That sort of attitude is exactly why the US is not a superpower any more, but hasn't noticed it yet. You assume that a big military is what matters. How stereotypically egotistical!
Where has US military power got it in recent years? It has toppled a government in a far away land, at a vast cost to its economy, not to mention losing hundreds of military personnel and posting hundreds of thousands away from their families for extended periods.
Meanwhile, the US remains the world's biggest polluter and US citizens are more addicted to cars than anyone else. And yet, the US has relatively limited natural resources, and is obviously not immune to any negative effects on the environment.
The US used to be a centre of serious scientific research a few years ago, with a brain drain effect on other leading nations. Now the brain drain is reversing: people who went over to the US a few years ago are coming back home, and we're grabbing some of the top people from the US instead.
The US has a population where more people believe in divine creation than evolution, and US politics is heavily influenced by the religious right.
At a more basic level of education, while the CIA World Factbook may claim a literacy rate of 99% for the US, other studies question the effective reading skills of as much as half of the adult population. Likewise, the US increasingly lags the best nations in surveys of basic mathematical skills.
I have had many discussions on Slashdot with American citizens proud of their nation's economic power, and confident of how much better the US economy was doing because of things like lower holiday allowances and fewer safeguards for employees. I think we can pretty much see that particular house of cards for what it always was at this point, and everything from US stock and housing markets to the value of the US dollar are being punished by just about everyone else in the world accordingly.
Looking at more elementary economic factors, what does the US actually make any more? Fundamentally, quality of life in a healthy economy depends on being able to produce useful products and provide useful services. You don't get points in the long run if all you do is "manage" things and provide "financial services" and other secondary details.
So if you're from the US and you still think you're a superpower, knock yourself out. Just please don't then complain in 20 years, when you don't have the resources to run your military any more, and it wouldn't matter if you did because you couldn't afford to pay the soldiers and sailors and airmen, and it wouldn't matter if you could because you wouldn't have enough skilled and educated people to keep the equipment up-to-date and operational.
Meanwhile, more enlightened nations, having educated their populations to increasingly high standards, advanced their understanding of science and engineering to design newer, better products, used their practical skills and natural resources to manufacture those products, paid attention to the world around them, developed mutually beneficial agreements with other nations to further all of these goals, and built their economies around these values, will be too polite to laugh (too much) at what's left of the US and the ignorance and blind faith that brought them down.
FWIW, we had a huge delay on the way out of Ciampino airport once, but that was because the baggage conveyors had broken, not because of anything to do with security...:-)
Unfortunately, the terrorists are indeed doing spectactularly well: our nations are perpetually living in fear, our governments appear to be running around in a blind panic trying to ensure an impossible level of security, and worst of all, the bad guys hardly have to lift a finger to achieve this because our own governments and the media are doing all the legwork for them.
I still don't understand why we use terms like "terrorist" that somehow seem to elevate what they do, instead of just calling them what they are—murderers, attempted murderers, inciters of violent crime—and throwing them into the justice system with the same contempt we would treat any other criminal who had committed the same acts, with no big speeches, no over-dramatised security theatre, no grandiose gestures. If our political leaders had shown any spine after the 9/11 attacks and the high profile bombings in Europe, then the term "War on Terror" would be nothing more than a footnote under "Streisand Effect" on Wikipedia, and hundreds of millions of people would be leading happier lives.
As businesses start to find significant numbers of their staff can't or won't visit the US, and ever more tourists avoid it in favour of more hospitable destinations, the US will feel the pain.
As I've had cause to remark several times in recent months, the US is no longer the world's superpower, it just hasn't realised it yet. If it continues to throw its weight around, then when the tables are inevitably turned and the US finds itself increasingly reliant on the goodwill of other nations in the next decade or two, it's going to find no-one will take its call, or those that do are only offering very loaded deals.
Actually, when I flew from the UK to Rome a few months ago, it was very noticeable that the staff on arrival were friendly and helpful, and the visible security consisted of a perfunctory passport check and one guard with a dog.
Flying home to Stansted in the UK, we were greeted by long queues and a passport check by someone looking down their nose at us as though it was beneath them to grant us entry to our own country, under the watchful eyes of several armed police officers who hadn't been properly trained to point their weapons somewhere safe when not using them.
I don't know where it all went wrong in the UK and the US, but the Italians are clearly doing something better than we are.
Grrr... Stupid new buggy posting system is eating my replies.
Short version: ditto to almost everything you wrote (except for the nature of my MP) but isn't your MP required by law to reply to you if you are a constituent?
Also, while the government bigwigs seem to favour big money at the moment, I find it reassuring that the policy documents coming out of the IPO recently are actually going beyond Gowers (who basically limited his report to what was immediately practical under current European law) to recognise that not everyone agrees about copyright's benefits, the current system is out of sync with popular expectations, and if fixing this requires changes at European level then that is what we should be driving. Though I loathe the idea in principle, for once I find myself hoping that the civil servants will do their thing without paying too much attention to what their elected masters want...
Why must you people always be so black and white? Of course material was produced before copyright, and would continue to be produced if copyright were replaced or abolished. That is not in dispute. The question is whether copyright is an effective promoter of the production and distribution of works. Does it mean more works get to people? Are those works of higher quality? Does any given work reach more people who enjoy or benefit from it (there is more than enough creative work in the world to last many lifetimes, so getting the right works to the right people is a useful goal)? You used the word "promote" yourself, yet you crudely attempt to gloss over these issues by trying to reduce the debate to a single, mundane question: would [any] material still be made without copyright?
And what is with your obsession with funding from the public purse? Copyright is not a purely macroeconomic tool. A very important part of the system is that it creates a direct channel for reward between consumer and producer: those who distribute their works to more people or are more valuable have more opportunity to benefit, thus there is a direct incentive to increase quality and maximise distribution.
Of course, old-fashioned set-ups where big organisations take the copyright in exchange for a deal that is rarely optimal for the creative people involved screw with this principle. However, as we've seen, the Internet is a great tool for change and developing new business models. Copyright is going to benefit individuals more and middleman corporations less as time goes on. In fact, strong copyright laws and a cost-effective method of enforcement could be a great leveller to prevent megacorps with economies of scale and visible brands from freeloading by letting the little guys put in all the effort and then scooping up the work for distribution without any obligation to give fair compensation.
Replacing copyright with some sort of subsidy system based on general taxation, as you propose in your reply to my other post, severs any potential direct connection between creator and beneficiary. Instead, it would inevitably create some sort of political system, where some supposedly worthy person or organisation deemed a certain work worthy of a certain reward based on some artificial means or subjective judgement. Rather than creating more and better works and sharing them more widely, creators would then be incentivised to game the new system instead, because that is where the rewards would be found. Why would we adopt such a system when we already have a well-established and transparent way of letting the beneficiaries of works themselves make a direct judgement? We call that system "money", and copyright is a simple principle that lets us apply that proven system to creative works as well.
Incidentally, I don't think you've really thought through your proposed tax scheme very much at all, because it is fundamentally flawed in several other ways as well, not least that the bureaucratic overheads of administering such a system would be staggering. Paradoxically, it relies on the idea that people would continue to be able to sell derivative works for money, which seems highly unlikely in a system where by construction everything can be shared for free. Then there is the issue of identifying the beneficiary of the tax, which might be trivial in first generation derived works but would require an implausible amount of research in general: consider the case of Open Source projects that have wanted to adopt a new licence, but would have to identify every individual contributor whose code remained in any part of the system to seek their approval, or the current difficulties faced by the collective licensing bodies in sharing out the proceeds from public performances of works under copyright. Practically, your tax system could only ever provide a financial benefit to contributors to creative works by imposing even more hassle than exists today, which brings us back to no-one selling anything and therefore
Do they? How many world class software products are funded only (or even primarily) by donations?
Don't most of these make money by charging for their services directly?
Sure, but those costs are then passed on to the artist or organisation that will (in the current system) be selling the work. In a system where those sales are not a reliable source of income, you need another way to guarantee funding the supporting cast.
There are lots of ways to capitalize on popularity, website ads are among the less significant.
Well, maybe there are, but you haven't said what any of them are, and it's not as if the world is full of examples of other people doing it. You asserted that giving a song away would increase popularity and, by that one specific mechanism, generate revenue. If you're not going to back that horse, pick another one.
I don't think you understand the difference here.
On the contrary. You seem to have completely missed my point, and launched some sort of attack on some sort of theft vs. copyright infringement point that isn't even related to what I wrote.
In any case, if you're so concerned about whether it is practical to enforce laws on a wide scale, you might like to consider that driving after drinking alcohol used to be socially acceptable, and more recently many drivers were unaware of the risks of using a mobile phone while on the move. Following a combination of legal action and public education about the facts, both activities have become increasingly unacceptable to society at large, and where the corresponding laws have been enforced, deterrence has resulted. (Where the laws have not been enforced, naturally, there has been limited or no change.)
Now, you can make as many headline-grabbing generalisations as you like about Big Media abusing copyright, rip-off prices for CDs and DVDs, and so on, and you're always going to gain sympathy from a certain type of person. However, the bottom line is that if stuff is going to get made, someone has to pay for it, and it's not clear how any approach that condones piracy or outright abolishes copyright is going to do that. People like having stuff for free, but they're not stupid and most people appreciate fairness. I suspect that if someone came into power with the genuine will to improve the situation, including curtailing the abuses of IP laws and legal actions by businesses, then the public would acknowledge that sharing material openly was a step too far.
For what it's worth, I wish I had mod points today. It is nice to see posts that don't reduce the whole copyright debate to some sort of all-or-nothing dichotomy, and which acknowledge the idea that you can have a reasonable idea but a flawed implementation. This seems far more constructive than just painting a crude picture of selfish pirates fighting greedy megacorporations, where everyone has extreme views and there is little scope for compromise and finding some middle ground.
1) Some people actually want to support the artists.
So buy stuff from independent sites or the artists themselves. You don't have to buy everything through Big Media middlemen, and in the age of the Internet, artists are getting wise to the new possibilities of not signing away all their rights, too.
2) Artists make most of their money from concerts and merchandising anyway.
Performers such as musicians might (though I don't think I have ever seen any verifiable source to support this oft-repeated claim).
But copyright also protects authors, illustrators, software developers... It also supports the numerous valuable secondary roles that help to refine, promote and ultimately increase quality and distribution of works: editors, research assistants, printers, services providing hosting and downloading bandwidth, and so on.
3) Your song being on www.downloadznork.com increases your popularity and people will be more likely to go to your website, giving you ad revenue.
Another claim often made but rarely supported. Does Slashdot of all places really believe that having eyes on a web site == profit? Do you understand how little ad revenue really brings in to anything but the largest of web sites? You aren't going to become one of the web's top 100 sites by releasing a music track.
4) We can't stop copyrighted content from appearing on the public P2P networks days or even hours after it is officially released, and copyright law has to respect this basic technological reality.
You can't realistically stop me getting into my car and driving it at your kid at 100mph either. Just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should, nor that the law should condone a harmful action instead of punishing those who do or try to do it. That is, after all, the entire point of having laws: they represent a concensus of what society collectively considers acceptable behaviour.
where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line.
Complete repeal of all copyright.
If that's your "sensible" approach, then I have to ask the same question no-one has ever managed to answer reasonably yet: what system do you propose instead, which continues to motivate the production and distribution of at least the same quantity and quality of works? It is implausible to claim that this will happen by magic, with everyone who makes a living producing material today (much of it being valuable but not particularly fun to make) continuing to do so without compensation or suddenly being replaced by an army of millions of volunteer contributors, so please try to do better than that.
You then post various false dichotomy arguments and delusions about how everything will just go outside government control and nothing will be done about it. These are trivially refuted by observing that you need an Internet connection to use any of these technically clever systems, ISPs are already the next target, and many western governments are already openly playing ball with Big Media despite the ISPs' protestations.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen them selling speedboats or peg legs.
Please learn your etymology. The first use of "piracy" in the sense we are talking about predates the Internet by centuries. The old "piracy does not mean copyright infringement" thing just makes you look ill-informed.
You don't give up ethics just because the bully's whine more.
A sound perspective, which is probably shared by those who view the illegal actions of a minority of people who routinely and deliberately infringe copyright as the wrong way to do things.
Rather the opposite; with the actions of the content industries in situations such as ACTA, it has become a moral imperative to deny them any form of revenue.
You can deny them revenue by simply not using their product. If pop music is just cookie-cutter crap, Hollywood is overcharging for its latest blockbuster movie, and Microsoft is ripping you off by charging what it does for Office and Windows, well, you're not going to die if you don't experience those things. Find other sources of entertainment. Use freely available software. You don't have to material under copyright illegally, and there is absolutely nothing in your argument that provides any ethical justification for doing so.
A good boss understands that working the kind of hours where this discussion is relevant is a productivity killer over long term anyway.
There is some merit in putting in abnormal hours if you're a small company, and those involved have a vested interest in putting in the extra work. That might be because the company will no longer be able to employ them without the work, because it will fail. It might be because the workers' compensation increases directly as a result of the extra work, because of something like profit-related pay or meaningful stock options.
But for larger companies, or for smaller companies where there is nothing in it for the staff, working much longer hours doesn't do anything for real productivity over the long run anyway, and the resentment and morale hit it creates is almost certainly not worth it for any short term boost.
I find it amusing that you just assume that the cops are not, themselves, a danger on the roads when they're doing this.
Exactly.
From discussions with traffic police I know in the UK, it seems to be standard practice for traffic patrols to have two officers in the car, and the one who is not driving is the one who is on the radio, giving the commentary during a pursuit, etc. If there is any serious car chasing to be done, a traffic car with suitably trained officers and proper spec will take over as the lead car as soon as possible and get everyone else to back off. There are pretty strict limits on the extent to which other officers are allowed to engage in pursuits.
On top of that, the serious decisions (such as when a pursuit is too dangerous to continue) are taken by senior officers in the control room, with the benefit of the commentary from vehicles on the ground and typically a view from a helicopter as well. Basically, the procedures are designed so that the guy who is actually driving the lead car in a pursuit can concentrate on the driving as much as possible.
Of course, other police officers also receive training in advanced driving techniques and are allowed to break certain rules that apply to the rest of us in an emergency, but they are typically much more limited in what they are allowed to do than specialist traffic officers, unless they too have specialist training and equipment.
How is "perceived as being wrong" different than wrong?
Shall we ask all the women who have the vote, all the black people who aren't slaves, and all the non-religious folks who aren't murdered as heretics?
Sometimes things aren't relevant in making a particular decision, but the people making the decision have prejudices and consider those things anyway. This is one of the reasons protecting privacy is important.
That doesn't mean you can't do what the PR agents do: generate higher-profile positive information. That makes it harder to encounter the negative stuff casually. It also changes the balance in the perception of the individual concerned if the negative stuff does also come to light.
If no charges were ever brought and no criminal record is involved, I have to wonder whether the OP regrets the actions because they were of the "perceived to be wrong" kind rather than the "actually wrong" kind. In that case, yes, it does suck to be held responsible, particularly if word is getting around but you have no effective right to reply and set the record straight.
The first thing I want from a new version of Thunderbird is fixing the data loss bugs, because right now I'm on the point of moving to another e-mail client.
(For the uninitiated, Thunderbird can literally nuke your e-mails without trace under some circumstances, such as if you move it from one folder to another. This is not just the old problems with the silly approach to indexing and "compacting", this is an actual, irretrievable, without-warning, 100% data loss. That's just not acceptable in this kind of software.)
The correct solution to companies that wilfully break the law is a blanket rule that companies may be fined a significant multiple of any benefit they gain from breaking that law, and for more serious actions, to throw the directors and/or any employees or shareholders directly responsible in jail.
I recognise the value in providing a certain level of legal protection for individuals who are operating as part of a corporate entity, but this is primarily to protect those who are investing in and/or working for that corporate entity from personal risk that is disproportionate to their level of control or potential benefits, particularly where finances are concerned.
The fact that in some jurisdictions the legal protection now goes far beyond that, to the point where there is almost a "just following orders" defence if you can hide any illegal activity behind a corporate shield, is IMNSHO a rather obvious flaw in the legal systems of those jurisdictions.
Well said. One of the big problems with databases and automated decision-making by computers (or semi-automated decision making by bureaucrats) is that often the isolated facts observed in the decision-making process don't tell the whole story.
A few months, I decided that my relationship with my then-girlfriend wasn't as satisfying as I wanted it to be. Being a geek, I naturally started looking for someone on the Internet, and then started spending time with another charming young lady I met on-line. I lied to my ex-g/f about what I was doing on the weekends, or sneaked out during the day while she was at work. Obviously the other young lady and I stayed out of public view as much as possible, and not even my closest friends knew about her. I did meet a couple of her friends, but they were sworn to secrecy.
In the end, that relationship ran its course. I gave that young lady a lot of money and she went away, promising to keep our meetings between us. However, if anyone I knew had spotted us during the time she was around, it would surely have led to some awkward questions I didn't want to answer, and it would have put any friends who also knew the other half (still my girlfriend at that point) in a difficult position.
A few weeks later, I met the young lady one more time. She gave me the engagement ring I had commissioned, which she and her colleagues had been making for me. My then-girlfriend (now fianceé) doesn't mind at all that I kept this secret from her, and it was worth all the effort just to see the smile on her face when I proposed.
Everyone has secrets, sometimes even from their closest friends and family. That doesn't mean everyone is a bad person, and it doesn't make it in society's interests to surrender privacy on the altar of corporate profit. In a world without privacy and secrets, I wouldn't have seen that smile.
Please don't mix privacy/data protection issues with intellectual property/copyright issues.
There is a new world of possibilities, and accompanying dangers, that come from building and mining huge databases containing data that can be associated with individual people. The law needs to reflect the ethical issues that arise in that world, which are only coincidentally and occasionally related to intellectual property issues.
There is no law in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar that requires corporate entities of any type to maximise the money made for shareholders no matter what acts may be necessary to do so. Indeed, there are companies who make a point of being ethical in some sense, and this is typically part of the attraction of those companies to their shareholders, employees and clients/customers alike. And of course it is by definition illegal for companies to increase the profit they make by breaking the law, which is one reason why real privacy and data protection laws are long overdue in most places.
Or perhaps, they've been told by the Chinese Government that a condition of them being provided access to internet users in their country is that they censor various searches, and not disclose that information to the public.
Well, sorry, but that's not the game we're playing. The mantra that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear does not often come with the rider "unless you have good reasons for keeping it secret, in which case that's OK and we'll let you off".
People like Google's Schmidt (if his statements are faithfully reported here, which seems to be in dispute) and Sun Chairman Scott "Privacy is dead; deal with it" McNealy don't give a damn about anyone else's privacy when it serves their business interests to view the world in black and white. For them to argue that it's OK to do something the public would disapprove of, because someone or something or some rule made it the only practical way to run their business, would be hypocrisy.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
I understand that this is what you are proposing. What I honestly don't understand is how you expect it to happen in the case of relatively expensive works with large audiences, where the work is worth only a modest amount to any individual.
I would be genuinely interested if anyone has an alternative model that has proven to be effective, but to my knowledge, so far it's near enough all talk and no action. People have been suggesting pledge-based systems for years, and nothing in the current copyright system precludes taking such an approach if it is a better incentive to create and share, yet almost no-one does.
Copyright, for all its flaws, currently supports millions of people producing and distributing goodness knows how much creative content, certainly vastly more than was produced and shared so widely under any other historical system. I have no reason to believe copyright is the best system, but on the basis of this evidence, I have no problem accepting that as an incentive scheme, it works.
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
Let us say "charitably" then, for the avoidance of doubt.
The point is that those people who currently work a 9–5 job doing not particularly enjoyable but practically useful work on things like software probably do it only because it pays reasonably well. They would therefore be unlikely to continue doing it, producing at the same rate and the same quality, if they had to work a different 9–5 to pay the rent and then put in the other 8 hours on top to write the software without compensation.
By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many
...and one of them is that FORTRAN is still the best tool for some jobs.
And for other jobs, people pretty much have stopped using it.
I'm afraid while we may not be too far apart on the copyright issue, we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on FOSS. I have nothing against those who build FOSS products and are kind enough to give away the fruits of their labours, but to me the claim that OpenOffice is actually superior to MS Office, or GIMP to Photoshop, or MySQL to Oracle, is just so obviously, comprehensively wrong that it is hardly worth debating (though if you want numerous specific and detailed arguments, I have posted on these subjects at some length in previous Slashdot discussions).
In any case, the kicker for me isn't even the technical arguments, which could be debated. The point isn't that not everyone has moved to Ubuntu, it's that almost no-one has moved to Ubuntu. If you only get a 50% take-up, you can contend that there are non-technical issues blocking adoption, or cultural issues to overcome. If you only get a 0.5% take-up after years of advocacy, and you still argue that you are right and almost the entire world is wrong, you lack credibility. There's an old poker saying: if you can't tell who the weak player at the table is, then it's you.
Slashdot Mirror
That sort of attitude is exactly why the US is not a superpower any more, but hasn't noticed it yet. You assume that a big military is what matters. How stereotypically egotistical!
Where has US military power got it in recent years? It has toppled a government in a far away land, at a vast cost to its economy, not to mention losing hundreds of military personnel and posting hundreds of thousands away from their families for extended periods.
Meanwhile, the US remains the world's biggest polluter and US citizens are more addicted to cars than anyone else. And yet, the US has relatively limited natural resources, and is obviously not immune to any negative effects on the environment.
The US used to be a centre of serious scientific research a few years ago, with a brain drain effect on other leading nations. Now the brain drain is reversing: people who went over to the US a few years ago are coming back home, and we're grabbing some of the top people from the US instead.
The US has a population where more people believe in divine creation than evolution, and US politics is heavily influenced by the religious right.
At a more basic level of education, while the CIA World Factbook may claim a literacy rate of 99% for the US, other studies question the effective reading skills of as much as half of the adult population. Likewise, the US increasingly lags the best nations in surveys of basic mathematical skills.
I have had many discussions on Slashdot with American citizens proud of their nation's economic power, and confident of how much better the US economy was doing because of things like lower holiday allowances and fewer safeguards for employees. I think we can pretty much see that particular house of cards for what it always was at this point, and everything from US stock and housing markets to the value of the US dollar are being punished by just about everyone else in the world accordingly.
Looking at more elementary economic factors, what does the US actually make any more? Fundamentally, quality of life in a healthy economy depends on being able to produce useful products and provide useful services. You don't get points in the long run if all you do is "manage" things and provide "financial services" and other secondary details.
So if you're from the US and you still think you're a superpower, knock yourself out. Just please don't then complain in 20 years, when you don't have the resources to run your military any more, and it wouldn't matter if you did because you couldn't afford to pay the soldiers and sailors and airmen, and it wouldn't matter if you could because you wouldn't have enough skilled and educated people to keep the equipment up-to-date and operational.
Meanwhile, more enlightened nations, having educated their populations to increasingly high standards, advanced their understanding of science and engineering to design newer, better products, used their practical skills and natural resources to manufacture those products, paid attention to the world around them, developed mutually beneficial agreements with other nations to further all of these goals, and built their economies around these values, will be too polite to laugh (too much) at what's left of the US and the ignorance and blind faith that brought them down.
FWIW, we had a huge delay on the way out of Ciampino airport once, but that was because the baggage conveyors had broken, not because of anything to do with security... :-)
Thanks God, the war on terrorism works so well.
Unfortunately, the terrorists are indeed doing spectactularly well: our nations are perpetually living in fear, our governments appear to be running around in a blind panic trying to ensure an impossible level of security, and worst of all, the bad guys hardly have to lift a finger to achieve this because our own governments and the media are doing all the legwork for them.
I still don't understand why we use terms like "terrorist" that somehow seem to elevate what they do, instead of just calling them what they are—murderers, attempted murderers, inciters of violent crime—and throwing them into the justice system with the same contempt we would treat any other criminal who had committed the same acts, with no big speeches, no over-dramatised security theatre, no grandiose gestures. If our political leaders had shown any spine after the 9/11 attacks and the high profile bombings in Europe, then the term "War on Terror" would be nothing more than a footnote under "Streisand Effect" on Wikipedia, and hundreds of millions of people would be leading happier lives.
One person alone won't be missed.
As businesses start to find significant numbers of their staff can't or won't visit the US, and ever more tourists avoid it in favour of more hospitable destinations, the US will feel the pain.
As I've had cause to remark several times in recent months, the US is no longer the world's superpower, it just hasn't realised it yet. If it continues to throw its weight around, then when the tables are inevitably turned and the US finds itself increasingly reliant on the goodwill of other nations in the next decade or two, it's going to find no-one will take its call, or those that do are only offering very loaded deals.
Actually, when I flew from the UK to Rome a few months ago, it was very noticeable that the staff on arrival were friendly and helpful, and the visible security consisted of a perfunctory passport check and one guard with a dog.
Flying home to Stansted in the UK, we were greeted by long queues and a passport check by someone looking down their nose at us as though it was beneath them to grant us entry to our own country, under the watchful eyes of several armed police officers who hadn't been properly trained to point their weapons somewhere safe when not using them.
I don't know where it all went wrong in the UK and the US, but the Italians are clearly doing something better than we are.
Grrr... Stupid new buggy posting system is eating my replies.
Short version: ditto to almost everything you wrote (except for the nature of my MP) but isn't your MP required by law to reply to you if you are a constituent?
Also, while the government bigwigs seem to favour big money at the moment, I find it reassuring that the policy documents coming out of the IPO recently are actually going beyond Gowers (who basically limited his report to what was immediately practical under current European law) to recognise that not everyone agrees about copyright's benefits, the current system is out of sync with popular expectations, and if fixing this requires changes at European level then that is what we should be driving. Though I loathe the idea in principle, for once I find myself hoping that the civil servants will do their thing without paying too much attention to what their elected masters want...
Why must you people always be so black and white? Of course material was produced before copyright, and would continue to be produced if copyright were replaced or abolished. That is not in dispute. The question is whether copyright is an effective promoter of the production and distribution of works. Does it mean more works get to people? Are those works of higher quality? Does any given work reach more people who enjoy or benefit from it (there is more than enough creative work in the world to last many lifetimes, so getting the right works to the right people is a useful goal)? You used the word "promote" yourself, yet you crudely attempt to gloss over these issues by trying to reduce the debate to a single, mundane question: would [any] material still be made without copyright?
And what is with your obsession with funding from the public purse? Copyright is not a purely macroeconomic tool. A very important part of the system is that it creates a direct channel for reward between consumer and producer: those who distribute their works to more people or are more valuable have more opportunity to benefit, thus there is a direct incentive to increase quality and maximise distribution.
Of course, old-fashioned set-ups where big organisations take the copyright in exchange for a deal that is rarely optimal for the creative people involved screw with this principle. However, as we've seen, the Internet is a great tool for change and developing new business models. Copyright is going to benefit individuals more and middleman corporations less as time goes on. In fact, strong copyright laws and a cost-effective method of enforcement could be a great leveller to prevent megacorps with economies of scale and visible brands from freeloading by letting the little guys put in all the effort and then scooping up the work for distribution without any obligation to give fair compensation.
Replacing copyright with some sort of subsidy system based on general taxation, as you propose in your reply to my other post, severs any potential direct connection between creator and beneficiary. Instead, it would inevitably create some sort of political system, where some supposedly worthy person or organisation deemed a certain work worthy of a certain reward based on some artificial means or subjective judgement. Rather than creating more and better works and sharing them more widely, creators would then be incentivised to game the new system instead, because that is where the rewards would be found. Why would we adopt such a system when we already have a well-established and transparent way of letting the beneficiaries of works themselves make a direct judgement? We call that system "money", and copyright is a simple principle that lets us apply that proven system to creative works as well.
Incidentally, I don't think you've really thought through your proposed tax scheme very much at all, because it is fundamentally flawed in several other ways as well, not least that the bureaucratic overheads of administering such a system would be staggering. Paradoxically, it relies on the idea that people would continue to be able to sell derivative works for money, which seems highly unlikely in a system where by construction everything can be shared for free. Then there is the issue of identifying the beneficiary of the tax, which might be trivial in first generation derived works but would require an implausible amount of research in general: consider the case of Open Source projects that have wanted to adopt a new licence, but would have to identify every individual contributor whose code remained in any part of the system to seek their approval, or the current difficulties faced by the collective licensing bodies in sharing out the proceeds from public performances of works under copyright. Practically, your tax system could only ever provide a financial benefit to contributors to creative works by imposing even more hassle than exists today, which brings us back to no-one selling anything and therefore
Donations still work in all these cases.
Do they? How many world class software products are funded only (or even primarily) by donations?
Don't most of these make money by charging for their services directly?
Sure, but those costs are then passed on to the artist or organisation that will (in the current system) be selling the work. In a system where those sales are not a reliable source of income, you need another way to guarantee funding the supporting cast.
There are lots of ways to capitalize on popularity, website ads are among the less significant.
Well, maybe there are, but you haven't said what any of them are, and it's not as if the world is full of examples of other people doing it. You asserted that giving a song away would increase popularity and, by that one specific mechanism, generate revenue. If you're not going to back that horse, pick another one.
I don't think you understand the difference here.
On the contrary. You seem to have completely missed my point, and launched some sort of attack on some sort of theft vs. copyright infringement point that isn't even related to what I wrote.
In any case, if you're so concerned about whether it is practical to enforce laws on a wide scale, you might like to consider that driving after drinking alcohol used to be socially acceptable, and more recently many drivers were unaware of the risks of using a mobile phone while on the move. Following a combination of legal action and public education about the facts, both activities have become increasingly unacceptable to society at large, and where the corresponding laws have been enforced, deterrence has resulted. (Where the laws have not been enforced, naturally, there has been limited or no change.)
Now, you can make as many headline-grabbing generalisations as you like about Big Media abusing copyright, rip-off prices for CDs and DVDs, and so on, and you're always going to gain sympathy from a certain type of person. However, the bottom line is that if stuff is going to get made, someone has to pay for it, and it's not clear how any approach that condones piracy or outright abolishes copyright is going to do that. People like having stuff for free, but they're not stupid and most people appreciate fairness. I suspect that if someone came into power with the genuine will to improve the situation, including curtailing the abuses of IP laws and legal actions by businesses, then the public would acknowledge that sharing material openly was a step too far.
For what it's worth, I wish I had mod points today. It is nice to see posts that don't reduce the whole copyright debate to some sort of all-or-nothing dichotomy, and which acknowledge the idea that you can have a reasonable idea but a flawed implementation. This seems far more constructive than just painting a crude picture of selfish pirates fighting greedy megacorporations, where everyone has extreme views and there is little scope for compromise and finding some middle ground.
1) Some people actually want to support the artists.
So buy stuff from independent sites or the artists themselves. You don't have to buy everything through Big Media middlemen, and in the age of the Internet, artists are getting wise to the new possibilities of not signing away all their rights, too.
2) Artists make most of their money from concerts and merchandising anyway.
Performers such as musicians might (though I don't think I have ever seen any verifiable source to support this oft-repeated claim).
But copyright also protects authors, illustrators, software developers... It also supports the numerous valuable secondary roles that help to refine, promote and ultimately increase quality and distribution of works: editors, research assistants, printers, services providing hosting and downloading bandwidth, and so on.
3) Your song being on www.downloadznork.com increases your popularity and people will be more likely to go to your website, giving you ad revenue.
Another claim often made but rarely supported. Does Slashdot of all places really believe that having eyes on a web site == profit? Do you understand how little ad revenue really brings in to anything but the largest of web sites? You aren't going to become one of the web's top 100 sites by releasing a music track.
4) We can't stop copyrighted content from appearing on the public P2P networks days or even hours after it is officially released, and copyright law has to respect this basic technological reality.
You can't realistically stop me getting into my car and driving it at your kid at 100mph either. Just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should, nor that the law should condone a harmful action instead of punishing those who do or try to do it. That is, after all, the entire point of having laws: they represent a concensus of what society collectively considers acceptable behaviour.
where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line.
Complete repeal of all copyright.
If that's your "sensible" approach, then I have to ask the same question no-one has ever managed to answer reasonably yet: what system do you propose instead, which continues to motivate the production and distribution of at least the same quantity and quality of works? It is implausible to claim that this will happen by magic, with everyone who makes a living producing material today (much of it being valuable but not particularly fun to make) continuing to do so without compensation or suddenly being replaced by an army of millions of volunteer contributors, so please try to do better than that.
You then post various false dichotomy arguments and delusions about how everything will just go outside government control and nothing will be done about it. These are trivially refuted by observing that you need an Internet connection to use any of these technically clever systems, ISPs are already the next target, and many western governments are already openly playing ball with Big Media despite the ISPs' protestations.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen them selling speedboats or peg legs.
Please learn your etymology. The first use of "piracy" in the sense we are talking about predates the Internet by centuries. The old "piracy does not mean copyright infringement" thing just makes you look ill-informed.
You don't give up ethics just because the bully's whine more.
A sound perspective, which is probably shared by those who view the illegal actions of a minority of people who routinely and deliberately infringe copyright as the wrong way to do things.
Rather the opposite; with the actions of the content industries in situations such as ACTA, it has become a moral imperative to deny them any form of revenue.
You can deny them revenue by simply not using their product. If pop music is just cookie-cutter crap, Hollywood is overcharging for its latest blockbuster movie, and Microsoft is ripping you off by charging what it does for Office and Windows, well, you're not going to die if you don't experience those things. Find other sources of entertainment. Use freely available software. You don't have to material under copyright illegally, and there is absolutely nothing in your argument that provides any ethical justification for doing so.
A weekend isn't long term.
No it's not, but the damage from expecting staff to work over a weekend without anything in it for them doesn't just stop on Monday.
A good boss understands that working the kind of hours where this discussion is relevant is a productivity killer over long term anyway.
There is some merit in putting in abnormal hours if you're a small company, and those involved have a vested interest in putting in the extra work. That might be because the company will no longer be able to employ them without the work, because it will fail. It might be because the workers' compensation increases directly as a result of the extra work, because of something like profit-related pay or meaningful stock options.
But for larger companies, or for smaller companies where there is nothing in it for the staff, working much longer hours doesn't do anything for real productivity over the long run anyway, and the resentment and morale hit it creates is almost certainly not worth it for any short term boost.
I find it amusing that you just assume that the cops are not, themselves, a danger on the roads when they're doing this.
Exactly.
From discussions with traffic police I know in the UK, it seems to be standard practice for traffic patrols to have two officers in the car, and the one who is not driving is the one who is on the radio, giving the commentary during a pursuit, etc. If there is any serious car chasing to be done, a traffic car with suitably trained officers and proper spec will take over as the lead car as soon as possible and get everyone else to back off. There are pretty strict limits on the extent to which other officers are allowed to engage in pursuits.
On top of that, the serious decisions (such as when a pursuit is too dangerous to continue) are taken by senior officers in the control room, with the benefit of the commentary from vehicles on the ground and typically a view from a helicopter as well. Basically, the procedures are designed so that the guy who is actually driving the lead car in a pursuit can concentrate on the driving as much as possible.
Of course, other police officers also receive training in advanced driving techniques and are allowed to break certain rules that apply to the rest of us in an emergency, but they are typically much more limited in what they are allowed to do than specialist traffic officers, unless they too have specialist training and equipment.
How is "perceived as being wrong" different than wrong?
Shall we ask all the women who have the vote, all the black people who aren't slaves, and all the non-religious folks who aren't murdered as heretics?
Sometimes things aren't relevant in making a particular decision, but the people making the decision have prejudices and consider those things anyway. This is one of the reasons protecting privacy is important.
That doesn't mean you can't do what the PR agents do: generate higher-profile positive information. That makes it harder to encounter the negative stuff casually. It also changes the balance in the perception of the individual concerned if the negative stuff does also come to light.
If no charges were ever brought and no criminal record is involved, I have to wonder whether the OP regrets the actions because they were of the "perceived to be wrong" kind rather than the "actually wrong" kind. In that case, yes, it does suck to be held responsible, particularly if word is getting around but you have no effective right to reply and set the record straight.
Sorry, I realised the "literally" abuse just about two seconds after I posted the comment. Mea culpa.
Obviously the "literally" was intended to apply to the "without trace", not to the use of strategic weapons of any kind.
And what's with the weird interface changes going on today? Is it really too hard to test obviously broken things not on the live server? :-(
The first thing I want from a new version of Thunderbird is fixing the data loss bugs, because right now I'm on the point of moving to another e-mail client.
(For the uninitiated, Thunderbird can literally nuke your e-mails without trace under some circumstances, such as if you move it from one folder to another. This is not just the old problems with the silly approach to indexing and "compacting", this is an actual, irretrievable, without-warning, 100% data loss. That's just not acceptable in this kind of software.)
The correct solution to companies that wilfully break the law is a blanket rule that companies may be fined a significant multiple of any benefit they gain from breaking that law, and for more serious actions, to throw the directors and/or any employees or shareholders directly responsible in jail.
I recognise the value in providing a certain level of legal protection for individuals who are operating as part of a corporate entity, but this is primarily to protect those who are investing in and/or working for that corporate entity from personal risk that is disproportionate to their level of control or potential benefits, particularly where finances are concerned.
The fact that in some jurisdictions the legal protection now goes far beyond that, to the point where there is almost a "just following orders" defence if you can hide any illegal activity behind a corporate shield, is IMNSHO a rather obvious flaw in the legal systems of those jurisdictions.
Well said. One of the big problems with databases and automated decision-making by computers (or semi-automated decision making by bureaucrats) is that often the isolated facts observed in the decision-making process don't tell the whole story.
A few months, I decided that my relationship with my then-girlfriend wasn't as satisfying as I wanted it to be. Being a geek, I naturally started looking for someone on the Internet, and then started spending time with another charming young lady I met on-line. I lied to my ex-g/f about what I was doing on the weekends, or sneaked out during the day while she was at work. Obviously the other young lady and I stayed out of public view as much as possible, and not even my closest friends knew about her. I did meet a couple of her friends, but they were sworn to secrecy.
In the end, that relationship ran its course. I gave that young lady a lot of money and she went away, promising to keep our meetings between us. However, if anyone I knew had spotted us during the time she was around, it would surely have led to some awkward questions I didn't want to answer, and it would have put any friends who also knew the other half (still my girlfriend at that point) in a difficult position.
A few weeks later, I met the young lady one more time. She gave me the engagement ring I had commissioned, which she and her colleagues had been making for me. My then-girlfriend (now fianceé) doesn't mind at all that I kept this secret from her, and it was worth all the effort just to see the smile on her face when I proposed.
Everyone has secrets, sometimes even from their closest friends and family. That doesn't mean everyone is a bad person, and it doesn't make it in society's interests to surrender privacy on the altar of corporate profit. In a world without privacy and secrets, I wouldn't have seen that smile.
Please don't mix privacy/data protection issues with intellectual property/copyright issues.
There is a new world of possibilities, and accompanying dangers, that come from building and mining huge databases containing data that can be associated with individual people. The law needs to reflect the ethical issues that arise in that world, which are only coincidentally and occasionally related to intellectual property issues.
[citation needed]
There is no law in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar that requires corporate entities of any type to maximise the money made for shareholders no matter what acts may be necessary to do so. Indeed, there are companies who make a point of being ethical in some sense, and this is typically part of the attraction of those companies to their shareholders, employees and clients/customers alike. And of course it is by definition illegal for companies to increase the profit they make by breaking the law, which is one reason why real privacy and data protection laws are long overdue in most places.
Or perhaps, they've been told by the Chinese Government that a condition of them being provided access to internet users in their country is that they censor various searches, and not disclose that information to the public.
Well, sorry, but that's not the game we're playing. The mantra that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear does not often come with the rider "unless you have good reasons for keeping it secret, in which case that's OK and we'll let you off".
People like Google's Schmidt (if his statements are faithfully reported here, which seems to be in dispute) and Sun Chairman Scott "Privacy is dead; deal with it" McNealy don't give a damn about anyone else's privacy when it serves their business interests to view the world in black and white. For them to argue that it's OK to do something the public would disapprove of, because someone or something or some rule made it the only practical way to run their business, would be hypocrisy.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
I understand that this is what you are proposing. What I honestly don't understand is how you expect it to happen in the case of relatively expensive works with large audiences, where the work is worth only a modest amount to any individual.
I would be genuinely interested if anyone has an alternative model that has proven to be effective, but to my knowledge, so far it's near enough all talk and no action. People have been suggesting pledge-based systems for years, and nothing in the current copyright system precludes taking such an approach if it is a better incentive to create and share, yet almost no-one does.
Copyright, for all its flaws, currently supports millions of people producing and distributing goodness knows how much creative content, certainly vastly more than was produced and shared so widely under any other historical system. I have no reason to believe copyright is the best system, but on the basis of this evidence, I have no problem accepting that as an incentive scheme, it works.
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
Let us say "charitably" then, for the avoidance of doubt.
The point is that those people who currently work a 9–5 job doing not particularly enjoyable but practically useful work on things like software probably do it only because it pays reasonably well. They would therefore be unlikely to continue doing it, producing at the same rate and the same quality, if they had to work a different 9–5 to pay the rent and then put in the other 8 hours on top to write the software without compensation.
By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many
...and one of them is that FORTRAN is still the best tool for some jobs.
And for other jobs, people pretty much have stopped using it.
I'm afraid while we may not be too far apart on the copyright issue, we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on FOSS. I have nothing against those who build FOSS products and are kind enough to give away the fruits of their labours, but to me the claim that OpenOffice is actually superior to MS Office, or GIMP to Photoshop, or MySQL to Oracle, is just so obviously, comprehensively wrong that it is hardly worth debating (though if you want numerous specific and detailed arguments, I have posted on these subjects at some length in previous Slashdot discussions).
In any case, the kicker for me isn't even the technical arguments, which could be debated. The point isn't that not everyone has moved to Ubuntu, it's that almost no-one has moved to Ubuntu. If you only get a 50% take-up, you can contend that there are non-technical issues blocking adoption, or cultural issues to overcome. If you only get a 0.5% take-up after years of advocacy, and you still argue that you are right and almost the entire world is wrong, you lack credibility. There's an old poker saying: if you can't tell who the weak player at the table is, then it's you.