Passion isn't important. Cost and risk are important. The processes are put in place to (attempt) to minimize cost and risk associated with software development. Experience teaches us that cost and risk are very high when building software.
When it's your money paying for the development effort, feel free to structure it so that you can chase your passion.
I sympathize with the idea that this kind of bureaucracy can suck the life out of developers, but guys, this is work. If it were that fun, they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.
The value of finding security holes is in disclosing them to everyone, particularly the affected vendor.
The most damaging holes are the ones that only the bad guys know about. This doesn't tend to advance security in software, it just allows people to take over your machine without your permission.
Security research or incentivization schemes that don't include a built-in mechanism to promote disclosure of the discovered problems won't help much.
This really applies to a whole class of media - the "any publicity is good publicity" crowd.
Think about it. If you come across a guy on a soapbox on the street corner, raving about how he communicates with purple unicorns in the 4th dimension, do you spend a lot of time refuting his arguments in a public forum?
No. Just let it go. Don't legitimize nuttiness by addressing it.
The old saying: "Never get in a fight with a pig. You'll get dirty, and the pig will enjoy it."
It's obvious that these screens can scratch. It's exposed to everything that's in your pocket.
PDA users have had this problem for a long time, which is why there are brisk sales for PDA screen protectors.
<sarcasm>I guess my only question is why they aren't going after those bastard manufacturers who make the plastic and metal items that are responsible for scratching the iPod nanos.</sarcasm>
I don't see how this guy's got a case anyway. From his patent statement:
The present invention simplifies the data modeling process and enables its full dynamic versioning by employing a non-hierarchical non-integrated structure to the organization of information.
That seems to seal it - he's disclaiming heirarchical data structures isn't he? Wouldn't it be fair to say that if anything, XML is a hierarchical data structure?
Certifications are for predictability and security in recruiting new employees. If you just hire anybody (say somebody who says they're really smart) then maybe you'll get something good, and maybe you'll get a real schmo.
When you hire someone with a certification, they had to go through certain steps to get that. It doesn't make them smart, and it doesn't make them a hard worker, but from the perspective of someone doing the hiring, it makes it more likely that they're smart or hard working. After all, they had to have the tenacity and patience to jump through a certain number of hoops to get the certification. Maybe they'll have the tenacity and the patience to jump through our set of hoops.
People get hired based on past experience, since that's the best predictor we have of their future behavior. (I didn't say it was a good predictor, I said it was the best we have) People who have certifications have demonstrated academic ability in a very specific area of applicability. It's no wonder at all people hire them, since the alternative is even more of a crapshoot.
I think it's appropriate to identify people who point to states rights in justifying their actions as conservative, that being a conservative hallmark position. Certainly there are judges who are typically thought of as "conservative" or "liberal", but as any serious sampling of their decisions will show you, it's myopic and incorrect to definitively put them in one category or the other in an absolute sense. By the way, Souter who went with the majority was appointed by the first president Bush.
"Are you afraid of being the only one who is scared?"
Your question, sir, terrifies me.:)
No, in general I guess I'm just worried people will see this is as another abstract ruling that doesn't have real applicability to their lives. It's one thing when a decision is handed down that deals with dispute resolution in some obscure dusty corner of tort law or copyright regulations, and it's another thing when people's houses are being taken away from them. It's a lot more real than whether or not you can be sued for downloading MP3s.
There is a connection between abstract principles, rules of law, and things that become physically possible in meatspace. Sometimes the connections are overdone, and we call that alarmism. I happen to think that this is a fairly serious decision, and that it's not alarmist to think that other municipal governments might be licking their chops at a decision like this.
Meme reinforcement. People like it when a nod is given to their favorite silly cliche. The moderators get to feel smart, because they got the joke. "All your base?" oh yeah, I think I saw some flash thingy about that once...that was pretty funny. Huh huh, heh heh
It's just a cultural flag in the dirt for slashdot. Personally, I'd prefer people spend mod points on things that at least have some originality, otherwise I'll just write a perl script to reload slashdot every 10 seconds and post "All Your Are Belong To Us" so that we can get that entertainment aspect out of the way as quickly as possible. I think there should be a firm principle that any humor that can be perl scripted shouldn't be part of serious debate.
Oh....no....did I use the term "serious debate" in the context of slashdot discussion forums? Oh lord.
The conservatives are really tripping over themselves on this one. In their haste to let the state's decide their own fate, they lost sight of the vital role of the government to protect individuals from people who would take their property away from them.
The SCOTUS is also supposed to be in the position to identify a nasty slippery slope when they see one. Here, people are left wondering: "if my government comes up with what they think is a better use for my land, can they take it without asking permission?"
The ruling in the state courts (which the SCOTUS deferred to) was based on what the city represented as its intentions with the plan. That's not sound at all - it's the legal way of saying "OK, we'll take you at your word on that". Bogus all the way.
It's not the wealth of the business that makes them effective, it's their contacts with the local city government. If they convince the city government that some piece of development is in the city's best interests, they're in. It doesn't take money to do this, it just takes connections.
The principle that has been established is that you own your land unless the government can think of a purpose for your land that would suit what they identify as the higher economic good. That's called expropriation.
I've posted other comments here about this, but here's the basic review:
The city government claims they seized the property for economic development, as part of a larger plan. Sure, the property is going to be turned over to a commercial developer, but it's "public use" of the land because of the larger economic development plan.
The state courts: Well, the city says their main reason for doing it is public use, not to benefit Pfizer, so it must be public use!
The supreme courts: We'll let the state courts worry about this. They said it's public use, so it probably is. Therefore, it's OK for the city to seize the land.
This is not the building of new roads, this is not the elimination of blight, this is a real estate development deal, and people are losing their houses over it. Does this frighten anybody but me?
Let's assume for a moment that no service provider would ever charge less than an atomic unit of currency for a service. ($0.01/transaction). This is necessary because it's fine to aggregate 30,000 units of 0.33 pennies with one client, but you can't actually withdraw that amount from a single client.
Now let's assume you want to pay $0.10. You just paid a 10% service fee, substantially higher than any current credit card transaction fee (typically 2-3%). The principle is this: as the total dollar value of the transaction decreases, the total percentage contribution of the fee skyrockets. Get down to a nickel, and you're paying 20% service fee.
So what? It's just a penny, right? Well actually the only way micropayments work for anybody is on volume, so it's not just a penny. It's 500,000 pennies, all charged at 10-20% service fees.
All this is even assuming someone could do it for as little as $0.01. No one has firmly established on a large scale that people want to pay these amounts, and no one has established that anyone wants to receive these amounts in large volume. How is this thing going to work?
Micropayments sound like a racket for the people processing the transactions, and a total accounting nightmare for people accepting them. Do you want to have an accounting department whose job it is to track down mistaken payments or processing errors on $0.25?
Some people say that the "conservative" party members in European politics would have no chance in American politics, because they would be considered lunatic leftists with a fringe agenda that no American would dare back. In other words, the conservative European politicians are to the left of the American democrats.
That's just the difference between third-way european quasi-socialism and American quasi-capitalism. One of the underlying differences in cultural assumption is that Americans tend to think of the government as primarily something that's there to preserve their personal freedom and economic freedom, while Europeans might feel that the government is primarily something to look out for the welfare of the people. These are goals that are sometimes contradictory, such as when you ask the question, "should health care be open for competition, with maximum options for the patient, or should it be a state-provided service guaranteeing full access to everyone?"
I'm not sure there's a better solution here, but there's no denying the major differences between the two systems.
Nothing really stops them except the filtering that the adoption agency does. Since they're probably not trained in intelligence procedures, I'd guess they can't stop this from happening.
But if you're Chinese intelligence, the better method is to prevent people from getting to the adoption service in the first place. They don't want to throw people in lonely prisons after they publish damaging things, they want to prevent damaging things from being published. The best way to do that is to use the Great Chinese Internet Filter (AYB) to block the adoption service, and to block known sites that choose to adopt Chinese blogs. It's easier to make the blogger irrelevant or unheard than it is to throw them in prison.
Things like freenet have been developed to really help the Chinese out in this situation. And this is really sad to say, but true: sometimes you need someone to be made an example of, because it's the recognition of the injustice towards them that spurs others to really consider the issue critically and do something about it, since the same could happen to them.
Research papers that are released, even by MS, usually aren't intended to get the attention of the broader market. They're intended to put forth ideas and let a few select people know what's going on inside the heads of MS engineers. That, and to raise the ire of slashdotters who don't read them and choose to automatically assume that MS persues every single research idea as a major project.
Look at it this way - MS can't afford not to be looking into the area of filesharing, because it's obviously something that their customers really, really want. There hasn't been any announcement of any product, there's just a whitepaper with no details. The not-so-sinister truth is that this research paper is just evidence that they are starting to think about the problem, not a representation of an imminent product offering.
On another topic, this talk of investors has me curious. How does one connect with a VC or angel investment firm? Most of the more public ones don't seem to want to do business with you unless you're something other than a caucasian male. It seems that it can pay off to be considered ethnic.;-)
There are many different networking events where people can get in touch with VCs. VCs aren't trying to hide themselves, they're always looking for good, developed, non-crackpot ideas as investment fodder.
If a person's ethnic status was a business asset, (for example, if you're a women-owned, minority-owned business and that gives you preferential treatment within your desired market, for example government contracting) then the VC might be interested in ethnic considerations, but for the most part they don't care. Being female or being a minority isn't inherently going to help you make more money.
On the issue of "stealth mode" companies, I'd generally agree it's best not to have the company be in stealth mode. In general, people overestimate the novelty of their ideas, and the desire of their competition to embark upon the huge effort that's needed to take a simple idea and turn it into something that actually makes money.
For example, if you come up with an idea for a particular type of software that hasn't been written yet, I can almost guarantee someone else has thought of writing it before, they just either haven't had the resources, or haven't had the desire or right moment to embark on that project. If you tell the world about your project, that doesn't suddenly mean that Microsoft is going to get interested in your market segment enough to bury you. Now, if you start to actually make a lot of money, it's a different story with competition...
If you're walmart, they may not even care if the lawsuit being brought against them has any merit or not. Swatting flies in the courts costs them the time of corporate lawyers who make $200/hour.
When you're looking to sue someone, you go for the deepest pockets that you can even somewhat plausibly go after. That's walmart. I think that the legal protections for them may either be shaky or incomplete...I mean, at kinkos they won't let you copy protected material if they can stop you, and they certainly won't let you counterfeit. Why should they care? How should they be expected to know what's right and what's not to copy?
What's right and what's fair isn't what we're discussing - this is strictly an issue of practicality in modern courts. Obviously someone at Walmart thinks that putting these restrictions in place is a lot cheaper in the long run than the alternative.
No, the principle is that if ISPs know that this kind of overreaction will occur, they will make quite sure that they don't have spammers in their midst. In essence, it's an attempt to incentivize ISPs to police themselves.
What's the alternative? Having some centralized, international spam cop whose job it is to clean up every ISP on the planet? If ISPs get a completely free pass on spam and don't have to care whether their subscribers are abusing other people or not, where is their incentive to prevent the abuse? The way you avoid the tragedy of the commons is by getting people to see their individual stake in the issue.
Certainly the quote that you're pointing out isn't the most diplomatic or effective way of putting it, and I doubt this kind of thinking is behind that quote - it probably is the knee-jerk reaction that you're identifying it for. Still, the idea might have some merit.
The laws aren't going to stop people, but you're highlighting an immediate (and valid issue for copyright holders) thing, and they're focusing on the long-term.
By going for copyright protection, they're attempting to secure the rights to go after people who do this in the EU and in the US. They are also trying to establish a precedent that will be seen as "the way the modern industrialized world does these things".
There's a heavy expectation that China is going to change big time in the next generation, and there will be a lot of effort put into bringing them into line with western expectations, from the perspective of the economy and commerce. This is just a part of a longer-term game.
I don't think the Europeans are explicitly thinking about China when making these appeals, but there will be a long term impact. In the meantime, they'll do what they can in China. But the overall point is that this is a fight about copyright material for the next 100 years, not about what movie is getting pirated this week.
The reason people don't want bad laws passed, even in small ways where it seems irrelevant is because it establishes a precedent. In many ways, a precedent is like the thin end of a wedge. Once you've worked in the smallest thing, you can just push from the back and eventually drive it all through.
The laws don't necessarily have to be the same, but if you check the article you'll find that the debate is in terms of competition, not in terms of what copyright is all about. The EU has no desire to fall behind, they really do want to keep up with the US in a lot of different areas. So a precedent in copyright has been established: let's extend the lifetime in the US. Now comes the pressure behind the wedge: the europeans want it too!
Slashdot Mirror
Who bears the risk of junior spilling a juice cup all over the expensive servers?
Passion isn't important. Cost and risk are important. The processes are put in place to (attempt) to minimize cost and risk associated with software development. Experience teaches us that cost and risk are very high when building software.
When it's your money paying for the development effort, feel free to structure it so that you can chase your passion.
I sympathize with the idea that this kind of bureaucracy can suck the life out of developers, but guys, this is work. If it were that fun, they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.
The value of finding security holes is in disclosing them to everyone, particularly the affected vendor.
The most damaging holes are the ones that only the bad guys know about. This doesn't tend to advance security in software, it just allows people to take over your machine without your permission.
Security research or incentivization schemes that don't include a built-in mechanism to promote disclosure of the discovered problems won't help much.
This really applies to a whole class of media - the "any publicity is good publicity" crowd.
Think about it. If you come across a guy on a soapbox on the street corner, raving about how he communicates with purple unicorns in the 4th dimension, do you spend a lot of time refuting his arguments in a public forum?
No. Just let it go. Don't legitimize nuttiness by addressing it.
The old saying: "Never get in a fight with a pig. You'll get dirty, and the pig will enjoy it."
It's obvious that these screens can scratch. It's exposed to everything that's in your pocket.
PDA users have had this problem for a long time, which is why there are brisk sales for PDA screen protectors.
<sarcasm>I guess my only question is why they aren't going after those bastard manufacturers who make the plastic and metal items that are responsible for scratching the iPod nanos.</sarcasm>
That seems to seal it - he's disclaiming heirarchical data structures isn't he? Wouldn't it be fair to say that if anything, XML is a hierarchical data structure?
<I>
<always>
<thought>
<so></so>
</thought>
</always>
</I>
Certifications are for predictability and security in recruiting new employees. If you just hire anybody (say somebody who says they're really smart) then maybe you'll get something good, and maybe you'll get a real schmo.
When you hire someone with a certification, they had to go through certain steps to get that. It doesn't make them smart, and it doesn't make them a hard worker, but from the perspective of someone doing the hiring, it makes it more likely that they're smart or hard working. After all, they had to have the tenacity and patience to jump through a certain number of hoops to get the certification. Maybe they'll have the tenacity and the patience to jump through our set of hoops.
People get hired based on past experience, since that's the best predictor we have of their future behavior. (I didn't say it was a good predictor, I said it was the best we have) People who have certifications have demonstrated academic ability in a very specific area of applicability. It's no wonder at all people hire them, since the alternative is even more of a crapshoot.
wget -O - http://slashdot.org/rss/index.rss | grep \/title | perl -e '%h=(); while() { chomp; $h{$_}++; } print join("\n", keys(%h));'
Duplicates? No problem for a system administrator...
I think it's appropriate to identify people who point to states rights in justifying their actions as conservative, that being a conservative hallmark position. Certainly there are judges who are typically thought of as "conservative" or "liberal", but as any serious sampling of their decisions will show you, it's myopic and incorrect to definitively put them in one category or the other in an absolute sense. By the way, Souter who went with the majority was appointed by the first president Bush.
Maybe they're all just conservative judges to me.
"Are you afraid of being the only one who is scared?"
:)
Your question, sir, terrifies me.
No, in general I guess I'm just worried people will see this is as another abstract ruling that doesn't have real applicability to their lives. It's one thing when a decision is handed down that deals with dispute resolution in some obscure dusty corner of tort law or copyright regulations, and it's another thing when people's houses are being taken away from them. It's a lot more real than whether or not you can be sued for downloading MP3s.
There is a connection between abstract principles, rules of law, and things that become physically possible in meatspace. Sometimes the connections are overdone, and we call that alarmism. I happen to think that this is a fairly serious decision, and that it's not alarmist to think that other municipal governments might be licking their chops at a decision like this.
Meme reinforcement. People like it when a nod is given to their favorite silly cliche. The moderators get to feel smart, because they got the joke. "All your base?" oh yeah, I think I saw some flash thingy about that once...that was pretty funny. Huh huh, heh heh
It's just a cultural flag in the dirt for slashdot. Personally, I'd prefer people spend mod points on things that at least have some originality, otherwise I'll just write a perl script to reload slashdot every 10 seconds and post "All Your Are Belong To Us" so that we can get that entertainment aspect out of the way as quickly as possible. I think there should be a firm principle that any humor that can be perl scripted shouldn't be part of serious debate.
Oh....no....did I use the term "serious debate" in the context of slashdot discussion forums? Oh lord.
The conservatives are really tripping over themselves on this one. In their haste to let the state's decide their own fate, they lost sight of the vital role of the government to protect individuals from people who would take their property away from them.
The SCOTUS is also supposed to be in the position to identify a nasty slippery slope when they see one. Here, people are left wondering: "if my government comes up with what they think is a better use for my land, can they take it without asking permission?"
The ruling in the state courts (which the SCOTUS deferred to) was based on what the city represented as its intentions with the plan. That's not sound at all - it's the legal way of saying "OK, we'll take you at your word on that". Bogus all the way.
It's not the wealth of the business that makes them effective, it's their contacts with the local city government. If they convince the city government that some piece of development is in the city's best interests, they're in. It doesn't take money to do this, it just takes connections.
The principle that has been established is that you own your land unless the government can think of a purpose for your land that would suit what they identify as the higher economic good. That's called expropriation.
Expropriation is bad, mmmkay?
I've posted other comments here about this, but here's the basic review:
The city government claims they seized the property for economic development, as part of a larger plan. Sure, the property is going to be turned over to a commercial developer, but it's "public use" of the land because of the larger economic development plan.
The state courts: Well, the city says their main reason for doing it is public use, not to benefit Pfizer, so it must be public use!
The supreme courts: We'll let the state courts worry about this. They said it's public use, so it probably is. Therefore, it's OK for the city to seize the land.
This is not the building of new roads, this is not the elimination of blight, this is a real estate development deal, and people are losing their houses over it. Does this frighten anybody but me?
Let's assume for a moment that no service provider would ever charge less than an atomic unit of currency for a service. ($0.01/transaction). This is necessary because it's fine to aggregate 30,000 units of 0.33 pennies with one client, but you can't actually withdraw that amount from a single client.
Now let's assume you want to pay $0.10. You just paid a 10% service fee, substantially higher than any current credit card transaction fee (typically 2-3%). The principle is this: as the total dollar value of the transaction decreases, the total percentage contribution of the fee skyrockets. Get down to a nickel, and you're paying 20% service fee.
So what? It's just a penny, right? Well actually the only way micropayments work for anybody is on volume, so it's not just a penny. It's 500,000 pennies, all charged at 10-20% service fees.
All this is even assuming someone could do it for as little as $0.01. No one has firmly established on a large scale that people want to pay these amounts, and no one has established that anyone wants to receive these amounts in large volume. How is this thing going to work?
Micropayments sound like a racket for the people processing the transactions, and a total accounting nightmare for people accepting them. Do you want to have an accounting department whose job it is to track down mistaken payments or processing errors on $0.25?
Some people say that the "conservative" party members in European politics would have no chance in American politics, because they would be considered lunatic leftists with a fringe agenda that no American would dare back. In other words, the conservative European politicians are to the left of the American democrats.
That's just the difference between third-way european quasi-socialism and American quasi-capitalism. One of the underlying differences in cultural assumption is that Americans tend to think of the government as primarily something that's there to preserve their personal freedom and economic freedom, while Europeans might feel that the government is primarily something to look out for the welfare of the people. These are goals that are sometimes contradictory, such as when you ask the question, "should health care be open for competition, with maximum options for the patient, or should it be a state-provided service guaranteeing full access to everyone?"
I'm not sure there's a better solution here, but there's no denying the major differences between the two systems.
Nothing really stops them except the filtering that the adoption agency does. Since they're probably not trained in intelligence procedures, I'd guess they can't stop this from happening.
But if you're Chinese intelligence, the better method is to prevent people from getting to the adoption service in the first place. They don't want to throw people in lonely prisons after they publish damaging things, they want to prevent damaging things from being published. The best way to do that is to use the Great Chinese Internet Filter (AYB) to block the adoption service, and to block known sites that choose to adopt Chinese blogs. It's easier to make the blogger irrelevant or unheard than it is to throw them in prison.
Things like freenet have been developed to really help the Chinese out in this situation. And this is really sad to say, but true: sometimes you need someone to be made an example of, because it's the recognition of the injustice towards them that spurs others to really consider the issue critically and do something about it, since the same could happen to them.
Research papers that are released, even by MS, usually aren't intended to get the attention of the broader market. They're intended to put forth ideas and let a few select people know what's going on inside the heads of MS engineers. That, and to raise the ire of slashdotters who don't read them and choose to automatically assume that MS persues every single research idea as a major project.
Look at it this way - MS can't afford not to be looking into the area of filesharing, because it's obviously something that their customers really, really want. There hasn't been any announcement of any product, there's just a whitepaper with no details. The not-so-sinister truth is that this research paper is just evidence that they are starting to think about the problem, not a representation of an imminent product offering.
On another topic, this talk of investors has me curious. How does one connect with a VC or angel investment firm? Most of the more public ones don't seem to want to do business with you unless you're something other than a caucasian male. It seems that it can pay off to be considered ethnic. ;-)
There are many different networking events where people can get in touch with VCs. VCs aren't trying to hide themselves, they're always looking for good, developed, non-crackpot ideas as investment fodder.
If a person's ethnic status was a business asset, (for example, if you're a women-owned, minority-owned business and that gives you preferential treatment within your desired market, for example government contracting) then the VC might be interested in ethnic considerations, but for the most part they don't care. Being female or being a minority isn't inherently going to help you make more money.
On the issue of "stealth mode" companies, I'd generally agree it's best not to have the company be in stealth mode. In general, people overestimate the novelty of their ideas, and the desire of their competition to embark upon the huge effort that's needed to take a simple idea and turn it into something that actually makes money.
For example, if you come up with an idea for a particular type of software that hasn't been written yet, I can almost guarantee someone else has thought of writing it before, they just either haven't had the resources, or haven't had the desire or right moment to embark on that project. If you tell the world about your project, that doesn't suddenly mean that Microsoft is going to get interested in your market segment enough to bury you. Now, if you start to actually make a lot of money, it's a different story with competition...
If you're walmart, they may not even care if the lawsuit being brought against them has any merit or not. Swatting flies in the courts costs them the time of corporate lawyers who make $200/hour.
When you're looking to sue someone, you go for the deepest pockets that you can even somewhat plausibly go after. That's walmart. I think that the legal protections for them may either be shaky or incomplete...I mean, at kinkos they won't let you copy protected material if they can stop you, and they certainly won't let you counterfeit. Why should they care? How should they be expected to know what's right and what's not to copy?
What's right and what's fair isn't what we're discussing - this is strictly an issue of practicality in modern courts. Obviously someone at Walmart thinks that putting these restrictions in place is a lot cheaper in the long run than the alternative.
No, the principle is that if ISPs know that this kind of overreaction will occur, they will make quite sure that they don't have spammers in their midst. In essence, it's an attempt to incentivize ISPs to police themselves.
What's the alternative? Having some centralized, international spam cop whose job it is to clean up every ISP on the planet? If ISPs get a completely free pass on spam and don't have to care whether their subscribers are abusing other people or not, where is their incentive to prevent the abuse? The way you avoid the tragedy of the commons is by getting people to see their individual stake in the issue.
Certainly the quote that you're pointing out isn't the most diplomatic or effective way of putting it, and I doubt this kind of thinking is behind that quote - it probably is the knee-jerk reaction that you're identifying it for. Still, the idea might have some merit.
The laws aren't going to stop people, but you're highlighting an immediate (and valid issue for copyright holders) thing, and they're focusing on the long-term.
By going for copyright protection, they're attempting to secure the rights to go after people who do this in the EU and in the US. They are also trying to establish a precedent that will be seen as "the way the modern industrialized world does these things".
There's a heavy expectation that China is going to change big time in the next generation, and there will be a lot of effort put into bringing them into line with western expectations, from the perspective of the economy and commerce. This is just a part of a longer-term game.
I don't think the Europeans are explicitly thinking about China when making these appeals, but there will be a long term impact. In the meantime, they'll do what they can in China. But the overall point is that this is a fight about copyright material for the next 100 years, not about what movie is getting pirated this week.
Copyright Holders
- Billions of dollars
- Coordinated world wide organizations of thousands of people working towards making money off of copyrighted material
- Government lobbyists
- Political Action committees
- Campaign Contributions
- 100 years of legal precedent
Copyright OpponentsUmm, I think we have a problem. I'm on the side of restraining copyright, but I'm not sure this fight is fair!
You're discovering the power of "the precedent".
The reason people don't want bad laws passed, even in small ways where it seems irrelevant is because it establishes a precedent. In many ways, a precedent is like the thin end of a wedge. Once you've worked in the smallest thing, you can just push from the back and eventually drive it all through.
The laws don't necessarily have to be the same, but if you check the article you'll find that the debate is in terms of competition, not in terms of what copyright is all about. The EU has no desire to fall behind, they really do want to keep up with the US in a lot of different areas. So a precedent in copyright has been established: let's extend the lifetime in the US. Now comes the pressure behind the wedge: the europeans want it too!
Hmm...I think I can see where this is going...