I have no idea what modern console games are doing; I don't have one. However, the idea that you need a dedicated server, run by the game developers or some intermediary on a subscription basis, just to get a dozen players in the same arena is just silly. Anyone could run a server even back in the early days of games like Quake, and many people did, and the community quickly developed tools to find them so you could match people up and get a game, and it worked just fine without id Software or Microsoft or Valve whoever else controlling everything. That was about 20 years ago, with devices and connection speeds orders of magnitude slower than we have today. If modern game developers can't do the same for the same kinds of game, then they just aren't very good.
So, your #1 draw for console gaming is real-time multiplayer, and you're not willing to pay for it. I'm not going to argue about whether MS or Sony are making a huge profit off their subscription prices, but I'm sure that the infrastructure that they've put in place did not come free and the cost has to be covered somehow.
Yes, it does. It's called your Internet connection, and you pay your ISP for it.
You can have high-end online games with 10-20 simultaneous players working just fine with a regular Internet connection. No phoning home. No subscription. No lock-in. No expiry date. I know, because I was there when we started writing them. That was around the 1990s, back when broadband was still a dream for most of us and people on the academic networks were called LPBs.
Given the advances in technology of the past 20 years, I don't for a moment believe that it's actually necessary to have a centralised server as a core dependency just for most multiplayer online gaming today. In fact, I can see only two reasons to write your game that way.
One reason is because you really are co-ordinating massive numbers of players in a shared world or otherwise dealing with huge amounts of content that changes over time. If that really is the nature of your game, that's fair enough, but in most cases it is not.
The other reason is just about keeping control, so you can do things like limiting second-hand markets and making it harder to pirate. That's an entirely understandable goal from a commercial point of view, but there is no advantage for legitimate users who just want to enjoy a game with their friends and there are a lot of potential problems or disadvantages.
I didn't like paying for it as well at first, but I don't really see it as that big of a burden anymore.
And that's exactly what a lot of these services are banking on, but apparently quite a lot of customers are getting bored of being exploited in that way now. I can't say I'm overflowing with sympathy for the services in question, because I remember the days when games were about having fun and not just about squeezing as much profit out of the customer base as possible. Ironically, I bought a lot more games in those days.
I don't know where you're from, but here in the UK school and university textbooks are mostly pretty decent, and the good ones are very good. And of course, that's part of my point: the good ones probably take more work to get right and will be priced higher, but if you value having good textbooks then you will presumably still buy them. If the extra quality isn't worth that much to you, you can buy lower quality work for a lower price and put up with its inadequacies. Either way, schools have limited budgets, so the price has to be realistic. Efforts will be focussed on creating works that have a good chance of being commercially successful, i.e., what the market wants.
Over here, even an average textbook will typically have dramatically more work put into checking its correctness and writing useful exercises and citations than something like a Wikipedia page on most subjects. Despite the widespread applicability of, say, a basic maths textbook for 14 years olds, the entire global academic community has so far not got together to write a common, community-led version online that is free to use and free for anyone to edit. That surely tells us something about the benefits of commercial incentives.
There is nothing whatsoever "free market" about limiting copying. NOTHING.
Obviously copyright itself is a limitation, an artificial monopoly. That is the nature of copyright.
The point is that, as you say, creative works are not property in the traditional sense. We can't just apply the traditional economics of physical property to creative works, where the fixed cost is a (possibly very large) up-front investment but the marginal cost of distribution is (usually) close to zero. Any model that determines the value of creative work based solely on the low marginal distribution cost is going to be unsustainable.
However, it still seems desirable to have some form of free market where prices are set by supply and demand. In this case, supply is limited primarily by the existence of the works in the first place and the cost of initially creating them, while on the demand side we have the size of the market and the value of the work to each potential buyer as usual.
Copyright is one possible solution to this set of constraints: we create a market not in the work in itself but in certain rights to use it. Someone who creates a work is free to offer copies for sale at whatever price they wish, but how many people buy a copy will be dictated by how big the target market is and whether the price is attractive to any given buyer.
But making textbooks subject to copyright makes the world a worse place, not a better one. It only leads to more textbooks with errors in them, hastily thrown together to make a buck — a buck protected by law.
I don't think your arguments here stand up to either logic or reality. A good textbook at a fair price will be more attractive than a bad textbook at a fair price, and schools will generally buy the better textbooks if they can afford them.
Absent copyright, educators would be free to fix the problems with existing texts and rerelease them, rather than wasting effort creating new, essentially duplicate works for hire.
But in reality, bad textbooks usually fail quickly, and better textbooks with some errors in early printings get reprinted with the errors corrected in later editions. The beneficiary of the ongoing sales are still the original creators, who did 99% of the work to create the book in the first place and then a bit more to improve it, not someone who comes along, makes a couple of minor improvements in a few minutes, and then starts redistributing something that is 99% someone else's work without those original creators receiving any benefit.
Copyright actually leads to more duplication of effort!
Sometimes, perhaps it does, but I'm not sure this is one of those times. New textbooks are usually issued to complement a new syllabus, or a new teaching method, or some significant advance in the state of the art. That usually means a substantial amount of new material.
In this case, we already have a pretty good idea of what happens if we pool community resources to write an alternative that anyone is free to copy and edit. The result is something like Wikipedia, and it is a great benefit to society and often a fine source of information. What it mostly does not have, however, is anything close to the level of curated structure, editing, and detail that goes into a professionally published textbook.
Math itself hasn't changed much at that level, but different syllabus requirements come and go, and so do different teaching methods.
Perhaps a better example would have been undergraduate or masters level texts, where there may be both significantly smaller markets and significantly higher levels of expertise required from significantly fewer potential authors, but in some subjects the contents of those texts might still need substantial updates from time to time.
So what else is fine because a lot of people do it? Driving while on the phone? ("Fine" until you have an accident, but then someone dies.) Piracy of software that was created by one guy working really hard in his bedroom for 5 yeas? ("Fine" unless you're that one guy, or anyone else using the software who would benefit from the continued development he can't now afford to do.) Tax dodging? ("Fine" until everyone else starts doing it as well, but then sorry, your society collapses.) Discrimination in the workplace? ("Fine" as long as you're OK because you're not too old/female/gay/black/Muslim/whatever.)
Laws move slowly, often a lot slower than social norms and popular understanding of new issues, but over time they do tend to reflect consensus ethics. I notice that the examples you gave are all cases where the current laws are arguably out of sync with much of society, but also not widely enforced. If they were, you'd see them changed very quickly to match what was and wasn't acceptable according to common ethical standards, probably after a bit of popular debate so more people understood the underlying issues that prompted the laws in the first place, which in some cases would be no bad thing anyway.
FWIW, I agree that extensions in favour of Disney and the like are an abuse of the principle and those aspects of the law should be changed. However, I also think it's important to remember that while the copyright term extensions are bad, in reality most piracy involves very recent works that would almost certainly still have been covered even under a much shorter and more reasonable term of protection. The whole issue of creeping term length is mostly a distraction in practice, when the terms are already so long as to be absurd anyway.
Unfortunately, IP laws generally tend to be expert matters that can be widely co-opted for purposes beyond their original and usually reasonable goals without attracting enough popular opposition to start affecting things like elections very much. Of course that's partly because enforcement is so scarce. If everyone suddenly started getting sued for what the law potentially allows when they infringed copyright, the law would probably be changed within weeks.
However, I think we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Copyright does have its merits, and I don't see a lot of people proposing plausible alternatives so far.
Really? They had mass-produced thousand-page textbooks for teaching many thousands or even millions of children to do math, complete with many thousands of carefully constructed exercises and guides for teachers, did they? They produced works equivalent to a modern movie or a show like Game of Thrones, with budgets running into the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, paying for production teams and casts numbering hundreds if not thousands of people, and then made those works available to millions of fans to enjoy? They produced software that took hundreds or thousands of programmers multiple years to develop, but which then benefitted many millions of people?
No. No, they didn't. No-one in the pre-copyright era was even trying to do things on these scales. They were simply impossible with the technology available at the time, so they had no need for an economic model that would pay for them either.
Before copyright, the writers, like Shakespeare, made nothing from their writing. They made all their money from direction and production.
Before copyright, most artists made little money from their work at all, and those who did made their money almost exclusively from wealthy patronage. Many of the greatest authors and playwrights and composers and performers of their time died young and broke.
Why do pro-copyright people hate capitalism so much?
I think you have it backwards. Copyright is an economic tool that makes a lot of creative work commercially viable, at least with enough odds of success to make it worth a try. Copyright is a vehicle for sharing the cost of the initial production among many potential customers, so even very expensive works are still viable if they are attractive to large numbers of people. Copyright is also a direct incentive to produce better works and distribute them to more people, because there is no guarantee you will make any money at all from your work, but the better it is and the more people it reaches, the more you stand to benefit in return. Copyright is the epitome of free market capitalism: the more value you create, the more you stand to benefit in return, and the value is measured directly by how many people pay you for your work.
I think your real objection is not to the free market aspect, but to the rules created for that market by artificially limiting copying by law. That is (or at least should be) a purely economic tool, and it should be abolished if and when someone comes along with a better idea that is more successful at incentivising the creation and distribution of new works with less of an ongoing social cost. But so far, no-one has. In fact, no-one has come up with anything that gets within orders of magnitude of the same effectiveness as our current copyright-based scheme. If anyone does, copyright isn't going to stop them from exploiting their alternative business model based on creating and distributing their own work in new ways, and the rest of the world will soon see the light, and those very market forces you claim to believe in will do the rest.
People were creating art long before there was such a thing as copyright.
Yes, they were. There was much less of it, and almost all of that was directed to the interests and preferences of a wealthy elite rather than what benefitted society as a whole. I don't know about you, but personally I think we're better off moving away from the patronage of the rich as the primary means for creators to earn a living, and the economic incentive created by copyright is one way to promote alternatives, because it lets you amortise the cost of a very expensive work over a very large number of people who each contribute only a small amount towards it.
Insofar as natural rights are even a thing, yes there is. There is a right to be free from violence. State-granted exceptions aside, this is literally encoded in every system of law from the very beginning (eye for an eye.)
I'm not a big fan of the term "natural rights", for reasons I explained in another post. In short, I think the term is too often used as a fudge factor, when what we are really talking about is some combination of personal moral values, consensus within a community, and actionable law.
Even in the sense of natural rights as those that are almost universally recognised without force of law, I think it's far from clear that someone's right to be take advantage of someone else outweighs that someone else's right to react. There are plenty of cultures in the world that do not accept or require a general freedom even from violence for certain groups of people who have committed certain acts deemed unacceptable, whether the group in question is women or children or some social group that is not in control. You or I might not find those cultures in agreement with our personal moral values, but that doesn't stop many other people being a part of such cultures, and in some cases even accepting them when they're on the receiving side of the violence.
In any case, the violence aspect is a diversion that doesn't seem to bet getting us any further with the original debate. The reality is that many laws go beyond natural rights, and obviously there is no general legal right to ignore laws with impunity just because someone feels they should have some right that contradicts those laws.
That's what things like copyright were for. Since the period has been extended so far, now it's for another purpose entirely; for the purpose of permitting movie studios to control our culture.
The thing is, the two aren't mutually exclusive. The same laws that protect Big Media's back catalogue not-quite-forever because of political shenanigans do also protect Big Media more legitimately against someone ripping off their latest blockbuster movie or hit song or popular game. The vast majority of piracy is not people copying older works that are only still covered by copyright because of term extensions. The vast majority of piracy is people copying much more recent works that would have been covered even under the original copyright laws in most countries. Mockery of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act may be fair and justified, but there are still a lot more people ripping the latest Taylor Swift album or Avengers movie or Call of Duty game than a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the early 20th century.
I have zero problems with arguing that copyright law has been abused and the principle has been taken too far and should be wound back. I've actively argued as much with my own elected representatives. But that doesn't mean anyone who doesn't want to pay for some work that took a great deal of time and money to produce should be able to just ignore the law and enjoy it for free anyway.
And I didn't explicitly agree not to punch you in the face, but our society as a whole has decided that that isn't acceptable behaviour, and that's why it's against the law.
Do you realise that your argument here is effectively that you are above the law, that the only laws that apply to you are the ones you agree with?
I'm not sure you understand what "natural rights" are. Go take a first level American History, or Politics, or Ethics class.
What some people call "natural rights" is mostly an illusion, a convenient lie we tell ourselves to try to make us feel better when enforceable law doesn't match our personal expectations or beliefs.
We each have our own personal moral standards, which govern the behaviour we personally believe to be right or acceptable, but those differ from one person to another and we can't necessarily expect that someone else will share the exact same beliefs. We have laws as a way of building consensus and recognising common ground, and as a way of deterring deviation from what is generally considered acceptable behaviour.
I will pay people when I've copied their work, if I find their work worthwhile, as will millions of others.
Big claim. No evidence.
At the consumer level, it's not copyright which causes people to decide to pay for work, and it's not copyright which stops people from pirating - it's the desire to pay for copies of work worth paying for.
For some people, yes. For many more people, unfortunately, no. There are plenty of people in the world who will simply take work done by others and enjoy it, without any thought that someone might have spent a lot of time and/or money to create that work in the first place or might deserve some form of appreciation and compensation in return.
In order to avoid those who try to do the right thing propping up those who don't, we have laws, and those laws say you can be sued if you infringe copyright, or even face criminal charges in a lot of places now if you're doing so on a commercial basis.
One of the biggest problems with this whole debate is people who argue against the basic principle of copyright without offering a practical alternative, and who take the position that copyright law is somehow unethical and therefore should be ignored. In the eyes of those who do the work to produce new content, and of the lawmakers they lobby, that just demonstrates the need for ever stronger enforcement and greater protections. What would actually make society a better place is probably much less severe copyright law and explicit recognition of the benefits of new technologies, but also effective enforcement of what is left.
It causes me harm that you don't send me 10% of your paycheck, because I don't have as much money to spend on stuff that makes me happy.
If you were the GP's agent, and they had only got that job as a result of your work and with a prior agreement to send you 10% of their paycheck as your fee, then you would be well within your rights to receive that money. You took on the work as an agent with no guarantee of getting paid but on the basis that you would receive 10% if things worked out, and in this case things did work out.
In particular, there's no natural right not to have information copied - the content producer's desire for profit doesn't trump the human right to remember information and write it down again.
There's no "natural right" for me not to find your comments offensive and come punch you in the face, but hopefully we can agree that the world is a better place because in civilised society we don't condone that sort of behaviour and we have laws to punish those who do it anyway.
No-one is disputing that in today's world copying information is fast and cheap. I expect almost everyone would agree that this is a good thing in principle. What often gets conveniently ignored in these discussions is that first there has to be some information worth copying. If creating or collecting that information involves a significant amount of work, it is useful to have some economic incentive for people to do that, and that's what things like copyright are for.
It causes no harm, and anything that causes no harm should not be illegal. If you don't like that, please point out the error in it.
It causes no harm as long as the work has already been created.
It causes great harm if the deal between society and creators, as set out through copyright, is that the creators have to invest whatever is necessary to create a work that will benefit others, but then they have a mechanism to generate revenue in return by controlling distribution for a while. Allowing creators to create as part of this deal, but then failing to effectively enforce the copyright protections, is failing to hold up the other side of the bargain, pure and simple. The harm is then whatever it cost the creators to create and share the work in the first place plus the opportunity cost for them because they didn't invest their resources into something else useful instead.
If society feels that the current bargain is not appropriate for today's world, that's fine, it can change the laws. If society collectively wants to do away with copyright because "information wants to be free" or whatever, fine, do it. Some people will still create new content and no doubt some people will still find ways to do so commercially. But society shouldn't complain if it makes that change and then finds that, lacking the same incentive to create and share new works, hardly anyone is making big summer blockbusters or original AAA quality computer games or well-produced studio albums or high school math textbooks with thousands of carefully constructed exercises and matching answer books for teachers any more. Nor should it complain when other business models that are less reliant on simply paying for something you find valuable -- things like blatant product placement throughout TV shows and movies, or subscription-only on-line software -- become the norm, even though a lot of consumers don't like them.
If you own hardware or software that is securely encrypted, then you will be committing an offence.
I won't be committing an offence regardless of how silly the US Congress is in this case, since I'm not in the US or subject to their jurisdiction. Isn't that the point here? The rest of the world is going to carry on trying to promote security and privacy with new technology. If the US government is more concerned about spying on its own citizens than about helping them to promote their security and privacy, the rest of the world will simply leave the US behind.
(I don't really expect this to happen, BTW. It looks like electioneering propaganda from here, not a serious proposal that anyone really expects to become law. And sadly we've been seeing this sort of short-sighted politics in other countries as well lately, including in my own.)
It is kind of amazing that in 2016 we still haven't solved encrypted and authenticated messaging. I'm not sure how easy it would be to explain to non-technical users how the signing mechanics work or at least why they need to install a digital signature on every new system that will send mail from a certain account, though.
In Australia, members of parliament are required to maintain details of financial investments in a public register. Private citizens are not so required.
The same is true in the UK, and if it turns out that anyone hasn't been disclosing relevant interests properly then there can be substantial negative consequences for them. Given all the scandals around parliamentary expenses and the general them-and-us culture at the moment, if any top Tory MPs (or MPs from any other party, for that matter) turn up on the list or have close connections to anyone who does, they're probably in real trouble.
Sure, but my point is that it is not an exception in this case. Sending and receiving invoices and other payment-related documentation by e-mail has been the norm for a lot of organisations for a long time. That's why this sort of scam is, regrettably, so effective.
I'm a professional web developer, among other hats I wear, so I use all of the major browsers regularly. Unfortunately, the users of the web sites and apps I write can choose whatever browser they want in most cases, so I'm often limited to the least common denominator in terms of functionality or performance requirements. And that least common denominator is Firefox an awful lot of the time these days.
In case you're interested, Chrome really is much better on performance with a lot of these newer features, and its usually adds new features more rapidly than anyone else. However, its quality of implementation is often terrible when new features are introduced, and sometimes for several months or even years afterwards, and on balance we also find Chrome is by far the least reliable major desktop browser when it comes to updates breaking functionality that used to work.
Any truly important, official communication from a government agency, or from any company demaning payment of any sort, is going to send it in a printed letter, not an email.
On what planet? My companies routinely send invoices to customers/clients by e-mail. We routinely get invoices from suppliers and service providers by e-mail, too. For things like signed contracts with serious amounts of money involved, sure, we'd send registered letters, but day-to-day has been mostly electronic for a long time here.
An unfortunate consequence of this is that since e-mail in general is not secure and in particular is not tamper-proof or reliably authenticated, it is open to this kind of abuse. I know some businesses we deal with have had some horrible incidents that cost them a lot of money because their in-house procedures weren't robust against an attacker who had enough inside information to look plausible.
A particularly devastating technique I've come across recently for attacking smaller and less formal businesses is based on identifying who normally pays invoices, someone more senior who they report to, and a pattern of where new suppliers might be and what sorts of amounts they'd be invoicing for. It's often pretty easy to guess this sort of information with minimal actual content, if say the company web site provides a couple of key names and contact details that legitimate business associates might actually need.
However, given that information, a malicious third party can then easily impersonate the e-mail of the senior person and send something asking the invoice-payer to settle a realistic bill for a new supplier. Thanks to the wonders of services like Google Mail, it will probably even arrive in their work inbox with the senior person's usual picture right there next to their name and e-mail address, looking all official and normal. Time it so the senior person is out at a meeting or on holiday or otherwise not there to answer a quick phone call, add a credible note that, say, you're trying to build a good long-term relationship with this new supplier to please try to settle up promptly to make a good impression, and it's easy to see how even though everyone is well meaning, they can be fooled simply because they didn't understand that the fake ID aspect was possible and as far as they knew it was all official communication using their normal work e-mail system.
Electrolysis is mostly about solving a different problem, I think, though perhaps it will have some consequential benefits for general performance as well.
What I really want is a Firefox that can manage to do a smooth CSS animation without a jump on the final frame, and render SVGs with more than a few elements at useful speeds, and manipulate video elements without triggering weird buffering and skipping effects, and so on. It's basically impossible to design a smooth, professional-looking UI that runs well in Firefox today without severely limiting how complex the presentation gets. You can do basic table- and form-based stuff fine, but start trying to do anything interesting like having interactive visuals, or co-ordinated multimedia elements, or more than very simple animations, and too many things just don't work or don't work fast enough to be acceptable in production.
And yet despite its problems [Firefox] runs smoother for me than chrome.
Your experience and mine are very different. The JS engine and a lot of the rendering for graphical elements are horribly slow in Firefox compared to any other major desktop browser today. Even IE11 is much faster at some things. I've spent much of the past few months with actual profiling data trying to find out why, and there's no single big issue. Firefox simply has awful performance for some functionality that comes up a lot when you're doing web apps.
You might be right, but I've been feeling for a while now that the tide seems to be turning.
It's clear by now that a lot of people will put up with a lot of questionable terms to keep access to a service like Facebook, at least for as long as most other people they know are also on Facebook. Even there it seems like younger generations are a lot more transient in their social networking habits than their parents and grandparents, though, and ironically a lot more wary of and careful about some of the risks of using these kinds of sites.
On the other hand, some random new tech device like we're talking about here is going to be completely expendable for most people, so I can't see them getting away with this kind of thing for long. There's probably also more cognitive dissonance involved when you're buying a physical thing that you expect to own and it then stops working for some software-related reason. Enough people seem to be running into problems with things like mobile OS updates, or even Windows 10 on a laptop now, that sooner or later they'll start running out of patience and doing more than just complaining online. Some combination of negative PR or even political attention will probably start to shift the boundaries of what is considered acceptable for new hardware eventually.
I think cars will be one of the most interesting cases, because it really is regarded as an essential for many people, but it's also an area where most people have to spend significant money on insurance and quite a few people also know they break the law "slightly" from time to time (speeding, intentionally or otherwise, or things like illegal parking for a few minutes while picking the kids up from school). The idea that your own car is tracking exactly when you're doing that and you're one step away from being prosecuted and losing your licence, or at least seeing your insurance premiums go up significantly, might make a lot of people think twice about installing Big Brother OS even if all the big auto manufacturers would like people to so they can sell the data. Plus there's the general security/privacy angle as with a lot of these connected devices as well, which at least the more technically inclined customers might start to consider a factor in purchasing decisions.
The one comfort I take from this sort of story is that as it happens more often, more normal (non-nerd) people will realise how much they could be giving up by allowing all this connected technology into their lives and relying on so many online services that can be changed or shut off at any time. That will lead to people voting with their wallets, and potentially even at the ballot box, for more reasonable terms and for stronger consumer protection, security and privacy rules.
It will probably also open up more of a market for consumer products that you really do own and control again, and remind people that if you want people to make nice things for you then at some point you do have to pay a realistic price for them, and none of that sounds bad to me either.
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I have no idea what modern console games are doing; I don't have one. However, the idea that you need a dedicated server, run by the game developers or some intermediary on a subscription basis, just to get a dozen players in the same arena is just silly. Anyone could run a server even back in the early days of games like Quake, and many people did, and the community quickly developed tools to find them so you could match people up and get a game, and it worked just fine without id Software or Microsoft or Valve whoever else controlling everything. That was about 20 years ago, with devices and connection speeds orders of magnitude slower than we have today. If modern game developers can't do the same for the same kinds of game, then they just aren't very good.
Or you could just buy them from GOG in the first place...
So, your #1 draw for console gaming is real-time multiplayer, and you're not willing to pay for it. I'm not going to argue about whether MS or Sony are making a huge profit off their subscription prices, but I'm sure that the infrastructure that they've put in place did not come free and the cost has to be covered somehow.
Yes, it does. It's called your Internet connection, and you pay your ISP for it.
You can have high-end online games with 10-20 simultaneous players working just fine with a regular Internet connection. No phoning home. No subscription. No lock-in. No expiry date. I know, because I was there when we started writing them. That was around the 1990s, back when broadband was still a dream for most of us and people on the academic networks were called LPBs.
Given the advances in technology of the past 20 years, I don't for a moment believe that it's actually necessary to have a centralised server as a core dependency just for most multiplayer online gaming today. In fact, I can see only two reasons to write your game that way.
One reason is because you really are co-ordinating massive numbers of players in a shared world or otherwise dealing with huge amounts of content that changes over time. If that really is the nature of your game, that's fair enough, but in most cases it is not.
The other reason is just about keeping control, so you can do things like limiting second-hand markets and making it harder to pirate. That's an entirely understandable goal from a commercial point of view, but there is no advantage for legitimate users who just want to enjoy a game with their friends and there are a lot of potential problems or disadvantages.
I didn't like paying for it as well at first, but I don't really see it as that big of a burden anymore.
And that's exactly what a lot of these services are banking on, but apparently quite a lot of customers are getting bored of being exploited in that way now. I can't say I'm overflowing with sympathy for the services in question, because I remember the days when games were about having fun and not just about squeezing as much profit out of the customer base as possible. Ironically, I bought a lot more games in those days.
I don't know where you're from, but here in the UK school and university textbooks are mostly pretty decent, and the good ones are very good. And of course, that's part of my point: the good ones probably take more work to get right and will be priced higher, but if you value having good textbooks then you will presumably still buy them. If the extra quality isn't worth that much to you, you can buy lower quality work for a lower price and put up with its inadequacies. Either way, schools have limited budgets, so the price has to be realistic. Efforts will be focussed on creating works that have a good chance of being commercially successful, i.e., what the market wants.
Over here, even an average textbook will typically have dramatically more work put into checking its correctness and writing useful exercises and citations than something like a Wikipedia page on most subjects. Despite the widespread applicability of, say, a basic maths textbook for 14 years olds, the entire global academic community has so far not got together to write a common, community-led version online that is free to use and free for anyone to edit. That surely tells us something about the benefits of commercial incentives.
There is nothing whatsoever "free market" about limiting copying. NOTHING.
Obviously copyright itself is a limitation, an artificial monopoly. That is the nature of copyright.
The point is that, as you say, creative works are not property in the traditional sense. We can't just apply the traditional economics of physical property to creative works, where the fixed cost is a (possibly very large) up-front investment but the marginal cost of distribution is (usually) close to zero. Any model that determines the value of creative work based solely on the low marginal distribution cost is going to be unsustainable.
However, it still seems desirable to have some form of free market where prices are set by supply and demand. In this case, supply is limited primarily by the existence of the works in the first place and the cost of initially creating them, while on the demand side we have the size of the market and the value of the work to each potential buyer as usual.
Copyright is one possible solution to this set of constraints: we create a market not in the work in itself but in certain rights to use it. Someone who creates a work is free to offer copies for sale at whatever price they wish, but how many people buy a copy will be dictated by how big the target market is and whether the price is attractive to any given buyer.
But making textbooks subject to copyright makes the world a worse place, not a better one. It only leads to more textbooks with errors in them, hastily thrown together to make a buck — a buck protected by law.
I don't think your arguments here stand up to either logic or reality. A good textbook at a fair price will be more attractive than a bad textbook at a fair price, and schools will generally buy the better textbooks if they can afford them.
Absent copyright, educators would be free to fix the problems with existing texts and rerelease them, rather than wasting effort creating new, essentially duplicate works for hire.
But in reality, bad textbooks usually fail quickly, and better textbooks with some errors in early printings get reprinted with the errors corrected in later editions. The beneficiary of the ongoing sales are still the original creators, who did 99% of the work to create the book in the first place and then a bit more to improve it, not someone who comes along, makes a couple of minor improvements in a few minutes, and then starts redistributing something that is 99% someone else's work without those original creators receiving any benefit.
Copyright actually leads to more duplication of effort!
Sometimes, perhaps it does, but I'm not sure this is one of those times. New textbooks are usually issued to complement a new syllabus, or a new teaching method, or some significant advance in the state of the art. That usually means a substantial amount of new material.
In this case, we already have a pretty good idea of what happens if we pool community resources to write an alternative that anyone is free to copy and edit. The result is something like Wikipedia, and it is a great benefit to society and often a fine source of information. What it mostly does not have, however, is anything close to the level of curated structure, editing, and detail that goes into a professionally published textbook.
Math itself hasn't changed much at that level, but different syllabus requirements come and go, and so do different teaching methods.
Perhaps a better example would have been undergraduate or masters level texts, where there may be both significantly smaller markets and significantly higher levels of expertise required from significantly fewer potential authors, but in some subjects the contents of those texts might still need substantial updates from time to time.
So what else is fine because a lot of people do it? Driving while on the phone? ("Fine" until you have an accident, but then someone dies.) Piracy of software that was created by one guy working really hard in his bedroom for 5 yeas? ("Fine" unless you're that one guy, or anyone else using the software who would benefit from the continued development he can't now afford to do.) Tax dodging? ("Fine" until everyone else starts doing it as well, but then sorry, your society collapses.) Discrimination in the workplace? ("Fine" as long as you're OK because you're not too old/female/gay/black/Muslim/whatever.)
Laws move slowly, often a lot slower than social norms and popular understanding of new issues, but over time they do tend to reflect consensus ethics. I notice that the examples you gave are all cases where the current laws are arguably out of sync with much of society, but also not widely enforced. If they were, you'd see them changed very quickly to match what was and wasn't acceptable according to common ethical standards, probably after a bit of popular debate so more people understood the underlying issues that prompted the laws in the first place, which in some cases would be no bad thing anyway.
FWIW, I agree that extensions in favour of Disney and the like are an abuse of the principle and those aspects of the law should be changed. However, I also think it's important to remember that while the copyright term extensions are bad, in reality most piracy involves very recent works that would almost certainly still have been covered even under a much shorter and more reasonable term of protection. The whole issue of creeping term length is mostly a distraction in practice, when the terms are already so long as to be absurd anyway.
Unfortunately, IP laws generally tend to be expert matters that can be widely co-opted for purposes beyond their original and usually reasonable goals without attracting enough popular opposition to start affecting things like elections very much. Of course that's partly because enforcement is so scarce. If everyone suddenly started getting sued for what the law potentially allows when they infringed copyright, the law would probably be changed within weeks.
However, I think we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Copyright does have its merits, and I don't see a lot of people proposing plausible alternatives so far.
There was as much or more art prior to copyright.
Really? They had mass-produced thousand-page textbooks for teaching many thousands or even millions of children to do math, complete with many thousands of carefully constructed exercises and guides for teachers, did they? They produced works equivalent to a modern movie or a show like Game of Thrones, with budgets running into the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, paying for production teams and casts numbering hundreds if not thousands of people, and then made those works available to millions of fans to enjoy? They produced software that took hundreds or thousands of programmers multiple years to develop, but which then benefitted many millions of people?
No. No, they didn't. No-one in the pre-copyright era was even trying to do things on these scales. They were simply impossible with the technology available at the time, so they had no need for an economic model that would pay for them either.
Before copyright, the writers, like Shakespeare, made nothing from their writing. They made all their money from direction and production.
Before copyright, most artists made little money from their work at all, and those who did made their money almost exclusively from wealthy patronage. Many of the greatest authors and playwrights and composers and performers of their time died young and broke.
Why do pro-copyright people hate capitalism so much?
I think you have it backwards. Copyright is an economic tool that makes a lot of creative work commercially viable, at least with enough odds of success to make it worth a try. Copyright is a vehicle for sharing the cost of the initial production among many potential customers, so even very expensive works are still viable if they are attractive to large numbers of people. Copyright is also a direct incentive to produce better works and distribute them to more people, because there is no guarantee you will make any money at all from your work, but the better it is and the more people it reaches, the more you stand to benefit in return. Copyright is the epitome of free market capitalism: the more value you create, the more you stand to benefit in return, and the value is measured directly by how many people pay you for your work.
I think your real objection is not to the free market aspect, but to the rules created for that market by artificially limiting copying by law. That is (or at least should be) a purely economic tool, and it should be abolished if and when someone comes along with a better idea that is more successful at incentivising the creation and distribution of new works with less of an ongoing social cost. But so far, no-one has. In fact, no-one has come up with anything that gets within orders of magnitude of the same effectiveness as our current copyright-based scheme. If anyone does, copyright isn't going to stop them from exploiting their alternative business model based on creating and distributing their own work in new ways, and the rest of the world will soon see the light, and those very market forces you claim to believe in will do the rest.
People were creating art long before there was such a thing as copyright.
Yes, they were. There was much less of it, and almost all of that was directed to the interests and preferences of a wealthy elite rather than what benefitted society as a whole. I don't know about you, but personally I think we're better off moving away from the patronage of the rich as the primary means for creators to earn a living, and the economic incentive created by copyright is one way to promote alternatives, because it lets you amortise the cost of a very expensive work over a very large number of people who each contribute only a small amount towards it.
Insofar as natural rights are even a thing, yes there is. There is a right to be free from violence. State-granted exceptions aside, this is literally encoded in every system of law from the very beginning (eye for an eye.)
I'm not a big fan of the term "natural rights", for reasons I explained in another post. In short, I think the term is too often used as a fudge factor, when what we are really talking about is some combination of personal moral values, consensus within a community, and actionable law.
Even in the sense of natural rights as those that are almost universally recognised without force of law, I think it's far from clear that someone's right to be take advantage of someone else outweighs that someone else's right to react. There are plenty of cultures in the world that do not accept or require a general freedom even from violence for certain groups of people who have committed certain acts deemed unacceptable, whether the group in question is women or children or some social group that is not in control. You or I might not find those cultures in agreement with our personal moral values, but that doesn't stop many other people being a part of such cultures, and in some cases even accepting them when they're on the receiving side of the violence.
In any case, the violence aspect is a diversion that doesn't seem to bet getting us any further with the original debate. The reality is that many laws go beyond natural rights, and obviously there is no general legal right to ignore laws with impunity just because someone feels they should have some right that contradicts those laws.
That's what things like copyright were for. Since the period has been extended so far, now it's for another purpose entirely; for the purpose of permitting movie studios to control our culture.
The thing is, the two aren't mutually exclusive. The same laws that protect Big Media's back catalogue not-quite-forever because of political shenanigans do also protect Big Media more legitimately against someone ripping off their latest blockbuster movie or hit song or popular game. The vast majority of piracy is not people copying older works that are only still covered by copyright because of term extensions. The vast majority of piracy is people copying much more recent works that would have been covered even under the original copyright laws in most countries. Mockery of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act may be fair and justified, but there are still a lot more people ripping the latest Taylor Swift album or Avengers movie or Call of Duty game than a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the early 20th century.
I have zero problems with arguing that copyright law has been abused and the principle has been taken too far and should be wound back. I've actively argued as much with my own elected representatives. But that doesn't mean anyone who doesn't want to pay for some work that took a great deal of time and money to produce should be able to just ignore the law and enjoy it for free anyway.
I didn't priorly agree to not copy shit.
And I didn't explicitly agree not to punch you in the face, but our society as a whole has decided that that isn't acceptable behaviour, and that's why it's against the law.
Do you realise that your argument here is effectively that you are above the law, that the only laws that apply to you are the ones you agree with?
I'm not sure you understand what "natural rights" are. Go take a first level American History, or Politics, or Ethics class.
What some people call "natural rights" is mostly an illusion, a convenient lie we tell ourselves to try to make us feel better when enforceable law doesn't match our personal expectations or beliefs.
We each have our own personal moral standards, which govern the behaviour we personally believe to be right or acceptable, but those differ from one person to another and we can't necessarily expect that someone else will share the exact same beliefs. We have laws as a way of building consensus and recognising common ground, and as a way of deterring deviation from what is generally considered acceptable behaviour.
I will pay people when I've copied their work, if I find their work worthwhile, as will millions of others.
Big claim. No evidence.
At the consumer level, it's not copyright which causes people to decide to pay for work, and it's not copyright which stops people from pirating - it's the desire to pay for copies of work worth paying for.
For some people, yes. For many more people, unfortunately, no. There are plenty of people in the world who will simply take work done by others and enjoy it, without any thought that someone might have spent a lot of time and/or money to create that work in the first place or might deserve some form of appreciation and compensation in return.
In order to avoid those who try to do the right thing propping up those who don't, we have laws, and those laws say you can be sued if you infringe copyright, or even face criminal charges in a lot of places now if you're doing so on a commercial basis.
One of the biggest problems with this whole debate is people who argue against the basic principle of copyright without offering a practical alternative, and who take the position that copyright law is somehow unethical and therefore should be ignored. In the eyes of those who do the work to produce new content, and of the lawmakers they lobby, that just demonstrates the need for ever stronger enforcement and greater protections. What would actually make society a better place is probably much less severe copyright law and explicit recognition of the benefits of new technologies, but also effective enforcement of what is left.
It causes me harm that you don't send me 10% of your paycheck, because I don't have as much money to spend on stuff that makes me happy.
If you were the GP's agent, and they had only got that job as a result of your work and with a prior agreement to send you 10% of their paycheck as your fee, then you would be well within your rights to receive that money. You took on the work as an agent with no guarantee of getting paid but on the basis that you would receive 10% if things worked out, and in this case things did work out.
In particular, there's no natural right not to have information copied - the content producer's desire for profit doesn't trump the human right to remember information and write it down again.
There's no "natural right" for me not to find your comments offensive and come punch you in the face, but hopefully we can agree that the world is a better place because in civilised society we don't condone that sort of behaviour and we have laws to punish those who do it anyway.
No-one is disputing that in today's world copying information is fast and cheap. I expect almost everyone would agree that this is a good thing in principle. What often gets conveniently ignored in these discussions is that first there has to be some information worth copying. If creating or collecting that information involves a significant amount of work, it is useful to have some economic incentive for people to do that, and that's what things like copyright are for.
It causes no harm, and anything that causes no harm should not be illegal. If you don't like that, please point out the error in it.
It causes no harm as long as the work has already been created.
It causes great harm if the deal between society and creators, as set out through copyright, is that the creators have to invest whatever is necessary to create a work that will benefit others, but then they have a mechanism to generate revenue in return by controlling distribution for a while. Allowing creators to create as part of this deal, but then failing to effectively enforce the copyright protections, is failing to hold up the other side of the bargain, pure and simple. The harm is then whatever it cost the creators to create and share the work in the first place plus the opportunity cost for them because they didn't invest their resources into something else useful instead.
If society feels that the current bargain is not appropriate for today's world, that's fine, it can change the laws. If society collectively wants to do away with copyright because "information wants to be free" or whatever, fine, do it. Some people will still create new content and no doubt some people will still find ways to do so commercially. But society shouldn't complain if it makes that change and then finds that, lacking the same incentive to create and share new works, hardly anyone is making big summer blockbusters or original AAA quality computer games or well-produced studio albums or high school math textbooks with thousands of carefully constructed exercises and matching answer books for teachers any more. Nor should it complain when other business models that are less reliant on simply paying for something you find valuable -- things like blatant product placement throughout TV shows and movies, or subscription-only on-line software -- become the norm, even though a lot of consumers don't like them.
If you own hardware or software that is securely encrypted, then you will be committing an offence.
I won't be committing an offence regardless of how silly the US Congress is in this case, since I'm not in the US or subject to their jurisdiction. Isn't that the point here? The rest of the world is going to carry on trying to promote security and privacy with new technology. If the US government is more concerned about spying on its own citizens than about helping them to promote their security and privacy, the rest of the world will simply leave the US behind.
(I don't really expect this to happen, BTW. It looks like electioneering propaganda from here, not a serious proposal that anyone really expects to become law. And sadly we've been seeing this sort of short-sighted politics in other countries as well lately, including in my own.)
Or does the US Congress think that they pass laws for the whole planet?
Was that a serious question? ;-)
It is kind of amazing that in 2016 we still haven't solved encrypted and authenticated messaging. I'm not sure how easy it would be to explain to non-technical users how the signing mechanics work or at least why they need to install a digital signature on every new system that will send mail from a certain account, though.
In Australia, members of parliament are required to maintain details of financial investments in a public register. Private citizens are not so required.
The same is true in the UK, and if it turns out that anyone hasn't been disclosing relevant interests properly then there can be substantial negative consequences for them. Given all the scandals around parliamentary expenses and the general them-and-us culture at the moment, if any top Tory MPs (or MPs from any other party, for that matter) turn up on the list or have close connections to anyone who does, they're probably in real trouble.
Sure, but my point is that it is not an exception in this case. Sending and receiving invoices and other payment-related documentation by e-mail has been the norm for a lot of organisations for a long time. That's why this sort of scam is, regrettably, so effective.
I'm a professional web developer, among other hats I wear, so I use all of the major browsers regularly. Unfortunately, the users of the web sites and apps I write can choose whatever browser they want in most cases, so I'm often limited to the least common denominator in terms of functionality or performance requirements. And that least common denominator is Firefox an awful lot of the time these days.
In case you're interested, Chrome really is much better on performance with a lot of these newer features, and its usually adds new features more rapidly than anyone else. However, its quality of implementation is often terrible when new features are introduced, and sometimes for several months or even years afterwards, and on balance we also find Chrome is by far the least reliable major desktop browser when it comes to updates breaking functionality that used to work.
Any truly important, official communication from a government agency, or from any company demaning payment of any sort, is going to send it in a printed letter, not an email.
On what planet? My companies routinely send invoices to customers/clients by e-mail. We routinely get invoices from suppliers and service providers by e-mail, too. For things like signed contracts with serious amounts of money involved, sure, we'd send registered letters, but day-to-day has been mostly electronic for a long time here.
An unfortunate consequence of this is that since e-mail in general is not secure and in particular is not tamper-proof or reliably authenticated, it is open to this kind of abuse. I know some businesses we deal with have had some horrible incidents that cost them a lot of money because their in-house procedures weren't robust against an attacker who had enough inside information to look plausible.
A particularly devastating technique I've come across recently for attacking smaller and less formal businesses is based on identifying who normally pays invoices, someone more senior who they report to, and a pattern of where new suppliers might be and what sorts of amounts they'd be invoicing for. It's often pretty easy to guess this sort of information with minimal actual content, if say the company web site provides a couple of key names and contact details that legitimate business associates might actually need.
However, given that information, a malicious third party can then easily impersonate the e-mail of the senior person and send something asking the invoice-payer to settle a realistic bill for a new supplier. Thanks to the wonders of services like Google Mail, it will probably even arrive in their work inbox with the senior person's usual picture right there next to their name and e-mail address, looking all official and normal. Time it so the senior person is out at a meeting or on holiday or otherwise not there to answer a quick phone call, add a credible note that, say, you're trying to build a good long-term relationship with this new supplier to please try to settle up promptly to make a good impression, and it's easy to see how even though everyone is well meaning, they can be fooled simply because they didn't understand that the fake ID aspect was possible and as far as they knew it was all official communication using their normal work e-mail system.
Electrolysis is mostly about solving a different problem, I think, though perhaps it will have some consequential benefits for general performance as well.
What I really want is a Firefox that can manage to do a smooth CSS animation without a jump on the final frame, and render SVGs with more than a few elements at useful speeds, and manipulate video elements without triggering weird buffering and skipping effects, and so on. It's basically impossible to design a smooth, professional-looking UI that runs well in Firefox today without severely limiting how complex the presentation gets. You can do basic table- and form-based stuff fine, but start trying to do anything interesting like having interactive visuals, or co-ordinated multimedia elements, or more than very simple animations, and too many things just don't work or don't work fast enough to be acceptable in production.
And yet despite its problems [Firefox] runs smoother for me than chrome.
Your experience and mine are very different. The JS engine and a lot of the rendering for graphical elements are horribly slow in Firefox compared to any other major desktop browser today. Even IE11 is much faster at some things. I've spent much of the past few months with actual profiling data trying to find out why, and there's no single big issue. Firefox simply has awful performance for some functionality that comes up a lot when you're doing web apps.
You might be right, but I've been feeling for a while now that the tide seems to be turning.
It's clear by now that a lot of people will put up with a lot of questionable terms to keep access to a service like Facebook, at least for as long as most other people they know are also on Facebook. Even there it seems like younger generations are a lot more transient in their social networking habits than their parents and grandparents, though, and ironically a lot more wary of and careful about some of the risks of using these kinds of sites.
On the other hand, some random new tech device like we're talking about here is going to be completely expendable for most people, so I can't see them getting away with this kind of thing for long. There's probably also more cognitive dissonance involved when you're buying a physical thing that you expect to own and it then stops working for some software-related reason. Enough people seem to be running into problems with things like mobile OS updates, or even Windows 10 on a laptop now, that sooner or later they'll start running out of patience and doing more than just complaining online. Some combination of negative PR or even political attention will probably start to shift the boundaries of what is considered acceptable for new hardware eventually.
I think cars will be one of the most interesting cases, because it really is regarded as an essential for many people, but it's also an area where most people have to spend significant money on insurance and quite a few people also know they break the law "slightly" from time to time (speeding, intentionally or otherwise, or things like illegal parking for a few minutes while picking the kids up from school). The idea that your own car is tracking exactly when you're doing that and you're one step away from being prosecuted and losing your licence, or at least seeing your insurance premiums go up significantly, might make a lot of people think twice about installing Big Brother OS even if all the big auto manufacturers would like people to so they can sell the data. Plus there's the general security/privacy angle as with a lot of these connected devices as well, which at least the more technically inclined customers might start to consider a factor in purchasing decisions.
The one comfort I take from this sort of story is that as it happens more often, more normal (non-nerd) people will realise how much they could be giving up by allowing all this connected technology into their lives and relying on so many online services that can be changed or shut off at any time. That will lead to people voting with their wallets, and potentially even at the ballot box, for more reasonable terms and for stronger consumer protection, security and privacy rules.
It will probably also open up more of a market for consumer products that you really do own and control again, and remind people that if you want people to make nice things for you then at some point you do have to pay a realistic price for them, and none of that sounds bad to me either.