And music is so far the only major exception to the rule, possibly because bundling up lots of tracks into an album and charging a higher price for it was always an artificial restriction. Much more music is bought as singles today, and mass-market singles can be economically sold at sub-dollar price points that are an impulse purchase for anyone who can afford an Internet connection and a device to use it. Unfortunately, the same economics don't necessarily work for creative sectors where the normal full purchase price would be in double-digits.
DRM protected digital content should be considered as rented or licensed for a short period anyway, not bought like a book or a record is. It's the video rental or amusement park model and the prices should reflect that, which they don't always do.
That is all fair. The other side, though, is that if someone is essentially offering some sort of rental model, maybe with access to a large library of content for a specific period at a price far lower than buying a permanent copy of each of the relevant works accessed during that period, then there needs to be some system so customers can't just blatantly take advantage.
It seems doubtful that the likes of Netflix and Spotify would get deals to provide mainstream content to their subscribers if they were then allowing those subscribers to download and keep as many movies/shows/songs they wanted to in return for buying whatever the shortest subscription is.
Some of these alternative models have proved to be popular precisely because they are beneficial for enough customers, just like the video rental stores of yesteryear, so it isn't necessarily helpful to ban the kinds of technologies that make them viable in the real world and insist that unprotected, permanent copies are the only way that creative works can be offered.
You can't win a trade war like this when you're just a consumer and someone else is producing the content. The value is all generated on their side, and they have plenty of alternative ways to supply their content and plenty of other consumers who will pay for it if you limit the Web so it won't meet their requirements.
According to the EPA list, excluding hybrids (which aren't "comparable") the best 2017 models get 35 combined MPG.
Then we must be looking at totally different methods for calculating the figures. The official combined mileage figures (I'm in the UK, for reference) for many family compacts are way higher than the 35 you're quoting. I'm looking at things like mid-range models from the likes of Ford, Vauxhall, Peugeot or Toyota here, and in a few models I looked up before, I didn't see a single one with a combined mileage figure as low as that.
Also, Smart is a bit of a special case that has so many quirks it's not particularly useful for comparison. (I wouldn't bet that a Smart actually is safer in a crash than many older cars, for one thing.)
First of all, old Mercs and Volvos had most of the fancy safety systems you seem to think are necessary.
I didn't say they were necessary, I said they were safer, and objectively that is clearly true.
And no, old Mercs and Volvos didn't have anything like the systems we see today. Show me a car more than a few years old that will warn the driver if they start to change lanes with someone approaching fast from behind in the next lane over, or that can rival the effectiveness of modern headlight and night vision systems, or that determines whether to allow wheels to lock when braking in an emergency based on what will bring the car to a halt most effectively on the current surface. No human being can match the performance of these systems, because we only have two eyes, they don't see that well at night, and one brake pedal and one steering wheel can't possibly offer as much control or feedback as all the sensors and independent driving/braking on separate wheels that modern driving aids can use.
As for your other complaints, maybe you only drive on roads where not only you yourself but also everyone else is a perfect driver. Personally, I've never been that lucky. I'm in favour of any reasonable safety aid that makes it less likely for some idiot to pull out right in front of someone else because they didn't look properly, or reverse into a wall or someone else's car because they didn't know how long their own vehicle was, or hit an animal on a country road at night because they didn't realise how limited their vision was and give themselves time to stop, or skid into the back of someone else in bad conditions because they didn't have the reflexes or a Formula 1 champion and the precision of a veteran stunt driver.
I could get an old car that's even more efficient than a comparable new car (e.g. a Geo Metro XFi or Honda CRX HF)
What comparable modern car do you think gets significantly less mileage than a Honda CR-X HF? Various old reports and brochures I found suggest that the CR-X HF would get mid-30s (mpg) on urban roads and low-50s on the highway, although those seem to be official figures so real driving efficiency was probably a bit lower. A typical modern compact family car ought to achieve real figures significantly better than those if driven sensibly. (And of course that's being very generous with "comparable", since a typical modern compact family car would be superior to the models you mentioned in almost every conceivable way.)
I could get an old car that's probably just as safe as new ones, other than maybe electronic nannies like ESP (e.g. an old Volvo or Mercedes).
You really couldn't. Not even close.
Modern lighting systems and even night vision cameras now give several seconds of extra warning of hazards compared to the technology of yesteryear.
Modern cars increasingly come with radar and external camera systems that give much better visibility around the vehicle, warn immediately about dangerous situations, and even take automatic action to avoid or reduce the effects of a crash.
Modern traction control and emergency braking systems do what human drivers used to do manually, but they do it hundreds of times per second, much more accurately, and often on each wheel independently for maximum effect, making it much more likely that a driver will be able to avoid a dangerous situation.
In the event that a crash does happen, modern cars have numerous features designed to protect both the occupants and those outside the vehicle: crumple zones, side impact protection, airbags, safer pedals, even windscreen wipers designed to reduce the impact on a pedestrian or cyclist hit by the car.
In the event of a crash where the occupants of the vehicle are unable to call for help themselves, modern cars can automatically call emergency services and provide information about the location of the emergency and current situation of the vehicle.
And yes, even tyre pressure warning systems are useful. Of course everyone should check their vehicles regularly anyway, but that won't help if you have a significant drop in tyre pressure after your journey starts.
You're mighty quick to tell me about my mistakes for someone who knows nothing about me, nothing about the dealership in question, and based on your last paragraph, apparently not very much about cars either.
I wouldn't have been at the dealership if it was a straightforward problem to diagnose.
The dealership actually waived most of their charges because it took so long to find the fault, so it cost me very little to get it fixed in the end.
And based on the recent non-dealership garages I've used, all based on personal recommendations, the dealership in this case must have been hiring wizards riding unicorns compared to the people getting hired elsewhere.
Gas consumption and emissions have been trending way down, certainly in my country (UK) where there are significant tax incentives, but the models we have available here obviously aren't unique to our market.
And modern cars have added numerous safety improvements, from more sophisticated driving aids that improve handling under emergency conditions, to "simple" stuff like adaptive headlights that give much better visibility at night and tyre pressure warning systems.
Get an older car and fix it. It's not complicated.
I've spent the past few weeks watching the local dealership for my car struggling to diagnose a problem despite having a professional workshop and the manufacturer's technical experts at the end of the phone. Anything less than about 20 years old has so much electronic wizardry inside it that amateur maintenance is simply not a viable option for some problems.
On the other hand, anything older than a few years is horrendously inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and dangerous in an emergency compared to modern vehicles.
I understand what copyright is intended to do, but I see little evidence that a 90+ year term and other onerous terms are means to this goal.
I'd be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed in several ways, including the steady creep up to the current absurd durations you mentioned. I am in no way supporting that side of the copyright system, as you can tell by many other posts I've made including to this very discussion.
However, most use of copyrighted work both by creators and by pirates still happens in the first few years, and in practice shortening the duration to something much more reasonable seems unlikely to affect the behaviour of either side very much. The basic principle is still that copyright establishes similar market incentives to create information-based products to the incentives established by respecting physical private property when it comes to creating physical products.
And of course, as Google points out, the search index could not have occurred under such a regime. I shouldn't have to sell you on the usefulness of internet search on society[...]
I'm something of a skeptic in that regard. My personal suspicion is that if we didn't have the likes of Google indexing everything, we'd just have evolved some other sort of directory/index system, along with including more explicit links in our Web content and probably making more use of bookmarks for starting points relevant to our personal interests. There were already plenty of moves in these directions in parallel with early search engine development, some much more promising than others, and the natural connectedness of the Web would lend itself just fine to scaling up these sorts of alternatives.
Maybe that would even have become a better system than what we have today. By its nature, an automated search engine will always be vulnerable to gaming whatever system it implements. Today's arrangement also locates an awful lot of power centrally with the big search engines, even though they are ultimately only useful because of any good content created by others that they help a visitor to find. When sites that would be of interest to visitors can rise and fall almost entirely by a change in the ranking algorithm at a search engine, over which the site has no control and for which the search engine has no accountability, I'm not sure everything is really working as wonderfully as we sometimes assume.
Automation has so far proven to be a questionable benefit over curation, and while it's certainly true that today's search engines are often better for finding interesting or useful information than the portals and web rings of the 1990s, that's not really a fair comparison. It's called web browsing for a reason, and I truly think we've lost something that had great potential there with the rise of the search engines.
When Google first launched their search engine, they didn't have ads in the way they and many other free-to-use online services do today. They were one of the pioneers of the modern online world where everything is expected to be "free", privacy is invaded routinely, advertising of questionable value to almost everyone other than the ad networks dominates, and web pages are so full of tracking and advertising junk that an entire ecosystem of tools had to be invented just to make the web not suck more than it did 20 years ago. Whatever benefits any of Google's services might have offered relative to the alternatives we had before, I'm still not sure it was worth the trade-off.
Given that vastly more work is created and that work is distributed to vastly more people under copyright-supported activities than via any other economic model in human history, I think your "making it less efficient" claim needs some supporting evidence.
The point of copyright is to create an effective market where the same sorts of effects that motivate making more and better physical products also motivate making more and better creative works.
America's founders knew that ideas and innovations belonged to the public not locked up behind laws, that's why we have limited copyrights, so that eventually works will go into the public domain to spark new ideas.
Somehow I doubt the founding fathers had industrial scale barratry and copyright lasting longer than any human lifetime in mind, nor on the other hand that large businesses should be able to make staggering profits by exploiting the works of others in almost textbook examples of what copyright was meant to prevent and get away with it because of fair use or safe harbour provisions.
But Google's major innovation wasn't inventing the search engine, it was monetizing their services by finding ways to attach advertising to the work of others.
If that's how they want to define innovation, then I'm OK if they find it difficult to do more of it.
You do realise that the US is far more liberal with its fair use provisions than almost anywhere else in the world? And that this has been a frequent source of debate in both the creative industries and among international diplomats, since it's questionable whether the US is actually complying with its own treaty obligations while at the same time trying to push ever longer copyright durations and more restrictive practices in other areas onto others?
Ultimately, Google makes the vast majority of its money from advertising, and that advertising is attached in one way or another to content whose value was entirely generated by others, whether we're talking about the main search engine, YouTube, or almost any of Google's other major services.
This is not to say that their services can't be useful, but the idea that innovation is some terrible challenge if you can't exploit all the content that others create to the n-th degree is just silly. As a counterpoint to your arguments about tanking the economy, I give you China, where copyright enforcement is essentially non-existent and (by Western standards) so are the professional creative industries. The primary innovation in content creation in China is arguably their skill at copying the work of others without having to contribute anything back in return.
"With no fair use, it's more difficult to make staggering amounts of money from other people's work," says organisation famous for making staggering amounts of money mostly because of other people's work.
Ah, cunning! So it's like my idea, but now you don't even have to hire someone to do the translation, because your boss/customer already did that bit. Nice. Definitely no programmers involved anywhere now!
Changing requirements aren't a problem. All you need is to define a language where they can be specified precisely, and hire someone who can translate your real world requirements into that language. Once you've got those, you can still do away with programmers because the new magic code generation tools will do everything else for you.
Slashdot Mirror
And music is so far the only major exception to the rule, possibly because bundling up lots of tracks into an album and charging a higher price for it was always an artificial restriction. Much more music is bought as singles today, and mass-market singles can be economically sold at sub-dollar price points that are an impulse purchase for anyone who can afford an Internet connection and a device to use it. Unfortunately, the same economics don't necessarily work for creative sectors where the normal full purchase price would be in double-digits.
DRM protected digital content should be considered as rented or licensed for a short period anyway, not bought like a book or a record is. It's the video rental or amusement park model and the prices should reflect that, which they don't always do.
That is all fair. The other side, though, is that if someone is essentially offering some sort of rental model, maybe with access to a large library of content for a specific period at a price far lower than buying a permanent copy of each of the relevant works accessed during that period, then there needs to be some system so customers can't just blatantly take advantage.
It seems doubtful that the likes of Netflix and Spotify would get deals to provide mainstream content to their subscribers if they were then allowing those subscribers to download and keep as many movies/shows/songs they wanted to in return for buying whatever the shortest subscription is.
Some of these alternative models have proved to be popular precisely because they are beneficial for enough customers, just like the video rental stores of yesteryear, so it isn't necessarily helpful to ban the kinds of technologies that make them viable in the real world and insist that unprotected, permanent copies are the only way that creative works can be offered.
You can't win a trade war like this when you're just a consumer and someone else is producing the content. The value is all generated on their side, and they have plenty of alternative ways to supply their content and plenty of other consumers who will pay for it if you limit the Web so it won't meet their requirements.
According to the EPA list, excluding hybrids (which aren't "comparable") the best 2017 models get 35 combined MPG.
Then we must be looking at totally different methods for calculating the figures. The official combined mileage figures (I'm in the UK, for reference) for many family compacts are way higher than the 35 you're quoting. I'm looking at things like mid-range models from the likes of Ford, Vauxhall, Peugeot or Toyota here, and in a few models I looked up before, I didn't see a single one with a combined mileage figure as low as that.
Also, Smart is a bit of a special case that has so many quirks it's not particularly useful for comparison. (I wouldn't bet that a Smart actually is safer in a crash than many older cars, for one thing.)
First of all, old Mercs and Volvos had most of the fancy safety systems you seem to think are necessary.
I didn't say they were necessary, I said they were safer, and objectively that is clearly true.
And no, old Mercs and Volvos didn't have anything like the systems we see today. Show me a car more than a few years old that will warn the driver if they start to change lanes with someone approaching fast from behind in the next lane over, or that can rival the effectiveness of modern headlight and night vision systems, or that determines whether to allow wheels to lock when braking in an emergency based on what will bring the car to a halt most effectively on the current surface. No human being can match the performance of these systems, because we only have two eyes, they don't see that well at night, and one brake pedal and one steering wheel can't possibly offer as much control or feedback as all the sensors and independent driving/braking on separate wheels that modern driving aids can use.
As for your other complaints, maybe you only drive on roads where not only you yourself but also everyone else is a perfect driver. Personally, I've never been that lucky. I'm in favour of any reasonable safety aid that makes it less likely for some idiot to pull out right in front of someone else because they didn't look properly, or reverse into a wall or someone else's car because they didn't know how long their own vehicle was, or hit an animal on a country road at night because they didn't realise how limited their vision was and give themselves time to stop, or skid into the back of someone else in bad conditions because they didn't have the reflexes or a Formula 1 champion and the precision of a veteran stunt driver.
I could get an old car that's even more efficient than a comparable new car (e.g. a Geo Metro XFi or Honda CRX HF)
What comparable modern car do you think gets significantly less mileage than a Honda CR-X HF? Various old reports and brochures I found suggest that the CR-X HF would get mid-30s (mpg) on urban roads and low-50s on the highway, although those seem to be official figures so real driving efficiency was probably a bit lower. A typical modern compact family car ought to achieve real figures significantly better than those if driven sensibly. (And of course that's being very generous with "comparable", since a typical modern compact family car would be superior to the models you mentioned in almost every conceivable way.)
I could get an old car that's probably just as safe as new ones, other than maybe electronic nannies like ESP (e.g. an old Volvo or Mercedes).
You really couldn't. Not even close.
Modern lighting systems and even night vision cameras now give several seconds of extra warning of hazards compared to the technology of yesteryear.
Modern cars increasingly come with radar and external camera systems that give much better visibility around the vehicle, warn immediately about dangerous situations, and even take automatic action to avoid or reduce the effects of a crash.
Modern traction control and emergency braking systems do what human drivers used to do manually, but they do it hundreds of times per second, much more accurately, and often on each wheel independently for maximum effect, making it much more likely that a driver will be able to avoid a dangerous situation.
In the event that a crash does happen, modern cars have numerous features designed to protect both the occupants and those outside the vehicle: crumple zones, side impact protection, airbags, safer pedals, even windscreen wipers designed to reduce the impact on a pedestrian or cyclist hit by the car.
In the event of a crash where the occupants of the vehicle are unable to call for help themselves, modern cars can automatically call emergency services and provide information about the location of the emergency and current situation of the vehicle.
And yes, even tyre pressure warning systems are useful. Of course everyone should check their vehicles regularly anyway, but that won't help if you have a significant drop in tyre pressure after your journey starts.
You're mighty quick to tell me about my mistakes for someone who knows nothing about me, nothing about the dealership in question, and based on your last paragraph, apparently not very much about cars either.
I wouldn't have been at the dealership if it was a straightforward problem to diagnose.
The dealership actually waived most of their charges because it took so long to find the fault, so it cost me very little to get it fixed in the end.
And based on the recent non-dealership garages I've used, all based on personal recommendations, the dealership in this case must have been hiring wizards riding unicorns compared to the people getting hired elsewhere.
What was wrong with my original point?
Gas consumption and emissions have been trending way down, certainly in my country (UK) where there are significant tax incentives, but the models we have available here obviously aren't unique to our market.
And modern cars have added numerous safety improvements, from more sophisticated driving aids that improve handling under emergency conditions, to "simple" stuff like adaptive headlights that give much better visibility at night and tyre pressure warning systems.
Get an older car and fix it. It's not complicated.
I've spent the past few weeks watching the local dealership for my car struggling to diagnose a problem despite having a professional workshop and the manufacturer's technical experts at the end of the phone. Anything less than about 20 years old has so much electronic wizardry inside it that amateur maintenance is simply not a viable option for some problems.
On the other hand, anything older than a few years is horrendously inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and dangerous in an emergency compared to modern vehicles.
Publicly traded company will always whatever is in their stockholders best interest (as they are required to do so by law)
No, they aren't. Putting it in bold doesn't make it any more true.
I'm calling Poe's Law on the parent post.
I understand what copyright is intended to do, but I see little evidence that a 90+ year term and other onerous terms are means to this goal.
I'd be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed in several ways, including the steady creep up to the current absurd durations you mentioned. I am in no way supporting that side of the copyright system, as you can tell by many other posts I've made including to this very discussion.
However, most use of copyrighted work both by creators and by pirates still happens in the first few years, and in practice shortening the duration to something much more reasonable seems unlikely to affect the behaviour of either side very much. The basic principle is still that copyright establishes similar market incentives to create information-based products to the incentives established by respecting physical private property when it comes to creating physical products.
And of course, as Google points out, the search index could not have occurred under such a regime. I shouldn't have to sell you on the usefulness of internet search on society[...]
I'm something of a skeptic in that regard. My personal suspicion is that if we didn't have the likes of Google indexing everything, we'd just have evolved some other sort of directory/index system, along with including more explicit links in our Web content and probably making more use of bookmarks for starting points relevant to our personal interests. There were already plenty of moves in these directions in parallel with early search engine development, some much more promising than others, and the natural connectedness of the Web would lend itself just fine to scaling up these sorts of alternatives.
Maybe that would even have become a better system than what we have today. By its nature, an automated search engine will always be vulnerable to gaming whatever system it implements. Today's arrangement also locates an awful lot of power centrally with the big search engines, even though they are ultimately only useful because of any good content created by others that they help a visitor to find. When sites that would be of interest to visitors can rise and fall almost entirely by a change in the ranking algorithm at a search engine, over which the site has no control and for which the search engine has no accountability, I'm not sure everything is really working as wonderfully as we sometimes assume.
Automation has so far proven to be a questionable benefit over curation, and while it's certainly true that today's search engines are often better for finding interesting or useful information than the portals and web rings of the 1990s, that's not really a fair comparison. It's called web browsing for a reason, and I truly think we've lost something that had great potential there with the rise of the search engines.
Oh wait, I just gave a dumb ass argument.
Well, since none of the things you mentioned would have had anything to do with copyright, yes, you did.
When Google first launched their search engine, they didn't have ads in the way they and many other free-to-use online services do today. They were one of the pioneers of the modern online world where everything is expected to be "free", privacy is invaded routinely, advertising of questionable value to almost everyone other than the ad networks dominates, and web pages are so full of tracking and advertising junk that an entire ecosystem of tools had to be invented just to make the web not suck more than it did 20 years ago. Whatever benefits any of Google's services might have offered relative to the alternatives we had before, I'm still not sure it was worth the trade-off.
Several other people built indices before Google, but that wasn't my point and I'm sure you knew that.
Yes, it's easy to make money when someone else is doing all the work.
Given that vastly more work is created and that work is distributed to vastly more people under copyright-supported activities than via any other economic model in human history, I think your "making it less efficient" claim needs some supporting evidence.
The point of copyright is to create an effective market where the same sorts of effects that motivate making more and better physical products also motivate making more and better creative works.
America's founders knew that ideas and innovations belonged to the public not locked up behind laws, that's why we have limited copyrights, so that eventually works will go into the public domain to spark new ideas.
Somehow I doubt the founding fathers had industrial scale barratry and copyright lasting longer than any human lifetime in mind, nor on the other hand that large businesses should be able to make staggering profits by exploiting the works of others in almost textbook examples of what copyright was meant to prevent and get away with it because of fair use or safe harbour provisions.
And all that technology on the Galactica was obsolete.
But Google's major innovation wasn't inventing the search engine, it was monetizing their services by finding ways to attach advertising to the work of others.
If that's how they want to define innovation, then I'm OK if they find it difficult to do more of it.
You do realise that the US is far more liberal with its fair use provisions than almost anywhere else in the world? And that this has been a frequent source of debate in both the creative industries and among international diplomats, since it's questionable whether the US is actually complying with its own treaty obligations while at the same time trying to push ever longer copyright durations and more restrictive practices in other areas onto others?
Ultimately, Google makes the vast majority of its money from advertising, and that advertising is attached in one way or another to content whose value was entirely generated by others, whether we're talking about the main search engine, YouTube, or almost any of Google's other major services.
This is not to say that their services can't be useful, but the idea that innovation is some terrible challenge if you can't exploit all the content that others create to the n-th degree is just silly. As a counterpoint to your arguments about tanking the economy, I give you China, where copyright enforcement is essentially non-existent and (by Western standards) so are the professional creative industries. The primary innovation in content creation in China is arguably their skill at copying the work of others without having to contribute anything back in return.
Maybe "innovation" isn't really Google's main motivation when making these comments.
"With no fair use, it's more difficult to make staggering amounts of money from other people's work," says organisation famous for making staggering amounts of money mostly because of other people's work.
Sounds like you are describing a compiler.
#thatsthejoke
Ah, cunning! So it's like my idea, but now you don't even have to hire someone to do the translation, because your boss/customer already did that bit. Nice. Definitely no programmers involved anywhere now!
Changing requirements aren't a problem. All you need is to define a language where they can be specified precisely, and hire someone who can translate your real world requirements into that language. Once you've got those, you can still do away with programmers because the new magic code generation tools will do everything else for you.