Don't worry, the UK government has been pushing for this for years. Technically it already exists, and about 5 volunteers have signed up for it. On the other hand, while certain groups have IIRC already been forced to have one, other test groups have outright rejected it.
With an election coming up, I haven't seen a single reference in favour of ID cards from the Labour lot who are in power at the moment, and both the other big parties have said they will scrap the scheme. It's become a political nightmare for the government.
FWIW, the really insidious thing here in the UK isn't actually the cards, it's the all-in-one database that is behind them. Curiously, the Conservatives (who are likely to win power later this year) seem to have been a bit quiet about that.
I'm not sure our differences are as significant as you are suggesting.
In principle, I am trying to distinguish between two different forms of protection:
copyright (where the state may provide statutory protection for a finite period, but it is reasonable to insist that anyone taking advantage of that protection then release their work afterwards)
technical protection (where a content provider may try to secure their work by other means, and if they really can, then they aren't reliant on copyright anyway so I see no reason the law should mandate that after a certain period of time they release things without protection).
It's a give-and-take thing: I think you should either sign up to all of the copyright bargain or none of it, but neither side should get just the half they like.
In practice today, I think the ethical picture is complicated because the law clearly does not provide an effective copyright protection for content providers who do share their work. If the legal system isn't going to live up to its side of the bargain, then I don't think it's fair to attack content providers who attempt to enforce rights they are supposed to have in law in a way that is more effective, and it muddies the issue over whether the content provider then has any obligation to release openly after the copyright duration expires.
You are confusing what are usually called "moral rights" (notably the right to be identified as the author of the work) with copyright (which is routinely transferred in its entirety, e.g., from employee to employer, or as a result of work for hire).
That is only true for the anglophone world. In the states which signed the Berne Convention, the author retains his rights infinitely.
The Berne Convention is one of the foundations of copyright law almost everywhere that has it. Are you claiming that transfer of copyright from an author to a publisher is impossible under the Berne rules?
Well last time I checked with my lawyer I in fact *do* own the code I write
And are your circumstances typical of most coders? I'm guessing not, because anyone either employed or producing works for hire as an independent will almost certainly have a clause in their contract transferring the copyright to the employer/client. Moreover, in most places in the western world, the presumption in law if no such agreement was explicit would still be in favour of the employer/contractor. For code developed commercially, you would typically retain the copyright only if either you had an explicit condition in your contract stating so, or if your project was not a work for hire commissioned by a specific client.
I'm completely open to the idea that alternative models might work. On the other hand, I can't help noticing that nothing in the current system prevents experimentation with those ideas, or indeed switching to them completely if they do in fact serve as a better incentive to produce than the current system. The fact that, in the entire world, the number of people finding so and changing accordingly is small enough that even on a forum like Slashdot no-one can ever cite any examples is quite telling.
The model you are proposing, namely creating works on the speculative basis of high returns, is IMHO not appropriate for the players you are talking about, namely authors and software developers looking for a steady income.
And yet there are millions of people in the world who are involved in those fields, whose income is just fine. Indeed, the same could be said of most businesses, whether copyright based or otherwise.
The major difference is that in the case of businesses relying on copyright, where the law promises something but the authorities fail to enforce it, the returns may be less than those to which the business might be entitled, which may make what would have been a good investment according to the law into a bad investment in practice. This is regrettable for those involved, but worse, the failure of the legal system to live up to its side of the bargain may have a chilling effect on the development of future businesses and the works they would bring us.
The reason you support (I think) long copyright terms is a consequence of the inappropriateness of your model.
You seem to misunderstand me. What makes you think I support long copyright terms?
But unlike you, I don't believe [production for a speculative future return] is the only way, only one among many which ultimately all depend on population statistics.
Once again, you are putting words under my fingers. Where did I ever suggest that other models should not be possible?
My contention is merely that the principle of copyright (if not its detailed current implementation in law) serves as an effective method to promote the creation and distribution of certain kinds of valuable works, and that none of the other models anyone has to my knowledge suggested would be similarly or more effective in that respect.
So anti-copyright people often claim, but the evidence suggests otherwise, and always has.
Where is the OSS version of big name business software, like the heavyweight CRM and accounting applications?
Where are all the OSS libraries that do more specialised, complicated mathematics, such as would be needed in simulations or CAD programs? For that matter, where are the OSS versions of serious simulation and CAD software themselves?
Heck, where is the serious OSS graphics package to take on Photoshop? That's hardly a niche product, and nothing in OSS world even comes close. (Please don't propose The GIMP; I'll just laugh, as will everyone else reading this who actually does serious graphics on a computer.)
Even where OSS has developed applications comparable to the commercial world and for widely used purposes, such as OpenOffice and Firefox, there is little innovation. More often than not, the OSS packages are cheap clones, emulating what the commercial world already had, offering little new in the way of functionality or usability. (Again, please spare us the Firefox vs. IE comparison; there are other commercially developed web browsers, and Opera has been far ahead of Firefox in terms of innovation for years.)
Perhaps the best example of all is computer games. A good game may be great fun to play, but it often takes a lot of people with diverse skills to build it, and that can be very hard work that takes a long time. The commercial world turns out its share of duds, but it also turns out many great games every year that bring happiness to millions of gamers. Can you name even one OSS project that has done the same? Pretty much the best non-commercial games are either successful for a brief period because of novelty value or are based on technology that is so dated in the commercial world that its creators give it away because it has no value left to a business.
OSS has done reasonably well with Linux (though it's hardly a quantum leap beyond commercial UNIX platforms), networking and communication tools, and software development tools. Apart from that, even its mainstream offerings are pretty limited.
Instead, companies are expected (if they wish to use OSS that is) to use the high level tools provided (libraries, content management systems, etc),and that usually still means paying a developer.
And contributing the resulting developments back to the OSS community, for anything publicly visible... which, incidentally, relies on the protection of copyright for its effectiveness.
It doesn't matter *why* they do it, the point is that they do it, and the publishers (or the public directly) get their work for free.
You're missing the point: the work isn't free. It's either supported directly or indirectly via taxpayer income (in which case, the public isn't getting it for free, it's just not being given a choice about paying for it) or it's being supported via commercial organisations that do charge for their products or services and thus generate revenue.
You have a rosy view of industrial R&D. Most of it is highly derivative, for the simple reason that innovation is risky and expensive.
Oh, really? Let's look at software development, since that appears to be an area we both have some experience in. Over the past decade or two, what has the academic world contributed to software development? What big advances in knowledge and understanding have been achieved without commercial incentives?
The commercial world has brought technologies like VMs, JIT compilation and garbage collection algorithms to the point where languages like Java and C# are viable alternatives to the low-level stalwarts for most tasks other than actual systems programming. The leading developers of pioneering tools like Haskell may have plenty of academic credentials, but their pay cheques come from places li
DRM does not work, at the moment. All it does is inconvenience legitimate users. It does not touch "pirates".
I sympathise with the concerns about DRM, but I very much doubt that the above claim is really true.
It seems pretty well established by now that a lot of casual infringement is done by "playground pirates", younger people who will copy things from friends without even realising that they are breaking the law. While DRM won't stop either professional pirates or those with enough geek credentials to use a P2P system safely and covertly, that doesn't cover the entire population, not by a long shot. It may well be that the irritation to and potential loss of revenue from legitimate customers is outweighed by the commercial benefits of discouraging playground piracy.
Given that the law is clearly on the side of the copyright holders here, yet the legal system slaps them in the face with amazing frequency by allowing widespread copyright infringement to take place with little if any practical recourse, I don't think we can blame the rightsholders for trying to defend themselves technically instead. (I have different objections to the abuse of the US legal system by certain Big Media organisations, but that is pretty much a local phenomenon because the US legal system is itself deeply flawed and wide open to such abuse.)
_IF_... effective DRM does come to pass, media corporations will effectively be able to bypass the law, allowing only who they want to use their products, irrespective of copyrights or anything else.
It's interesting that you chose the terms "media corporations" and "bypass" there. While I have little sympathy for over-stuffed middlemen, I think it is important to consider that with the increasing availability of broadband Internet and the increasing technological aptitude of the population, copyright or whatever replaces it will be an important legal framework to support artists who are going it alone, either self-publishing or working directly with private technical staff rather than just handing everything over to a publisher/record label/studio as has been the dominant mode of working up to this point. In a nutshell, not every rightsholder is a cash-grabbing multinational megacorp, and I think as time goes by more and more of the little guys will be going independent.
In that context, whatever system we have needs to provide sufficient incentive for people to share their work for the benefit of others. If copyright doesn't do that — and for a little guy without a full-time legal staff to chase those who rip them off, the legal system clearly doesn't live up to its side of the bargain today — then again I can't blame people for trying to protect their interests in other ways.
In that regard, there is no law that entitles someone to access a particular work, even after a certain period of time. Indeed, people around here talk about "fair use rights", but fair use is (in US terms) an affirmative defence to a specific case of copyright infringement, effectively nullifying that particular legal restriction. There is no "right" of any kind attached to it. So there isn't really any law to be bypassed, in your terms.
This might sound like a dangerous situation, but just as I don't think content providers should be able to lock up their content indefinitely behind a purely legal shield, neither do I think society has a right to go "thought police" on everyone and somehow require that we all hand over every idea or concrete work we conceive of in some open format. That's far too invasive an idea to be ethical, and far too broad a measure to be practical. In short, if someone is willing to share a work, but only on their terms and with the ability to enforce those terms in practice, I don't see what business the law has telling them they can't.
Your characterisation of OSS is interesting, but doesn't address the basic problem: some products are fundamentally boring, utilitarian things, and that includes some big projects that you can't just build by combining up convenient blocks. Copyright provides a commercial incentive to develop such things anyway, because they are useful. In the absence of copyright, or a sufficiently effective replacement, it is unlikely that such software would be made at all, because no single customer or small collective would want to stump up the entire development cost.
I don't know in which world you live, but this happens every day, for free, in every university on earth.
It really doesn't. Academics publish because*:
Their university pays them.
Their university provides accommodation, food, etc.
It is a condition of their readership/tenured professorship/other externally funded academic position.
It increases their standing in the academic community to the point where they can achieve the above.
* Delete as applicable, but I bet you can't delete all of them for any academic you know.
Moreover, universities are themselves typically funded by carrying out research for the commercial sector, by government subsidies out of taxpayers' money, or through income from providing degree-level tuition.
As for quality, while there are certainly some good academics, many write poorly, repeat the same basic idea many times rather than innovating, and wouldn't survive a week in a comparable industrial R&D setting where you have to earn your pay by continuously producing useful work.
If that is your position, can you please be the first person ever to answer my standard question on this topic?
In your case, I would add the additional consideration that what you call speculation/gambling is what others might call investment, and the entire business world and global economy is founded on that principle, so I think you're on a bit of a loser with that argument.
I don't dispute that it's a viable economic model for your friend, but it doesn't scale, does it?
How does, say, software developed by a team of 500 people get made in this environment? You could probably count all the OSS-style projects of that scale in the world on your fingers, and even the flag-bearers in that respect are rarely significantly better than what the commercial world has produced with far fewer resources and much sooner.
What about a movie involving a dozen main cast, dozens more extras, a custom orchestral score, state-of-the-art CG effects, etc? Would you expect millions of people to donate tens of dollars each to fund that sort of project in advance?
What about a smaller scale, but still more than one person alone could do in a few days or weeks, say a specialist technical book that involves significant research and proper peer review?
FWIW, I agree with almost everything you wrote there (and have said as much in official consultations and contacts with my representatives, too).
I think there are a couple of flaws in your proposals. For example, I would allow an exclusive distribution deal but only with a statutory maximum duration that is quite short (no more than a year or two). That way, if a distributor is doing a good job and providing value to the artist (and by implication, that probably means promoting the work effectively so more people benefit from it) then the artist can renew the distribution deal, but they always have the control, not the middleman corporations.
Also, expiry on death isn't really viable for creators with dependents. If a creator is working with a reasonable expectation of benefit and then dies suddenly, I think it's reasonable for a spouse/children to inherit the rights and claim that income, the same as they would for any other kind of payment that would have been due to the deceased. A shorter time frame for copyright in general should be sufficient to prevent abuse.
Finally, DRM is a tricky one. I see that particular form of protection as having limited practical value, but I also object to telling copyright holders they can't try to protect their rights/limit the damage through technical means. I think forcing everything into the open no matter what limits the potential to create new business models that might serve both the copyright holder and the market better than assuming everyone has to buy everything with full rights and at full price.
The main problem I have with technical measures is when the law also prohibits circumventing those measures in order to exercise otherwise legal use of the work. For example, if someone has bought a piece of software or a music track and has the right to use them normally, then I have no problem with that person cracking the DRM or downloading a pre-cracked version if whatever protection/validation/activation system it came with prevents that use. Likewise, once a work is released to the public (even with restrictions, e.g., on a rental model), the clock has started on the copyright duration, and perhaps it should be required that an unrestricted copy of any work so released must also be placed in escrow with a central agency for public release when the copyright expires.
The current copyright model provides a plausible economic basis for making works that are expensive to create, yet sharing the cost between many beneficiaries who each contribute only a small share of the total. This is how you can download a music track that cost thousands to produce for a dollar on iTunes, or you can buy a book that took the author and everyone working in production and editorial months or even years to produce for just a few dollars on Amazon.
Whenever the principle of copyright comes up, sooner or later I seem to ask the same question: in any alternative economic model you propose, what replaces the situation I described, so that at least the same number and quality of works are available to the same number of people? No-one has yet been able to offer even a plausible answer to that question for debate, but by all means share a new idea with us and let's discuss it.
If the content creators worked at a viable market rate on that basis, then only artists who were independently wealthy themselves, supported by wealthy benefactors, or able to collaborate with large numbers of other artists to produce a work of common interest would be able to share professional quality work with the general public. If you don't think that reverting to a predominantly patronage/voluntary model would hit the number and quality of works available to the average member of the public, then I've got some Enron shares I'd like to sell you.
Profits can be made selling merchandise and playing live.
I really wish people would stop auto-repeating this line. It might be true (or it might not) for professional musicians, but how is an author, or an artist of the drawing/painting/photographer variety, or a software developer supposed to make a living in those ways?
Yes, the reaction to this seems to be wildly missing the point AFAICS.
The old version would have allowed a government minister, acting on his/her own authority without the usual oversight/consent from Parliament, to set penalties for all kinds of things. That was how we got the danger of people being completely cut off from the Internet because someone with whom they shared a connection had been merely accused of infringement three times. And yes, the current minister is unelected, and seems to have adopted rather strong views on this subject shortly after a private meeting with a big player in the game.
Now, a takedown system is not great: it's vulnerable to malicious false claims, it's going to impose a compliance burden on ISPs, and it isn't as strong a defence of copyright holders where they have a legitimate grievance. Even so, surely that is still better than effectively unrestricted penalties imposed without either the usual legislative or judicial oversight on the basis of a mere allegation by an industry with a history of making false accusations.
I don't have a problem with auto-updates being enabled by default, as long as the behaviour is openly stated and can be made to prompt or completely disabled by those who prefer to do so. On-by-default is sensible for something like a browser, given that probably most users would otherwise not update the system, which causes problems for them and, if their system gets compromised as a result, everyone else.
But this only works if you trust the source of the updates. Mozilla have never, to my knowledge, tried to impose the sort of thing that would worry me. Google have.
I'm a bit the same. On technical grounds, I'd like to use Chrome instead of the increasingly bloated Firefox, and given sufficient privacy and security safeguards I could live without the other plug-ins I use.
But Chrome comes from Google, and releases often with an auto-updating mechanism. Given both Google's form for being wildly off-target on privacy issues (Buzz, etc.) and the openly dismissive/arrogant attitude exhibited by some of their senior executives, I just don't trust them not to pull a fast one and start logging every page I visit, or sneaking in ads at the browser level, or something along those lines.
Perhaps this could theoretically be avoided by careful checking of the small print before each update, or adjusting certain settings so things don't happen automatically, but I don't want to have to do that sort of thing just to be able to update my web browser safely and make sure no-one's sneaked anything in. I'll just use another browser instead.
I've been following the whole ACTA fiasco for a while, and was getting increasingly nervous about the whole "behind closed doors" thing. Of course, many of the proposals, particularly from the US, are obviously big-corp-funded crazy talk, and the secrecy of the whole process is abhorrent. However, now that I've seen an official document for the first time, I'm actually pleasantly surprised, in that it's not as bad as I expected.
I find it reassuring that there are quite a few notes where the EU has explicitly disagreed, apparently even indicating that this is not a point on which they will give way in some cases, e.g., on restricting any damages for infringement to actual damages and rejecting any notion of punitive damages entirely, or where they want to insert wording with the anticircumvention provisions to provide for safeguarding the benefits of certain limits on IPR (which would presumably leave open the door to excluding otherwise fair use from the anticircumvention protection).
Well, if we're talking generally, then effectively the answer is yes. We might as well be realistic about what modern technology allows, including the ability to conceal small cameras for covert surveillance.
Why is you looking at the camera, and not know what it is doing, any different?
The camera is just a tool. It is whether the people involved can see each other that determines parity. If you're looking at a camera, you don't even know who's on the other end of it.
Considering that a random person walking down the street may or may not have this ability
This line of discussion is tiresome. You have constructed a hypothetical superhuman person with abilities, resources and intent that I find entirely unrealistic, and your entire argument that Google's actions are reasonable is based on the premise that such people exist.
There's nothing wrong with them taking pictures on the street, as you don't have, and have never had, any reasonable expectation of privacy in these public areas.
So a few people keep saying, but as I've noted several times elsewhere in this discussion, I think most people would reasonably expect all kinds of social conventions to be followed even under those circumstances: you probably wouldn't like it if someone physically followed you around writing down everywhere you went, or kept a video camera on your wallet the whole time you were out in case you momentarily revealed your card details while making a payment.
And that's before we get into the increased concerns when modern technology allows mass databases, data mining and open republication via the Internet. I think society's expectations of privacy are going to evolve as non-technical people start to realise the implications of not changing the rules to keep up with the capabilities of new technologies.
First of all, an obscure street view photo is hardly "publicly and permanently in front of the entire world".
But the problem is that in the Internet age, a compromising photo can go from obscure to hundreds of thousands of hits in a matter of minutes. Is there any real difference between "obscure" and "not discovered and publicised yet" on the Internet?
Have you never known a friend to be abused by an ex on a site like Facebook? It's brutal: post one compromising photo, and it's a good bet that many people who know that person will see it before it is noticed and removed. Depending on what's in that photo, it could cause break-ups of friendships, loss of a job, family problems...
Exactly the same could happen with a system like Street View, given that anything compromising is likely to be either at someone's home address (which is easily searched for) or somewhere with certain associations, like outside a drug rehabilitation centre.
Whether the people seeing you are physically walking by or not is irrelevant (again, in my opinion).
Well, of course you're entitled to your opinion. But please see my other comments in this discussion for why I do not believe any privacy law should treat those scenarios in the same way, for example because in one case there is parity (you see me, but I also see you) and in the other there is not.
If you can see something in public, there is absolutely no reason to ban photographing it.
If your view is truly that black and white, then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Photographs record things permanently, and photographs can be copied and widely distributed. There are profound implications to those two facts that don't apply to something that someone sees casually walking down the street.
I respectfully suggest that you are trying to validate a position you have already decided is the right one, and stretching your arguments to the point of implausibility to get there.
To give one simple consideration you haven't taken into account: if we are both walking down the street and see each other, there is parity. You can see what I am doing, but I can see that you are watching me. There is no such parity when one of the parties is unknown and watching by remote camera proxy. Society has historically regarded such parity as a good thing, while describing one-sided attempts to observe another party covertly with terms like "spying" and "stalking".
Secondly, the scale and efficiency of the process do matter. You write as if the entire human population possesses eidetic memory, the artistic skill to render a photorealistic drawing of what they saw, the time and inclination to do so for whatever reason just because they once caught sight of something intended to be private, and the desire to share the results with the world via the Internet. I suspect that you could not cite a single example where this has, in fact, happened. Meanwhile, with Google's automated process, it is a matter of public and legal record that such results have occurred on many occasions.
These are the kinds of reasons why we should not equate the cases of a person randomly walking down the street and a Google camera van. We can't just treat the public/private divide as something black and white: the context, and the consequences, are very different, and any amicable balance of reasonable privacy with reasonable freedom of expression has to take into account the whole scale, not just the extremes.
As far as redistribution goes, if Google had people manually inspecting each image, then no, they should not have published it, but they don't, so it's perfectly excusable for them to have published it in the first place
I don't grant your premise. Just because taking proper care is difficult or expensive, that is not an excuse not to take such care. If they can't come up with an automated system that gets it right without showing likely invasive images to real people, then they don't get to run the system in places that have strong privacy laws.
a takedown request mechanism is a perfectly adequate solution. As far I know, Google has taken down every such image when requested to do so.
But this is exactly the problem: once you've published compromising information to the Internet, it is difficult if not impossible to ever take it back again. Pandora's box is open, and closing it again does not fix the damage.
Moreover, a takedown system transfers the burden of enforcement onto the individual, and such a system is unworkable on a worldwide scale because no individual has the resources to check every possible web site that might host a photograph of them to make sure they aren't doing anything they shouldn't.
This is exactly why I favour pretty heavy penalties for those who collect and share more than they should: then penalty should fit the crime, and screwing someone publicly and permanently in front of the entire world is much worse than one person catching a momentary view of something unintended as they walk down the street.
It's absurd to claim Google is violating people's privacy when they're the ones going outdoors naked.
Again, I don't accept your premise. It is not automatically the case that merely going outside forfeits all reasonable expectation of privacy. Apparently, I share this view with the legal systems of several jurisdictions that have now ruled that Street View is a violation of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, the UK government has been pushing for this for years. Technically it already exists, and about 5 volunteers have signed up for it. On the other hand, while certain groups have IIRC already been forced to have one, other test groups have outright rejected it.
With an election coming up, I haven't seen a single reference in favour of ID cards from the Labour lot who are in power at the moment, and both the other big parties have said they will scrap the scheme. It's become a political nightmare for the government.
FWIW, the really insidious thing here in the UK isn't actually the cards, it's the all-in-one database that is behind them. Curiously, the Conservatives (who are likely to win power later this year) seem to have been a bit quiet about that.
I'm not sure our differences are as significant as you are suggesting.
In principle, I am trying to distinguish between two different forms of protection:
It's a give-and-take thing: I think you should either sign up to all of the copyright bargain or none of it, but neither side should get just the half they like.
In practice today, I think the ethical picture is complicated because the law clearly does not provide an effective copyright protection for content providers who do share their work. If the legal system isn't going to live up to its side of the bargain, then I don't think it's fair to attack content providers who attempt to enforce rights they are supposed to have in law in a way that is more effective, and it muddies the issue over whether the content provider then has any obligation to release openly after the copyright duration expires.
You are confusing what are usually called "moral rights" (notably the right to be identified as the author of the work) with copyright (which is routinely transferred in its entirety, e.g., from employee to employer, or as a result of work for hire).
That is only true for the anglophone world. In the states which signed the Berne Convention, the author retains his rights infinitely.
The Berne Convention is one of the foundations of copyright law almost everywhere that has it. Are you claiming that transfer of copyright from an author to a publisher is impossible under the Berne rules?
Well last time I checked with my lawyer I in fact *do* own the code I write
And are your circumstances typical of most coders? I'm guessing not, because anyone either employed or producing works for hire as an independent will almost certainly have a clause in their contract transferring the copyright to the employer/client. Moreover, in most places in the western world, the presumption in law if no such agreement was explicit would still be in favour of the employer/contractor. For code developed commercially, you would typically retain the copyright only if either you had an explicit condition in your contract stating so, or if your project was not a work for hire commissioned by a specific client.
I'm completely open to the idea that alternative models might work. On the other hand, I can't help noticing that nothing in the current system prevents experimentation with those ideas, or indeed switching to them completely if they do in fact serve as a better incentive to produce than the current system. The fact that, in the entire world, the number of people finding so and changing accordingly is small enough that even on a forum like Slashdot no-one can ever cite any examples is quite telling.
The model you are proposing, namely creating works on the speculative basis of high returns, is IMHO not appropriate for the players you are talking about, namely authors and software developers looking for a steady income.
And yet there are millions of people in the world who are involved in those fields, whose income is just fine. Indeed, the same could be said of most businesses, whether copyright based or otherwise.
The major difference is that in the case of businesses relying on copyright, where the law promises something but the authorities fail to enforce it, the returns may be less than those to which the business might be entitled, which may make what would have been a good investment according to the law into a bad investment in practice. This is regrettable for those involved, but worse, the failure of the legal system to live up to its side of the bargain may have a chilling effect on the development of future businesses and the works they would bring us.
The reason you support (I think) long copyright terms is a consequence of the inappropriateness of your model.
You seem to misunderstand me. What makes you think I support long copyright terms?
But unlike you, I don't believe [production for a speculative future return] is the only way, only one among many which ultimately all depend on population statistics.
Once again, you are putting words under my fingers. Where did I ever suggest that other models should not be possible?
My contention is merely that the principle of copyright (if not its detailed current implementation in law) serves as an effective method to promote the creation and distribution of certain kinds of valuable works, and that none of the other models anyone has to my knowledge suggested would be similarly or more effective in that respect.
In OSS, boring projects get built just the same.
So anti-copyright people often claim, but the evidence suggests otherwise, and always has.
Where is the OSS version of big name business software, like the heavyweight CRM and accounting applications?
Where are all the OSS libraries that do more specialised, complicated mathematics, such as would be needed in simulations or CAD programs? For that matter, where are the OSS versions of serious simulation and CAD software themselves?
Heck, where is the serious OSS graphics package to take on Photoshop? That's hardly a niche product, and nothing in OSS world even comes close. (Please don't propose The GIMP; I'll just laugh, as will everyone else reading this who actually does serious graphics on a computer.)
Even where OSS has developed applications comparable to the commercial world and for widely used purposes, such as OpenOffice and Firefox, there is little innovation. More often than not, the OSS packages are cheap clones, emulating what the commercial world already had, offering little new in the way of functionality or usability. (Again, please spare us the Firefox vs. IE comparison; there are other commercially developed web browsers, and Opera has been far ahead of Firefox in terms of innovation for years.)
Perhaps the best example of all is computer games. A good game may be great fun to play, but it often takes a lot of people with diverse skills to build it, and that can be very hard work that takes a long time. The commercial world turns out its share of duds, but it also turns out many great games every year that bring happiness to millions of gamers. Can you name even one OSS project that has done the same? Pretty much the best non-commercial games are either successful for a brief period because of novelty value or are based on technology that is so dated in the commercial world that its creators give it away because it has no value left to a business.
OSS has done reasonably well with Linux (though it's hardly a quantum leap beyond commercial UNIX platforms), networking and communication tools, and software development tools. Apart from that, even its mainstream offerings are pretty limited.
Instead, companies are expected (if they wish to use OSS that is) to use the high level tools provided (libraries, content management systems, etc),and that usually still means paying a developer.
And contributing the resulting developments back to the OSS community, for anything publicly visible... which, incidentally, relies on the protection of copyright for its effectiveness.
It doesn't matter *why* they do it, the point is that they do it, and the publishers (or the public directly) get their work for free.
You're missing the point: the work isn't free. It's either supported directly or indirectly via taxpayer income (in which case, the public isn't getting it for free, it's just not being given a choice about paying for it) or it's being supported via commercial organisations that do charge for their products or services and thus generate revenue.
You have a rosy view of industrial R&D. Most of it is highly derivative, for the simple reason that innovation is risky and expensive.
Oh, really? Let's look at software development, since that appears to be an area we both have some experience in. Over the past decade or two, what has the academic world contributed to software development? What big advances in knowledge and understanding have been achieved without commercial incentives?
The commercial world has brought technologies like VMs, JIT compilation and garbage collection algorithms to the point where languages like Java and C# are viable alternatives to the low-level stalwarts for most tasks other than actual systems programming. The leading developers of pioneering tools like Haskell may have plenty of academic credentials, but their pay cheques come from places li
DRM does not work, at the moment. All it does is inconvenience legitimate users. It does not touch "pirates".
I sympathise with the concerns about DRM, but I very much doubt that the above claim is really true.
It seems pretty well established by now that a lot of casual infringement is done by "playground pirates", younger people who will copy things from friends without even realising that they are breaking the law. While DRM won't stop either professional pirates or those with enough geek credentials to use a P2P system safely and covertly, that doesn't cover the entire population, not by a long shot. It may well be that the irritation to and potential loss of revenue from legitimate customers is outweighed by the commercial benefits of discouraging playground piracy.
Given that the law is clearly on the side of the copyright holders here, yet the legal system slaps them in the face with amazing frequency by allowing widespread copyright infringement to take place with little if any practical recourse, I don't think we can blame the rightsholders for trying to defend themselves technically instead. (I have different objections to the abuse of the US legal system by certain Big Media organisations, but that is pretty much a local phenomenon because the US legal system is itself deeply flawed and wide open to such abuse.)
_IF_ ... effective DRM does come to pass, media corporations will effectively be able to bypass the law, allowing only who they want to use their products, irrespective of copyrights or anything else.
It's interesting that you chose the terms "media corporations" and "bypass" there. While I have little sympathy for over-stuffed middlemen, I think it is important to consider that with the increasing availability of broadband Internet and the increasing technological aptitude of the population, copyright or whatever replaces it will be an important legal framework to support artists who are going it alone, either self-publishing or working directly with private technical staff rather than just handing everything over to a publisher/record label/studio as has been the dominant mode of working up to this point. In a nutshell, not every rightsholder is a cash-grabbing multinational megacorp, and I think as time goes by more and more of the little guys will be going independent.
In that context, whatever system we have needs to provide sufficient incentive for people to share their work for the benefit of others. If copyright doesn't do that — and for a little guy without a full-time legal staff to chase those who rip them off, the legal system clearly doesn't live up to its side of the bargain today — then again I can't blame people for trying to protect their interests in other ways.
In that regard, there is no law that entitles someone to access a particular work, even after a certain period of time. Indeed, people around here talk about "fair use rights", but fair use is (in US terms) an affirmative defence to a specific case of copyright infringement, effectively nullifying that particular legal restriction. There is no "right" of any kind attached to it. So there isn't really any law to be bypassed, in your terms.
This might sound like a dangerous situation, but just as I don't think content providers should be able to lock up their content indefinitely behind a purely legal shield, neither do I think society has a right to go "thought police" on everyone and somehow require that we all hand over every idea or concrete work we conceive of in some open format. That's far too invasive an idea to be ethical, and far too broad a measure to be practical. In short, if someone is willing to share a work, but only on their terms and with the ability to enforce those terms in practice, I don't see what business the law has telling them they can't.
Your characterisation of OSS is interesting, but doesn't address the basic problem: some products are fundamentally boring, utilitarian things, and that includes some big projects that you can't just build by combining up convenient blocks. Copyright provides a commercial incentive to develop such things anyway, because they are useful. In the absence of copyright, or a sufficiently effective replacement, it is unlikely that such software would be made at all, because no single customer or small collective would want to stump up the entire development cost.
I don't know in which world you live, but this happens every day, for free, in every university on earth.
It really doesn't. Academics publish because*:
* Delete as applicable, but I bet you can't delete all of them for any academic you know.
Moreover, universities are themselves typically funded by carrying out research for the commercial sector, by government subsidies out of taxpayers' money, or through income from providing degree-level tuition.
As for quality, while there are certainly some good academics, many write poorly, repeat the same basic idea many times rather than innovating, and wouldn't survive a week in a comparable industrial R&D setting where you have to earn your pay by continuously producing useful work.
If that is your position, can you please be the first person ever to answer my standard question on this topic?
In your case, I would add the additional consideration that what you call speculation/gambling is what others might call investment, and the entire business world and global economy is founded on that principle, so I think you're on a bit of a loser with that argument.
I don't dispute that it's a viable economic model for your friend, but it doesn't scale, does it?
How does, say, software developed by a team of 500 people get made in this environment? You could probably count all the OSS-style projects of that scale in the world on your fingers, and even the flag-bearers in that respect are rarely significantly better than what the commercial world has produced with far fewer resources and much sooner.
What about a movie involving a dozen main cast, dozens more extras, a custom orchestral score, state-of-the-art CG effects, etc? Would you expect millions of people to donate tens of dollars each to fund that sort of project in advance?
What about a smaller scale, but still more than one person alone could do in a few days or weeks, say a specialist technical book that involves significant research and proper peer review?
FWIW, I agree with almost everything you wrote there (and have said as much in official consultations and contacts with my representatives, too).
I think there are a couple of flaws in your proposals. For example, I would allow an exclusive distribution deal but only with a statutory maximum duration that is quite short (no more than a year or two). That way, if a distributor is doing a good job and providing value to the artist (and by implication, that probably means promoting the work effectively so more people benefit from it) then the artist can renew the distribution deal, but they always have the control, not the middleman corporations.
Also, expiry on death isn't really viable for creators with dependents. If a creator is working with a reasonable expectation of benefit and then dies suddenly, I think it's reasonable for a spouse/children to inherit the rights and claim that income, the same as they would for any other kind of payment that would have been due to the deceased. A shorter time frame for copyright in general should be sufficient to prevent abuse.
Finally, DRM is a tricky one. I see that particular form of protection as having limited practical value, but I also object to telling copyright holders they can't try to protect their rights/limit the damage through technical means. I think forcing everything into the open no matter what limits the potential to create new business models that might serve both the copyright holder and the market better than assuming everyone has to buy everything with full rights and at full price.
The main problem I have with technical measures is when the law also prohibits circumventing those measures in order to exercise otherwise legal use of the work. For example, if someone has bought a piece of software or a music track and has the right to use them normally, then I have no problem with that person cracking the DRM or downloading a pre-cracked version if whatever protection/validation/activation system it came with prevents that use. Likewise, once a work is released to the public (even with restrictions, e.g., on a rental model), the clock has started on the copyright duration, and perhaps it should be required that an unrestricted copy of any work so released must also be placed in escrow with a central agency for public release when the copyright expires.
The current copyright model provides a plausible economic basis for making works that are expensive to create, yet sharing the cost between many beneficiaries who each contribute only a small share of the total. This is how you can download a music track that cost thousands to produce for a dollar on iTunes, or you can buy a book that took the author and everyone working in production and editorial months or even years to produce for just a few dollars on Amazon.
Whenever the principle of copyright comes up, sooner or later I seem to ask the same question: in any alternative economic model you propose, what replaces the situation I described, so that at least the same number and quality of works are available to the same number of people? No-one has yet been able to offer even a plausible answer to that question for debate, but by all means share a new idea with us and let's discuss it.
If the content creators worked at a viable market rate on that basis, then only artists who were independently wealthy themselves, supported by wealthy benefactors, or able to collaborate with large numbers of other artists to produce a work of common interest would be able to share professional quality work with the general public. If you don't think that reverting to a predominantly patronage/voluntary model would hit the number and quality of works available to the average member of the public, then I've got some Enron shares I'd like to sell you.
Profits can be made selling merchandise and playing live.
I really wish people would stop auto-repeating this line. It might be true (or it might not) for professional musicians, but how is an author, or an artist of the drawing/painting/photographer variety, or a software developer supposed to make a living in those ways?
Yes, the reaction to this seems to be wildly missing the point AFAICS.
The old version would have allowed a government minister, acting on his/her own authority without the usual oversight/consent from Parliament, to set penalties for all kinds of things. That was how we got the danger of people being completely cut off from the Internet because someone with whom they shared a connection had been merely accused of infringement three times. And yes, the current minister is unelected, and seems to have adopted rather strong views on this subject shortly after a private meeting with a big player in the game.
Now, a takedown system is not great: it's vulnerable to malicious false claims, it's going to impose a compliance burden on ISPs, and it isn't as strong a defence of copyright holders where they have a legitimate grievance. Even so, surely that is still better than effectively unrestricted penalties imposed without either the usual legislative or judicial oversight on the basis of a mere allegation by an industry with a history of making false accusations.
I don't have a problem with auto-updates being enabled by default, as long as the behaviour is openly stated and can be made to prompt or completely disabled by those who prefer to do so. On-by-default is sensible for something like a browser, given that probably most users would otherwise not update the system, which causes problems for them and, if their system gets compromised as a result, everyone else.
But this only works if you trust the source of the updates. Mozilla have never, to my knowledge, tried to impose the sort of thing that would worry me. Google have.
I'm a bit the same. On technical grounds, I'd like to use Chrome instead of the increasingly bloated Firefox, and given sufficient privacy and security safeguards I could live without the other plug-ins I use.
But Chrome comes from Google, and releases often with an auto-updating mechanism. Given both Google's form for being wildly off-target on privacy issues (Buzz, etc.) and the openly dismissive/arrogant attitude exhibited by some of their senior executives, I just don't trust them not to pull a fast one and start logging every page I visit, or sneaking in ads at the browser level, or something along those lines.
Perhaps this could theoretically be avoided by careful checking of the small print before each update, or adjusting certain settings so things don't happen automatically, but I don't want to have to do that sort of thing just to be able to update my web browser safely and make sure no-one's sneaked anything in. I'll just use another browser instead.
I've been following the whole ACTA fiasco for a while, and was getting increasingly nervous about the whole "behind closed doors" thing. Of course, many of the proposals, particularly from the US, are obviously big-corp-funded crazy talk, and the secrecy of the whole process is abhorrent. However, now that I've seen an official document for the first time, I'm actually pleasantly surprised, in that it's not as bad as I expected.
I find it reassuring that there are quite a few notes where the EU has explicitly disagreed, apparently even indicating that this is not a point on which they will give way in some cases, e.g., on restricting any damages for infringement to actual damages and rejecting any notion of punitive damages entirely, or where they want to insert wording with the anticircumvention provisions to provide for safeguarding the benefits of certain limits on IPR (which would presumably leave open the door to excluding otherwise fair use from the anticircumvention protection).
The cameras are behind invisibility cloaks now?
Well, if we're talking generally, then effectively the answer is yes. We might as well be realistic about what modern technology allows, including the ability to conceal small cameras for covert surveillance.
Why is you looking at the camera, and not know what it is doing, any different?
The camera is just a tool. It is whether the people involved can see each other that determines parity. If you're looking at a camera, you don't even know who's on the other end of it.
Considering that a random person walking down the street may or may not have this ability
This line of discussion is tiresome. You have constructed a hypothetical superhuman person with abilities, resources and intent that I find entirely unrealistic, and your entire argument that Google's actions are reasonable is based on the premise that such people exist.
There's nothing wrong with them taking pictures on the street, as you don't have, and have never had, any reasonable expectation of privacy in these public areas.
So a few people keep saying, but as I've noted several times elsewhere in this discussion, I think most people would reasonably expect all kinds of social conventions to be followed even under those circumstances: you probably wouldn't like it if someone physically followed you around writing down everywhere you went, or kept a video camera on your wallet the whole time you were out in case you momentarily revealed your card details while making a payment.
And that's before we get into the increased concerns when modern technology allows mass databases, data mining and open republication via the Internet. I think society's expectations of privacy are going to evolve as non-technical people start to realise the implications of not changing the rules to keep up with the capabilities of new technologies.
First of all, an obscure street view photo is hardly "publicly and permanently in front of the entire world".
But the problem is that in the Internet age, a compromising photo can go from obscure to hundreds of thousands of hits in a matter of minutes. Is there any real difference between "obscure" and "not discovered and publicised yet" on the Internet?
Have you never known a friend to be abused by an ex on a site like Facebook? It's brutal: post one compromising photo, and it's a good bet that many people who know that person will see it before it is noticed and removed. Depending on what's in that photo, it could cause break-ups of friendships, loss of a job, family problems...
Exactly the same could happen with a system like Street View, given that anything compromising is likely to be either at someone's home address (which is easily searched for) or somewhere with certain associations, like outside a drug rehabilitation centre.
Whether the people seeing you are physically walking by or not is irrelevant (again, in my opinion).
Well, of course you're entitled to your opinion. But please see my other comments in this discussion for why I do not believe any privacy law should treat those scenarios in the same way, for example because in one case there is parity (you see me, but I also see you) and in the other there is not.
If you can see something in public, there is absolutely no reason to ban photographing it.
If your view is truly that black and white, then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Photographs record things permanently, and photographs can be copied and widely distributed. There are profound implications to those two facts that don't apply to something that someone sees casually walking down the street.
I respectfully suggest that you are trying to validate a position you have already decided is the right one, and stretching your arguments to the point of implausibility to get there.
To give one simple consideration you haven't taken into account: if we are both walking down the street and see each other, there is parity. You can see what I am doing, but I can see that you are watching me. There is no such parity when one of the parties is unknown and watching by remote camera proxy. Society has historically regarded such parity as a good thing, while describing one-sided attempts to observe another party covertly with terms like "spying" and "stalking".
Secondly, the scale and efficiency of the process do matter. You write as if the entire human population possesses eidetic memory, the artistic skill to render a photorealistic drawing of what they saw, the time and inclination to do so for whatever reason just because they once caught sight of something intended to be private, and the desire to share the results with the world via the Internet. I suspect that you could not cite a single example where this has, in fact, happened. Meanwhile, with Google's automated process, it is a matter of public and legal record that such results have occurred on many occasions.
These are the kinds of reasons why we should not equate the cases of a person randomly walking down the street and a Google camera van. We can't just treat the public/private divide as something black and white: the context, and the consequences, are very different, and any amicable balance of reasonable privacy with reasonable freedom of expression has to take into account the whole scale, not just the extremes.
As far as redistribution goes, if Google had people manually inspecting each image, then no, they should not have published it, but they don't, so it's perfectly excusable for them to have published it in the first place
I don't grant your premise. Just because taking proper care is difficult or expensive, that is not an excuse not to take such care. If they can't come up with an automated system that gets it right without showing likely invasive images to real people, then they don't get to run the system in places that have strong privacy laws.
a takedown request mechanism is a perfectly adequate solution. As far I know, Google has taken down every such image when requested to do so.
But this is exactly the problem: once you've published compromising information to the Internet, it is difficult if not impossible to ever take it back again. Pandora's box is open, and closing it again does not fix the damage.
Moreover, a takedown system transfers the burden of enforcement onto the individual, and such a system is unworkable on a worldwide scale because no individual has the resources to check every possible web site that might host a photograph of them to make sure they aren't doing anything they shouldn't.
This is exactly why I favour pretty heavy penalties for those who collect and share more than they should: then penalty should fit the crime, and screwing someone publicly and permanently in front of the entire world is much worse than one person catching a momentary view of something unintended as they walk down the street.
It's absurd to claim Google is violating people's privacy when they're the ones going outdoors naked.
Again, I don't accept your premise. It is not automatically the case that merely going outside forfeits all reasonable expectation of privacy. Apparently, I share this view with the legal systems of several jurisdictions that have now ruled that Street View is a violation of privacy.
Well, no, that's not the only difference.