The problem in discussions like this is someone, like yourself, who can't imagine a different world. You don't fully understand the rules or implications but you're sure there's no other way things could work.
What a horribly arrogant, patronising thing to write.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have, and the empirical evidence and economic theories supporting various possible alternatives. I have written Masters-length reports in the course of lobbying for change, participated in government reviews, and spent a fair few hours debating with folks on-line to cap it all.
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
The debate shouldn't be polarised between "everything should be free, no copyright laws should exist" and "everything is just fine as it is".
I completely agree. But the OP to whom I responded initially was openly saying that he was ignoring even the basic idea behind copyright and just ripping whatever he felt like. He wasn't saying he was breaking DRM so he could use something he already paid for, or format-shifting a legit copy of something for personal convenience, or downloading music that would have fallen out of copyright but for the Disney lawyers. He just doesn't like paying for stuff, so he freeloads and rips whatever he likes, because he can.
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright.
No it doesn't. But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work. No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion. The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily, but this seems a very dubious assumption: in the "fun" creative arts, people could do that anyway today, so I see no reason to assume that more people would do so if they didn't get paid for it than do already; and in the less "fun" but more practical arts, as in much of contemporary software development, I hardly think thousands/millions of people are going to spend basically all of their spare time after finishing other day jobs working on boring but necessary code.
That's the best you've got? Most of the arguments in that book seem to be against patents, rather than copyright. In the case of software, the main argument against copyright seems to be that competition leads to thriving innovation as demonstrated by the OSS world, which is just funny. The big name OSS applications are almost all second-rate rip-offs of established products from the commercial or academic spheres: OpenOffice, the GIMP, Thunderbird, MySQL. Programming languages seem like a strong area for OSS, but in reality much of what it has produced in recent years is all variations on the same theme, and the serious innovation is happening in academia or industrial R&D labs at Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the like. Heck, even Linux itself is obviously based on UNIX. I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already? Maybe the allegedly superior technical grounds aren't enough, and all the usability research and user help that Microsoft and Apple can fund with their copyright-driven products actually makes a big difference to non-geek users.
After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries
That's rather a severe over-generalisation. For one thing, the basic capitalist structure advocated by plenty of economists naturally leads to monopolies in the long run, so in practice we break out of pure capitalism and introduce other mechanisms to ensure that any legal monopoly status is in the public interest. Now, there are plenty of things about today's implementation of copyright that I do not think are in the public interest, but that doesn't mean the basic principle of copyright can't be administered in such a way too.
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
Please don't equate my support for the basic principle of copyright with supporting copyright for excessive durations, supporting wholesale transfer of rights from the authors who deserve them to middleman corporations, or any other screwed up aspect of the current implementation. I am all in favour of copyright reform. I just haven't seen any real evidence that getting rid of copyright entirely would improve anything, other than the feelings of a few people in this discussion.
With copyright, there is a motivation for investors who think they have good judgement of likely success to back a new artist, for example by arranging advertising for providing a cash advance set against any future earnings. They do this in the expectation that they will make a net positive return on their investments, winning more often than not, because they are good judges of what the market wants.
We tend to be critical of "middleman" organisations like publishers and record labels for their abuses of copyright, and I certainly would support reforms that shifted power back firmly toward the artists, but in this respect these organisations do serve a useful purpose.
Without copyright (or some other system to replace it) there is no such incentive, because as soon as the artist's work is out there is no longer any expectation of income for an investor.
Do you? Civil disobedience involves publicly breaking the law and accepting the consequences. The key point there is the "accepting the consequences" part. Are you making a show of infringing copyright and accepting the full consequences of the law to make your point?
Because if you're knowingly breaking the law without that, it's not civil disobedience, it's just illegal.
You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along
Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.
current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?
This idea is a common proposal in these discussions, so let me ask you a few basic questions about it.
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start pledging to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result? There is nothing to stop someone adopting this approach today. How many artists have successfully started a career by doing so?
The copyright system lets an artist who thinks they can make a good product do so, and if the product turns out to be good it can be its own recommendation. The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have. (I appreciate that in reality Big Media get in the way of this, and I have no problem with changing the copyright structure to keep the rights with the artists and other creative people where they belong, but this does not undermine the fundamental idea behind copyright.)
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few.
And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?
How many million-lines-of-code software products?
How many detailed, fact-checked, well-edited 1,000 page textbooks?
For that matter, how many good books did it produce per year, and how many people got to read them?
I've never disputed that valuable works have been or would be created without the benefit of copyright protection, but the scale matters. You can't just extrapolate from the fact that some good works were produced and some people benefited from them before copyright to the conclusion that copyright has not encouraged the creation of more or better works.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day.
Ah, the FOSS argument. How wonderfully Slashdot.
You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right? And that even the big name FOSS projects are not exempt from this? So much so, in fact, that even though the FOSS projects are free, most people still prefer to use commercial offerings.
At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
I've never disputed that there are serious flaws with the current implementation of copyright. Arguments about not extending terms to crazy 50+ year durations are all very reasonable. But if you look at what's being swapped on filesharing systems, is it very early Disney cartoons and back-catalogues for old bands, or is it the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters?
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not, that producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days, and that producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy.
The thing is, I don't have a problem with the basic principle of copyright, and frankly, I'm not sure most people do.
Sure, it sucks if you want the latest and greatest works but you can't afford the asking price. Life is tough. But whenever we have these discussions, no-one in the "everything should be free" camp seems to have a credible alternative system that still produces plenty of high quality works.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
this is simply an arms race. we know from history that those never 'finish' they just keep on going. this one will, too, if put into place.
That is debatable. If they can get things like "3 strikes" passed, then the next step is to push for custodial sentences for repeat infringers who find ways to dodge the third strike, or licensing just for the "privilege" of being able to use an Internet connection. I think once the news starts carrying pictures of students getting locked up for three months or fined enough to bankrupt them because by their own admission they ripped off all their media, a lot of people who casually infringe because of the low perceived risk will reevaluate.
People like you are as much a problem as Big Media's absurd power grabs. You are unashamedly breaking the law, which makes you the poster boy for Big Media when they are pushing for ever more extreme laws. And while you will deserve it if you ever get screwed by those laws, lots of people will wind up suffering through no fault of their own if these measures go through.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but that one data point makes me question what orifice that extradition 'fact' came from, no matter how truthy it sounds.
Well, good for you. Question away! In the time you took to write that post, you could have typed "US UK extradition treaty" into Wikipedia (or found the first link to it on Google), read up on the Extradition Act 2003, and discovered that what I wrote was fair and your statistics do nothing to refute it. Never mind, though, this is Slashdot, and it's far more fun to use the words "orifice" and "truthy" than to actually check facts anyway.
If this goes through on Monday, there will be calls to punish the EU Council for treason, but of course nothing will come of it.
As far as I'm aware, the EU still takes more public money than any other organisation that has failed to produce audited accounts, and it's been doing so for more than a decade now. I think we can safely assume that they are above the law. And if they're not, as we've recently seen with the Lisbon treaty, they are quite capable of rewriting the law until they are, without needing any mandate from the people.
The cutest thing about this is the "sharing" is entirely one-way. It's like the extradition arrangements, where European politicians use weasel words about how "in practice" the same rules will apply for getting someone from the US into the EU as the other way around, even though the written conditions are clearly very different.
Given that the US government has proved over recent years to be probably the greatest threat to world stability, and about the least effective in terms of things like regulation of the financial sector, respect for privacy and civil liberties, and not going overboard any time the term "national security" is used, I don't understand why anyone, least of all the EU, is so keen to suck up so much. The era of the US being the world's only superpower is over and not coming back, the politicos just haven't realised yet.
you can make life miserable for a few unlucky enough to be caught, but you can't change reality. and the reality of the situation is, the rich goons aren't rich enough to alter the fundamental rules of the internet
The problem is, they just might be. We already have the DMCA in the US and the EUCD in Europe. Three-strikes legislation is being actively pushed for in several places, even after being turned down once already in some of those places. Copyright infringement has already been criminalised under some circumstances in several places.
If you think they can't impose mandatory monitoring/filtering on ISPs and then issue arbitrary, disproportionate fines to thousands or even millions of people, you're new at this. Look at speeding fines generated automatically from start to finish based on roadside cameras, or the summary powers available to police officers in many jurisdictions these days for that matter.
It doesn't help that a lot of the people who take your view actually are flagrantly violating the more reasonable parts of copyright law for personal gain and freeloading off the work of others. The balance of copyright law is wrong and going in the wrong direction IMHO, and I do oppose things like copyright term extension, and I do support a right for individuals with legitimate copies of works to make personal use those works as they see fit in private. But those aren't the people the industry is going after for the most part; they're going after those who are openly trading (or outright selling) copies of the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters.
It's too bad you folks in the UK let them take your guns away, or you might have other options available to you.
Which explains why the US was led by George W. Bush for such a short period: you have guns available, so as your nation gave up even the pretense of due process and respect for your own Constitution in the name of wars on abstract nouns, watched your economy crumble and the ongoing rise of the mighty corporations, and introduced infringements of privacy and civil liberties at least as draconian as many of those going on elsewhere in the world, you... elected the guy a second time, let him serve a full second term, and then let him retire quietly to a life of riches with no apparent remorse for the mess he made during his time in office. Yeah, guns are definitely the answer to people like this. Right. Absolutely.
In the real world, violence rarely helps anything. At best, it provides a temporary respite or a catalyst for change that already had a solid basis. You have to be in a pretty extreme position, effectively civil war and changing your entire system of government forcibly, before violence really gains you anything, and even then it's only good for creating an opportunity to change and not much use if the change isn't a good one in its own right. If the only way you can make your point is through violence then the chances are that once you stop beating it into people you'll lose the debate again anyway. This is true of anything from police abusing their authority to waging war to physical abuse of public officials.
[Mandelson is] an out-of-control power-crazed sociopath and should never have been allowed back into government.
We didn't allow him back in. In fact, he resigned twice already under dubious circumstances. Then he got appointed to Europe, and now he's been appointed to a very senior position in Parliament after being appointed to the House of Lords. Note that the term "appointed" here implies that the people never got a vote, he was put into those positions by the Prime Minister and his chums. Oh, and the Prime Minister was appointed as Tony Blair's successor, in direction contradiction of a Labour Party manifesto promise to voters at the last general election, which they won with such a huge majority because of funny electoral math and not popular support (having actually lost the popular vote in England to the Conservatives, in fact).
Basically, these guys don't even have a shadow of a mandate for what they're doing in the first place, but since they're already a lame duck administration they seem to feel they have little to lose by wading in with the most illiberal, draconian legislation they can shove through in the final parliamentary session before the general election. Thus we get resistance to court rulings on cleaning up the DNA database, a roll-out of trials for an expensive ID card scheme that both the major opposition parties in England have long since pledged to scrap, and now this.
My personal favourite from this week's Queen's Speech was the bill to make it a legal requirement to half the budget deficit within four years, which would conveniently mean that having destroyed our economy themselves, they could then pass a poison pill to their successors when they inevitably lose the next general election. Presumably they will then claim in four years that whoever won the election has broken the law by being unable to do the impossible, and pretend that in some alternate reality Labour would somehow have been able to fix the problems they were unable to prevent in the first place.
The various extreme anti-copyright-infringement policies flying around at the moment sound like much the same thing: having mostly ignored or actively gone against the recommendations of their own Gowers Review when it comes to IP laws, they are now setting up back channel ways to suck up to big business while they still can, knowing that if they tried to push these things through Parliament properly they would face stiff opposition (not to mention probably losing even more votes, since post-Gowers they pretty much know that people overwhelmingly oppose things like copyright term extension).
As a final note, the Open Rights Group are pretty dumb if they think invoking the recent XBox cut-offs supports the case against this. I haven't seen a single report that suggests there were people cut off by Microsoft inappropriately (i.e., not after breaking the rules), the cut-off only affected their use of the XBox and not unrelated Internet services, and even the BBC carried an article based on one such person, who admitted freely that he was ripping off games illegally because it saved him money, which is exactly what the cut-off was intended to obstruct.
It's why leadership and direction are such important qualities in management, and why companies try to hire and keep the best.
If only that were so...
It's been my experience that most medium-sized and larger companies actively take steps to hire mediocrity and lose their best people, whether or not they realise it.
Such companies can typically be identified by a combination of three give-away signs: they are too large for everyone to know everyone, which creates room for a layer of middle-managers who are neither hands-on team leaders nor directors, and there exist dedicated people/departments for things like HR and IT.
As soon as you've got that kind of culture, you're likely to be hiring cookie cutter candidates. Then you have to introduce business processes that cater to the least common denominator, which by design stifle individuality and innovation. Unfortunately, those are often exactly the reasons that the best people are the best people: they bring unique technical strengths, creative ideas inspired by their personal past experiences, or insightful points of view. Having made individuality thoroughly subservient to the machine, you have discarded the extra value good people could have contributed, so those people feel a lack of motivation; you compensate them on a level similar to the cookie cutter guys, so they feel a lack of recognition; and since they are exactly the people who can most easily find new work, they are the first out of the door, leaving your overall workforce even lower on the scale. And thus the downward spiral continues.
I'm all for proving things properly, but unfortunately, in the real world, we mostly deal with infinite problem spaces that don't lend themselves to a convenient recursive analysis.
The problem is that if all you've got is some code you don't understand and some tests, you don't really know whether it works. At most, you only know that it gives the correct answers in the specific cases you're testing.
Then your customers, who are using your product in other cases, will find bugs.
Then you will have to spend several times as much effort fixing the bug post-release as it would have taken to avoid the bug in the first place, and your developer morale will start to take a beating because all they ever do is fix bugs instead of working on creating cool new stuff that is what motivates a high proportion of people who get into this industry.
Then your good people will all leave, except for two who you have to pay a small fortune in salary because they're the only guys left who know how your code works at all.
Ultimately, you will be left running a dead company walking for as long as you can keep selling the increasingly out-of-date and bug-ridden product before your poor PR and your increasingly distant competition steal all your customers.
That's a technicality. Tracking cookies are used all over the web by advertising networks serving content from within their own domain that is embedded in pages from other domains.
If you don't like cookies, feel free to block them. It's not hard to do.
But blocking other cookie-like tools is often hard to do, as clearly demonstrated by the number of recent forum discussions on this subject that are full of geeks who don't even know LSOs exist, never mind how to disable them.
The difference between hidden POST data and cookies is obvious: one leaves data on the user's machine, which can also be used when they visit other web sites or during later browsing sessions; the other does not.
And if you have a problem because this new rule will affect you but it's not feasible to rewrite your entire CMS, then frankly, I have to wonder what you're doing right now, and whether you're not exactly the kind of person/business for whom this new restriction is intended to cause a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem in discussions like this is someone, like yourself, who can't imagine a different world. You don't fully understand the rules or implications but you're sure there's no other way things could work.
What a horribly arrogant, patronising thing to write.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have, and the empirical evidence and economic theories supporting various possible alternatives. I have written Masters-length reports in the course of lobbying for change, participated in government reviews, and spent a fair few hours debating with folks on-line to cap it all.
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
The debate shouldn't be polarised between "everything should be free, no copyright laws should exist" and "everything is just fine as it is".
I completely agree. But the OP to whom I responded initially was openly saying that he was ignoring even the basic idea behind copyright and just ripping whatever he felt like. He wasn't saying he was breaking DRM so he could use something he already paid for, or format-shifting a legit copy of something for personal convenience, or downloading music that would have fallen out of copyright but for the Disney lawyers. He just doesn't like paying for stuff, so he freeloads and rips whatever he likes, because he can.
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright.
No it doesn't. But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work. No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion. The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily, but this seems a very dubious assumption: in the "fun" creative arts, people could do that anyway today, so I see no reason to assume that more people would do so if they didn't get paid for it than do already; and in the less "fun" but more practical arts, as in much of contemporary software development, I hardly think thousands/millions of people are going to spend basically all of their spare time after finishing other day jobs working on boring but necessary code.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
That's the best you've got? Most of the arguments in that book seem to be against patents, rather than copyright. In the case of software, the main argument against copyright seems to be that competition leads to thriving innovation as demonstrated by the OSS world, which is just funny. The big name OSS applications are almost all second-rate rip-offs of established products from the commercial or academic spheres: OpenOffice, the GIMP, Thunderbird, MySQL. Programming languages seem like a strong area for OSS, but in reality much of what it has produced in recent years is all variations on the same theme, and the serious innovation is happening in academia or industrial R&D labs at Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the like. Heck, even Linux itself is obviously based on UNIX. I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already? Maybe the allegedly superior technical grounds aren't enough, and all the usability research and user help that Microsoft and Apple can fund with their copyright-driven products actually makes a big difference to non-geek users.
After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries
That's rather a severe over-generalisation. For one thing, the basic capitalist structure advocated by plenty of economists naturally leads to monopolies in the long run, so in practice we break out of pure capitalism and introduce other mechanisms to ensure that any legal monopoly status is in the public interest. Now, there are plenty of things about today's implementation of copyright that I do not think are in the public interest, but that doesn't mean the basic principle of copyright can't be administered in such a way too.
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
Please don't equate my support for the basic principle of copyright with supporting copyright for excessive durations, supporting wholesale transfer of rights from the authors who deserve them to middleman corporations, or any other screwed up aspect of the current implementation. I am all in favour of copyright reform. I just haven't seen any real evidence that getting rid of copyright entirely would improve anything, other than the feelings of a few people in this discussion.
With copyright, there is a motivation for investors who think they have good judgement of likely success to back a new artist, for example by arranging advertising for providing a cash advance set against any future earnings. They do this in the expectation that they will make a net positive return on their investments, winning more often than not, because they are good judges of what the market wants.
We tend to be critical of "middleman" organisations like publishers and record labels for their abuses of copyright, and I certainly would support reforms that shifted power back firmly toward the artists, but in this respect these organisations do serve a useful purpose.
Without copyright (or some other system to replace it) there is no such incentive, because as soon as the artist's work is out there is no longer any expectation of income for an investor.
It's amusing though to see someone lionising corporatism and complaining about the power of the state.
It's amusing to see someone mention FOSS in one sentence and then equate copyright protection with corporatism in the next.
Until then, I remain civilly disobedient.
Do you? Civil disobedience involves publicly breaking the law and accepting the consequences. The key point there is the "accepting the consequences" part. Are you making a show of infringing copyright and accepting the full consequences of the law to make your point?
Because if you're knowingly breaking the law without that, it's not civil disobedience, it's just illegal.
You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along
Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.
current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?
This idea is a common proposal in these discussions, so let me ask you a few basic questions about it.
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start pledging to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result? There is nothing to stop someone adopting this approach today. How many artists have successfully started a career by doing so?
The copyright system lets an artist who thinks they can make a good product do so, and if the product turns out to be good it can be its own recommendation. The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have. (I appreciate that in reality Big Media get in the way of this, and I have no problem with changing the copyright structure to keep the rights with the artists and other creative people where they belong, but this does not undermine the fundamental idea behind copyright.)
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few.
And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?
How many million-lines-of-code software products?
How many detailed, fact-checked, well-edited 1,000 page textbooks?
For that matter, how many good books did it produce per year, and how many people got to read them?
I've never disputed that valuable works have been or would be created without the benefit of copyright protection, but the scale matters. You can't just extrapolate from the fact that some good works were produced and some people benefited from them before copyright to the conclusion that copyright has not encouraged the creation of more or better works.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day.
Ah, the FOSS argument. How wonderfully Slashdot.
You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right? And that even the big name FOSS projects are not exempt from this? So much so, in fact, that even though the FOSS projects are free, most people still prefer to use commercial offerings.
At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
I've never disputed that there are serious flaws with the current implementation of copyright. Arguments about not extending terms to crazy 50+ year durations are all very reasonable. But if you look at what's being swapped on filesharing systems, is it very early Disney cartoons and back-catalogues for old bands, or is it the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters?
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not, that producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days, and that producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy.
Because through copyright, many people
The thing is, I don't have a problem with the basic principle of copyright, and frankly, I'm not sure most people do.
Sure, it sucks if you want the latest and greatest works but you can't afford the asking price. Life is tough. But whenever we have these discussions, no-one in the "everything should be free" camp seems to have a credible alternative system that still produces plenty of high quality works.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
this is simply an arms race. we know from history that those never 'finish' they just keep on going. this one will, too, if put into place.
That is debatable. If they can get things like "3 strikes" passed, then the next step is to push for custodial sentences for repeat infringers who find ways to dodge the third strike, or licensing just for the "privilege" of being able to use an Internet connection. I think once the news starts carrying pictures of students getting locked up for three months or fined enough to bankrupt them because by their own admission they ripped off all their media, a lot of people who casually infringe because of the low perceived risk will reevaluate.
People like you are as much a problem as Big Media's absurd power grabs. You are unashamedly breaking the law, which makes you the poster boy for Big Media when they are pushing for ever more extreme laws. And while you will deserve it if you ever get screwed by those laws, lots of people will wind up suffering through no fault of their own if these measures go through.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but that one data point makes me question what orifice that extradition 'fact' came from, no matter how truthy it sounds.
Well, good for you. Question away! In the time you took to write that post, you could have typed "US UK extradition treaty" into Wikipedia (or found the first link to it on Google), read up on the Extradition Act 2003, and discovered that what I wrote was fair and your statistics do nothing to refute it. Never mind, though, this is Slashdot, and it's far more fun to use the words "orifice" and "truthy" than to actually check facts anyway.
If this goes through on Monday, there will be calls to punish the EU Council for treason, but of course nothing will come of it.
As far as I'm aware, the EU still takes more public money than any other organisation that has failed to produce audited accounts, and it's been doing so for more than a decade now. I think we can safely assume that they are above the law. And if they're not, as we've recently seen with the Lisbon treaty, they are quite capable of rewriting the law until they are, without needing any mandate from the people.
The cutest thing about this is the "sharing" is entirely one-way. It's like the extradition arrangements, where European politicians use weasel words about how "in practice" the same rules will apply for getting someone from the US into the EU as the other way around, even though the written conditions are clearly very different.
Given that the US government has proved over recent years to be probably the greatest threat to world stability, and about the least effective in terms of things like regulation of the financial sector, respect for privacy and civil liberties, and not going overboard any time the term "national security" is used, I don't understand why anyone, least of all the EU, is so keen to suck up so much. The era of the US being the world's only superpower is over and not coming back, the politicos just haven't realised yet.
you can make life miserable for a few unlucky enough to be caught, but you can't change reality. and the reality of the situation is, the rich goons aren't rich enough to alter the fundamental rules of the internet
The problem is, they just might be. We already have the DMCA in the US and the EUCD in Europe. Three-strikes legislation is being actively pushed for in several places, even after being turned down once already in some of those places. Copyright infringement has already been criminalised under some circumstances in several places.
If you think they can't impose mandatory monitoring/filtering on ISPs and then issue arbitrary, disproportionate fines to thousands or even millions of people, you're new at this. Look at speeding fines generated automatically from start to finish based on roadside cameras, or the summary powers available to police officers in many jurisdictions these days for that matter.
It doesn't help that a lot of the people who take your view actually are flagrantly violating the more reasonable parts of copyright law for personal gain and freeloading off the work of others. The balance of copyright law is wrong and going in the wrong direction IMHO, and I do oppose things like copyright term extension, and I do support a right for individuals with legitimate copies of works to make personal use those works as they see fit in private. But those aren't the people the industry is going after for the most part; they're going after those who are openly trading (or outright selling) copies of the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters.
It's too bad you folks in the UK let them take your guns away, or you might have other options available to you.
Which explains why the US was led by George W. Bush for such a short period: you have guns available, so as your nation gave up even the pretense of due process and respect for your own Constitution in the name of wars on abstract nouns, watched your economy crumble and the ongoing rise of the mighty corporations, and introduced infringements of privacy and civil liberties at least as draconian as many of those going on elsewhere in the world, you... elected the guy a second time, let him serve a full second term, and then let him retire quietly to a life of riches with no apparent remorse for the mess he made during his time in office. Yeah, guns are definitely the answer to people like this. Right. Absolutely.
In the real world, violence rarely helps anything. At best, it provides a temporary respite or a catalyst for change that already had a solid basis. You have to be in a pretty extreme position, effectively civil war and changing your entire system of government forcibly, before violence really gains you anything, and even then it's only good for creating an opportunity to change and not much use if the change isn't a good one in its own right. If the only way you can make your point is through violence then the chances are that once you stop beating it into people you'll lose the debate again anyway. This is true of anything from police abusing their authority to waging war to physical abuse of public officials.
[Mandelson is] an out-of-control power-crazed sociopath and should never have been allowed back into government.
We didn't allow him back in. In fact, he resigned twice already under dubious circumstances. Then he got appointed to Europe, and now he's been appointed to a very senior position in Parliament after being appointed to the House of Lords. Note that the term "appointed" here implies that the people never got a vote, he was put into those positions by the Prime Minister and his chums. Oh, and the Prime Minister was appointed as Tony Blair's successor, in direction contradiction of a Labour Party manifesto promise to voters at the last general election, which they won with such a huge majority because of funny electoral math and not popular support (having actually lost the popular vote in England to the Conservatives, in fact).
Basically, these guys don't even have a shadow of a mandate for what they're doing in the first place, but since they're already a lame duck administration they seem to feel they have little to lose by wading in with the most illiberal, draconian legislation they can shove through in the final parliamentary session before the general election. Thus we get resistance to court rulings on cleaning up the DNA database, a roll-out of trials for an expensive ID card scheme that both the major opposition parties in England have long since pledged to scrap, and now this.
My personal favourite from this week's Queen's Speech was the bill to make it a legal requirement to half the budget deficit within four years, which would conveniently mean that having destroyed our economy themselves, they could then pass a poison pill to their successors when they inevitably lose the next general election. Presumably they will then claim in four years that whoever won the election has broken the law by being unable to do the impossible, and pretend that in some alternate reality Labour would somehow have been able to fix the problems they were unable to prevent in the first place.
The various extreme anti-copyright-infringement policies flying around at the moment sound like much the same thing: having mostly ignored or actively gone against the recommendations of their own Gowers Review when it comes to IP laws, they are now setting up back channel ways to suck up to big business while they still can, knowing that if they tried to push these things through Parliament properly they would face stiff opposition (not to mention probably losing even more votes, since post-Gowers they pretty much know that people overwhelmingly oppose things like copyright term extension).
As a final note, the Open Rights Group are pretty dumb if they think invoking the recent XBox cut-offs supports the case against this. I haven't seen a single report that suggests there were people cut off by Microsoft inappropriately (i.e., not after breaking the rules), the cut-off only affected their use of the XBox and not unrelated Internet services, and even the BBC carried an article based on one such person, who admitted freely that he was ripping off games illegally because it saved him money, which is exactly what the cut-off was intended to obstruct.
So what do you do? Redesign the whole modular system, unravel all the finished modules and rework them to fit the new interfaces you have to design?
If you have to do that to accommodate a typical change in requirements, then your system was never really modular at all, was it?
Modules represent, among other things, units of change.
It's why leadership and direction are such important qualities in management, and why companies try to hire and keep the best.
If only that were so...
It's been my experience that most medium-sized and larger companies actively take steps to hire mediocrity and lose their best people, whether or not they realise it.
Such companies can typically be identified by a combination of three give-away signs: they are too large for everyone to know everyone, which creates room for a layer of middle-managers who are neither hands-on team leaders nor directors, and there exist dedicated people/departments for things like HR and IT.
As soon as you've got that kind of culture, you're likely to be hiring cookie cutter candidates. Then you have to introduce business processes that cater to the least common denominator, which by design stifle individuality and innovation. Unfortunately, those are often exactly the reasons that the best people are the best people: they bring unique technical strengths, creative ideas inspired by their personal past experiences, or insightful points of view. Having made individuality thoroughly subservient to the machine, you have discarded the extra value good people could have contributed, so those people feel a lack of motivation; you compensate them on a level similar to the cookie cutter guys, so they feel a lack of recognition; and since they are exactly the people who can most easily find new work, they are the first out of the door, leaving your overall workforce even lower on the scale. And thus the downward spiral continues.
I'm all for proving things properly, but unfortunately, in the real world, we mostly deal with infinite problem spaces that don't lend themselves to a convenient recursive analysis.
The problem is that if all you've got is some code you don't understand and some tests, you don't really know whether it works. At most, you only know that it gives the correct answers in the specific cases you're testing.
Then your customers, who are using your product in other cases, will find bugs.
Then you will have to spend several times as much effort fixing the bug post-release as it would have taken to avoid the bug in the first place, and your developer morale will start to take a beating because all they ever do is fix bugs instead of working on creating cool new stuff that is what motivates a high proportion of people who get into this industry.
Then your good people will all leave, except for two who you have to pay a small fortune in salary because they're the only guys left who know how your code works at all.
Ultimately, you will be left running a dead company walking for as long as you can keep selling the increasingly out-of-date and bug-ridden product before your poor PR and your increasingly distant competition steal all your customers.
Cookies cannot be read by other domains.
That's a technicality. Tracking cookies are used all over the web by advertising networks serving content from within their own domain that is embedded in pages from other domains.
If you don't like cookies, feel free to block them. It's not hard to do.
But blocking other cookie-like tools is often hard to do, as clearly demonstrated by the number of recent forum discussions on this subject that are full of geeks who don't even know LSOs exist, never mind how to disable them.
The difference between hidden POST data and cookies is obvious: one leaves data on the user's machine, which can also be used when they visit other web sites or during later browsing sessions; the other does not.
And if you have a problem because this new rule will affect you but it's not feasible to rewrite your entire CMS, then frankly, I have to wonder what you're doing right now, and whether you're not exactly the kind of person/business for whom this new restriction is intended to cause a problem.