Overall, the text still hints at a global DMCA with notice-and-takedown
The safe harbour and takedown notice system in the DMCA is one of the few sensible aspects. There has to be some practical mechanism for copyright holders to enforce their legal rights, but it shouldn't be powerful enough for vested interests to abuse the system and suppress legitimate distribution. The takedown notice and counter-notice system is as fair a balance as anything I've seen suggested.
The point here isn't that I like a FPS while my partner likes a puzzler. The point is that I like high-end, big production values games that are probably quite expensive to make and buy, and that I only look for a few of these titles per year, often with epic settings or on-line play that give replay value. Meanwhile, the other half plays quite a lot of different puzzle games, all fairly quick to make and cheap to buy.
That means we look for our games in completely different places. I read reviews of AAA titles, and then buy them from a store of one kind or another. She downloads a lot of trials from smaller companies, and her typical purchase is a full version of something where she's played the demo for a while and enjoyed it, probably downloaded from the same small company that provided the demo in the first place. I wouldn't even know where to find most of the places she gets her games, and vice versa.
We also have very different budgets. I'm buying relatively new AAA titles, and expect to pay a significant amount for a game, and possibly some more for expansions down the line if they're good. She's buying cheap and cheerful titles for a few pounds at most, mostly as impulse purchases.
If you're selling games, you might reasonably be aiming for either of us, but it's very unlikely that you're aiming for both of us at the same time. We represent entirely different market segments.
The thing I find a little surprising is that while neither of us pirates games and we both pay for what we play, I am by far the less profitable target customer these days. I am so fed up with being disappointed by high-end games — not because of the game itself but because of instability, DRM and the like — that I just don't buy many of them any more, and only those I can check out properly in advance. On the other hand, puzzlers tend to just work on any hardware from the last decade, don't routinely crash, and rarely if ever come with obnoxious DRM schemes that require CDs in the drive, shutting down other processes, or other such nonsense. That makes throwing a few pounds at one you enjoy a fairly safe bet. I'm sure there's a lesson for games publishers in there somewhere.
I like long-term games with depth, like RPGs with good single player storylines. I also like things like FPSes and RTSes, but the back-stories to these are mostly irrelevant and it's the game play and immersion that really count. There are significant exceptions and cross-overs with other genres, of which Deus Ex remains the most obvious example to me and perhaps things like Oblivion also count, but most FPS or RTS games are pretty straight-up these days.
In all cases, these are fairly high-end titles. I only buy a few of them, and even fewer these days, since anything with any sort of DRM that's liable to screw up my system or stop me playing in future or anything that tries to push extra-cost downloadable content on me is an automatic "no", which rules out a lot today. High production values count: I want good graphics, good voice acting, a well-planned story, spectacular effects, etc.
My better half, on the other hand, enjoys puzzle games. Most of them are very simple in concept, their graphics are pretty rather than spectacular, and their background music is OK but hardly going to win awards. A group of kids with the right backgrounds in programming and arts could put one of these together with a few days of hard work.
If you don't think we're completely different market segments, or that we look for games in different places and with different goals going into the store/web site/whatever, you're crazy.:-)
The title of this slashdot discussion is "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?", and the consensus so far is "No, unless you count works that never got bankrolled due to unfounded fears of the impact of piracy".
I'm not sure we have any sort of consensus yet. If we do, it certainly isn't what you wrote there. You can't just dismiss the idea that some works don't get made as "unfounded fears" without any evidence.
It is always the case that an artificial restriction like copyright is damaging in the immediate term. We could make the world a better place for the general population tomorrow by abolishing copyright this evening, and it will always be so.
The whole point of systems like copyright is to provide an incentive, so that someone is still creating works for us to enjoy the day after tomorrow. You are just dismissing this effect as if it is an incidental detail, but it is the whole point of the system.
As other points in this thread have mentioned, they are not being hurt in any statistically significant manner by piracy and it might actually be helping their cold-byte sales.
Unless you know a lot of math, you might want to be careful throwing around terms like "statistically significant" in this company.
Getting more specific, no-one has really addressed even the examples I mentioned in my original post, of games studios that made good stuff having to fold after one turkey or sci-fi productions with potential that still got canned before having a serious chance to establish themselves.
Even though artists can now more easily direct-market, the studios still have vast reservoirs of cash, a warchest of government-backed IP, and the lawyers to sick on virtually anyone they please.
Are you by any chance based in the US? If so, I'm sorry for you, because your legal system is basically a joke in this respect. In many other jurisdictions, however, courts can and often do award costs to the winning party, which means if Big Media want to bring a whole bunch of fishing expedition cases against Little Guys, they have to accept that every one of those cases is likely to get defended and wind up paying out a small but significant level of costs.
Consider the parallels with organisations like the RIAA. They have been successfully getting settlements for a few thousand dollars out of many people in the US, because the legal system makes fighting those cases unreasonably difficult for most people. Such a strategy has not been employed by equivalent groups in any other jurisdiction, as far as I am aware. Even in the US, some targets have started fighting these cases, while circling vultures have started talking about whether SLAPP and RICO laws could be applied to the media groups.
Not to mention a majority of the public mindshare as to whether IP is rented or owned by the rights holders, and whether that licence had ought to be revoked.
I'm not sure what you meant by that. IME, even those who do obey copyright law as it stands often have little respect for Big Media and consider that they have been ripping off customers for years. I don't think many tears would be shed if the big record labels started dying off tomorrow, and the ones that survived only did so by negotiating much fairer contracts with their artists and other staff at the expense of corporate profits.
The lesson they are trying to teach here is not that "copying copyrighted works is bad" but that "'downloading' is bad".
That argument just doesn't make sense. The larger legal download services and innovative alternatives like Spotify are basically all backed by either Big Media or other powerful and established commercial interests. Why would these groups to discourage downloading, when they've finally figured out that there is a lot of money to be made in offering consumers what they actually want in this area?
To the naive these sound identical, but the delta is precisely the business model of independent and copyleft artists.
The delta also includes possibly the fastest growing revenue stream for traditional music publishers.
Not the only alternative of course, but you did only ask for one: Assurance Contracts.
That is one of the more promising ideas, in that it at least has some theoretical basis and economic credibility. I would worry for the amount of infrastructure required to handle the escrow or similar arrangements; very few systems based on paying small amounts in non-trivial ways via third parties have been successful. Perhaps that could be resolved by establishing dedicated third parties, much as we have with credit card companies today.
Using artificially restricted supply to inflate demand always has a negative macroeconomic effect. In our case, we end up with copyrights being traded as property so that both artist and consumer suffer. Perhaps the intent is to spread the cost over portions of the public who appreciate the work, but the effect is the indentured servitude of most popular artists to their financiers.
But the same advances in technology that allow widespread duplication at near-zero cost also make it possible for artists with the necessary skills to create and share their works on a large scale without relying on middlemen who do not offer enough in return to justify their involvement (and their cut of the profits). The indentured servitude model and Big Media middlemen that add little value need to die, but I think market forces are already closing in on them anyway.
I don't know.. this part does sound like 19th century slave owners arguing that the world would have no T-shirts if they were not allowed to protect their human-property rights. First off, we have more T-shirts than ever before and secondly I see tossing my T-shirt or not watching blockbusters as small potatoes in the face of allowing the entire domain of human knowledge to continue to be sliced up and auctioned.
I look at this very simply: there is nothing in copyright law that requires someone making creative work to build their business model around it. If other models were similarly or more effective as an incentive, copyright law doesn't prevent someone from adopting them. Given that only a few alternative models have been tried seriously, and almost none of those have gained any traction at all in competitive commercial markets, that is at least a fairly strong suggestion about the real effectiveness of the known alternatives to a copyright-based system.
Sorry, my previous post wasn't clear. I suspect that you and I are indeed in general agreement, and the first half of my post was meant to sum up where our argument naturally leads. The second half of that post was aimed at the people in this discussion who don't accept that argument, and was meant as a generic "you", not to imply that you personally were dismissing anything.
And how many computer programmers do you think are going to get paid, if anyone can just take their code and do what they want with it for free?
Part of the problem with this debate is that some people have a knee-jerk reaction to fire off cheap shots about overpaid actors or record labels overcharging for CDs for years, or just playing live and charging admission. The problem is, the overwhelming majority of creative content produced in the world is not big budget Hollywood movies or albums from high profile, highly paid recording artists. In fact, most people who work in creative industries are in supporting roles and don't directly create anything themselves, they either support work mainly created by others in some way (for example, in a research or editorial capacity), or they support the mechanics that gets those works into the hands of the general population so they can benefit from each work (for example, working in the print room at a publisher, or handling customer support in a software business).
And then having done bad stuff to the model of "buying bytes", what is going to pay the rent of the people who did all the hard work up-front to work out what those bytes should be?
The benefit of copyright in the modern era isn't that it allows charging for each copy of a product with near-zero marginal production cost, it is that it allows substantial initial development costs to be amortised over the entire consumer base, so each individual consumer only needs to contribute a small amount even though a product might cost a great deal to make.
If you casually dismiss the copyright model, you'd better have a good alternative that still allows that amortisation one way or another, or a whole lot of stuff you like isn't going to get made any more.
This is usually the point where a few trolls fire off the usual cheap shots, but having had this discussion with several people in the past on this forum and elsewhere, it's pretty rare that anyone has even a credible alternative model to suggest. Do you?
The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
Well, depending on your interpretation, that's either a tautology or assuming facts not in evidence. Were you going for pointless, or just illogical?
Either way, it is remarkable how quickly people on this particular forum trot out the old "they wouldn't have bought it anyway" mantra, without a shred of evidence to support that claim and despite the obvious logical flaws in the argument. Clearly the pirates valued the material enough to bother ripping it and playing/watching/listening to it the first time. I defy anyone to claim that all illegal downloaders then immediately delete anything they aren't going to buy legally after "sampling" it once. Pretty much all of the serious studies of pirate behaviour and motivation have found a substantial proportion of people who agree that what they are doing is unethical as well as illegal, and freely admit that they are only doing it because they believe they will get away with it.
Basically, you don't have an iota of evidence to back up your claim, and you are just trying to rationalise illegal behaviour and allowing law-abiding citizens to subsidise law-breaking freeloaders.
I thought "art" was made because the author had some sort of passion or talent for what they were doing.
I think you're trying to shift the topic from creative work in general to "art" specifically. Sorry to disappoint you, but a great deal of creative work produced and mass-distributed in the world today is made by people who do it to pay the rent. In some cases, those people are lucky enough to work in an industry where they also get to enjoy their jobs.
For your first point those people paying more than their "fair share" in media would not get any price break if more product sold.
No, they probably wouldn't. That point is an ethical one.
There is a useful rule of thumb you can use to decide whether a behaviour you advocate, such as illegally copying content without paying for it, is likely to be unethical: if everyone tried to act in the same way, would your overall position/argument still be reasonable, or would bad stuff happen?
I think we can all agree that if everyone just ripped material and no-one paid anything, acting as the freeloaders do today, then all the arguments about free distribution being useful advertising are worth about as much as millions of zero-revenue subscribers at a dot com start-up. (There would still be some validity in arguments about raising the profile of artists who also perform live and can charge for admission, but that represents only a small fraction of the people who work in creative industries.)
If the quality is good enough then some people will pay for it.
Chances are, some people also will not.
We know that artistic works can be commercial successes based only on those who do play by the rules and pay for what they take. If this were not true, all kinds of businesses would have failed already. But this is missing the point, twice.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
Secondly, we do not know how much better the incentive would be to create and share more and better works in future if everyone contributed in return for what they take today. Although it's popular to think of Big Media as The Enemy(TM) around these parts, the reality is that a lot of commercial creative work is made and distributed by much smaller organisations, which use a lot of the money they bring in just to pay the salaries and invest the rest in a very few new projects, often only one at once. In a lot of cases, the entire business at risk of failure if any of those new projects doesn't make it, so relatively few new projects are attempted. Instead, much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.
If you doubt this, consider the number of game studios over the years that have produced a string of enjoyable titles but not survived a single bad one. Of those that have survived for a long time, ask yourself what proportion of their recent titles are new and how many are just the latest in a franchise with little real change from the last one. Ask yourself how many popular sci-fi shows that plenty of geeks enjoy still get cancelled in their infancy, because they don't bring in enough money almost immediately for those who bankroll them to continue writing the cheques until the series is established.
Now ask yourself, if there was both more money in the bank following a previously successful product and a greater potential profit from any new project, does this make it more or less likely that new and innovative products will be given more of a chance?
Perhaps not, but it does give him an interest in the future direction of the industry besides his scientific research. When presenting this kind of article, particularly in a field notorious for industrial political lobbying and trying to avoid disclosure as GM foods, it makes a very bad impression if such ties aren't declared openly.
So in other words we should wait until they cripple or kill someone?
Well, no, that's not what I wrote at all, is it?
But if you couldn't make a convincing case in a court that the manner of someone's driving is actually dangerous or inconsiderate, you're just another guy who doesn't like other people doing something, and you deserve as much weight in law, which is to say none at all.
Live performance is all very well for certain types of artist: singers, instrumentalists and actors, basically.
But what about everyone else who is part of a creative industry, currently supported by copyright? How does a book author sell a live performance? An investigative journalist writing for a newspaper or magazine? A software developer? A cartographer? A graphic designer? A composer, such as the subject of this debate? A game level designer? A movie SFX guy?
Now, how about all the supporting roles that are not themselves creative, but make the artistic works of others better? An editor or technical proofreader? A researcher? A sound engineer? A software QA guy? A web usability expert?
This is the fundamental problem with the "just perform it live" argument: other than musicians and actors, it basically doesn't apply to anyone, yet there are valuable creative works produced or enhanced by numerous other kinds of artists and supporting staff.
As for distribution for promotional purposes: well, that's fine up to a point, but eventually there has to be some way of making money or it's just a glorified pyramid scheme. Live performance isn't that way for most of the people I mentioned, nor is expecting the whole world to be funded by advertising. (Do you have any idea how much of the advertising industry is based on promoting artistic works?)
So, as I said before, we basically come back to the social problem: we need a mechanism for those who enjoy works to support those who create those works. That mechanism isn't copyright in its current widely abused and over-legislated state, but I have yet to see a convincing argument for how a world without that incentive will be a better place in the long run.
My difficulty with this argument is always the same: it essentially implies that copyright-based business models as a way to incentivise the creation and distribution of new artistic works are not viable. That may be true as long as ripping people off is socially acceptable. However, there is little evidence that the same quality and quantity of works will be produced without such a commercial incentive. Artists still have bills to pay, and even the best artists can produce better work given time to plan, refine and edit their material with a roof over their head than they will produce ad-hoc in their spare time while holding down another job to pay for the food at dinner.
I would suggest that the real problem is that technology has outpaced social models: most people are not in the position of directly depending on sales of artistic work for their income, and view copying as a victimless crime. This is, to some extent, because they feel they have been ripped off by Big Media middlemen for years and see turnabout as fair play. But of course it's not just Big Media middlemen who lose out, because these industries also provide for millions of hard-working people, many of whom contribute to making better products for us all to enjoy but will never be in the limelight themselves. I don't think the average person really thinks through the consequences of breaking the copyright model in the Internet age, even if they would miss the benefits of all those people working in creative industries were they not there any more because there was no longer enough money to pay their salaries.
Perhaps in future, we will evolve some other model or models, where those who put in hard work that contributes to valuable artistic output can be recognised and rewarded by those who enjoy the results. I think many people, even in today's world where bought-and-paid-for copyright laws no longer reflect the original spirit of the idea, still feel that it's fair to pay someone who creates work they find useful or enjoyable. Maybe copyright is too far down the path of lost credibility and something newer that is more socially acceptable needs to take over. But no-one has really come up with that something yet, and I wish a few more people thought through the long-term consequences of just ignoring copyright until we have a better replacement.
If he's a composer, he'd makes his money writing music and selling it to performers.
But this is exactly his point: he is a composer, Eleanor/Brenna is a performer, and because she is ripping his music illegally instead of paying him for it, he doesn't get to sell it.
It sounds like he is already making a loss on some of his activities, just to get his music out there. How is this fair on him, as the guy who is actually putting in the effort to make something valuable and contributing it to society?
It's not like he was asking for an obscene amount of money for a legit copy of the sheet music: any one person wanting a copy only has to pay up about $4. It sounds like this guy is a practising artist who makes new work on a continuing basis and derives a significant fraction of his income from those little payments. This is exactly the sort of scenario that copyright is supposed to promote, but the whole economic foundation of the arrangement breaks if one side doesn't keep up their end of the deal.
If it were left up to common sense, it would have to be proved that a driver was driving dangerously - ether before (to prevent) or after (to late) an accident.
Well, yes, that's rather the point. I think it should be required to show that if you are going to punish someone under the law, the behaviour concerned is genuinely a problem. If that isn't clear enough from plod following behind a car with the dashboard camera filming it for a few seconds before pulling the car over, perhaps the driving wasn't really that dangerous after all?
As to not liking drivers who go fast - well, why should someone come into my street, where I live, and my children walk, and be allowed to drive at a speed that puts us at risk.
Flippant answer: Because statistically, most drivers don't want people driving above a very low speed in their road, yet most drivers admit to going significantly faster elsewhere. There is a very high probability that your position is hypocritical.
Slightly more legal answer: You are doing what is called "assuming facts not in evidence". You haven't shown that driving at any given speed does in fact put you or your family at risk. We get this a lot with cyclists around here, a certain group of them forever whining about how they are persecuted by other road users doing dangerous things, yet statistically cycling is pretty safe in this city and the behaviours that certain vocal cyclists don't like do not actually seem to cause any accidents in practice.
This is the problem with the libertarian / free to do what you want argument. A lot of people do not act with common sense and put others at risk. Without clear mandated safety requirements, people will take risks and it will be difficult to stop them. Not having some rules to control behavior, we wind up having to live with the standards of the least responsible.
And again with the facts not in evidence...
It is a fact that most drivers are pretty good at judging a reasonable speed for the conditions. For example, while we have 20mph areas in my city and the normal limit is 30mph by default, most drivers will slow down to well under 20mph on residential roads with lots of parked cars even when the limit does not require this, while most drivers will ignore the 20mph limit imposed by NIMBY-pandering councillors on one road because the locals didn't like having cars going past their houses at normal speeds and used the presence of a school nearly a mile down the road to "justify" a lower limit.
Of course, there are always idiots who will not drive according to common sense, but then chances are they won't drive according to any arbitrary speed limit you pick either. The solution to this problem is to have actual police officers in actual police cars who can go on patrol and pull over the genuinely dangerous guys to get them off the road. No fixed position speed camera is ever going to do that.
As for your off-topic cheap shot at BP, some of us are getting a bit fed up of hearing a nation that routinely drives massive vehicles with vast engines consuming huge amounts of oil and causing horrific environmental damage whinging because a company on whom they have relied to feed their addiction for decades got something wrong and now they see that the engineering involved is non-trivial and can go wrong. While the current situation is environmentally very bad, and the managers who appear to have slacked off on safety systems and the regulators supposedly watching them need to be held accountable, it is actually quite remarkable that such incidents are so rare, given the engineering involved.
Of course, Deepwater Horizon is also a great example of how having clear rules doesn't help much if the guys who are supposed to be following them just don't care. What was needed there wasn't more rules, it was someone on the ground to assess what was really happening and take immediate action to get the dangers fixed.
Of course quotas and such are silly, just as automated machines with fixed limits are silly. Likewise, giving any form of reward to those enforcing the rules (such as letting them keep any money raised in fines) is just foolishly building corruption into the system.
Still, biased as humans are, it is well established that most drivers do a decent job of judging appropriate driving style under the conditions at the time, and certainly a better job than most lawmakers setting down general rules from an office miles away three years earlier. Thus we see quite a few jurisdictions adopting things like the 85% rule as their official standard for setting speed limits.
Likewise, my personal experience has been that traffic police officers are, for the most part, very level-headed when it comes to deciding who to go after and who to leave alone. I've always assumed this comes from being the guys who see the consequences of accidents, and therefore caring a lot more about preventing those accidents than enforcing arbitrary rules.
The problem with policing the roads is that what constitutes safe and responsible driving does depend so much on the context. There are suburban roads near my home that would be perfectly safe to travel at 40-50mph at some times, while I probably wouldn't exceed half that speed at other times. Safe driving speeds on some types of road need to drop substantially at night due to the limited visibility. Some roads have specific times of day when they are much higher risk, such as at the end of the school day when there are both lots of young children around and lots of parents' vehicles parked up at the roadside that can hide dangers. There are high speed roads near my home city that have a terrible accident record because people push the speed up during the rush hour when congestion makes it unsafe, yet where doing well over the legal speed limit would be perfectly safe at night when the road is empty and the design means typical car lights would give sufficient visibility.
Our one-size-fits-all speed limits take into account exactly none of these factors, and nor do the machines that enforce those limits. Good drivers do, and so do good police officers. I just wish the law reflected that, so that instead of having lots of technical offences, we could prosecute (properly, in court) those drivers who are actually dangerous/inconsiderate.
This is exactly the problem with modern laws and automated enforcement: everyone slips up momentarily from time to time according to some artificial, precise benchmark. Someone who is generally aware of their vehicle's capabilities and what is going on around them, and who drives at a reasonable speed under those conditions, may still find that they have drifted above the legal limit on occasion, not least because the legal limits in this country are frequently set considerably lower than is justified on any grounds other than "we don't like drivers who go fast". This, by the way, was first explained to me by my driving instructor, an ex-police officer whose husband was still a top-class police driver.
This didn't used to matter, when those same police officers with the same awareness of reality were responsible for enforcing speed limits. If you were doing 80mph on a clear motorway, no-one cared. If you were doing 80mph weaving in and out of traffic on a crowded motorway, you'd get pulled over. Common sense was the rule.
Today, when automated enforcement and fixed penalty notices allow for monitoring every car on numerous occasions during a single journey and penalising even harmless transgressions with no scope for common sense, the situation is different.
By the way, just in case you think this is sour grapes: I have been driving for years, completely clean licence, never pulled over, no RTAs. I just don't like being forced to spend more time watching my speedo and less time watching the road around me because machines have no awareness of reasonable behaviour or context. I would rather road traffic laws provided serious deterrents/punishments for those who were actually doing something harmful, and left everyone else alone -- like any other law, really.
Judging from the responses on the Your Freedom web site so far, this is a very common sentiment in our society today. We're fed up with the nanny state interfering with normal people's everyday lives, and we just want them to stop and go away now, please.
Not everyone could do this, but a lot of people can. There's a huge amount that the government and universities could do to make this easier, but sadly don't. They still compile statistics as if the only two options are 'working for a corporation' or 'claiming the dole,' so a lot of people never explore alternative options.
I'm glad to see someone pointing this out. Thank you.
In industries such as large-scale manufacturing, people need to work in groups and have expensive premises and equipment before they can do anything useful and earn money. A typical employment relationship reflects this: the individual members of the group get a fixed deal, but this represents only a modest fraction of the profits at a successful business, with the employer who provided the opportunity and took the risks to get everything set up claiming the lion's share.
None of that applies in knowledge-based industries such as software development. There are few good reasons for any reasonably capable developer to work as anyone's employee.
Like TheRaven64, I wish the careers services at universities who do produce graduates with reasonable skill and experience would explain this, before their talented people all go off to work in cubicle farms for The Man their whole lives.
Signed, A guy who got off the treadmill a lot later than he should have
...balk at Help Desk offers because they think it's beneath them.
For graduates who are trained to a reasonable level of knowledge and skills, it often is beneath them, in the sense that they are capable of doing much more demanding (and better compensated) things.
Unfortunately for them, there are already many existing workers in the market with equally good paperwork and several years of real world experience behind them. Blame the dot-com boom for starting the trend, the general push in the UK to get everyone and his brother to do a university degree for perpetuating it, and the way that we're a relatively young industry and few people hitting retirement age and leaving the employment pool today are in IT for not closing the cycle.
In that context, most employers are going to go for the proven, experienced candidate over the hot shot graduate without a second thought. There used to be a reasonable argument about taking on fresh grads rather than people with a year or two of experience because then you could train people in your own organisation's way of doing things without having to break old habits. However, when you can hire people who have been "downsized" after 5 or 10 years in the business for not much more money than a graduate would be claiming a year or two down the line, even that argument for hiring grads is weak.
There are just too many people with these qualifications, at a time when not enough paying jobs require them.
Antagonising a police officer and being a dick to them will get you slapped with a 'Intentional harassment, alarm or distress' or a 'breach of the peace' charge which will result in you being arrested and probably fined or cautioned.
It seems to me that if the video going around is representative, it was not the 16-year-old freelance photographer who was being antagonistic. In fact, for a 16-year-old under those circumstances, I think he was impressively calm and polite. Rather, it appears to have been the police officers, including at least one senior officer, who were the trouble-makers. They appear to have been preventing the photographer from working legally, threatening in their behaviour, and physically abusive on several separate occasions, all the while failing to provide information that they are required by law to give while demanding information that they have no legal right to obtain.
Police officers are granted legal powers that most of us are not, and they must be held to a higher standard accordingly. If the video is representative then the senior officer who was throwing his weight around should be bust back down to walking the beat, outright fired, and/or subject to criminal prosecution, depending on how much of the abuse was actually due to him and how much just happened on his watch. I don't care how long he's been in the force or how senior he is: this wasn't an isolated slip, it was a senior officer and several of his subordinates openly and persistently abusing their position of authority. There is absolutely no excuse for that.
Likewise, every other officer who can be identified as supporting this behaviour should be disciplined and/or criminally prosecuted as appropriate. People like that need to be made into examples, and the video posted in every police station in the country.
Oh, and for bonus points, they trotted out some absurd line about terrorism towards the end of the incident. If a senior police officer really considered that boy to be a terrorist threat, I think I would rather take my chances with the terrorists than trust a police service with such poor judgement to protect me! In any case, if ever there was proof that so-called anti-terrorism laws are far too broad and subject to abuse by front-line officers, this is it. Either those laws need repealing, or a mandatory 10 year prison sentence for anyone who abuses them needs to be introduced.
Slashdot Mirror
Overall, the text still hints at a global DMCA with notice-and-takedown
The safe harbour and takedown notice system in the DMCA is one of the few sensible aspects. There has to be some practical mechanism for copyright holders to enforce their legal rights, but it shouldn't be powerful enough for vested interests to abuse the system and suppress legitimate distribution. The takedown notice and counter-notice system is as fair a balance as anything I've seen suggested.
You have now missed the point twice. Please stop trolling and actually read the posts you're replying to before you fire off your criticism. Thanks.
They are segments.
The point here isn't that I like a FPS while my partner likes a puzzler. The point is that I like high-end, big production values games that are probably quite expensive to make and buy, and that I only look for a few of these titles per year, often with epic settings or on-line play that give replay value. Meanwhile, the other half plays quite a lot of different puzzle games, all fairly quick to make and cheap to buy.
That means we look for our games in completely different places. I read reviews of AAA titles, and then buy them from a store of one kind or another. She downloads a lot of trials from smaller companies, and her typical purchase is a full version of something where she's played the demo for a while and enjoyed it, probably downloaded from the same small company that provided the demo in the first place. I wouldn't even know where to find most of the places she gets her games, and vice versa.
We also have very different budgets. I'm buying relatively new AAA titles, and expect to pay a significant amount for a game, and possibly some more for expansions down the line if they're good. She's buying cheap and cheerful titles for a few pounds at most, mostly as impulse purchases.
If you're selling games, you might reasonably be aiming for either of us, but it's very unlikely that you're aiming for both of us at the same time. We represent entirely different market segments.
The thing I find a little surprising is that while neither of us pirates games and we both pay for what we play, I am by far the less profitable target customer these days. I am so fed up with being disappointed by high-end games — not because of the game itself but because of instability, DRM and the like — that I just don't buy many of them any more, and only those I can check out properly in advance. On the other hand, puzzlers tend to just work on any hardware from the last decade, don't routinely crash, and rarely if ever come with obnoxious DRM schemes that require CDs in the drive, shutting down other processes, or other such nonsense. That makes throwing a few pounds at one you enjoy a fairly safe bet. I'm sure there's a lesson for games publishers in there somewhere.
for the masses, there is a 'computer game'.
Really?
I like long-term games with depth, like RPGs with good single player storylines. I also like things like FPSes and RTSes, but the back-stories to these are mostly irrelevant and it's the game play and immersion that really count. There are significant exceptions and cross-overs with other genres, of which Deus Ex remains the most obvious example to me and perhaps things like Oblivion also count, but most FPS or RTS games are pretty straight-up these days.
In all cases, these are fairly high-end titles. I only buy a few of them, and even fewer these days, since anything with any sort of DRM that's liable to screw up my system or stop me playing in future or anything that tries to push extra-cost downloadable content on me is an automatic "no", which rules out a lot today. High production values count: I want good graphics, good voice acting, a well-planned story, spectacular effects, etc.
My better half, on the other hand, enjoys puzzle games. Most of them are very simple in concept, their graphics are pretty rather than spectacular, and their background music is OK but hardly going to win awards. A group of kids with the right backgrounds in programming and arts could put one of these together with a few days of hard work.
If you don't think we're completely different market segments, or that we look for games in different places and with different goals going into the store/web site/whatever, you're crazy. :-)
The title of this slashdot discussion is "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?", and the consensus so far is "No, unless you count works that never got bankrolled due to unfounded fears of the impact of piracy".
I'm not sure we have any sort of consensus yet. If we do, it certainly isn't what you wrote there. You can't just dismiss the idea that some works don't get made as "unfounded fears" without any evidence.
It is always the case that an artificial restriction like copyright is damaging in the immediate term. We could make the world a better place for the general population tomorrow by abolishing copyright this evening, and it will always be so.
The whole point of systems like copyright is to provide an incentive, so that someone is still creating works for us to enjoy the day after tomorrow. You are just dismissing this effect as if it is an incidental detail, but it is the whole point of the system.
As other points in this thread have mentioned, they are not being hurt in any statistically significant manner by piracy and it might actually be helping their cold-byte sales.
Unless you know a lot of math, you might want to be careful throwing around terms like "statistically significant" in this company.
Getting more specific, no-one has really addressed even the examples I mentioned in my original post, of games studios that made good stuff having to fold after one turkey or sci-fi productions with potential that still got canned before having a serious chance to establish themselves.
Even though artists can now more easily direct-market, the studios still have vast reservoirs of cash, a warchest of government-backed IP, and the lawyers to sick on virtually anyone they please.
Are you by any chance based in the US? If so, I'm sorry for you, because your legal system is basically a joke in this respect. In many other jurisdictions, however, courts can and often do award costs to the winning party, which means if Big Media want to bring a whole bunch of fishing expedition cases against Little Guys, they have to accept that every one of those cases is likely to get defended and wind up paying out a small but significant level of costs.
Consider the parallels with organisations like the RIAA. They have been successfully getting settlements for a few thousand dollars out of many people in the US, because the legal system makes fighting those cases unreasonably difficult for most people. Such a strategy has not been employed by equivalent groups in any other jurisdiction, as far as I am aware. Even in the US, some targets have started fighting these cases, while circling vultures have started talking about whether SLAPP and RICO laws could be applied to the media groups.
Not to mention a majority of the public mindshare as to whether IP is rented or owned by the rights holders, and whether that licence had ought to be revoked.
I'm not sure what you meant by that. IME, even those who do obey copyright law as it stands often have little respect for Big Media and consider that they have been ripping off customers for years. I don't think many tears would be shed if the big record labels started dying off tomorrow, and the ones that survived only did so by negotiating much fairer contracts with their artists and other staff at the expense of corporate profits.
The lesson they are trying to teach here is not that "copying copyrighted works is bad" but that "'downloading' is bad".
That argument just doesn't make sense. The larger legal download services and innovative alternatives like Spotify are basically all backed by either Big Media or other powerful and established commercial interests. Why would these groups to discourage downloading, when they've finally figured out that there is a lot of money to be made in offering consumers what they actually want in this area?
To the naive these sound identical, but the delta is precisely the business model of independent and copyleft artists.
The delta also includes possibly the fastest growing revenue stream for traditional music publishers.
Not the only alternative of course, but you did only ask for one: Assurance Contracts.
That is one of the more promising ideas, in that it at least has some theoretical basis and economic credibility. I would worry for the amount of infrastructure required to handle the escrow or similar arrangements; very few systems based on paying small amounts in non-trivial ways via third parties have been successful. Perhaps that could be resolved by establishing dedicated third parties, much as we have with credit card companies today.
Using artificially restricted supply to inflate demand always has a negative macroeconomic effect. In our case, we end up with copyrights being traded as property so that both artist and consumer suffer. Perhaps the intent is to spread the cost over portions of the public who appreciate the work, but the effect is the indentured servitude of most popular artists to their financiers.
But the same advances in technology that allow widespread duplication at near-zero cost also make it possible for artists with the necessary skills to create and share their works on a large scale without relying on middlemen who do not offer enough in return to justify their involvement (and their cut of the profits). The indentured servitude model and Big Media middlemen that add little value need to die, but I think market forces are already closing in on them anyway.
I don't know.. this part does sound like 19th century slave owners arguing that the world would have no T-shirts if they were not allowed to protect their human-property rights. First off, we have more T-shirts than ever before and secondly I see tossing my T-shirt or not watching blockbusters as small potatoes in the face of allowing the entire domain of human knowledge to continue to be sliced up and auctioned.
I look at this very simply: there is nothing in copyright law that requires someone making creative work to build their business model around it. If other models were similarly or more effective as an incentive, copyright law doesn't prevent someone from adopting them. Given that only a few alternative models have been tried seriously, and almost none of those have gained any traction at all in competitive commercial markets, that is at least a fairly strong suggestion about the real effectiveness of the known alternatives to a copyright-based system.
Sorry, my previous post wasn't clear. I suspect that you and I are indeed in general agreement, and the first half of my post was meant to sum up where our argument naturally leads. The second half of that post was aimed at the people in this discussion who don't accept that argument, and was meant as a generic "you", not to imply that you personally were dismissing anything.
And how many computer programmers do you think are going to get paid, if anyone can just take their code and do what they want with it for free?
Part of the problem with this debate is that some people have a knee-jerk reaction to fire off cheap shots about overpaid actors or record labels overcharging for CDs for years, or just playing live and charging admission. The problem is, the overwhelming majority of creative content produced in the world is not big budget Hollywood movies or albums from high profile, highly paid recording artists. In fact, most people who work in creative industries are in supporting roles and don't directly create anything themselves, they either support work mainly created by others in some way (for example, in a research or editorial capacity), or they support the mechanics that gets those works into the hands of the general population so they can benefit from each work (for example, working in the print room at a publisher, or handling customer support in a software business).
So what?
You did notice that the entire post you replied to was about the "so what" part, right?
And then having done bad stuff to the model of "buying bytes", what is going to pay the rent of the people who did all the hard work up-front to work out what those bytes should be?
The benefit of copyright in the modern era isn't that it allows charging for each copy of a product with near-zero marginal production cost, it is that it allows substantial initial development costs to be amortised over the entire consumer base, so each individual consumer only needs to contribute a small amount even though a product might cost a great deal to make.
If you casually dismiss the copyright model, you'd better have a good alternative that still allows that amortisation one way or another, or a whole lot of stuff you like isn't going to get made any more.
This is usually the point where a few trolls fire off the usual cheap shots, but having had this discussion with several people in the past on this forum and elsewhere, it's pretty rare that anyone has even a credible alternative model to suggest. Do you?
The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
Well, depending on your interpretation, that's either a tautology or assuming facts not in evidence. Were you going for pointless, or just illogical?
Either way, it is remarkable how quickly people on this particular forum trot out the old "they wouldn't have bought it anyway" mantra, without a shred of evidence to support that claim and despite the obvious logical flaws in the argument. Clearly the pirates valued the material enough to bother ripping it and playing/watching/listening to it the first time. I defy anyone to claim that all illegal downloaders then immediately delete anything they aren't going to buy legally after "sampling" it once. Pretty much all of the serious studies of pirate behaviour and motivation have found a substantial proportion of people who agree that what they are doing is unethical as well as illegal, and freely admit that they are only doing it because they believe they will get away with it.
Basically, you don't have an iota of evidence to back up your claim, and you are just trying to rationalise illegal behaviour and allowing law-abiding citizens to subsidise law-breaking freeloaders.
I thought "art" was made because the author had some sort of passion or talent for what they were doing.
I think you're trying to shift the topic from creative work in general to "art" specifically. Sorry to disappoint you, but a great deal of creative work produced and mass-distributed in the world today is made by people who do it to pay the rent. In some cases, those people are lucky enough to work in an industry where they also get to enjoy their jobs.
For your first point those people paying more than their "fair share" in media would not get any price break if more product sold.
No, they probably wouldn't. That point is an ethical one.
There is a useful rule of thumb you can use to decide whether a behaviour you advocate, such as illegally copying content without paying for it, is likely to be unethical: if everyone tried to act in the same way, would your overall position/argument still be reasonable, or would bad stuff happen?
I think we can all agree that if everyone just ripped material and no-one paid anything, acting as the freeloaders do today, then all the arguments about free distribution being useful advertising are worth about as much as millions of zero-revenue subscribers at a dot com start-up. (There would still be some validity in arguments about raising the profile of artists who also perform live and can charge for admission, but that represents only a small fraction of the people who work in creative industries.)
Then people will pay for it.
If the quality is good enough then some people will pay for it.
Chances are, some people also will not.
We know that artistic works can be commercial successes based only on those who do play by the rules and pay for what they take. If this were not true, all kinds of businesses would have failed already. But this is missing the point, twice.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
Secondly, we do not know how much better the incentive would be to create and share more and better works in future if everyone contributed in return for what they take today. Although it's popular to think of Big Media as The Enemy(TM) around these parts, the reality is that a lot of commercial creative work is made and distributed by much smaller organisations, which use a lot of the money they bring in just to pay the salaries and invest the rest in a very few new projects, often only one at once. In a lot of cases, the entire business at risk of failure if any of those new projects doesn't make it, so relatively few new projects are attempted. Instead, much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.
If you doubt this, consider the number of game studios over the years that have produced a string of enjoyable titles but not survived a single bad one. Of those that have survived for a long time, ask yourself what proportion of their recent titles are new and how many are just the latest in a franchise with little real change from the last one. Ask yourself how many popular sci-fi shows that plenty of geeks enjoy still get cancelled in their infancy, because they don't bring in enough money almost immediately for those who bankroll them to continue writing the cheques until the series is established.
Now ask yourself, if there was both more money in the bank following a previously successful product and a greater potential profit from any new project, does this make it more or less likely that new and innovative products will be given more of a chance?
This does not qualify him as a shill.
Perhaps not, but it does give him an interest in the future direction of the industry besides his scientific research. When presenting this kind of article, particularly in a field notorious for industrial political lobbying and trying to avoid disclosure as GM foods, it makes a very bad impression if such ties aren't declared openly.
So in other words we should wait until they cripple or kill someone?
Well, no, that's not what I wrote at all, is it?
But if you couldn't make a convincing case in a court that the manner of someone's driving is actually dangerous or inconsiderate, you're just another guy who doesn't like other people doing something, and you deserve as much weight in law, which is to say none at all.
Live performance is all very well for certain types of artist: singers, instrumentalists and actors, basically.
But what about everyone else who is part of a creative industry, currently supported by copyright? How does a book author sell a live performance? An investigative journalist writing for a newspaper or magazine? A software developer? A cartographer? A graphic designer? A composer, such as the subject of this debate? A game level designer? A movie SFX guy?
Now, how about all the supporting roles that are not themselves creative, but make the artistic works of others better? An editor or technical proofreader? A researcher? A sound engineer? A software QA guy? A web usability expert?
This is the fundamental problem with the "just perform it live" argument: other than musicians and actors, it basically doesn't apply to anyone, yet there are valuable creative works produced or enhanced by numerous other kinds of artists and supporting staff.
As for distribution for promotional purposes: well, that's fine up to a point, but eventually there has to be some way of making money or it's just a glorified pyramid scheme. Live performance isn't that way for most of the people I mentioned, nor is expecting the whole world to be funded by advertising. (Do you have any idea how much of the advertising industry is based on promoting artistic works?)
So, as I said before, we basically come back to the social problem: we need a mechanism for those who enjoy works to support those who create those works. That mechanism isn't copyright in its current widely abused and over-legislated state, but I have yet to see a convincing argument for how a world without that incentive will be a better place in the long run.
My difficulty with this argument is always the same: it essentially implies that copyright-based business models as a way to incentivise the creation and distribution of new artistic works are not viable. That may be true as long as ripping people off is socially acceptable. However, there is little evidence that the same quality and quantity of works will be produced without such a commercial incentive. Artists still have bills to pay, and even the best artists can produce better work given time to plan, refine and edit their material with a roof over their head than they will produce ad-hoc in their spare time while holding down another job to pay for the food at dinner.
I would suggest that the real problem is that technology has outpaced social models: most people are not in the position of directly depending on sales of artistic work for their income, and view copying as a victimless crime. This is, to some extent, because they feel they have been ripped off by Big Media middlemen for years and see turnabout as fair play. But of course it's not just Big Media middlemen who lose out, because these industries also provide for millions of hard-working people, many of whom contribute to making better products for us all to enjoy but will never be in the limelight themselves. I don't think the average person really thinks through the consequences of breaking the copyright model in the Internet age, even if they would miss the benefits of all those people working in creative industries were they not there any more because there was no longer enough money to pay their salaries.
Perhaps in future, we will evolve some other model or models, where those who put in hard work that contributes to valuable artistic output can be recognised and rewarded by those who enjoy the results. I think many people, even in today's world where bought-and-paid-for copyright laws no longer reflect the original spirit of the idea, still feel that it's fair to pay someone who creates work they find useful or enjoyable. Maybe copyright is too far down the path of lost credibility and something newer that is more socially acceptable needs to take over. But no-one has really come up with that something yet, and I wish a few more people thought through the long-term consequences of just ignoring copyright until we have a better replacement.
If he's a composer, he'd makes his money writing music and selling it to performers.
But this is exactly his point: he is a composer, Eleanor/Brenna is a performer, and because she is ripping his music illegally instead of paying him for it, he doesn't get to sell it.
It sounds like he is already making a loss on some of his activities, just to get his music out there. How is this fair on him, as the guy who is actually putting in the effort to make something valuable and contributing it to society?
It's not like he was asking for an obscene amount of money for a legit copy of the sheet music: any one person wanting a copy only has to pay up about $4. It sounds like this guy is a practising artist who makes new work on a continuing basis and derives a significant fraction of his income from those little payments. This is exactly the sort of scenario that copyright is supposed to promote, but the whole economic foundation of the arrangement breaks if one side doesn't keep up their end of the deal.
If it were left up to common sense, it would have to be proved that a driver was driving dangerously - ether before (to prevent) or after (to late) an accident.
Well, yes, that's rather the point. I think it should be required to show that if you are going to punish someone under the law, the behaviour concerned is genuinely a problem. If that isn't clear enough from plod following behind a car with the dashboard camera filming it for a few seconds before pulling the car over, perhaps the driving wasn't really that dangerous after all?
As to not liking drivers who go fast - well, why should someone come into my street, where I live, and my children walk, and be allowed to drive at a speed that puts us at risk.
Flippant answer: Because statistically, most drivers don't want people driving above a very low speed in their road, yet most drivers admit to going significantly faster elsewhere. There is a very high probability that your position is hypocritical.
Slightly more legal answer: You are doing what is called "assuming facts not in evidence". You haven't shown that driving at any given speed does in fact put you or your family at risk. We get this a lot with cyclists around here, a certain group of them forever whining about how they are persecuted by other road users doing dangerous things, yet statistically cycling is pretty safe in this city and the behaviours that certain vocal cyclists don't like do not actually seem to cause any accidents in practice.
This is the problem with the libertarian / free to do what you want argument. A lot of people do not act with common sense and put others at risk. Without clear mandated safety requirements, people will take risks and it will be difficult to stop them. Not having some rules to control behavior, we wind up having to live with the standards of the least responsible.
And again with the facts not in evidence...
It is a fact that most drivers are pretty good at judging a reasonable speed for the conditions. For example, while we have 20mph areas in my city and the normal limit is 30mph by default, most drivers will slow down to well under 20mph on residential roads with lots of parked cars even when the limit does not require this, while most drivers will ignore the 20mph limit imposed by NIMBY-pandering councillors on one road because the locals didn't like having cars going past their houses at normal speeds and used the presence of a school nearly a mile down the road to "justify" a lower limit.
Of course, there are always idiots who will not drive according to common sense, but then chances are they won't drive according to any arbitrary speed limit you pick either. The solution to this problem is to have actual police officers in actual police cars who can go on patrol and pull over the genuinely dangerous guys to get them off the road. No fixed position speed camera is ever going to do that.
As for your off-topic cheap shot at BP, some of us are getting a bit fed up of hearing a nation that routinely drives massive vehicles with vast engines consuming huge amounts of oil and causing horrific environmental damage whinging because a company on whom they have relied to feed their addiction for decades got something wrong and now they see that the engineering involved is non-trivial and can go wrong. While the current situation is environmentally very bad, and the managers who appear to have slacked off on safety systems and the regulators supposedly watching them need to be held accountable, it is actually quite remarkable that such incidents are so rare, given the engineering involved.
Of course, Deepwater Horizon is also a great example of how having clear rules doesn't help much if the guys who are supposed to be following them just don't care. What was needed there wasn't more rules, it was someone on the ground to assess what was really happening and take immediate action to get the dangers fixed.
Of course quotas and such are silly, just as automated machines with fixed limits are silly. Likewise, giving any form of reward to those enforcing the rules (such as letting them keep any money raised in fines) is just foolishly building corruption into the system.
Still, biased as humans are, it is well established that most drivers do a decent job of judging appropriate driving style under the conditions at the time, and certainly a better job than most lawmakers setting down general rules from an office miles away three years earlier. Thus we see quite a few jurisdictions adopting things like the 85% rule as their official standard for setting speed limits.
Likewise, my personal experience has been that traffic police officers are, for the most part, very level-headed when it comes to deciding who to go after and who to leave alone. I've always assumed this comes from being the guys who see the consequences of accidents, and therefore caring a lot more about preventing those accidents than enforcing arbitrary rules.
The problem with policing the roads is that what constitutes safe and responsible driving does depend so much on the context. There are suburban roads near my home that would be perfectly safe to travel at 40-50mph at some times, while I probably wouldn't exceed half that speed at other times. Safe driving speeds on some types of road need to drop substantially at night due to the limited visibility. Some roads have specific times of day when they are much higher risk, such as at the end of the school day when there are both lots of young children around and lots of parents' vehicles parked up at the roadside that can hide dangers. There are high speed roads near my home city that have a terrible accident record because people push the speed up during the rush hour when congestion makes it unsafe, yet where doing well over the legal speed limit would be perfectly safe at night when the road is empty and the design means typical car lights would give sufficient visibility.
Our one-size-fits-all speed limits take into account exactly none of these factors, and nor do the machines that enforce those limits. Good drivers do, and so do good police officers. I just wish the law reflected that, so that instead of having lots of technical offences, we could prosecute (properly, in court) those drivers who are actually dangerous/inconsiderate.
Cute, but utterly ignorant.
This is exactly the problem with modern laws and automated enforcement: everyone slips up momentarily from time to time according to some artificial, precise benchmark. Someone who is generally aware of their vehicle's capabilities and what is going on around them, and who drives at a reasonable speed under those conditions, may still find that they have drifted above the legal limit on occasion, not least because the legal limits in this country are frequently set considerably lower than is justified on any grounds other than "we don't like drivers who go fast". This, by the way, was first explained to me by my driving instructor, an ex-police officer whose husband was still a top-class police driver.
This didn't used to matter, when those same police officers with the same awareness of reality were responsible for enforcing speed limits. If you were doing 80mph on a clear motorway, no-one cared. If you were doing 80mph weaving in and out of traffic on a crowded motorway, you'd get pulled over. Common sense was the rule.
Today, when automated enforcement and fixed penalty notices allow for monitoring every car on numerous occasions during a single journey and penalising even harmless transgressions with no scope for common sense, the situation is different.
By the way, just in case you think this is sour grapes: I have been driving for years, completely clean licence, never pulled over, no RTAs. I just don't like being forced to spend more time watching my speedo and less time watching the road around me because machines have no awareness of reasonable behaviour or context. I would rather road traffic laws provided serious deterrents/punishments for those who were actually doing something harmful, and left everyone else alone -- like any other law, really.
Judging from the responses on the Your Freedom web site so far, this is a very common sentiment in our society today. We're fed up with the nanny state interfering with normal people's everyday lives, and we just want them to stop and go away now, please.
Not everyone could do this, but a lot of people can. There's a huge amount that the government and universities could do to make this easier, but sadly don't. They still compile statistics as if the only two options are 'working for a corporation' or 'claiming the dole,' so a lot of people never explore alternative options.
I'm glad to see someone pointing this out. Thank you.
In industries such as large-scale manufacturing, people need to work in groups and have expensive premises and equipment before they can do anything useful and earn money. A typical employment relationship reflects this: the individual members of the group get a fixed deal, but this represents only a modest fraction of the profits at a successful business, with the employer who provided the opportunity and took the risks to get everything set up claiming the lion's share.
None of that applies in knowledge-based industries such as software development. There are few good reasons for any reasonably capable developer to work as anyone's employee.
Like TheRaven64, I wish the careers services at universities who do produce graduates with reasonable skill and experience would explain this, before their talented people all go off to work in cubicle farms for The Man their whole lives.
Signed,
A guy who got off the treadmill a lot later than he should have
...balk at Help Desk offers because they think it's beneath them.
For graduates who are trained to a reasonable level of knowledge and skills, it often is beneath them, in the sense that they are capable of doing much more demanding (and better compensated) things.
Unfortunately for them, there are already many existing workers in the market with equally good paperwork and several years of real world experience behind them. Blame the dot-com boom for starting the trend, the general push in the UK to get everyone and his brother to do a university degree for perpetuating it, and the way that we're a relatively young industry and few people hitting retirement age and leaving the employment pool today are in IT for not closing the cycle.
In that context, most employers are going to go for the proven, experienced candidate over the hot shot graduate without a second thought. There used to be a reasonable argument about taking on fresh grads rather than people with a year or two of experience because then you could train people in your own organisation's way of doing things without having to break old habits. However, when you can hire people who have been "downsized" after 5 or 10 years in the business for not much more money than a graduate would be claiming a year or two down the line, even that argument for hiring grads is weak.
There are just too many people with these qualifications, at a time when not enough paying jobs require them.
Antagonising a police officer and being a dick to them will get you slapped with a 'Intentional harassment, alarm or distress' or a 'breach of the peace' charge which will result in you being arrested and probably fined or cautioned.
It seems to me that if the video going around is representative, it was not the 16-year-old freelance photographer who was being antagonistic. In fact, for a 16-year-old under those circumstances, I think he was impressively calm and polite. Rather, it appears to have been the police officers, including at least one senior officer, who were the trouble-makers. They appear to have been preventing the photographer from working legally, threatening in their behaviour, and physically abusive on several separate occasions, all the while failing to provide information that they are required by law to give while demanding information that they have no legal right to obtain.
Police officers are granted legal powers that most of us are not, and they must be held to a higher standard accordingly. If the video is representative then the senior officer who was throwing his weight around should be bust back down to walking the beat, outright fired, and/or subject to criminal prosecution, depending on how much of the abuse was actually due to him and how much just happened on his watch. I don't care how long he's been in the force or how senior he is: this wasn't an isolated slip, it was a senior officer and several of his subordinates openly and persistently abusing their position of authority. There is absolutely no excuse for that.
Likewise, every other officer who can be identified as supporting this behaviour should be disciplined and/or criminally prosecuted as appropriate. People like that need to be made into examples, and the video posted in every police station in the country.
Oh, and for bonus points, they trotted out some absurd line about terrorism towards the end of the incident. If a senior police officer really considered that boy to be a terrorist threat, I think I would rather take my chances with the terrorists than trust a police service with such poor judgement to protect me! In any case, if ever there was proof that so-called anti-terrorism laws are far too broad and subject to abuse by front-line officers, this is it. Either those laws need repealing, or a mandatory 10 year prison sentence for anyone who abuses them needs to be introduced.