Is there anywhere in my post where I said I was defining the word copyright? The post is quite clear that I am trying to find layman's terms to express the goals and effects of laws.
That is a contradiction. If there were respect for copyright, law makers would not feel the need to make copyright stronger.
Where in my post do I say that copyright laws need to be stronger? The post says that the effect of a strong copyright law that is respected is such and such. It makes no claim that current laws need to be strengthened.
I did emphasize respect for the law. Personally, I believe our biggest problem is that Stallman and others have manipulated people to disrespoect laws for personal political gains.
strong copyright allows publishers to do whatever they want, which in practice means a myriad of formats that no-one and nothing but the reading device of the publisher understands (or even is allowed to understand).
Publishers can publish things in whatever format they please regardless of the copyright laws.
Copyright laws do affect the format publishers choose. If there was widespread respect for copyright laws; I stipulate that publishers would be more apt to publish in an open format. Conversely, when there is respect for copyright laws, they choose methods to obfuscated code.
You are right that "proprietary formats" would not exist. With no legal recourse, publishers would either stop creating products, or they would find technical means to obfuscate code or other ways to limit audiences. Since publishers will be desparate to find ways to retain the economic value of their creations, they will probably create even more, harder to read formats. The only way you will stop obfuscation would be to make obfuscation and encryption illegal.
Copyright does not dictate publishing format. The only thing affected is the republishing of information. Publishers cannot publish things they do not have the right to publish.
You may not remember, but the primary reason we have such robust Network Interface Cards from a variety of manufacturers today is that there was fierce competition between standards in the early days of networking. NICs were pounded through an evolutionary process and we ended up with a more robust product.
The idea there there should only be one operating system and one chip set led to the dual Intel/Microsoft monopolies. Personally, I think the RISC based processors were following a better design path. Unfortunately, the pressure to have only one chipset and one OS that would run ALL programs led to the worst possible solution: the Microsoft and Intel blob.
Imagine how much more fun we would have with 20 or 30 fundamentally different CPU designs on the market, and hundreds of competing Operating Systems? Personally, I think the world is better when there's a ton of different competing technologies on the market.
I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.
The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.
When there is no respect for copyrights, then publishers must resort to other measures to protect their works.
If we had widespread respect of copyrights, then there would be no need for technologies that prevent people from copying music or printing eBooks.
Likewise, Open Source would be stronger if there was respect for copyrights. In theory, the OSS, GNU, etc., are built on the tradition of copyright. Companies are more willing to produce source for clients when they do not fear that their source will be stolen by a competitor.
customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook.
This is where you really are missing the point. You are basically trying to turn the argument for more freedom for the consumer into restrictions on the freedom of the publisher. Creators of software should not have any such restrictions on what they create. The groups pushing for restrictive and intrusive technologies do so because they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law. If there was respect for copyright law, then I could sell you an MP3 for a nickel and not worry about you "republishing" the MP3 by giving it to all of your friends.
Re:A few thoughts and some questions....
on
Upbeat on E-books
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· Score: 1
I use Questia. My main goal in using eBooks is research. I use the system to verify references and look up original source material. I like text based ebooks because I can quickly grab quotes and make notations about the things I read.
Researching online turns reading from a passive to an active engagement...so I really am not that annoyed by reading on a computer screen.
I wonder how much they will take off with the regular (aka non-geek) population.
I've turned several historians onto the product and they love it. Well, that is non-Socialist researchers. Socialists hate Questia because it is an evil creation of the industrial military complex. Questia charges a subscription fee. The internet should be tearing down the market, not building it up.
BTW, Personally, I disagree with the premise behind the OneReader Project that we need to have one master eBook format and a universal reader. I believe that things work better when there are competing formats and competing ideas on the table. I believe in an evolutionary processes rather than having centrally controlled processes. The competing formats might look like eBabble, but that is the nature of human freedom and human diversity. A world with only one format of eBook is the same as a world with only one language. The diversity adds spice and creativity.
I think many firms think outsourcing security is safer as they see their employees as their worst risk. I've watched managers knowingly do horrible things to employees...then they become paranoid that they employees with act in retribution.
To a large extent, employees are a worse threat since they will learn the company's weaknesses. The growing distrust between management and workers is scary.
Anyway, my experience is that managers who perceive themselves in a different class than workers don't like delegating secutity to members of the class they disparage.
You have it backwards. Philosophy's that claim that there is "a will of the people" are that we are all subject to that "will of the people" are more likely to end up with a monarch or other dictator. Look through the history of monarchies and dictatator ships, most claim that, in some way or other, they are representative of the will of the people. Communist claim that their dictatoship of the proletariate is the will of the people. Kings and Queens claimed the same for various reasons.
If you realize that there is no such thing as a "will of the people" then you see that there really is a world with billions of different skin bags running around each with their different point of views, etc..
Rejecting the notion that we are subordinate to the collective will, then we see that we need to develop a government that, first and foremost, protects individual rights, protects free expression. Those silly classical liberals would even say that there should be protection of property rights.
Rejecting the notion that there is a will of the people, then we want a political system that minimizes the ability of the government to coerce and control people...since we accept that all people have souls, we do want a government that allows a great deal of input and participation.
Regardless of who wins the election tomorrow, neither of the candidates is a manifestation of the will of the people. Whoever wins is just the person who will hold office for the next term.
I suspect that people will be a lot more attentive to the technology of counting votes than they were in the past. Sadly, few people seem to realize the value of an electoral college (which was state of the art vote counting technology in the 1780s.) Even today, I think recent events warrant this technology. The idea is that you determine population in an area every ten years and use this data to separate the population into buckets, you then count the vote in each bucket then determine the winner of the election by counting the buckets.
The bucket counting process does give small states a boost in the process. The main thing it does is that it evens out wierd fluctuations in the data. For example, there might be higher voter turn out in states with a hotly contested senate seat.
The Electoral College was state of the art too. IF something went wrong, you would have a body that could deliberate and select the leader. Sadly, the courts seem to have usurped this authority.
The biggest problem with the bucket counting system is that the US is not expanding the number of buckets with the population.
Of course, if you believe that the "will of the people" is real and that it is determined mathematically by the vote, then the vote counting technology is just plain wrong.
Authority (who's the boss) is usually assigned for political reasons. Reponsibility has more to do with ethics and capabilities.
When the boss is incapable of doing a task, then clearly, some underling bears the responsibility when things go wrong.
Conversely, the people with highly developed sense of ethics and professionalism step up to the plate, work to make the project work and essentially take responsibility.
Theoretically, it is possible to give authority to the people who take responsibility.
On the other hand, having the authority without the responsibility is a much larger disaster waiting to happen.
This might cause problems for a company...it usually doesn't tarnish the teflon coat of the people in charge. For that matter, when a company sees a manager with authority and no responsibility, they generally respond by expanding his authority.
Once again, the Conservative mind is completely, 100% absolutely right. Anything anyone has ever attempted to say about the earth, environment, EVOLUTION, and other politically movitated liberal sciences is questionable. There is no way we can say anything intelligent about living on the planet earth unless we have a controlled experiment. That means two identical planets: one where Bush and the consume until we drop SUV crowd lives...and another where the conservationists live.
Speaking of which, if someone is planning on doing this experiment...I would like to live on the planet with the conservationists...
"Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride."
I think Wired is getting confused about the demographic of their market. For some odd reason, I think very few of their readers can remember when cars came out. Personally, I hope some people are sitting with their grand parents, but I doubt they routinely read "Wired" articles to the dwindling population that can remember when cars came out.
PS, cars were already around when I was born, and I am considered too old by most hiring managers to program computers.
I have read several histories of Oracle. My belief that the product was developed by people of varying skill levels with a great deal of input from the customer base is a hell of a lot closer to reality than the bogus myth being pushed that database was derived from the aether by a bunch of stuck up, head in the clouds set theorists who were sitting in an ivory tower contemplating the fragrances of each other farts.
The buzziness of words generally has more to do with context than the word itself. Object Oriented is not by necessity a buzzword. About 80% of the time its used it is a buzzword. As in "I was synergized by my object oriented coffee this morning."
You are obviously taking data integrity to heart in your project. I think that is fantastic. The sales man who starts talking about ACID probably is just trying to get the buzz.
I am counting on the fact that some PhDs at Oracle figured out how to do ACID right.
It probably wasn't a PhD at Oracle that wrote the code. The code was probably hacked out people of various skill levels. The driving force behind a lot of things at Oracle was screaming customers livid about losing data. You should read up on the history of Oracle. The PhDs usually come in after the fact and "explain" things to students.
BTW, I've had really weird problems with Oracle. Lot's of things have gone wrong that never should have happened. Most stuff works, the application is better than most. It is not perfect.
Personally, I don't just stop with ACID, I make sure I have an audit trail from start to finish and I make a barage of tests that show that the audit trails add up. Even with ACID I never buy the illusion that there will never be a problem with the transaction.
ACID may be about data integrity. My point is that people who have an ACID database tend to stop thinking about data integrity.
It's about making it impossible for unexpected bugs to corrupt data
Sorry, but I don't buy into the illusion that anyone is creating perfect programs. I have had to deal with people who thought they wrote perfect programs. My experience is that the programs written by buzz word spouting gurus is generally very poor quality.
Truth is, most people want ACID (and transaction processing) because it saves them from having to think too much. You perform a whole bunch of data operations. If it doesn't work you role back. If you are just dropping things into a MySQL structure, you have to think harder about what will happen if an operation crashes mid way.
As for the parent post, he's just bought into the illusion that database gurus think at a transcendental level. It is a common ailment. Object gurus, business gurus, religious gurus, political gurus are all treading on the same clouds. It is a common ailment that usually cures itself with time.
Isn't it more like, the fewer sources of opinion there are in an area, the MORE dangerous regulation is
Good catch. I think regulation is dangerous regardless of the number of channels of communication.
I should have said "perceived need" for regulation. When there a few avenues for communication we start feeling a need for a countervaling forces.
The effect of regulation is always to reduce the number of avenues of communication. Regulations generally help put the cap on monopolies.
PS: this poll reminds me that I need to throw more effort into the Local Campaign Directory I put on my site. I think the internet community should really work hard to get candidate web sites out in front of the community. That will be the project for tomorrow.
TV and print seemed to require regulation because there was a very small number of TV stations and newspapers in each demographic region.
The internet is not subject to the constraints that made it necessary to limit print media and TV. So we should not have the regulation.
For that matter, if the technology were to start creating thousands of little tv stations and newspapers, then we should be looking at ending all regulation.
The real political force on the net is all the blogs and weird opinion pieces that people throw around. These are incredibly difficult to regulate.
The whole need for regulation resulted from the small number of people in the publishing industry. In a world where every one can be a publisher, then the need for reuglation vanishes.
The primary use of blogs is shameless self promotion. The chronological format is not the best format for developing interconnected ideas (the wiki design is better for that).
It is extremely difficult to find worthwile information in brain fart type blogs. Such blogs might provide info on trends, but it takes a good web crawl to make sense of the trends.
For that matter, I got the impression that the main reason Google bought blogger was the wealth of links from the blogs.
BTW: politics is one of the richest areas for blogging. People pointing to candidates and articles they like end up building a topology of links that help the candidates who are making an impression get noticed. The motives of all political blogs is questionable.
Standards have the tendency to freeze innovation. For this reason, I like situations where there are competing standards since the friction between standards allows both room and reason for growth.
So, I guess I am not joking, I like worlds were people and companies are working to set their own standards and where we have a fair amount of leaway in our interpretation of implementation of standards.
I don't associate downloading music with theft. Downloading is a great way to distribute music. I associate distributing music without the consent of the musicians theft. I would consider downloading music from a pirated collection a form of theft. There's a ton of downloadable music out there. The only problem is that it is not the top forty songs.
The ideal solution would be for us to define the line between using and publishing music. Because no one was addressing the problem that some of the people downloading music would then go out and distribute that music to thousands...we have an unfortunate situation where companies such as MS can associate stealing (ie republishing music) with downloading. Thus justifies creating instrusive programs to monitor and control our listening behavior.
The foundation for an open society is trust. I am livid about the way the debate between music pirates (ie people who want to republish and distribute works) and MS is justifying instrusive technology.
Sugar isn't so overpriced that I would go steal it. Music is. Now THAT'S a market principle.
And, notice how the core of the cited article is that we have to have extremely intrusive and restrictive techologies because people today have abandonned respect for others. Companies price their music as if each distribution would be given to thousands. In response, the technology firms are saying that we have to have intrusive technologies to protect rights.
Stealing is an antimarket and antisocial action. It is a method of destroying the market. These actions are now used by MS as a global justification for their antimarket actions. The problem is that we get hypnotized into thinking that we are liberating ourselves, when in fact we are creating a mechanism that is cutting out the smaller independent channels.
Look at history, you see a continued cycle where iconoclasts will justify stealing because they find moral fault in the people they rob. The stealing is then followed by an even more oppressive society than existed before the looting.
Liberation is found in respect for people. The market reaction to prices that are too high is to substitute the overpriced product with another product.
BTW, my guess is that Marx would agree with your statement that stealing is a market mechanism. I suspect Smith and most classical liberals would not.
People who make music were always grossly overpaid and I don't think most of them deserve it.
You obviously don't know many musicians. My guess is your only experience with musicians is from watching coddled stars on MTV and you probably only listen to top 40 music. Most musicians do not make a living from their music.
BTW, Market principles do not revolve around our presonal moral prejudices about what other people deserve. I think sugar farmers are overpaid and tomato farmers don't get enough respect. That does not justify my stealing sugar.
If your decision to steal music is based on ideals, then why not actually elevate your ideals to the point where you listen to something other than the ultra packaged top 40 crap?
Of course, you post also points out that much of force behind the various anti IP movements is pure envy. The anti-IP logic is as follows:
"Why should those old fart programmers get to own houses and cars when all they did was develop the programs that we study in school. This is unjust because I have to live in a dorm and drive this crap Buick my parents gave me. I am green with envy. Hence, the people who create things do not deserve any rights to the things they create."
NOTE, there are good arguments that the IP system needs reform. The arguments, however, do not start with judgments on who deserves and who does not deserve to live in a house.
I have a few mailto links posted around and about to give the email address crawlers fodder. Getting the terabytes of spam is not difficult...the problem is that there is zero value to the actual fruit of the spam harvest.
Sounds more like this effort is about increasing criminal penalties to people who use the fraudulent information in their registry for scams than it is about forcing everyone to give their cell phone and primary email account in their registration.
For example, imagine a company that uses the address for a local bank in their program to harvest credit card numbers from web surfers. If caught the whois records add to the fraud case.
If this is the intention of the legislation, then enforcement is not a major issue...since it is something tacked onto other scams.
The web is really a mixed bag that allows a mix of open standards, and proprietary software. To claim it is all open source is misleading. It is a dynamic network that allows development on multiple layers.
The most important aspect of the web is that the interface of the different layers were well defined and exposed...not that each line of code in the different layers is exposed.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for not reading the post.
Is there anywhere in my post where I said I was defining the word copyright? The post is quite clear that I am trying to find layman's terms to express the goals and effects of laws.
Where in my post do I say that copyright laws need to be stronger? The post says that the effect of a strong copyright law that is respected is such and such. It makes no claim that current laws need to be strengthened.
I did emphasize respect for the law. Personally, I believe our biggest problem is that Stallman and others have manipulated people to disrespoect laws for personal political gains.
Publishers can publish things in whatever format they please regardless of the copyright laws.
Copyright laws do affect the format publishers choose. If there was widespread respect for copyright laws; I stipulate that publishers would be more apt to publish in an open format. Conversely, when there is respect for copyright laws, they choose methods to obfuscated code.
You are right that "proprietary formats" would not exist. With no legal recourse, publishers would either stop creating products, or they would find technical means to obfuscate code or other ways to limit audiences. Since publishers will be desparate to find ways to retain the economic value of their creations, they will probably create even more, harder to read formats. The only way you will stop obfuscation would be to make obfuscation and encryption illegal.
Copyright does not dictate publishing format. The only thing affected is the republishing of information. Publishers cannot publish things they do not have the right to publish.
You may not remember, but the primary reason we have such robust Network Interface Cards from a variety of manufacturers today is that there was fierce competition between standards in the early days of networking. NICs were pounded through an evolutionary process and we ended up with a more robust product.
The idea there there should only be one operating system and one chip set led to the dual Intel/Microsoft monopolies. Personally, I think the RISC based processors were following a better design path. Unfortunately, the pressure to have only one chipset and one OS that would run ALL programs led to the worst possible solution: the Microsoft and Intel blob.
Imagine how much more fun we would have with 20 or 30 fundamentally different CPU designs on the market, and hundreds of competing Operating Systems? Personally, I think the world is better when there's a ton of different competing technologies on the market.
I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.
The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.
When there is no respect for copyrights, then publishers must resort to other measures to protect their works.
If we had widespread respect of copyrights, then there would be no need for technologies that prevent people from copying music or printing eBooks.
Likewise, Open Source would be stronger if there was respect for copyrights. In theory, the OSS, GNU, etc., are built on the tradition of copyright. Companies are more willing to produce source for clients when they do not fear that their source will be stolen by a competitor.
This is where you really are missing the point. You are basically trying to turn the argument for more freedom for the consumer into restrictions on the freedom of the publisher. Creators of software should not have any such restrictions on what they create. The groups pushing for restrictive and intrusive technologies do so because they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law. If there was respect for copyright law, then I could sell you an MP3 for a nickel and not worry about you "republishing" the MP3 by giving it to all of your friends.
I use Questia. My main goal in using eBooks is research. I use the system to verify references and look up original source material. I like text based ebooks because I can quickly grab quotes and make notations about the things I read.
Researching online turns reading from a passive to an active engagement...so I really am not that annoyed by reading on a computer screen.
I've turned several historians onto the product and they love it. Well, that is non-Socialist researchers. Socialists hate Questia because it is an evil creation of the industrial military complex. Questia charges a subscription fee. The internet should be tearing down the market, not building it up.
BTW, Personally, I disagree with the premise behind the OneReader Project that we need to have one master eBook format and a universal reader. I believe that things work better when there are competing formats and competing ideas on the table. I believe in an evolutionary processes rather than having centrally controlled processes. The competing formats might look like eBabble, but that is the nature of human freedom and human diversity. A world with only one format of eBook is the same as a world with only one language. The diversity adds spice and creativity.
I think many firms think outsourcing security is safer as they see their employees as their worst risk. I've watched managers knowingly do horrible things to employees...then they become paranoid that they employees with act in retribution.
To a large extent, employees are a worse threat since they will learn the company's weaknesses. The growing distrust between management and workers is scary.
Anyway, my experience is that managers who perceive themselves in a different class than workers don't like delegating secutity to members of the class they disparage.
You have it backwards. Philosophy's that claim that there is "a will of the people" are that we are all subject to that "will of the people" are more likely to end up with a monarch or other dictator. Look through the history of monarchies and dictatator ships, most claim that, in some way or other, they are representative of the will of the people. Communist claim that their dictatoship of the proletariate is the will of the people. Kings and Queens claimed the same for various reasons.
If you realize that there is no such thing as a "will of the people" then you see that there really is a world with billions of different skin bags running around each with their different point of views, etc..
Rejecting the notion that we are subordinate to the collective will, then we see that we need to develop a government that, first and foremost, protects individual rights, protects free expression. Those silly classical liberals would even say that there should be protection of property rights.
Rejecting the notion that there is a will of the people, then we want a political system that minimizes the ability of the government to coerce and control people...since we accept that all people have souls, we do want a government that allows a great deal of input and participation.
Regardless of who wins the election tomorrow, neither of the candidates is a manifestation of the will of the people. Whoever wins is just the person who will hold office for the next term.
I suspect that people will be a lot more attentive to the technology of counting votes than they were in the past. Sadly, few people seem to realize the value of an electoral college (which was state of the art vote counting technology in the 1780s.) Even today, I think recent events warrant this technology. The idea is that you determine population in an area every ten years and use this data to separate the population into buckets, you then count the vote in each bucket then determine the winner of the election by counting the buckets.
The bucket counting process does give small states a boost in the process. The main thing it does is that it evens out wierd fluctuations in the data. For example, there might be higher voter turn out in states with a hotly contested senate seat.
The Electoral College was state of the art too. IF something went wrong, you would have a body that could deliberate and select the leader. Sadly, the courts seem to have usurped this authority.
The biggest problem with the bucket counting system is that the US is not expanding the number of buckets with the population.
Of course, if you believe that the "will of the people" is real and that it is determined mathematically by the vote, then the vote counting technology is just plain wrong.
Authority (who's the boss) is usually assigned for political reasons. Reponsibility has more to do with ethics and capabilities.
When the boss is incapable of doing a task, then clearly, some underling bears the responsibility when things go wrong.
Conversely, the people with highly developed sense of ethics and professionalism step up to the plate, work to make the project work and essentially take responsibility.
Theoretically, it is possible to give authority to the people who take responsibility.
This might cause problems for a company...it usually doesn't tarnish the teflon coat of the people in charge. For that matter, when a company sees a manager with authority and no responsibility, they generally respond by expanding his authority.
Once again, the Conservative mind is completely, 100% absolutely right. Anything anyone has ever attempted to say about the earth, environment, EVOLUTION, and other politically movitated liberal sciences is questionable. There is no way we can say anything intelligent about living on the planet earth unless we have a controlled experiment. That means two identical planets: one where Bush and the consume until we drop SUV crowd lives...and another where the conservationists live.
Speaking of which, if someone is planning on doing this experiment...I would like to live on the planet with the conservationists...
I think Wired is getting confused about the demographic of their market. For some odd reason, I think very few of their readers can remember when cars came out. Personally, I hope some people are sitting with their grand parents, but I doubt they routinely read "Wired" articles to the dwindling population that can remember when cars came out.
PS, cars were already around when I was born, and I am considered too old by most hiring managers to program computers.
I have read several histories of Oracle. My belief that the product was developed by people of varying skill levels with a great deal of input from the customer base is a hell of a lot closer to reality than the bogus myth being pushed that database was derived from the aether by a bunch of stuck up, head in the clouds set theorists who were sitting in an ivory tower contemplating the fragrances of each other farts.
The buzziness of words generally has more to do with context than the word itself. Object Oriented is not by necessity a buzzword. About 80% of the time its used it is a buzzword. As in "I was synergized by my object oriented coffee this morning."
You are obviously taking data integrity to heart in your project. I think that is fantastic. The sales man who starts talking about ACID probably is just trying to get the buzz.
It probably wasn't a PhD at Oracle that wrote the code. The code was probably hacked out people of various skill levels. The driving force behind a lot of things at Oracle was screaming customers livid about losing data. You should read up on the history of Oracle. The PhDs usually come in after the fact and "explain" things to students.
BTW, I've had really weird problems with Oracle. Lot's of things have gone wrong that never should have happened. Most stuff works, the application is better than most. It is not perfect.
Personally, I don't just stop with ACID, I make sure I have an audit trail from start to finish and I make a barage of tests that show that the audit trails add up. Even with ACID I never buy the illusion that there will never be a problem with the transaction.
ACID may be about data integrity. My point is that people who have an ACID database tend to stop thinking about data integrity.
Sorry, but I don't buy into the illusion that anyone is creating perfect programs. I have had to deal with people who thought they wrote perfect programs. My experience is that the programs written by buzz word spouting gurus is generally very poor quality.
Truth is, most people want ACID (and transaction processing) because it saves them from having to think too much. You perform a whole bunch of data operations. If it doesn't work you role back. If you are just dropping things into a MySQL structure, you have to think harder about what will happen if an operation crashes mid way.
As for the parent post, he's just bought into the illusion that database gurus think at a transcendental level. It is a common ailment. Object gurus, business gurus, religious gurus, political gurus are all treading on the same clouds. It is a common ailment that usually cures itself with time.
Good catch. I think regulation is dangerous regardless of the number of channels of communication.
I should have said "perceived need" for regulation. When there a few avenues for communication we start feeling a need for a countervaling forces.
The effect of regulation is always to reduce the number of avenues of communication. Regulations generally help put the cap on monopolies.
PS: this poll reminds me that I need to throw more effort into the Local Campaign Directory I put on my site. I think the internet community should really work hard to get candidate web sites out in front of the community. That will be the project for tomorrow.
TV and print seemed to require regulation because there was a very small number of TV stations and newspapers in each demographic region.
The internet is not subject to the constraints that made it necessary to limit print media and TV. So we should not have the regulation.
For that matter, if the technology were to start creating thousands of little tv stations and newspapers, then we should be looking at ending all regulation.
The real political force on the net is all the blogs and weird opinion pieces that people throw around. These are incredibly difficult to regulate.
The whole need for regulation resulted from the small number of people in the publishing industry. In a world where every one can be a publisher, then the need for reuglation vanishes.
The primary use of blogs is shameless self promotion. The chronological format is not the best format for developing interconnected ideas (the wiki design is better for that).
It is extremely difficult to find worthwile information in brain fart type blogs. Such blogs might provide info on trends, but it takes a good web crawl to make sense of the trends.
For that matter, I got the impression that the main reason Google bought blogger was the wealth of links from the blogs.
BTW: politics is one of the richest areas for blogging. People pointing to candidates and articles they like end up building a topology of links that help the candidates who are making an impression get noticed. The motives of all political blogs is questionable.
Standards have the tendency to freeze innovation. For this reason, I like situations where there are competing standards since the friction between standards allows both room and reason for growth.
So, I guess I am not joking, I like worlds were people and companies are working to set their own standards and where we have a fair amount of leaway in our interpretation of implementation of standards.
I don't associate downloading music with theft. Downloading is a great way to distribute music. I associate distributing music without the consent of the musicians theft. I would consider downloading music from a pirated collection a form of theft. There's a ton of downloadable music out there. The only problem is that it is not the top forty songs.
The ideal solution would be for us to define the line between using and publishing music. Because no one was addressing the problem that some of the people downloading music would then go out and distribute that music to thousands...we have an unfortunate situation where companies such as MS can associate stealing (ie republishing music) with downloading. Thus justifies creating instrusive programs to monitor and control our listening behavior.
The foundation for an open society is trust. I am livid about the way the debate between music pirates (ie people who want to republish and distribute works) and MS is justifying instrusive technology.
And, notice how the core of the cited article is that we have to have extremely intrusive and restrictive techologies because people today have abandonned respect for others. Companies price their music as if each distribution would be given to thousands. In response, the technology firms are saying that we have to have intrusive technologies to protect rights.
Stealing is an antimarket and antisocial action. It is a method of destroying the market. These actions are now used by MS as a global justification for their antimarket actions. The problem is that we get hypnotized into thinking that we are liberating ourselves, when in fact we are creating a mechanism that is cutting out the smaller independent channels.
Look at history, you see a continued cycle where iconoclasts will justify stealing because they find moral fault in the people they rob. The stealing is then followed by an even more oppressive society than existed before the looting.
Liberation is found in respect for people. The market reaction to prices that are too high is to substitute the overpriced product with another product.
BTW, my guess is that Marx would agree with your statement that stealing is a market mechanism. I suspect Smith and most classical liberals would not.
You obviously don't know many musicians. My guess is your only experience with musicians is from watching coddled stars on MTV and you probably only listen to top 40 music. Most musicians do not make a living from their music.
BTW, Market principles do not revolve around our presonal moral prejudices about what other people deserve. I think sugar farmers are overpaid and tomato farmers don't get enough respect. That does not justify my stealing sugar.
If your decision to steal music is based on ideals, then why not actually elevate your ideals to the point where you listen to something other than the ultra packaged top 40 crap?
Of course, you post also points out that much of force behind the various anti IP movements is pure envy. The anti-IP logic is as follows:
"Why should those old fart programmers get to own houses and cars when all they did was develop the programs that we study in school. This is unjust because I have to live in a dorm and drive this crap Buick my parents gave me. I am green with envy. Hence, the people who create things do not deserve any rights to the things they create."
NOTE, there are good arguments that the IP system needs reform. The arguments, however, do not start with judgments on who deserves and who does not deserve to live in a house.
I have a few mailto links posted around and about to give the email address crawlers fodder. Getting the terabytes of spam is not difficult...the problem is that there is zero value to the actual fruit of the spam harvest.
For example, imagine a company that uses the address for a local bank in their program to harvest credit card numbers from web surfers. If caught the whois records add to the fraud case.
If this is the intention of the legislation, then enforcement is not a major issue...since it is something tacked onto other scams.
The web is really a mixed bag that allows a mix of open standards, and proprietary software. To claim it is all open source is misleading. It is a dynamic network that allows development on multiple layers.
The most important aspect of the web is that the interface of the different layers were well defined and exposed...not that each line of code in the different layers is exposed.
I probably misunderstand this people bidding for HAL auction. But in this post 2001 world, shouldn't HAL be bidding for people?