also valuable. And yet, permitting a relatively small proportion of those different modes of presentation to be freely copied could effectively negate any meaningful protection, and thus any meaningful compensation to whoever provide the value in collecting and presenting the data. Meanwhile, registering each possible presentation individually would waste a huge amount of time for both the rightsholder and the registration service.
It's also doubtful whether such an obligation is even possible in Berne signatories without passing additional legislation to break with the convention, which has consequences of its own that many countries wouldn't like.
The centralised licensing database might be a neat idea for one-off major works like books or films. However, a lot of valuable content, and in particular several new business models that are genuinely doing things no-one has ever done before using new technologies but rely on the copyright framework for their economic viability, would be completely undermined. Any update to copyright law for the digital age should be promoting innovative business models that actually create value, not killing them before they even start.
If information about my browsing habits starts to become unusable then perhaps they will stop tracking it.
I'm about as pro-privacy as they come on this issue, but even I don't mind a web site doing analytics within its own domain to see which types of content are most popular so they can be prioritised, optimise navigation based on users actual needs, etc. It's the cross-site/cross-visit tracking that is creepy, IMHO, particularly if associated with any other data previously known only to some of those sites.
Because bandwidth costs money, in a nutshell. There's no point spending that money to provide a page the user may never see.
The same argument applies in reverse. We don't all have effectively unlimited broadband caps, and I will not thank Google if it starts randomly downloading pages with accompanying multimedia content to use up mine.
(My sites show up plenty fast enough on demand for my visitors, and the only sites I use where speed is a real problem would be unlikely to benefit much from this feature since I'd have to log in first to see the real content anyway.)
OK, I'm following most of that, but the legal definition of "reasonable" that you're implying seems to take into account only whether it would be acceptable to perform any search under the circumstances, without reference to the nature of that search. I don't see a lot of people objecting to walking through a metal detector. I do see people objecting to being virtually strip-searched. Both are conducted by airport security allegedly to look for prohibited items, but that's about where the similarity ends AFAICS. I don't see why prohibiting one, on the grounds that it goes way over the line of common decency, should necessarily prohibit the other, which we might consider a proportionate response to a known threat.
If you plead "not guilty", you need to provide some evidence that the police officer is lying about the broken tail-light, just as you would if the cop claimed to have seen you kill someone and you were pleading "not guilty".
The trouble with both arguments is the presumption that if it's your word against the cop's, the cop wins by default. That makes life convenient for the cops, but it's not as if there are no bent ones out there or they're somehow immune from making mistakes.
The cop should be required to provide evidence, beyond taking his word for it, that your tail light was faulty. It's not that hard to snap a photo or send a video from his dash cam.
I think you're reading more than I intended into the analogy. My point was merely that we (and the law) do recognise the concept of inalienable rights, things so important that to protect against abuse they cannot be given up even voluntarily. If flying is a necessity, but in order to fly someone must give up rights that are intended to be protected, then I would hope that demonstrated the need for those rights to be considered inalienable. I don't really see why there would be any ethical problem with holding that you can't waive your Fourth Amendment protections under any circumstances -- why should someone ever need to consent to an unreasonable search or seizure? -- but you're obviously more familiar with US law than me so perhaps there's a legal can of worms there that shouldn't be opened for some legitimate reason.
You make a big fuss, but your first and third points are exactly the ones I see people make over and over again in these discussions. Flying is effectively a necessity for many people in today's society, so those people have no realistic alternative but to consent to whatever conditions are demanded so they can fly. A right that you can be forced to give up is no right at all, and therefore the privacy rights at issue here must be placed above voluntary waiver to protect against abuse. Contrary to your post, there seems to be plenty of precedent for this: you can't consent to me picking up a knife and stabbing you to death, no matter what you say or who I am, for example.
The trouble is, at some point something has to become a check on the power of the representatives at any given time.
History teaches us that some principles are too precious to entrust to any representative government subject to the immediate political pressures of the day. We typically enshrine those principles in some sort of constitution or bill of rights, which is placed above the administration for the time being and beyond their power to overrule without going back to the people as a whole for their explicit consent to change the rules.
Some other system, independent of the way the administration of the day is brought to power, is required to intervene when that administration crosses a line they are not empowered to cross. In the US, as I understand it, that "other system" is supposed to be the judiciary, ultimately via the Supreme Court.
Which brings me neatly to my question: is it possible/appropriate under the US system to appeal such a ruling to a higher court, until you reach someone who could potentially rule that regardless of any need the TSA might feel to continue as they are they may not in fact do so because it violates the US Constitution?
- Does MS Office handle ODF completely without any formatting glitch? Can you modify it so it does?
No, but it doesn't matter. Exactly one person I work with regularly sends me ODF files. He's a fellow contractor, not a paying client, and he asked up-front whether I could read the format because he knew a lot of people can't. (Of course, those using more recent versions of MS software actually can read ODF files anyway, probably at least as well as OpenOffice reads DOC(X) files.)
Meanwhile, my paying clients all expect DOC(X) documents, so that's what I have to send them, and I need software that is going to get it right.
- Does MS Internet Explorer handle OGG natively? Can you modify it so it does?
Given that anyone can write and install their own codecs on Windows machines from a technical point of view, you're shooting yourself in the foot a bit with that one.
Meanwhile, from a legal point of view, you can't modify Firefox to support H.264 even if you want to, if you're in a jurisdiction that has software patents. (Not that I like the idea of software patents, but I run my business in a world where some places have them.)
- Do all the non-Autodesk commercial 3D packages support FBX flawlessly? Can you modify them so they do?
It doesn't matter. Pretty much everyone in the industry uses Autodesk software or something compatible with it. It is the undeniable, dominant, effectively universal standard. (See also: Adobe Creative suite.)
Meanwhile, it might be theoretically possible for Blender to be modified to support FBX, but in practice the fact is that in several years the entire Blender community have not managed to do it despite numerous calls for it to be done.
All of this shows up the basic flaw with the pro-FOSS "you can always modify it" argument: there isn't always some friendly developer willing to spend their time building whatever feature we want to have quickly and for free. While we could theoretically write it ourselves or pay someone to do it for us, in practice it is far cheaper to buy a commercial product that already does it instead of treating every software requirement as a bespoke programming job.
Just to quickly follow up on your data type issues:
"Lots of formatting" is a relative scale, and although I mentioned docx, it applies just as well to things like spreadsheets as well, of course. In any case, even basic things like tables and numbered lists go wrong with irritating frequency if you're trying to get LibreOffice and MS Office to interoperate, and those are hardly drivers for switching to a DTP package. The bottom line is that if you write a document in LibreOffice, you can't save it in an MS Office format and trust that it's fit to send to a client.
For H.264, I will respectfully disagree with you about the technical issues. We routinely see a factor of 2 difference in file size, and if you're running a system that sends many such files over the Internet, that's a huge difference in your bandwidth costs. It's true that there are theoretical software patent issues, but they are mostly overhyped, since pretty much all major video software works with H.264 just fine. Again, the bottom line is that the other browsers support it and Firefox doesn't, so Firefox users are potentially missing out. (Chrome was going to drop support for H.264 so the mighty G could push their own "open standard", but they seem to have quietly reversed that decision, or at least delayed implementation after the market pushed back.)
As for FBX, I promise you it is widespread in the industry: if you want to outsource anything from content creation to motion capture work, this is how people communicate. The Blender plug-in, last I checked, was a one-way, unreliable implementation of a small subset of FBX features, which isn't even close to good enough. This is almost a running joke in the community, and it has been for years.
Oh, and you're right about the GIMP. In fact, unless things have changed dramatically and very recently, none of the major FOSS graphics packages can make full use of modern OpenType fonts. (Also, for the GIMP, two words: layer styles.)
When the tools cost thousands of dollars it becomes a large barrier to entry for beginners and small shops.
That is undeniably true (speaking as someone putting his own hard-earned cash into a new company right now). On the flip side, good tools typically pay for themselves in greater productivity and better quality of results very quickly. If you don't want to spend a few thousand on the right equipment and software, then it's possible that you're in a very awkward position, but IME it's far more likely that either you have the wrong idea about something or your business plan isn't really viable.
I did download the high-quality PDF of the magazine. The idea is interesting, but without meaning to be harsh, they're actually a pretty good demonstration of why I would never rely on today's FOSS tools to do serious work. As a guy who takes some pride in his design work, I can immediately see dozens of little details where the magazine does something poorly but professional grade software would just get it right. I won't have a dig by listing them all, but as a couple of examples, several of the pages seem to be one big bitmap, and the typography is lacking basic elements like ligatures and true small caps. They do acknowledge the limitations of their font and they're open about how they're working to improve it, but the bottom line is they could drop a few hundred bucks on some pro fonts from Adobe, do their layout in InDesign, and get the job done right.
My vote for most unintentional self-defeating article: the one starting on page 40, which contrasts proprietary with FOSS approaches. The characterisation of proprietary software is pure FUD:
Graphic artists using propriety software might spend an afternoon opening a graphic in a big bulky graphics application just to convert its colourspace.
Seriously? This is followed by the wonderful:
Proprietary software typically has two answers to your problems: don't do it, or spend more money to be able to do it. This might apply to a specific file format you want to use, or an effect you want to achieve, or a way of working.
Actually, one of the main reasons we've spent so much on various big ticket proprietary software is precisely that they do just work with the industry standard data formats out of the box. If anyone thinks FOSS does better, please get back to me once Firefox can play H.264 video, Blender can work with FBX files, and LibreOffice can reliably interoperate with MS Word while working on docx files with non-trivial formatting.
The article about AdaptableGIMP on page 47 is another enlightening read, mainly for the interesting contrast between the approach it advocates and what you read in Microsoft blogs from the guys behind the Office UI redesign. There are two completely different mindsets at work there, but one is the product of a few people doing some basic experiments and the other is the product of a massive global study funded by the kind of money and drawing on the kind of resources that no FOSS project can access. As a Brit, I'm naturally inclined to root for the little guys, but as a businessman, I know which data I'd prefer to bet on.
It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.
Someone will be along shortly to bleat about how this will be fixed in Firefox 15 or something, because apparently it's now OK for anything that is mentioned in a footnote on a roadmap to be announced as if it's an existing feature in production builds, even if in reality it remains unproven and several months away from release at best. Don't believe me? Take a look at the subject of this discussion.
There might be a perfectly reasonable implementation of a feature that does what someone needs and works on one browser, even if it's not yet standardised. Probably at least half of today's (and tomorrow's) standard HTML and CSS started life that way.
Of course, there's nothing to say that anyone using Firefox will actually be using the new features, and indeed I suspect most won't, precisely because they aren't yet portable enough to be worth much to most web developers. That doesn't make everyone else immune from silliness like incompatibility with add-ons or breaking the basic typography engine, though.
Don't aim for one or a few browsers, aim for standards.
I'm sorry, but that argument doesn't get any more sensible as more people parrot it.
For one thing, there are no standards that cover a lot of the newer technologies yet, and if you're going to force updates every few weeks then "This is in beta and is subject to change" just doesn't cut it.
For another thing, even if there were, standards are only ever a means to an end, and that end is producing useful tools that help people get things done. Firefox can push for trendy new standards all it likes, but it's not written by super-human developers who can avoid regressions, and those regressions hurt.
But the people complaining don't want Firefox 4.1, they want Firefox 4.0.1 - aka fixes for security holes and other serious bugs, but with minimal chance of incompatibility
That's exactly it. The whole version numbering thing is a complete red herring. The point is that with such a rapid release cycle, and with the failure to distinguish between bug fixes and new feature releases/UI changes, it is no longer possible to aim at a stable, secure, standardised browser platform within an organisation if you rely on Firefox as your browser.
The trouble is, it doesn't really matter what legal agreements exist in theory. If the legal entity you had the agreement with ceases to exist, or goes into some kind of formal administration to wind it up, then what are you going to do if they don't comply, sue them for $0?
A more reliable and time-honoured approach in this sort of situation is to have a copy of what the buying party is supposed to get held in escrow by an independent third party, with that third party authorised to release the material if and only if the selling party shuts down. Without that level of independence, there's no way to ensure that anything useful happens in practice. As far as I'm aware, none of the major DRM-based download services have made such a provision.
Another obvious alternative is to just let people download DRM-free content anyway, on the grounds that if they're bothering to pay you rather than rip you off in the first place, most of them probably don't want to support lots of other people who didn't, and the die-hard rippers were going to find a copy anyway. Of course, it's easy to take this friendly approach in a thought experiment where finding out you're wrong doesn't cost you your livelihood...
The fundamental problem with this issue is that there is genuine merit on both sides of the argument.
It is clearly the case that certain Big Media organisations have engaged in legally dubious pricing practices over the years and have engaged in hostile lawsuits against innocent targets. It is clearly the case that privacy and freedom from unwarranted state intrusion into our lives is valuable and should be protected.
On the other hand, it is also the case that there are sick people in the world who really do exploit children and vulnerable people, and it is also the case that copyright infringement is illegal today, and for as long as that remains the case, the technical problems with enforcement created by the existence of the Internet require technical solutions on the same scale.
Fundamentally, I think the whole Internet anonymity vs. censorship argument is aiming at the wrong target. If you have to rely on Internet anonymity and technical measures to protect your ability to communicate, you have bigger problems, and it's time to move to the next box (soap, ballot, jury, ammo, in that order, as the saying goes). This is the case in several countries in the world today, but each of them is effectively in a state of civil war, so what is on the statute books doesn't really matter for the immediate future.
On the other hand, if we accept that the basics of civilised society, legitimate government and reasonable judicial processes are in place, I believe we should try to work within that system to fix the parts that let it down. In such a case, anonymity and darknets put those who know how to use them above the law, pure and simple, and not everyone who benefits is going to be a nice person.
Copyright isn't an unreasonable economic tool, and the idea of paying people a fair price if you benefit from their work is OK, but the current implementation of our copyright system is a joke and needs fixing so it has some kind of credibility with the general public. Thus we shouldn't allow large, commercial organisations with a track record of abusing the legal system anywhere near any kind of enforcement action without appropriate judicial process.
On the flip side, as a basic principle, we should have a judicial system where someone whose legal rights are being infringed can take some proportionate action against the infringer. A right you cannot defend is no right at all. The key is to build a process that relies on impartial scrutiny but can act in a timely fashion. And as I said, if we can't do that, we probably have bigger problems to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental stores.
Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
If Amazon is effectively positioning itself as the entire supply chain from author to reader, a lot of middlemen are going to get cut out, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing if they no longer serve a useful purpose but cream a bit off the top anyway.
However, given that Amazon have little credible competition for two major sales channels (on-line ordering of paper books, and distribution of e-books), there is a very real danger here that this series of events will follow:
Rather like DRM and AAA games, we are in danger of being left with no-one producing good work that you can simply pay for and enjoy any more, just mediocrity with strings attached.
If all you're doing is trivial HTML, a bit of CSS for formatting, and maybe the occasonal effect with jQuery, sure, it all works much the same. But then if that's all you're doing, why do you need to update to the latest and greatest browser every five minutes?
I have spent much of the past few days trying to track down browser portability bugs with some software I work on, because we finally reached the point where you just couldn't run it properly on the latest version of anyone's browser without some sort of workaround or customisation. It was running quite happily a year ago.
One problem at a time, I've been confirming what we already suspected: all of these problems are down to regressions or arbitrary behaviour changes in the browsers and/or the extensions they use that are supposed to be backward compatible but just aren't in reality, and most of the breakage our customers see is because someone auto-updated something on their machine and broke it.
(I'm just waiting for someone now to pipe up with a holier-than-thou "So have you filed a bug report yet?" comment. If you're about to be that guy, please go annoy someone else. People pay me to write software, not to spend the next week or more producing minimal test cases for everyone in the browser industry who screwed up and then another couple of days trying to navigate yet another project's absurdly complicated bug reporting system. And right now, I have at least one confirmed bug against every major browser and several common extensions/plug-ins/JS libraries, so that "everyone in the browser industry" wasn't so much hyperbole as raw frustration.)
Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we just reviewed our browser support policy for one of our clients, and I'm afraid Firefox has now joined Chrome on the "not supported" list. We aren't developing a public web site, we're developing control software for equipment that clients pay very large sums of money for. If we say we support a particular browser, that comes with serious strings attached, and that in turn means there has to be a stable version with reasonably long-term support expected that we can test against before we're willing to sign our names under a support contract for it.
Forgive me for not replying to your entire post point by point, but I think that would get too long. I will address a few of the most important points, though.
Firstly, I would gently remind you that we are discussing UK copyright law here, not US. What is and isn't precedent in the US is irrelevant; as you have noted yourself, we have different rules in the UK/Europe.
Secondly, you appear to have read the words "business model" and failed to suppress a common knee-jerk reaction associated with Big Media dinosaurs that predate the Internet. Please read the rest of my sentence, and then read your reply, and then consider how in practice one would achieve the result you want, and then consider that you have just condemned the most likely method.
Thirdly, I apologise for not providing more details, but please understand that there are multiple scenarios where (a) there is original, creative data (not just a database, something that required serious work that no-one has ever made before) and (b) there are many ways to present that data (and presenting the data in different ways is a direct benefit to the interested public) and (c) freely copying enough of those ways will damage or negate the value of the rest, and finally (d) registering them in a way that takes "no more than a few minutes" each is the kind of administrative burden that kills start-ups before they get going, because a few minutes multiplied by hundreds or thousands of cases rapidly becomes a full-time job just doing red tape.
I apologise for being somewhat cryptic here, but I'm in Cambridge, UK, where there are many tech/new media start-ups, and I have privileged information about some of them, which I don't want to accidentally disclose on a public forum for obvious reasons. You may choose not to believe me, though you may also observe that I have no reason to lie, but in any case I'm not going to go any further for the sake of making a point on Slashdot. As a moderately close analogy, consider what would happen if a musical composer were required to register every recording of his composition that he or anyone associated with him ever made in order to guarantee the exclusive rights that composers enjoy today, or if a font studio had to register every demonstration page they ever made using a new font to secure the exclusive rights on the font files themselves.
Anyway, these start-ups are using new technologies to do interesting things that no-one has ever done before, and they are being founded and/or funded on the basis of a copyright system as set out in law today, and in particular, their efficiency relies on the presumption of copyright being held by default by the artist. I think that is sufficient to negate any arguments about how copyright as an incentive doesn't work and to call into question the argument that new works would still be created and distributed in the same quantity and quality under a registration regime.
As I said, advocating a centralised database and mandatory registration [un-sic] in order to secure copyright might work for the kind of middleman player that publishes or promotes a few major works, but it totally fails to account for these alternative business models, and those are where a lot of innovation is potentially going to happen in the next few years as we learn how to take advantage of all this wonderful technology we've built. If you cut off that evolution before it has a chance to find a reasonable balance between incentivising creation/distribution and minimising the limitations on the public, then you will simply kill all those start-ups I described overnight, or at the very least severely hurt their growth if they have enough reserves to fund the burden you're placing on them. Then no-one will benefit from the innovative work they are doing, which is hardly in the public interest, and contrary to the very purpose of copyright.
I'm a contractor, so I've worked on quite a few projects within a relatively short space of time. Few of them block prefetching techniques in practice as far as I know, but several of them keep quite careful metrics about user download performance, particularly those serving multimedia content of one kind or another, and they are certainly healthy enough for their intended user bases without prefetching.
I'm not arguing that prefetching should always be disabled, BTW, just pointing out a possible reason why some content providers might choose to do so. This is an industry where big players literally remove all of the unnecessary spaces from their HTML files or serve "broken" content with missing closing tags, because a small reduction in file sizes multiplied by a large number of visitors can still equal a significant amount of extra hardware and/or bandwidth you don't have to pay for.
Obviously that sort of argument doesn't apply to most smaller sites, but then I guess most smaller sites wouldn't know or care about blocking prefetching either.
Have you considered how much of an overhead mandatory regulation would introduce for businesses that offer many different ways to present the same set of underlying data? Maybe the data itself is valuable, requiring significant effort and/or investment to create/collect/organise. Maybe offering to present it in different ways according to the user's needs is also valuable. And yet, permitting a relatively small proportion of those different modes of presentation to be freely copied could effectively negate any meaningful protection, and thus any meaningful compensation to whoever provide the value in collecting and presenting the data. Meanwhile, registering each possible presentation individually would waste a huge amount of time for both the rightsholder and the registration service.
It's also doubtful whether such an obligation is even possible in Berne signatories without passing additional legislation to break with the convention, which has consequences of its own that many countries wouldn't like.
The centralised licensing database might be a neat idea for one-off major works like books or films. However, a lot of valuable content, and in particular several new business models that are genuinely doing things no-one has ever done before using new technologies but rely on the copyright framework for their economic viability, would be completely undermined. Any update to copyright law for the digital age should be promoting innovative business models that actually create value, not killing them before they even start.
If information about my browsing habits starts to become unusable then perhaps they will stop tracking it.
I'm about as pro-privacy as they come on this issue, but even I don't mind a web site doing analytics within its own domain to see which types of content are most popular so they can be prioritised, optimise navigation based on users actual needs, etc. It's the cross-site/cross-visit tracking that is creepy, IMHO, particularly if associated with any other data previously known only to some of those sites.
Because bandwidth costs money, in a nutshell. There's no point spending that money to provide a page the user may never see.
The same argument applies in reverse. We don't all have effectively unlimited broadband caps, and I will not thank Google if it starts randomly downloading pages with accompanying multimedia content to use up mine.
(My sites show up plenty fast enough on demand for my visitors, and the only sites I use where speed is a real problem would be unlikely to benefit much from this feature since I'd have to log in first to see the real content anyway.)
OK, I'm following most of that, but the legal definition of "reasonable" that you're implying seems to take into account only whether it would be acceptable to perform any search under the circumstances, without reference to the nature of that search. I don't see a lot of people objecting to walking through a metal detector. I do see people objecting to being virtually strip-searched. Both are conducted by airport security allegedly to look for prohibited items, but that's about where the similarity ends AFAICS. I don't see why prohibiting one, on the grounds that it goes way over the line of common decency, should necessarily prohibit the other, which we might consider a proportionate response to a known threat.
Some people don't care about privacy until it affects them.
Perhaps you could get your mother and sister a nicely printed copy of the wisdom of Pastor Niemoeller for their next birthdays.
If you plead "not guilty", you need to provide some evidence that the police officer is lying about the broken tail-light, just as you would if the cop claimed to have seen you kill someone and you were pleading "not guilty".
The trouble with both arguments is the presumption that if it's your word against the cop's, the cop wins by default. That makes life convenient for the cops, but it's not as if there are no bent ones out there or they're somehow immune from making mistakes.
The cop should be required to provide evidence, beyond taking his word for it, that your tail light was faulty. It's not that hard to snap a photo or send a video from his dash cam.
Thanks for the reply.
I think you're reading more than I intended into the analogy. My point was merely that we (and the law) do recognise the concept of inalienable rights, things so important that to protect against abuse they cannot be given up even voluntarily. If flying is a necessity, but in order to fly someone must give up rights that are intended to be protected, then I would hope that demonstrated the need for those rights to be considered inalienable. I don't really see why there would be any ethical problem with holding that you can't waive your Fourth Amendment protections under any circumstances -- why should someone ever need to consent to an unreasonable search or seizure? -- but you're obviously more familiar with US law than me so perhaps there's a legal can of worms there that shouldn't be opened for some legitimate reason.
You make a big fuss, but your first and third points are exactly the ones I see people make over and over again in these discussions. Flying is effectively a necessity for many people in today's society, so those people have no realistic alternative but to consent to whatever conditions are demanded so they can fly. A right that you can be forced to give up is no right at all, and therefore the privacy rights at issue here must be placed above voluntary waiver to protect against abuse. Contrary to your post, there seems to be plenty of precedent for this: you can't consent to me picking up a knife and stabbing you to death, no matter what you say or who I am, for example.
The trouble is, at some point something has to become a check on the power of the representatives at any given time.
History teaches us that some principles are too precious to entrust to any representative government subject to the immediate political pressures of the day. We typically enshrine those principles in some sort of constitution or bill of rights, which is placed above the administration for the time being and beyond their power to overrule without going back to the people as a whole for their explicit consent to change the rules.
Some other system, independent of the way the administration of the day is brought to power, is required to intervene when that administration crosses a line they are not empowered to cross. In the US, as I understand it, that "other system" is supposed to be the judiciary, ultimately via the Supreme Court.
Which brings me neatly to my question: is it possible/appropriate under the US system to appeal such a ruling to a higher court, until you reach someone who could potentially rule that regardless of any need the TSA might feel to continue as they are they may not in fact do so because it violates the US Constitution?
- Does MS Office handle ODF completely without any formatting glitch? Can you modify it so it does?
No, but it doesn't matter. Exactly one person I work with regularly sends me ODF files. He's a fellow contractor, not a paying client, and he asked up-front whether I could read the format because he knew a lot of people can't. (Of course, those using more recent versions of MS software actually can read ODF files anyway, probably at least as well as OpenOffice reads DOC(X) files.)
Meanwhile, my paying clients all expect DOC(X) documents, so that's what I have to send them, and I need software that is going to get it right.
- Does MS Internet Explorer handle OGG natively? Can you modify it so it does?
Given that anyone can write and install their own codecs on Windows machines from a technical point of view, you're shooting yourself in the foot a bit with that one.
Meanwhile, from a legal point of view, you can't modify Firefox to support H.264 even if you want to, if you're in a jurisdiction that has software patents. (Not that I like the idea of software patents, but I run my business in a world where some places have them.)
- Do all the non-Autodesk commercial 3D packages support FBX flawlessly? Can you modify them so they do?
It doesn't matter. Pretty much everyone in the industry uses Autodesk software or something compatible with it. It is the undeniable, dominant, effectively universal standard. (See also: Adobe Creative suite.)
Meanwhile, it might be theoretically possible for Blender to be modified to support FBX, but in practice the fact is that in several years the entire Blender community have not managed to do it despite numerous calls for it to be done.
All of this shows up the basic flaw with the pro-FOSS "you can always modify it" argument: there isn't always some friendly developer willing to spend their time building whatever feature we want to have quickly and for free. While we could theoretically write it ourselves or pay someone to do it for us, in practice it is far cheaper to buy a commercial product that already does it instead of treating every software requirement as a bespoke programming job.
Just to quickly follow up on your data type issues:
"Lots of formatting" is a relative scale, and although I mentioned docx, it applies just as well to things like spreadsheets as well, of course. In any case, even basic things like tables and numbered lists go wrong with irritating frequency if you're trying to get LibreOffice and MS Office to interoperate, and those are hardly drivers for switching to a DTP package. The bottom line is that if you write a document in LibreOffice, you can't save it in an MS Office format and trust that it's fit to send to a client.
For H.264, I will respectfully disagree with you about the technical issues. We routinely see a factor of 2 difference in file size, and if you're running a system that sends many such files over the Internet, that's a huge difference in your bandwidth costs. It's true that there are theoretical software patent issues, but they are mostly overhyped, since pretty much all major video software works with H.264 just fine. Again, the bottom line is that the other browsers support it and Firefox doesn't, so Firefox users are potentially missing out. (Chrome was going to drop support for H.264 so the mighty G could push their own "open standard", but they seem to have quietly reversed that decision, or at least delayed implementation after the market pushed back.)
As for FBX, I promise you it is widespread in the industry: if you want to outsource anything from content creation to motion capture work, this is how people communicate. The Blender plug-in, last I checked, was a one-way, unreliable implementation of a small subset of FBX features, which isn't even close to good enough. This is almost a running joke in the community, and it has been for years.
Oh, and you're right about the GIMP. In fact, unless things have changed dramatically and very recently, none of the major FOSS graphics packages can make full use of modern OpenType fonts. (Also, for the GIMP, two words: layer styles.)
When the tools cost thousands of dollars it becomes a large barrier to entry for beginners and small shops.
That is undeniably true (speaking as someone putting his own hard-earned cash into a new company right now). On the flip side, good tools typically pay for themselves in greater productivity and better quality of results very quickly. If you don't want to spend a few thousand on the right equipment and software, then it's possible that you're in a very awkward position, but IME it's far more likely that either you have the wrong idea about something or your business plan isn't really viable.
I did download the high-quality PDF of the magazine. The idea is interesting, but without meaning to be harsh, they're actually a pretty good demonstration of why I would never rely on today's FOSS tools to do serious work. As a guy who takes some pride in his design work, I can immediately see dozens of little details where the magazine does something poorly but professional grade software would just get it right. I won't have a dig by listing them all, but as a couple of examples, several of the pages seem to be one big bitmap, and the typography is lacking basic elements like ligatures and true small caps. They do acknowledge the limitations of their font and they're open about how they're working to improve it, but the bottom line is they could drop a few hundred bucks on some pro fonts from Adobe, do their layout in InDesign, and get the job done right.
My vote for most unintentional self-defeating article: the one starting on page 40, which contrasts proprietary with FOSS approaches. The characterisation of proprietary software is pure FUD:
Graphic artists using propriety software might spend an afternoon opening a graphic in a big bulky graphics application just to convert its colourspace.
Seriously? This is followed by the wonderful:
Proprietary software typically has two answers to your problems: don't do it, or spend more money to be able to do it. This might apply to a specific file format you want to use, or an effect you want to achieve, or a way of working.
Actually, one of the main reasons we've spent so much on various big ticket proprietary software is precisely that they do just work with the industry standard data formats out of the box. If anyone thinks FOSS does better, please get back to me once Firefox can play H.264 video, Blender can work with FBX files, and LibreOffice can reliably interoperate with MS Word while working on docx files with non-trivial formatting.
The article about AdaptableGIMP on page 47 is another enlightening read, mainly for the interesting contrast between the approach it advocates and what you read in Microsoft blogs from the guys behind the Office UI redesign. There are two completely different mindsets at work there, but one is the product of a few people doing some basic experiments and the other is the product of a massive global study funded by the kind of money and drawing on the kind of resources that no FOSS project can access. As a Brit, I'm naturally inclined to root for the little guys, but as a businessman, I know which data I'd prefer to bet on.
As far as I can tell, neither Chrome nor IE has suffered from this to anything like the same extent for literally years.
Half the Internet has reported that bug.
It's often caused by having a page in one tab doing something slow (loading from a slow server, lots of JS, something like that) and locking up all the other tabs because they aren't properly independent in Firefox.
Someone will be along shortly to bleat about how this will be fixed in Firefox 15 or something, because apparently it's now OK for anything that is mentioned in a footnote on a roadmap to be announced as if it's an existing feature in production builds, even if in reality it remains unproven and several months away from release at best. Don't believe me? Take a look at the subject of this discussion.
There might be a perfectly reasonable implementation of a feature that does what someone needs and works on one browser, even if it's not yet standardised. Probably at least half of today's (and tomorrow's) standard HTML and CSS started life that way.
Of course, there's nothing to say that anyone using Firefox will actually be using the new features, and indeed I suspect most won't, precisely because they aren't yet portable enough to be worth much to most web developers. That doesn't make everyone else immune from silliness like incompatibility with add-ons or breaking the basic typography engine, though.
Don't aim for one or a few browsers, aim for standards.
I'm sorry, but that argument doesn't get any more sensible as more people parrot it.
For one thing, there are no standards that cover a lot of the newer technologies yet, and if you're going to force updates every few weeks then "This is in beta and is subject to change" just doesn't cut it.
For another thing, even if there were, standards are only ever a means to an end, and that end is producing useful tools that help people get things done. Firefox can push for trendy new standards all it likes, but it's not written by super-human developers who can avoid regressions, and those regressions hurt.
But the people complaining don't want Firefox 4.1, they want Firefox 4.0.1 - aka fixes for security holes and other serious bugs, but with minimal chance of incompatibility
That's exactly it. The whole version numbering thing is a complete red herring. The point is that with such a rapid release cycle, and with the failure to distinguish between bug fixes and new feature releases/UI changes, it is no longer possible to aim at a stable, secure, standardised browser platform within an organisation if you rely on Firefox as your browser.
The trouble is, it doesn't really matter what legal agreements exist in theory. If the legal entity you had the agreement with ceases to exist, or goes into some kind of formal administration to wind it up, then what are you going to do if they don't comply, sue them for $0?
A more reliable and time-honoured approach in this sort of situation is to have a copy of what the buying party is supposed to get held in escrow by an independent third party, with that third party authorised to release the material if and only if the selling party shuts down. Without that level of independence, there's no way to ensure that anything useful happens in practice. As far as I'm aware, none of the major DRM-based download services have made such a provision.
Another obvious alternative is to just let people download DRM-free content anyway, on the grounds that if they're bothering to pay you rather than rip you off in the first place, most of them probably don't want to support lots of other people who didn't, and the die-hard rippers were going to find a copy anyway. Of course, it's easy to take this friendly approach in a thought experiment where finding out you're wrong doesn't cost you your livelihood...
Now I remember why I opted out of letting my GP push my medical records to the Big Central Database.
Hopefully, that will still apply here.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that there is genuine merit on both sides of the argument.
It is clearly the case that certain Big Media organisations have engaged in legally dubious pricing practices over the years and have engaged in hostile lawsuits against innocent targets. It is clearly the case that privacy and freedom from unwarranted state intrusion into our lives is valuable and should be protected.
On the other hand, it is also the case that there are sick people in the world who really do exploit children and vulnerable people, and it is also the case that copyright infringement is illegal today, and for as long as that remains the case, the technical problems with enforcement created by the existence of the Internet require technical solutions on the same scale.
Fundamentally, I think the whole Internet anonymity vs. censorship argument is aiming at the wrong target. If you have to rely on Internet anonymity and technical measures to protect your ability to communicate, you have bigger problems, and it's time to move to the next box (soap, ballot, jury, ammo, in that order, as the saying goes). This is the case in several countries in the world today, but each of them is effectively in a state of civil war, so what is on the statute books doesn't really matter for the immediate future.
On the other hand, if we accept that the basics of civilised society, legitimate government and reasonable judicial processes are in place, I believe we should try to work within that system to fix the parts that let it down. In such a case, anonymity and darknets put those who know how to use them above the law, pure and simple, and not everyone who benefits is going to be a nice person.
Copyright isn't an unreasonable economic tool, and the idea of paying people a fair price if you benefit from their work is OK, but the current implementation of our copyright system is a joke and needs fixing so it has some kind of credibility with the general public. Thus we shouldn't allow large, commercial organisations with a track record of abusing the legal system anywhere near any kind of enforcement action without appropriate judicial process.
On the flip side, as a basic principle, we should have a judicial system where someone whose legal rights are being infringed can take some proportionate action against the infringer. A right you cannot defend is no right at all. The key is to build a process that relies on impartial scrutiny but can act in a timely fashion. And as I said, if we can't do that, we probably have bigger problems to worry about.