Obviously, you read the 4 draft chapters you reviewed and haven't looked at the book since. Otherwise, you would have seen his discussion of user interfaces, programmer arrogance, documentation, the technical comparison of NeWS and X (he thinks NeWS was better technically), etc.
OK, he overstated his case a little, (OTOH, how do you expect to set up shared memory segments in the general case?) but you have to admit it's 10 times more likely that a programmer comes up with a good transparent protocol for pipes than for shared memory, and that such a protocol is more useful for pipes than for shared memory. His point (pipes encourage good, simple protocols) stands.
You want him to only use Fetchmail as an example once? Remember, he uses Freeciv as an example two or three times, too, and that's not one of his projects.
You need to read ESR's book and learn exactly why RPC, OLE Automation, and thus vbs are Bad Things. Or maybe just find a Zen master to shout ``ten pounds of VAX'' at you.
If you read the article, you would know the score was for the development groups behind the products, not the products themselves.
And, of course, it's a completely different issue getting Windows to use Linux/Unix native protocols and getting Linux to use Windows native protocols.
Well, no, it's more like saying ``be sure not to use anything with a contract involved, or those evil lawyer bastards will hang you by the balls''. Pure, unbiased reporting from a bastion of capitalism...
Btw., since where does a good pro-Capitalism magazine like Forbes get off opposing good Anarcho-Capitalist techniques like private enforcement?
There has never been a government solution that worked out better than a private solution?
Not that I'm aware of.
Privatized law enforcement turned out pretty horribly (Pinkerton et al), for example.
Could you give some more details? More than likely, any problems with Pinkerton are ultimately the result of government monopoly, i.e., Pinkerton's only real competition was an inefficient tax-supported monopoly and no other competition could be established due to government interference. If the government establishes a high barrier to entry in the private enforcement market, that's not an argument for having a government in the first place.
1. Nothing in your IP claim would change if copyright law is abolished.
2. What are you talking about anyway? Nothing you said supports your claim that your style of IP rights is essential to Open Source, or even contradicts a single thing I said. I.e., your post has no meaning.
Consider this: every time we've tried a government solution to a product and a private solution, the private solution has turned out better. What makes you think protection of property and enforcement of contracts constitutes the one exception?
Seriously, are you alleging that our only choice is rediculous every-right-is-owned-by-the-creator vs. everything-is-completely-PD-and-no-restrictions-on -attribution? That's rediculous. In the first place, it's misleading to think of IP law as enshrining a single set of IP rights. There are two sets of IP rights, one possessed by the owner of a work and the other by the owner of a copy. And there is no natural distinction as to which owner gets any given right. Even a right to copy does not naturally attach to the owner of a work---after all, my copying a work seems to involve only myself and my copy and my copying equipment. If anything, the work as a whole increases in value as a result, so it's hardly obvious that copying is a tort against the owner of the work. Also, note that (1) certain kinds of copying (so-called ``fair use'') are reserved by copyright law to the owner of a copy and (2) copyright law thus constitutes a balance between conflicting claims, not a simple assertion of the work owner's claims.
Given the possibility of compromise, there are six possible areas for positions on (say) copyright law:
The owner of the work should possess all rights, and the owner of a copy should have only those rights explicitly granted.
The owner of a work should have more rights than granted under copyright law, but not all rights.
The owner of a work should have exactly those rights granted under copyright law.
The owner of a work should have the same amount of rights as now, but a different set of rights.
The owner of a work should have fewer rights than now, but not none at all. This is (say) RMS's position.
The owner of a work should have no rights except those explicitly retained.
Of course, cutting across all of these is the issue of how far from the default the members of a particular work owner/copy owner pair should be allowed to deviate in their contracts.
People who advocate ``IP'' usually mean one of the first three, and assume the only other choice is the last one (usually combined with severe restrictions on contracts to ban the others). People who contest ``IP'' usually advocate one of the last three (usually one of the last two) and the first one is the only other alternative. Newsflash: you're both wrong. There are six possibilities, not two---and at least five of them allow the GPL to be written and enforced.
Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today.
Um, no. The situation in the US is the product of not enough unfettered capitalism, so that only corporations can afford to jump the complex hoops necessary to influence campaigns. If the campaign laws were blown wide open, Kazaa users could spend more than enough to buy a congressman somewhere to stand up for them, without paying half as much as they would in license fees if they bought all their downloaded music...
If wages are too low, then people are more likely to get trapped in situations where they actually lose money just by working. There used to be such things as debtor's prisons, and debt to the company store. Under such a system, it's possible for people to become slaves just because the "free market" doesn't value their labor enough to cover their cost of living,
Usually this means they need to go get some job skills...
Actually, the bare minimum for capitalism is recognition of property and contract rights. If you don't have freedom of contract, you need mucho government regulation to cover areas like polution control, intellectual property, warranties, and others where good law consists of a compromise between conflicting interests, not just the errection of a single interest as supreme (as in traditional property law).
In fact, your point that they must hold off suing their customers because of perceived damage to their reputation only further proves my point that they need a front to do their dirty work.
Well, maybe. I doubt a front just for a single record label would do much good (although I could be wrong); I think the fact that the RIAA is a single institution, with no competition, has more to do with their prominence than the `front' factor. After all, if you're ticked off at the RIAA (or the recording industry), your only recourse is to boycott all labels, whereas if you're only ticked off at a single label, you can still buy some music. It's a lot easier to boycott a single company than an entire industry.
OTOH, you probably do have a point about the front factor---a given label is going to be far more cautious if it's own reputation is on the line, rather than the reputation of some other company most people have never heard of.
In any case, I think we agree that these lawsuits would not be in the interest of the labels without the existence of the RIAA. To bad they're only suing their customers, since customers aren't protected under anti-trust law...
I didn't think the RIAA was in buisiness---I thought they were just an industry group (i.e., a cartel/guild), not an actual productive force. As such, I suspect the RIAA would be the last person hurt by an effective boycott.
Also: does anyone happen to know what the RIAA's membership fee structure looks like? I wonder if their revenue is even affected by CD sales...
Were the recording companies forced to conduct their own lawsuits independently, they would be much less likely to do anything publicly. After all, the damage to brand equity would far outweigh the lost sales.
Actually, there's an even bigger risk to proceeding independantly: one record company would realize they're suing their own customers, and defect. This would be a competitive advantage for that particular label and their artists. To neutralize that advantage, the other labels would be forced to hold off on suing their customers. This is the real reason the RIAA does all the suing---they're the only group with the monopoly to abuse by such terminally stupid actions.
In any case, I doubt even the American public is dumb enough not to realise ``the recording industry'' means ``the record labels''.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you read the 4 draft chapters you reviewed and haven't looked at the book since. Otherwise, you would have seen his discussion of user interfaces, programmer arrogance, documentation, the technical comparison of NeWS and X (he thinks NeWS was better technically), etc.
OK, he overstated his case a little, (OTOH, how do you expect to set up shared memory segments in the general case?) but you have to admit it's 10 times more likely that a programmer comes up with a good transparent protocol for pipes than for shared memory, and that such a protocol is more useful for pipes than for shared memory. His point (pipes encourage good, simple protocols) stands.
You want him to only use Fetchmail as an example once? Remember, he uses Freeciv as an example two or three times, too, and that's not one of his projects.
An OS that actually follows the rules and a culture that knows how to apply them.
Try to show some respect to the maintainer of termcap and inventor of GUD.
You need to read ESR's book and learn exactly why RPC, OLE Automation, and thus vbs are Bad Things. Or maybe just find a Zen master to shout ``ten pounds of VAX'' at you.
You're wrong. Go read 100 pages on the difference between Latin and English on Google.
If you read the article, you would know the score was for the development groups behind the products, not the products themselves.
And, of course, it's a completely different issue getting Windows to use Linux/Unix native protocols and getting Linux to use Windows native protocols.
OTOH, they didn't do it with Linux, even though LinuxCounter estimates 13mil seats...
Well, no, it's more like saying ``be sure not to use anything with a contract involved, or those evil lawyer bastards will hang you by the balls''. Pure, unbiased reporting from a bastion of capitalism...
Btw., since where does a good pro-Capitalism magazine like Forbes get off opposing good Anarcho-Capitalist techniques like private enforcement?
Not that I'm aware of.
Could you give some more details? More than likely, any problems with Pinkerton are ultimately the result of government monopoly, i.e., Pinkerton's only real competition was an inefficient tax-supported monopoly and no other competition could be established due to government interference. If the government establishes a high barrier to entry in the private enforcement market, that's not an argument for having a government in the first place.
Is this supposed to be an argument for government monopolies?
The product of government established municipal and regional monopolies... Hardly an argument for government monopolies.
I'm not replying to you. I'm replying to an AC that didn't even reply to you. Nothing in the post you replied to is a reply to anything you said.
1. Nothing in your IP claim would change if copyright law is abolished.
2. What are you talking about anyway? Nothing you said supports your claim that your style of IP rights is essential to Open Source, or even contradicts a single thing I said. I.e., your post has no meaning.
Consider this: every time we've tried a government solution to a product and a private solution, the private solution has turned out better. What makes you think protection of property and enforcement of contracts constitutes the one exception?
Seriously, are you alleging that our only choice is rediculous every-right-is-owned-by-the-creator vs. everything-is-completely-PD-and-no-restrictions-o
Given the possibility of compromise, there are six possible areas for positions on (say) copyright law:
Of course, cutting across all of these is the issue of how far from the default the members of a particular work owner/copy owner pair should be allowed to deviate in their contracts.
People who advocate ``IP'' usually mean one of the first three, and assume the only other choice is the last one (usually combined with severe restrictions on contracts to ban the others). People who contest ``IP'' usually advocate one of the last three (usually one of the last two) and the first one is the only other alternative. Newsflash: you're both wrong. There are six possibilities, not two---and at least five of them allow the GPL to be written and enforced.
Um, no. The situation in the US is the product of not enough unfettered capitalism, so that only corporations can afford to jump the complex hoops necessary to influence campaigns. If the campaign laws were blown wide open, Kazaa users could spend more than enough to buy a congressman somewhere to stand up for them, without paying half as much as they would in license fees if they bought all their downloaded music...
Usually this means they need to go get some job skills...
Actually, the bare minimum for capitalism is recognition of property and contract rights. If you don't have freedom of contract, you need mucho government regulation to cover areas like polution control, intellectual property, warranties, and others where good law consists of a compromise between conflicting interests, not just the errection of a single interest as supreme (as in traditional property law).
Nah, users'd be grateful...
Wait a second, you mean XP's dismal boot time is a feature?
Well, maybe. I doubt a front just for a single record label would do much good (although I could be wrong); I think the fact that the RIAA is a single institution, with no competition, has more to do with their prominence than the `front' factor. After all, if you're ticked off at the RIAA (or the recording industry), your only recourse is to boycott all labels, whereas if you're only ticked off at a single label, you can still buy some music. It's a lot easier to boycott a single company than an entire industry.
OTOH, you probably do have a point about the front factor---a given label is going to be far more cautious if it's own reputation is on the line, rather than the reputation of some other company most people have never heard of.
In any case, I think we agree that these lawsuits would not be in the interest of the labels without the existence of the RIAA. To bad they're only suing their customers, since customers aren't protected under anti-trust law...
I didn't think the RIAA was in buisiness---I thought they were just an industry group (i.e., a cartel/guild), not an actual productive force. As such, I suspect the RIAA would be the last person hurt by an effective boycott.
Also: does anyone happen to know what the RIAA's membership fee structure looks like? I wonder if their revenue is even affected by CD sales...
No one objects to a child who shoplifts being made to return the items. If she had to pay $2000, too, that would be more of a problem.
Actually, there's an even bigger risk to proceeding independantly: one record company would realize they're suing their own customers, and defect. This would be a competitive advantage for that particular label and their artists. To neutralize that advantage, the other labels would be forced to hold off on suing their customers. This is the real reason the RIAA does all the suing---they're the only group with the monopoly to abuse by such terminally stupid actions.
In any case, I doubt even the American public is dumb enough not to realise ``the recording industry'' means ``the record labels''.