Auctioning off a rare resource like this is much better than forcing everyone to pay more taxes. It is a progressive tax in that it is a service that only the wealthiest will buy. Let's hope the stickers become a status symbol...then you would be able to charge more. It is essentially a tax on consumption...not production.
There is a lot to be said for moving away from high taxes on production to government fees.
I agree that there is a point where the government auctioning off services would turn into a negative thing...for example auctioning off police protection. But I don't see an absolute where auctioning services is always wrong.
The state has a rare resource. The probably want to move a small number of vehicles to the passenger lane. Here the auction makes sense.
Of course, no one mentioned the obvious. If you want to drive in the passenger lane without bidding on the ticket...well, just get one of those inflatable dolls...
There is actually a law of diminishing returns on building and widening roads. There are even cases where building new roads and adding lanes lead to more traffic conjestion. One rule is that more roads simply leads to more cars. I learned the promptly forgot many of the paradoxes that happen in road modeling.
There is now a number of companies that have programs to model traffic patterns, and cities have been able to speed things up by carefully studying their traffic and adding roads in the right places. However, as cities grow, there will always be a point where the gridlock starts occuring...no matter how smart they are about building roads.
Of course, once everyone has a Segway, we will be in paradise.
I would think 2.3b is probably quite conservative. I would suspect that the average P2P listener will download two to three thousand songs a year. It doesn't seem like a lot. But, collectively it is a sizeable chunk of the music market.
You should add to the physical downloads the amount of music that gets burned on CDs and distributed as gifts. I know students who don't have CD burners, but have collections of 300+ albums just given to them by friends or at parties. I really wouldn't be surprised if the underground music exchange market wasn't several times the size of the above ground market.
I agree, the article wasn't well written. I was disappointed by the lack of depth, and I thought the author was a bit full of himself.
The topic, however, is extremely interesting. I find the distribution of web traffic to be fascinating topic. While Wall Street concentrates on just the biggest sites, IMHO, the real meat of the net is all the small independent sites, and the interaction between these sites.
I've actually spent a fair amount of time trying to help to build awareness of independent web sites in small towns, and trying to help towns build a topology of links that can attract more traffic into their independent niches. Although the article was poorly written, it starts to address the important issue that small sites need to know: They need to know how to identify their niche and to understand the flow of traffic in their niche.
IMHO, the topology of the independent web is much more interesting that the Media Metrix 50. Figuring out how to define and build these markets is a major challenge. I wish the article went further in that direction.
I was snippy in my post because the study of traffic begins with the obvious. Webmasters get their biggest jumps in traffic by answering obvious questions like: who is my audience? Who are my competitors? How is the traffic distributed among my competitors? What are the keywords that attract my audience?
I read the entire article before posting, expecting to find something insightful, an interesting deduction based on what the author was saying, something of the like.
The fault of the article was that it didn't present its ideas very clearly...not that it dwelt the obvious. Personally, I think the introduction of terms is more important than wrapping up with a conclusion...the net seems to change too fast for conclusions.
The article made interesting allusions to the patterns of traffic in large markets being similar to small markets. It is an obvious way to state things, but a worthwhile observation.
The article is actually about the distribution of traffic in different niches and how there is similar patterns in different niches. Although it may be tough for an individual to compete with Yahoo for the position of number 1 in the global portal market, it is still possible to make a splash in a niche market.
Hmmm, it is even possible for people to make a decent living by figuring out the needs of these different markets and developing sites that serve the markets. Ad values in niche markets are higher than the global market. Gosh, there are places in this great big internet of ours where an individual can have an impact.
The article suggests that both the niche and the most popular sites still have exponential growth curves--indicating that the media really isn't completely overrun by the three biggest sites as we find news articles hinting at. Instead there appears to be a layering of niche markets. This touches on important political debates about internet regulation.
Considering that a large number of people who frequent/. are interested in traffic patterns, the growth of the Internet. There was probably a naive/. editor who thought that the article would be a good topic of conversation.
Of course, neither the/. editor who thought this might be an interesting topic of conversation nor the author of the article is even close to your level of intelligence. So they deserve to be insulted. I mean, the obvious is fodder for weak minds. True genius seeks out the counter intuitive, the obscure and the contradictory.
The net is filled with these tiny minded people who actually work to build sites on truly mundane issues like corn growing in Iowa. BORING!!!!!
Let's ignore the fact that it is petty minds working on the obvious that grow the food we eat, and build houses we live in. It may be necessary to have a bunch of petty minds working on the obvious to make the internet work...but please, we don't need to hear any of this in our idle chit chat on slashdot. This forum should be about truly important questions such as the different smells that come from a priori, a posteriori and synthetic farts.
A great deal of the web is about community involvement. If you look at towns across the US [e.g. Missoula, Mt], you will find hundreds of stores, artists and businesses with sites. Many of these sites get only a few hundred hits per year, but a lead from a local person hitting a local site is extremely valuable, making the small site profitable.
I've always subscribed to the notion that the end user should control their own viewing space. However, there's always that crowd that doesn't have the where with all to figure out how to adjust their browsers, and the lowest common denominator always seems to rule.
I lost a contract recently because the user didn't like the hideous font I used on the page.
The page used the browser's default font. The client couldn't figure out why the site looked good on my computer and horrible on hers.
Agreed, it was a happy accident of history that the music industry was able to make their billions in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and what companies want is unreasonable. They want the courts to force the market to continue it's bubble of growth.
Making the companies succeed really shouldn't be the concern of the courts.
The technology itself demands some readjustments in the contract between buyers and sellers. The last step of the technology worked against the producers big time because it made it easy for customers to make unlimited downloads of a works and pretty much eliminated the need for a costly distribution chain.
There needs to be stronger protection against unlimited copying, but the consumer should benefit from tremendous increase in efficiency.
I haven't purchased a single product from the music industry since about 1999, I don't like supporting the record industry that exists today.
But the question is about rights.
The relation between the producer (seller) and consumer (buyer) of goods is largely a matter of contract. Since intellectual goods are abstract, the courts have been correct in realizing that selling the goods has to be thought of in terms of rights.
The transaction of buying and selling a CD involves a certain number of rights. Selling a CD in the store does not include the right to make unlimited reproductions of the CD.
When you have a different technology for distributing music, then there will naturally be different prices and a different set of rights involved in the purchase.
Let's say you have a technology that allows a music company to sell a single listen to a song or to view a DVD. These technologies would have a different price and a different set of rights than buying a CD for a permanent collection. You are clearly buying one license for a single view. Breaking the encryption on the music is clearly a violation of the rights. It is not a matter of fair use.
The truth of the matter is that as different technologies evolve, there needs to be an evolution in the contract between buyer and seller.
There has been dramatic changes in technology, and so there needs to be adjustments in the contract. however, both sides of the purchase need to benefit from the changes. The changes in technology did not come from the music industry, they came from the tech sector. The consumer should be benefitting from these changes. Instead we see record companies engaging in price fixing, and the record industry is working feverishly to prevent people from benefitting from the technology.
The changes in technologies require a change in the definition of the contract between buyer and seller (ie...the rights). The changes cannot be one sided...as the music industry proposes. The costs of production and distribution have dropped dramatically.
It is absurd to say that there is a static natural law involving copyright and music. The technology demands a certain amount of reclarification in contracts. The draconian changes that the music industry want are one sided, but are a start. They now need to be accompanied either by dramatic drops in in price, or other benefit to the consumer.
The article does a good job of showing how the quality of government legislation drops with competing legislatures start injecting directives into the legislation.
Each member country of the EU is passing laws based on directives of the EU. This is impeding full debate on the issue of copyrights and patents. A partial debate about principles takes place in the EU, and a partial debate about implementation takes place at the country level. The result is that you end up with convoluted, fractured laws.
States in the US have the same problem. They are often forced to pass compromised legislation as the result of incomplete directives coming from Washington. State education policies end up with all sorts of diversions as the result of acts passed by Congress.
The crack down on bootleggers continued after the end of Prohibition. Everyone living in the hills know that revenuers chase you down when you are transporting a little bit moonshine.
This is the case of trying to close illegitimate channels of distribution, so it is not quite the same as a complete prohibition. The problem, of course, is that the music industry hasn't done as good a job as it could at creating new low cost distribution mechanism for above ground MP3s. They want dollars for what probably should cost pennies.
If the crack down accompanies lower prices from the music industry's end, then it will be good for the consumer, it would be good for the Internet and the music industry.
If the legislation is one sided, then it will probably fail.
thus spoke the evil proctologist said: the enema of my enemy is my friend....
The SCO Group of Lindon, Utah (not to be confused with the cutting edge SCO design firm of Santa Cruz that had made contributions to science) is simply trying to use the power of patents to destroy in its quest for riches.
There are many who consider the power to destroy as a greater power than the power to create.
Even though IBM may not have a perfect past, they do have a long history of creating things, and that history deserves a little bit of admiration. IBM has made a good steady stream of contributions to science along the path of it quest for world dominance. So, yeah, I will cheer big blue as I personally value those who create more than those that simply brandish threats and demand payments.
Hey, in the US you only need to do about 4 hours a week to stay alive....you need to work about 30 hours a week to pay for the apartment, car and commute.
There are two leisure classes...at the opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
The long work hours is one of the catches of technology work. For that matter, it is one of the catches of most creative work. There is a great deal involved in getting a programmer to the point where they are totally primed for work. When they are, the extra twenty or so hours in the work week is magic.
Of course, trying to keep employees primed at 60-80 weeks leads to burn out. The IT work load generally is cyclical as well. There is a killer deadline, people have to be give their all to meet the deadline...then there is a shallow period.
In the ideal world, companies would realize this and allow IT workers much more time off with pay during slow times.
Brazil is a poor country and we are currently cutting costs everywere [...] and my salary is less than U$ 15,000 per year.
A classic conflict in the market...buyers are trying to get the price cut, and suppliers are trying to make more.
Seems to me that, if Brazilian tech workers want to get paid more, the struggle is to find ways that they can collect more money for their work. So the government's push to lower the amount paid for software may not be in the tech workers' best interest. The thing I realized too late in my career was to concentrate energy in areas where people are spending money, rather than in low return industries that are just tying to cut costs.
I think the best description is that open source and property rights are independent of each other, which is why people can argue for it from both a nationalistic point of view as well as from a libertarian point of view.
I can publish all of my source code and still claim the patent and copyright to the material. Advancing knowledge is not anti market.
Likewise, A nation dictating that only OSS can be used is not a contradiction to the notion of OSS.
In some regards, OSS has an element of reaction to the monopolies held by the big software firms. In this regards, I can see how OSS can be hijacked by those opposed to market economies.
The Brazilian mandate is interesting because it highlights how OSS is independent of the notion of the free market. It also makes me suspect that we are likely to see other nations jumping on the OSS wagon for anti-US and nationalistic reasons.
it's a recognition that software and data have very little economic value by themselves
I would disagree strongly with this statement. Software and ideas have tremendous value. Knowledge has value that way exceeds most pieces of physical property.
The struggle has been to find a way for these extremely valuable contributions to acheive an economic reward. The whole copyright/patent thing was an attempt to give economic rewards to the advancement of knowledge.
>> Please don't confuse the Smith potrayed by the more rabid free-marketeers with the real Adam Smith who wrote "wealth of Nations".
We also have to avoid the portrayal of Smith that was promoted by Karl Marx and Max Weber which is far more prevalent in schools and is far more more skewed than the interpretation developed by free marketers.
You are totally right. For the most part The Wealth of Nations is a descriptive work. Smith talks about about how people invest their labors, and how they use their labor to produce stock that they use as the basis to build more goods. He leaves it to the reader to derive that property ownership is good.
He also has examples that imply that cultures with different notions of property rights have different standards of living. That is nations with primitively defined notions of property tend to be poor.
He spends a great deal of time describing how the existence of physical stock and the reinvestment of this stock makes the nation grow richer, but, again does not say that that the existence of the stock is contigent on ownership is good. Most of that is left as implications.
Only occasionally does he break out in philosophical rhetoric about the sacredness of property to the individual. e.g.
The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. Adam Smith
But for the most part, the book is descriptive, and it is up to the audience to infer from the fact that the majority of the book is about investing labor and receiving gain from labor that somehow ownership of the produce from labor plays a part.
As I recall, Darwin didn't spend that much time talking abou evolution in the "The Origins of the Species." For the most part it seemed to contain descriptions of species and fossils.
Thanks for the clarification. You are completely right, the true root of OSS is the tradition of open scientific inquiry.
My brain fart was about the growth of the Linux community. A great deal of the interest in Linux is in reaction to the Microsoft monopoly. I suspect that many people on this board have Microsoft carved in their brains as the source of all evil...forgetting that MS was once seen as the force that was liberating us from the tyranny of the mainframe mindset.
There is a tendency for people to see their lives as being all of history, when, in fact, Western history has thousands of years of discourse on the role of markets and science. Personally, I think the OSS movement is very much short sighted.
I found the Brazilian legislation interesting because they had a history of approaching IT in a nationalistic manor. It is also interesting that the nationalistic tradition toward IS fits quite well within with the goals of OSS at this point in time. I labeled the post history, because I was thinking about how much I wish the article had delved into the history...not in a belief that I know more history than others. I tend to stray in comments.
OSS is like most social revolutions. It is for anything which broadens its agenda and power base. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
From a historical perspective, this news on Brazil is quite interesting. They have had one of the most meddlesome governments in IT. I was working with several Brazilians in the 80s. At the time, Brazil wanted to build up its computer manufacturing and had strict import laws controlling the importation of computers and computer programs. The hope was that by creating an isolated market, they would develop a flourishing IT industry. My friends, of course, thought the laws were extremely troublesome and oppressive, and were trying to find a way out of Brazil. They told stories of how most of Brazil's IT infrastructure was running on 10 year old software because companies couldn't import the new software. I was hoping the acticle would have more info on the history of Brazil's attempts to legislate its IT industry.
Anyway, mandating the use of OSS fits well within the social and political objectives of the movement. OSS does not stand for "choice." OSS stands for "open development." These are different ideas. In many regards OSS is in stark opposition to the notion of ownership of property. All the brouhaha about copyrights and patents is an attempt to create some sort of ownership to intellectual development; so that it would fit in a free market.
When the code is publicly developed, there is no longer any "ownership" of ideas or code. It is all a communal resource. Hence, the philosophies of ownership that were advanced by Smith, Locke and others are no longer applicable.
As for choice, for OSS to really excel it cannot allow companies to choose that this piece of software is open and this piece is closed. The goal of the GPL is to make all the software code "open." Otherwise the greed of software developers would be to take from the community without giving back. Government mandates simply add the power to the state to enforce the idea of open development.
OSS pretty much started as a reaction to the Microsoft monopoly. Since monopolies limit choice, I can see how people in the initial step of the revolution equated open with free; However, I suspect that it will be anti-US and nationalistic attitudes of countries like Brazil that will bring the OSS revolution to fruition. The fact that the revolution is different then what people thought the revolution was about is par for the course.
The INEEL museum in the middle of Idaho has a public display of an engine for a nuclear powered airplane. The idea was that the plane would drag the engine behind it on a long cable; so the pilots wouldn't die of radiation sickness. The plane would never land.
Independent coops can give rural users good rates. We are using the Universal Service Fee so that the monolpolies can undercut the small coops; so it is likely that it will end up costing more to wire rural areas with the universal service fee than without it.
It is also interesting that, after your post, the posting got hit with a slew of over ratings. Hmmm, I need to adjust down my assumptions about the IQs of/. readers. The behavior is much more lemming like than rational.
The point of the post was to point out the failed reasoning behind regulations, and to emphasize that rural users are better served by a different technology...which makes the whole point of the Universal Service Fee obsolete.
but think that wired rural broadband will not happen in a free market for a long long time.
Personally, I think rural areas should be wireless, and that the market should create independent rural cooperatives to provide the wireless connections for phone and internet. Rural areas can also make use of back up services through satellite.
Stringing wires to every remote farm is an inefficient use of capital. If wire is not the best way to provide service, then the free market is correct to skip that option.
Think for a moment how much better off a farm would be to have a fuel cell generating electricity, wireless phones and internet? You could get rid of all the wires that you have to maintain, and avoid costly mistakes when you accidentally drive the tractor over the cable.
The universal access fee is based on a false assumption that you need all options in all markets. The most efficient means to access rural markets is with independently owned rural communication cooperatives that provide local service to its members. The Universal Service Fee tax is taking money from the city market, and using it to subsidize the efforts of Baby Bells to take over these markets and service them with a lower quality inefficient technologies.
The Universal Service Fund is extremely important because it will help make cable available in rural areas that are better serviced by wireless connections. The people in these rural areas that are better serviced by wireless deserve to have the option of DSL and cable. Isn't this the fundamental foundation of a free market? That is everyone in every market should have the same options regardless of the cost of serving that market? The alternative is the unthinkable option of people on farms just having cell phones, satellite dishes and wireless connections to the internet just because that is the most efficient way to provide service.
The harder trick, of course, is that people in the city should have equal access to wireless. However, since there are more people bidding to use the available bandwidth in the city it is cost prohibitive. So, what we need to do is add a Universal Service Fee to the wireless internet in rural areas and use that money to subsidize wireless connections in the city. It is only fair. This is another example of how taxation helps make the free market free!!!!!
If you make a legal defense fund, you should first make sure you are fighting the right battle. That is, you should create a legal defense fund for people who are trammeled by the RIAA, then let the fund decide which cases to fight. Only fight cases that you are sure you can win.
All I know about this case is what was printed in the article. There may be things we don't know about the case. For example, there may be evidence that the student was actively copying a large number of CDs into the school's server to make a profitable business, or that the software he wrote was just a web interface to an old copy of Napster. I can see how a court would regard a name like ChewPlastic as being a site specifically designed for copying CDs (chewing plastic).
The article screams that this is a case of merit. However, that is what people do. They manipulate the press to show their innocence and wonderfulness. The press releases from Exxon make it out to be the most environmentally sensitive company on the planet, and no company cares more about health than Phillip Morris.
The legal defense fund sounds great, but it should be designed so that it chooses winning cases. This sounds like a winner, but the whole story is not on the wire. Choosing losing cases at this point just strengthens precedents for the RIAA. I fear that there will be a large number of people being squashed by the RIAA.
BTW, I believe the article. I think he was unfairly trounced on by the RIAA, but I have seen too many people twist words in print to put money down. And I think the legal defense fund is great. There just needs to be a mechanism to verify merits before turning on the money spout.
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Auctioning off a rare resource like this is much better than forcing everyone to pay more taxes. It is a progressive tax in that it is a service that only the wealthiest will buy. Let's hope the stickers become a status symbol...then you would be able to charge more. It is essentially a tax on consumption...not production.
There is a lot to be said for moving away from high taxes on production to government fees.
I agree that there is a point where the government auctioning off services would turn into a negative thing...for example auctioning off police protection. But I don't see an absolute where auctioning services is always wrong.
The state has a rare resource. The probably want to move a small number of vehicles to the passenger lane. Here the auction makes sense.
Of course, no one mentioned the obvious. If you want to drive in the passenger lane without bidding on the ticket...well, just get one of those inflatable dolls...
There is actually a law of diminishing returns on building and widening roads. There are even cases where building new roads and adding lanes lead to more traffic conjestion. One rule is that more roads simply leads to more cars. I learned the promptly forgot many of the paradoxes that happen in road modeling.
There is now a number of companies that have programs to model traffic patterns, and cities have been able to speed things up by carefully studying their traffic and adding roads in the right places. However, as cities grow, there will always be a point where the gridlock starts occuring...no matter how smart they are about building roads.
Of course, once everyone has a Segway, we will be in paradise.
This 2001 USA Today article indicated that 2.8 billion songs a month were cursing through Napster.
I would think 2.3b is probably quite conservative. I would suspect that the average P2P listener will download two to three thousand songs a year. It doesn't seem like a lot. But, collectively it is a sizeable chunk of the music market.
You should add to the physical downloads the amount of music that gets burned on CDs and distributed as gifts. I know students who don't have CD burners, but have collections of 300+ albums just given to them by friends or at parties. I really wouldn't be surprised if the underground music exchange market wasn't several times the size of the above ground market.
I agree, the article wasn't well written. I was disappointed by the lack of depth, and I thought the author was a bit full of himself.
The topic, however, is extremely interesting. I find the distribution of web traffic to be fascinating topic. While Wall Street concentrates on just the biggest sites, IMHO, the real meat of the net is all the small independent sites, and the interaction between these sites.
I've actually spent a fair amount of time trying to help to build awareness of independent web sites in small towns, and trying to help towns build a topology of links that can attract more traffic into their independent niches. Although the article was poorly written, it starts to address the important issue that small sites need to know: They need to know how to identify their niche and to understand the flow of traffic in their niche.
IMHO, the topology of the independent web is much more interesting that the Media Metrix 50. Figuring out how to define and build these markets is a major challenge. I wish the article went further in that direction.
I was snippy in my post because the study of traffic begins with the obvious. Webmasters get their biggest jumps in traffic by answering obvious questions like: who is my audience? Who are my competitors? How is the traffic distributed among my competitors? What are the keywords that attract my audience?
The fault of the article was that it didn't present its ideas very clearly...not that it dwelt the obvious. Personally, I think the introduction of terms is more important than wrapping up with a conclusion...the net seems to change too fast for conclusions.
The article made interesting allusions to the patterns of traffic in large markets being similar to small markets. It is an obvious way to state things, but a worthwhile observation.
The article is actually about the distribution of traffic in different niches and how there is similar patterns in different niches. Although it may be tough for an individual to compete with Yahoo for the position of number 1 in the global portal market, it is still possible to make a splash in a niche market.
/. are interested in traffic patterns, the growth of the Internet. There was probably a naive /. editor who thought that the article would be a good topic of conversation.
/. editor who thought this might be an interesting topic of conversation nor the author of the article is even close to your level of intelligence. So they deserve to be insulted. I mean, the obvious is fodder for weak minds. True genius seeks out the counter intuitive, the obscure and the contradictory.
Hmmm, it is even possible for people to make a decent living by figuring out the needs of these different markets and developing sites that serve the markets. Ad values in niche markets are higher than the global market. Gosh, there are places in this great big internet of ours where an individual can have an impact.
The article suggests that both the niche and the most popular sites still have exponential growth curves--indicating that the media really isn't completely overrun by the three biggest sites as we find news articles hinting at. Instead there appears to be a layering of niche markets. This touches on important political debates about internet regulation.
Considering that a large number of people who frequent
Of course, neither the
The net is filled with these tiny minded people who actually work to build sites on truly mundane issues like corn growing in Iowa. BORING!!!!!
Let's ignore the fact that it is petty minds working on the obvious that grow the food we eat, and build houses we live in. It may be necessary to have a bunch of petty minds working on the obvious to make the internet work...but please, we don't need to hear any of this in our idle chit chat on slashdot. This forum should be about truly important questions such as the different smells that come from a priori, a posteriori and synthetic farts.
A great deal of the web is about community involvement. If you look at towns across the US [e.g. Missoula, Mt], you will find hundreds of stores, artists and businesses with sites. Many of these sites get only a few hundred hits per year, but a lead from a local person hitting a local site is extremely valuable, making the small site profitable.
I've always subscribed to the notion that the end user should control their own viewing space. However, there's always that crowd that doesn't have the where with all to figure out how to adjust their browsers, and the lowest common denominator always seems to rule.
I lost a contract recently because the user didn't like the hideous font I used on the page.
The page used the browser's default font. The client couldn't figure out why the site looked good on my computer and horrible on hers.
Agreed, it was a happy accident of history that the music industry was able to make their billions in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and what companies want is unreasonable. They want the courts to force the market to continue it's bubble of growth.
Making the companies succeed really shouldn't be the concern of the courts.
The technology itself demands some readjustments in the contract between buyers and sellers. The last step of the technology worked against the producers big time because it made it easy for customers to make unlimited downloads of a works and pretty much eliminated the need for a costly distribution chain.
There needs to be stronger protection against unlimited copying, but the consumer should benefit from tremendous increase in efficiency.
I haven't purchased a single product from the music industry since about 1999, I don't like supporting the record industry that exists today.
...the rights). The changes cannot be one sided...as the music industry proposes. The costs of production and distribution have dropped dramatically.
But the question is about rights.
The relation between the producer (seller) and consumer (buyer) of goods is largely a matter of contract. Since intellectual goods are abstract, the courts have been correct in realizing that selling the goods has to be thought of in terms of rights.
The transaction of buying and selling a CD involves a certain number of rights. Selling a CD in the store does not include the right to make unlimited reproductions of the CD.
When you have a different technology for distributing music, then there will naturally be different prices and a different set of rights involved in the purchase.
Let's say you have a technology that allows a music company to sell a single listen to a song or to view a DVD. These technologies would have a different price and a different set of rights than buying a CD for a permanent collection. You are clearly buying one license for a single view. Breaking the encryption on the music is clearly a violation of the rights. It is not a matter of fair use.
The truth of the matter is that as different technologies evolve, there needs to be an evolution in the contract between buyer and seller.
There has been dramatic changes in technology, and so there needs to be adjustments in the contract. however, both sides of the purchase need to benefit from the changes. The changes in technology did not come from the music industry, they came from the tech sector. The consumer should be benefitting from these changes. Instead we see record companies engaging in price fixing, and the record industry is working feverishly to prevent people from benefitting from the technology.
The changes in technologies require a change in the definition of the contract between buyer and seller (ie
It is absurd to say that there is a static natural law involving copyright and music. The technology demands a certain amount of reclarification in contracts. The draconian changes that the music industry want are one sided, but are a start. They now need to be accompanied either by dramatic drops in in price, or other benefit to the consumer.
The article does a good job of showing how the quality of government legislation drops with competing legislatures start injecting directives into the legislation.
Each member country of the EU is passing laws based on directives of the EU. This is impeding full debate on the issue of copyrights and patents. A partial debate about principles takes place in the EU, and a partial debate about implementation takes place at the country level. The result is that you end up with convoluted, fractured laws.
States in the US have the same problem. They are often forced to pass compromised legislation as the result of incomplete directives coming from Washington. State education policies end up with all sorts of diversions as the result of acts passed by Congress.
The crack down on bootleggers continued after the end of Prohibition. Everyone living in the hills know that revenuers chase you down when you are transporting a little bit moonshine.
This is the case of trying to close illegitimate channels of distribution, so it is not quite the same as a complete prohibition. The problem, of course, is that the music industry hasn't done as good a job as it could at creating new low cost distribution mechanism for above ground MP3s. They want dollars for what probably should cost pennies.
If the crack down accompanies lower prices from the music industry's end, then it will be good for the consumer, it would be good for the Internet and the music industry.
If the legislation is one sided, then it will probably fail.
thus spoke the evil proctologist said: the enema of my enemy is my friend....
The SCO Group of Lindon, Utah (not to be confused with the cutting edge SCO design firm of Santa Cruz that had made contributions to science) is simply trying to use the power of patents to destroy in its quest for riches.
There are many who consider the power to destroy as a greater power than the power to create.
Even though IBM may not have a perfect past, they do have a long history of creating things, and that history deserves a little bit of admiration. IBM has made a good steady stream of contributions to science along the path of it quest for world dominance. So, yeah, I will cheer big blue as I personally value those who create more than those that simply brandish threats and demand payments.
Hey, in the US you only need to do about 4 hours a week to stay alive....you need to work about 30 hours a week to pay for the apartment, car and commute.
There are two leisure classes...at the opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
The long work hours is one of the catches of technology work. For that matter, it is one of the catches of most creative work. There is a great deal involved in getting a programmer to the point where they are totally primed for work. When they are, the extra twenty or so hours in the work week is magic.
Of course, trying to keep employees primed at 60-80 weeks leads to burn out. The IT work load generally is cyclical as well. There is a killer deadline, people have to be give their all to meet the deadline...then there is a shallow period.
In the ideal world, companies would realize this and allow IT workers much more time off with pay during slow times.
Brazil is a poor country and we are currently cutting costs everywere [...] and my salary is less than U$ 15,000 per year.
A classic conflict in the market...buyers are trying to get the price cut, and suppliers are trying to make more.
Seems to me that, if Brazilian tech workers want to get paid more, the struggle is to find ways that they can collect more money for their work. So the government's push to lower the amount paid for software may not be in the tech workers' best interest. The thing I realized too late in my career was to concentrate energy in areas where people are spending money, rather than in low return industries that are just tying to cut costs.
Good luck on getting a job.
I think the best description is that open source and property rights are independent of each other, which is why people can argue for it from both a nationalistic point of view as well as from a libertarian point of view.
I can publish all of my source code and still claim the patent and copyright to the material. Advancing knowledge is not anti market.
Likewise, A nation dictating that only OSS can be used is not a contradiction to the notion of OSS.
In some regards, OSS has an element of reaction to the monopolies held by the big software firms. In this regards, I can see how OSS can be hijacked by those opposed to market economies.
The Brazilian mandate is interesting because it highlights how OSS is independent of the notion of the free market. It also makes me suspect that we are likely to see other nations jumping on the OSS wagon for anti-US and nationalistic reasons.
I would disagree strongly with this statement. Software and ideas have tremendous value. Knowledge has value that way exceeds most pieces of physical property.
The struggle has been to find a way for these extremely valuable contributions to acheive an economic reward. The whole copyright/patent thing was an attempt to give economic rewards to the advancement of knowledge.
We also have to avoid the portrayal of Smith that was promoted by Karl Marx and Max Weber which is far more prevalent in schools and is far more more skewed than the interpretation developed by free marketers.
You are totally right. For the most part The Wealth of Nations is a descriptive work. Smith talks about about how people invest their labors, and how they use their labor to produce stock that they use as the basis to build more goods. He leaves it to the reader to derive that property ownership is good.
He also has examples that imply that cultures with different notions of property rights have different standards of living. That is nations with primitively defined notions of property tend to be poor.
He spends a great deal of time describing how the existence of physical stock and the reinvestment of this stock makes the nation grow richer, but, again does not say that that the existence of the stock is contigent on ownership is good. Most of that is left as implications.
Only occasionally does he break out in philosophical rhetoric about the sacredness of property to the individual. e.g.
But for the most part, the book is descriptive, and it is up to the audience to infer from the fact that the majority of the book is about investing labor and receiving gain from labor that somehow ownership of the produce from labor plays a part.
As I recall, Darwin didn't spend that much time talking abou evolution in the "The Origins of the Species." For the most part it seemed to contain descriptions of species and fossils.
Thanks for the clarification. You are completely right, the true root of OSS is the tradition of open scientific inquiry.
My brain fart was about the growth of the Linux community. A great deal of the interest in Linux is in reaction to the Microsoft monopoly. I suspect that many people on this board have Microsoft carved in their brains as the source of all evil...forgetting that MS was once seen as the force that was liberating us from the tyranny of the mainframe mindset.
There is a tendency for people to see their lives as being all of history, when, in fact, Western history has thousands of years of discourse on the role of markets and science. Personally, I think the OSS movement is very much short sighted.
I found the Brazilian legislation interesting because they had a history of approaching IT in a nationalistic manor. It is also interesting that the nationalistic tradition toward IS fits quite well within with the goals of OSS at this point in time. I labeled the post history, because I was thinking about how much I wish the article had delved into the history...not in a belief that I know more history than others. I tend to stray in comments.
OSS is like most social revolutions. It is for anything which broadens its agenda and power base. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
From a historical perspective, this news on Brazil is quite interesting. They have had one of the most meddlesome governments in IT. I was working with several Brazilians in the 80s. At the time, Brazil wanted to build up its computer manufacturing and had strict import laws controlling the importation of computers and computer programs. The hope was that by creating an isolated market, they would develop a flourishing IT industry. My friends, of course, thought the laws were extremely troublesome and oppressive, and were trying to find a way out of Brazil. They told stories of how most of Brazil's IT infrastructure was running on 10 year old software because companies couldn't import the new software. I was hoping the acticle would have more info on the history of Brazil's attempts to legislate its IT industry.
Anyway, mandating the use of OSS fits well within the social and political objectives of the movement. OSS does not stand for "choice." OSS stands for "open development." These are different ideas. In many regards OSS is in stark opposition to the notion of ownership of property. All the brouhaha about copyrights and patents is an attempt to create some sort of ownership to intellectual development; so that it would fit in a free market.
When the code is publicly developed, there is no longer any "ownership" of ideas or code. It is all a communal resource. Hence, the philosophies of ownership that were advanced by Smith, Locke and others are no longer applicable.
As for choice, for OSS to really excel it cannot allow companies to choose that this piece of software is open and this piece is closed. The goal of the GPL is to make all the software code "open." Otherwise the greed of software developers would be to take from the community without giving back. Government mandates simply add the power to the state to enforce the idea of open development.
OSS pretty much started as a reaction to the Microsoft monopoly. Since monopolies limit choice, I can see how people in the initial step of the revolution equated open with free; However, I suspect that it will be anti-US and nationalistic attitudes of countries like Brazil that will bring the OSS revolution to fruition. The fact that the revolution is different then what people thought the revolution was about is par for the course.
The INEEL museum in the middle of Idaho has a public display of an engine for a nuclear powered airplane. The idea was that the plane would drag the engine behind it on a long cable; so the pilots wouldn't die of radiation sickness. The plane would never land.
Independent coops can give rural users good rates. We are using the Universal Service Fee so that the monolpolies can undercut the small coops; so it is likely that it will end up costing more to wire rural areas with the universal service fee than without it.
It is also interesting that, after your post, the posting got hit with a slew of over ratings. Hmmm, I need to adjust down my assumptions about the IQs of /. readers. The behavior is much more lemming like than rational.
The point of the post was to point out the failed reasoning behind regulations, and to emphasize that rural users are better served by a different technology...which makes the whole point of the Universal Service Fee obsolete.
Personally, I think rural areas should be wireless, and that the market should create independent rural cooperatives to provide the wireless connections for phone and internet. Rural areas can also make use of back up services through satellite.
Stringing wires to every remote farm is an inefficient use of capital. If wire is not the best way to provide service, then the free market is correct to skip that option.
Think for a moment how much better off a farm would be to have a fuel cell generating electricity, wireless phones and internet? You could get rid of all the wires that you have to maintain, and avoid costly mistakes when you accidentally drive the tractor over the cable.
The universal access fee is based on a false assumption that you need all options in all markets. The most efficient means to access rural markets is with independently owned rural communication cooperatives that provide local service to its members. The Universal Service Fee tax is taking money from the city market, and using it to subsidize the efforts of Baby Bells to take over these markets and service them with a lower quality inefficient technologies.
The Universal Service Fund is extremely important because it will help make cable available in rural areas that are better serviced by wireless connections. The people in these rural areas that are better serviced by wireless deserve to have the option of DSL and cable. Isn't this the fundamental foundation of a free market? That is everyone in every market should have the same options regardless of the cost of serving that market? The alternative is the unthinkable option of people on farms just having cell phones, satellite dishes and wireless connections to the internet just because that is the most efficient way to provide service.
The harder trick, of course, is that people in the city should have equal access to wireless. However, since there are more people bidding to use the available bandwidth in the city it is cost prohibitive. So, what we need to do is add a Universal Service Fee to the wireless internet in rural areas and use that money to subsidize wireless connections in the city. It is only fair. This is another example of how taxation helps make the free market free!!!!!
If you make a legal defense fund, you should first make sure you are fighting the right battle. That is, you should create a legal defense fund for people who are trammeled by the RIAA, then let the fund decide which cases to fight. Only fight cases that you are sure you can win.
All I know about this case is what was printed in the article. There may be things we don't know about the case. For example, there may be evidence that the student was actively copying a large number of CDs into the school's server to make a profitable business, or that the software he wrote was just a web interface to an old copy of Napster. I can see how a court would regard a name like ChewPlastic as being a site specifically designed for copying CDs (chewing plastic).
The article screams that this is a case of merit. However, that is what people do. They manipulate the press to show their innocence and wonderfulness. The press releases from Exxon make it out to be the most environmentally sensitive company on the planet, and no company cares more about health than Phillip Morris.
The legal defense fund sounds great, but it should be designed so that it chooses winning cases. This sounds like a winner, but the whole story is not on the wire. Choosing losing cases at this point just strengthens precedents for the RIAA. I fear that there will be a large number of people being squashed by the RIAA.
BTW, I believe the article. I think he was unfairly trounced on by the RIAA, but I have seen too many people twist words in print to put money down. And I think the legal defense fund is great. There just needs to be a mechanism to verify merits before turning on the money spout.