How does note taking improve learning? I have never experienced this. This is probably an individual thing, but every time I took notes in university, I more or less missed the lecture. I also found that I had difficulty understanding what I wrote afterwards. So, in essence, I was wasting my class time writing down something that I would not be able to read later.
While this may not be everyone's experience, note taking certainly cannot be assumed to make people learn. Further, a more complete record of what went on in the class would be more useful when it came time to review. Students learn in different ways, but everyone learns when they review class material -- unless of course the student has a photographic memory.
Basically, the students should spend their time learning from the teacher what they cannot learn from books or fixed materials. They should not be spending their time writing. If copying down everything the professor says helps you learn, use the video or audio of the lecture to copy when you are studying.
You have hit my point exactly. I have said in previous discussions that the lecture has been old technology since the invention of the book -- and note taking is even further back on the educational evolutionary scale.
With all these other technologies, the professor can get the prerequisite knowledge out of the way, and concentrate on asking questions. Since archiving is easy, excellent questions of the past could be included in the material given to the students. Students could then be expected to invent new questions each time.
This would keep professors on their toes. They would have to make sure they had thorough answers to previous questions, and they would have to think quickly (or even once in a while actually say "I don't know").
This would also keep students on their toes. They might be able to claim they did not have time to read a book, but who does not have time to listen to an audio recording while on the bus or jogging? Everybody has mp3 players nowadays. And all the students would benefit more if they were better informed when they came to class.
So, if you missed my point, it was this: The classroom is not a place for a lecture or taking notes, it is a place to play with the information one has learned and to ask a more experienced or knowledgeable person about the parts one does not understand. Digital technology only helps in getting the preliminaries out of the way.
Maybe it is just me, but I always thought note taking was a distraction keeping my attention on writing and away from what the professor was actually saying.
In any case, this is all irrelevant. Now that it is possible, do professors actually have any excuse not to give full compressed video, audio, text, and even slides or any other supplementary materials from every lecture they give? A single TA could compile all this material in a single semester, and it would be ready for all future students. I doubt if such information would exceed a CD per semester, and such materials would be of far greater use that notes rapidly scribbled as one tries to keep up with class.
If students have laptops in class or computers at home, why should they have to take notes at all?
I will first respond to your last statement and then address the rest of your post in its original order.
And, by the way, don't bother replying. I've expended all the time I can afford in this discussion.
You are a very interesting person. Like most people from North America, or perhaps the English speaking world, you consider it acceptable to repeatedly call someone's arguments "bullshit" and then claim you are finished with the argument and that the discussion is a waste of time. If it was a waste of time, why did you bother to respond in the first place? Is this the way you always back out of arguments that you are losing?
Given that you are forcing me to defend my point of view by attacking it, I feel compelled to do just that. I also cannot let your arguments, however irrational, pass into the future unanswered. Your opinions are too threatening to the very concept of Free Speech to be allowed to stand unchallenged.
Do you honestly think that this argument is not costly for me as well? Do you think you are the only person that has better things to do with his free time? If it was not for this whole copyright thing, I would be able to devote more time to creating and learning. It may surprise you to learn that copyright suppresses a lot of art as well as encouraging it.
Finally, I have to make it clear that these arguments are not merely intended for you. They are primarily intended to add my voice to the growing public outcry against unjust and immoral information land grab perpetrated by monetarily lascivious businessmen and facilitated by the nefarious manipulation of legal systems and treaties worldwide and a few generations of indoctrinated sheep like yourself.
You know, you are very good at trying to put words in my mouth. The problem is that you have made a number of assumptions about me and my knowledge, and pretty much none of them are right.
Touché. I have made some assumptions, and for instances where I was wrong, I apologise.
"It is funny how people who work with publishers of this and that frequently think they are knowledgeable about copyright after listening to their publishers tell them about the issue."
Now there's a load of bullshit. The reason that any successful writer needs an understanding of copyright law is to PROTECT him/herself from the publishers. My training came from actually reading the laws themselves, interpretations of the laws from commentators, and interpretations from my agents. As a result, I can recognize a bad contract when I see one.
In that case, you should read more about the tradition and the intent of copyright. The letter of the law often does not correctly respect its spirit. Recognising bad contracts for yourself as an individual is one thing, but the law is very much like a contract for everyone. While the contract embodied in the Statute of Anne was one that might be acceptable to societies in general, the current state of copyright law worldwide should be considered unacceptable by everyone. In my previous post, I listed a few of the reasons why the Berne Convention, specifically, has harmed our common intellectual landscape greatly.
Funny how anti-copyright people tend to accuse those who disagree with them as being in league with distributors and guilty of groupthink or being easily led. Mind you, I've also been called a thief and a murderer because I believe in fighting for my rights under the law, so groupthink is the least of those things I can be accused of.
I have no difficulty believing you have been accused of many things, but you are a victim of groupthink. Whether or not you learned about copyright on your own, your reasoning
Well, it appears we disagree more than I anticipated. You have a rather liberal attitude toward the definitions of words. However, I can never slight someone for an abundance of creativity. Let me see if I can shed some light on your points here:
I may not be a lawyer, but I am a pro writer, and that does mean I have to have a working knowledge of the law and why it is there.
It is funny how people who work with publishers of this and that frequently think they are knowledgeable about copyright after listening to their publishers tell them about the issue. I often find, as well, that this understanding is tainted by its source. Then again, the publishers created copyright to protect their position, so they have a vested interest in getting you to believe what you believe.
Very true. And I would not call anybody opposed to one law on logical grounds to be an anarchist. I would call somebody who is opposed to that law so that they can take advantage by making an exception for just themselves, however, to be anarchistic. . . An 18 year old IP pirate who has taken up the cause because he doesn't like paying for music or movies, but god help you if you trample on something he feels entitled to, is anarchistic. He talks a good talk, but deep down inside he only cares about himself - his idea of a balance between the creator and the consumer is whatever gives him the free music, and he doesn't care who it hurts.
This is one of those liberal definitions I was talking about. Let us see what Mr. Webster has to say:
Anarchist An"arch*ist, n. [Cf. F. anarchiste.]
An anarch; one who advocates anarchy of aims at the overthrow of civil government.
[1913 Webster]
Anarchy An"arch*y, n. [Gr. ?: cf. F. anarchie. See Anarch.]
1. Absence of government; the state of society where there is no law or supreme power; a state of lawlessness; political confusion.
[1913 Webster]
So, an anarchist by the dictionary and nearly everyone I have ever had the pleasure to speak with -- except for you -- is a person who opposes government and laws as a general principal and advocates the abolition of both. I doubt very much that this can be limited to greedy, self-indulgent teenagers who enjoy trolling on Slashdot or whatever fora that catch their fancy. I think referring to this very constrained category as "greedy teenagers" or something similarly accurate would have been a very much better choice.
While I am now quite certain I do not fit your definition of an anarchist, the fact still does stand that you used the term rather wantonly -- rather like an irresponsible news reporter is apt to do.
Well, seeing as I'm in Cananda, I care a lot more about the Berne Convention than any American laws, but they do affect me, as I do write in the American market whenever I can.
Well, considering that the Berne Convention is one of the worst things ever to happen to the intellectual landscape of the world, it is nice to hear that someone is proud to be oppressed by such an evil set of laws. In short, the Berne Convention is evil because:
It eliminates formalities: This is bad because it means that anybody can claim to have a copyright on anything, and it takes going to court and hiring a lawyer to prove one's innocence or assert one's rights from a false claimant. It basically turns the law on its head by making everyone guilty until proven innocent. I think the RIAA and IFPI have provided ample demonstrations of this principle in action.
It eliminates documentation: Stemming from the above point, because anybody can claim a copyright and there is no registration, there is no way to find out who has copyrighted what. This means that authors wanting to create new works based on or referencing older ones cannot
While I agree with your comment in general, I do not agree with your characterisation of people who oppose copyright as "anarchists". I think it is a bad term for a number of reasons.
People who are opposed to one law are not necessarily opposed to all law or the concept of law in general.
Copyright is a monopoly and is at odds with the principles of laissez-faire capitalism and is a remnant of the monarchical laws of England, laws that the Constitution was meant to protect the citizens of the US from.
Information is not land and should not be territorialised as such.
Copyright violates your First Amendment right to Free Speech, especially if you view information as speech (who is to say what I can and cannot sing in public or anywhere?).
For these reasons and many others, people who oppose copyright cannot be considered "anarchists". In fact, calling such people anarchists would be similar to claiming that Thomas Jefferson was an anarchist, especially since, according to his writings, he would have been right along side the people calling for the abolishment of copyright.
Other than that, I have one other point of contention: He is a university professor and an adult. I am certain that he will not take his questions verbatim from Slashdot. Even if he did, there are enough trolls and *AA sympathisers to balance the viewpoint somewhat. From the comments I have read, it appears that there are quite a few people who think Mr. Taylor will be reasonable -- an astonishing thought considering his employer and position.
. . . the BBC itself has an interest in the post-broadcast DVD market.
The question is: Does the BBC have the right to wall off this content which has already been paid for just to guarantee future profits on DVD sales? If the programming is paid for by government mandated TV Licenses (which it appears to be), is it fair -- or even legal -- for the BBC to even charge money for DVDs? The public already paid for those shows. Why should they have to pay again?
That does not change the fact that RealPlayer is a) proprietary and b) bloatware. RealPlayer haters are not limited to MS sympathisers. Yes, it is more cross platform than WMP, but it sucks about as much. It is slow. It hogs memory -- on a desktop. On mobile devices, it is worse. In fact, it is the only real drawback to my mobile phone.
Why does the BBC not just standardise on a some format that everybody can use with any A/V player? Why should one company's product control all of the BBC content?
I do not see this as a double standard at all. If open or free is good and secretive or proprietary is bad, anybody that tends toward openness and freedom should be encouraged, and anybody that leans toward secrecy or monopolism should be punished -- or at least insulted.
This supply and demand argument cannot be more false. The fact is that monopoly economics are the only thing that can explain the US cell phone market. Considering the high prices, lack of choices, lack of feature competition, lack of service competition, and lack of coverage, anyone who argues supply and demand in the US cellphone market ought to have their head examined.
Let me list several types of vendor lockin in the US:
Handset
Handsets are locked to specific service providers. When one changes service, one cannot transfer an old phone to a new service provider, even when the provider offers compatible network. Even the iPhone which works on GSM networks is not a true GSM phone. It does not have a SIM card and cannot be used with any other service provider.
Network
By not having a standard network like the rest of the world, the service providers all have different incompatible hardware. This means two things: a) a duplication of effort, like many cell towers using different technology covering the same area, and b) degraded coverage. b) becomes an issue when you think of ubiquity. Subways, for instance, are underground and cannot have ten cell network's infrastructure built into them. If all the cell networks ran GSM or some other standard architecture, one set of transmitters would work for all service providers. This standardization would also eliminate spotty coverage that is so frequently experienced in US cities. Handsets also, even when unlocked, do not work on different network architectures, so they are essentially locked anyway.
Handset Choice
Because phones are bought by the service providers and not the customers themselves, the choice of which phones are likely to be most popular is made by market research, not the actual public. This limitation is HUGE. In other parts of the world, there are magazines that review literally tens or hundreds of phones every month! (with feature comparison charts at the back). I can go to any of thousands of stores and buy a phone without having to buy service, and, better yet, I know for a fact that my phone will work. This is not possible in the US. Conclusion: since service providers are choosing phone features, the public is not, and supply and demand is absent.
Business Orientation
Another obvious pointer to the monopolistic nature of the US cellphone market is that teenagers are not driving the market. Some time way back in the 80s, some genius at some service provider got the notion that business customers were the people to market cell phones to. Let's face it. Business customers suck compared to teenagers. They are stingy, they keep their phones forever, they do not spend much time talking, and they worry about high phone bills. This is why all the payment plans in the US have prepaid blocks. In Japan, by comparison, the market is driven by teenages who have to have new phones every six months and rack up tons of money in bills to talk to their latest acquaintances. Anybody who has fought with a sibling over the phone in the house would appreciate the social pressure to talk on phones a lot here. However, the vendors just do not get it, and US customers are paying for the vendors' decision.
Price
In the rest of the world, cellphone handset prices have dropped rapidly. I have watched a cellphone go from US$700 to less than US$300 in less than 6 months -- by which time it is often replaced by a newer version at near half the price of the older model. This is in the absence of the service provider subsidy. This subsidy is available any time I purchase service for any new device I wish to purchase whether or not the service provider is selling it. In the US, I could not look to other vendors for a particular phone because the vendor is the service provider, and no other phones will work with the provider's network.
. . . There are probably quite a few more I have not thought of at the moment, but that fairly well demonstrates the situation US customers are in.
Do you still believe that the market in the US is driven by supply and demand?
It is interesting for you to call his article a troll when you prove his point in your second statement. I quote:
This is without even considering that the W41CA isn't available in the US so our excitement is based on comparing iPhone with what is.
That was precisely his point: Why is it that no phone with functionality rivalling the iPhone was available until now? Why is it that these phones have been available in Japan for years?
In his article, he was not comparing his phone for the sake of saying "My phone is better than your phone", he was pointing out that people waited in line all night to get functionality that has been available in Japan for nearly a decade and in the rest of the world for a few years. Who cares if the Casio phone has a touchscreen? The question is: does it allow you to do all or most of the things the iPhone does? It does not have to allow you to do those things in the same way.
Your phone runs Opera Mini. iPhone runs full blown Safari.
So, you are saying the US phone market does not suck because the iPhone has Safari. If that is not a red herring, we might as well choose another color. The argument also assumes that Safari is definitively better than Opera which is arguable at best.
It has a shell. Third party apps will soon be hitting the web in droves.
I certainly hope you are right, but I doubt it very much. Linux has a shell, too, and Motorola has been entirely successful in making it difficult or impossible to get access to it on their Linux phones. Apple will certainly behave similarly. Also, only people with a lot of cash and a need to show off buy iPhones, so the majority of its userbase are not geeks but yuppies. As you are probably aware, yuppies are about as intelligent as cattle and will doubtless be able to do little more than make calls with their iPhones.
And iTunes support, you do not have that. The Casio can't play anything from the already large library of iTunes media that many of us already have. Call it vendor lock in if you want, we don't really care, we just want to enjoy our media.
Vendor lockin is precisely what it is. I have been listening to mp3s on my phones for the last 4 years or so. Has the iPhone or even iTunes been available that long? My phone also has a USB port and mounts as a hard drive on any computer with zero software installation, so I can play or move my music to or from anyone's computer. Neither the Casio nor the iPhone can do that.
But that is not the point. The point is that iTunes is not a standard. It is proprietary. Mp3s work with everything And please do not argue that iTunes audio tracks somehow sound better than mp3s.
So, in the end, your argument is just a defense of the iPhone per se, and not a reasonable defense of the cellphone market in the US. In the end, it is your post that is both off topic and a troll.
This has everything to do with the *AAs, and Microsoft for that matter. The idea is that no DRM system, which is what the *AAs and MS are trying to force on us, can be completely enforced in hardware and to prevent hardware manufacturers from disabling the rights granted by the GPL.
If anyone can use hardware to stop you from modifying software, what is the point of having the "right" or "freedom" to modify it?
The cellphone manufacturers want the right to benefit from the GPL without giving their customers the right to do the same, and the *AAs are a driving force and an excuse for this circumvention attempt. If it were not businesses behaving this way, it would be called squatting.
It is unfortunate that Linus has been convinced by this old argument -- I first heard it about 2001 or 2002 -- that the FSF is a "religious movement", especially since that term originally was used to refer to Linux. Fact: If it were not for the FSF and the GPL, Linux would never have been viable for any business use. Linus would be working for low wages as a programmer in Finland, and no one would know his name.
They require documents to be stored forever or to expire at a certain date, and as soon as it expires, nothing about the document is allowed to be found. So as soon as the document expires, somebody has to go through all backups, tapes, computers, usb sticks etc.
This sounds excellent. The schools can just make the storage policy 24 hours and have a nightly cron job that deletes any documents over 24 hours old. A script could delete any documents that are older than that when a USB disk was inserted (Students should be warned of this, of course, as they could lose all of their data to the school's memory hole). Administrative documents could have some sort of exemption, but student data should all be expunged quickly. Then, when Big Brother comes a knocking, the schools can say they complied and they have nothing to offer. It is perfect, really.
Well, it seems I should have looked into that "watermarking" claim before I repeated it. It does not appear from the discussion or any other source that watermarking technology was actually used. Also, this post has an excellent alternative argument I had not even thought of. However, benefits such as this are often used to get people to convert to more privacy invasive systems. Look at all the incentives to get people away from using cash and start using credit (which is an information gold mine for banks).
My favorite quote of all this was from an EFF attorney; to paraphrase: if someone steals your iPod, the thief would have the name and email address of the rightful owner!
While I could not agree more that the article was badly written and heavy on the fear mongering, I still must say that including such information in the files does qualify as DRM (watermarking), and does represent a significant risk to customers. The thief example is not very threatening. However, all sorts of customer tracking are privacy invasive, and this system could definitely be abused by a malicious person.
Imagine an estranged lover, bitter over a recent breakup, who is still in possession of your iPod or maybe just the songs on the lover's computer which you used to download part or all of your collection. This person uploads your collection to every P2P service the individual can think of. Now the RIAA comes knocking on your door saying that you have shared such and such files and you owe them millions of dollars, but you can just settle by giving them your life savings.
Do you really think the RIAA is going to care about your breakup with your lover or if they can actually win the case? They have watermarked songs with your personal information bought from an account with your credit card on a computer you regularly and admittedly used. When and if you broke up with that lover would be difficult to establish in court, and the RIAA does not care about a rock solid case, they know it is cheaper for you to settle. Would Apple's embedded watermarking DRM hurt you then?
The whole premise for this is that usability actually matters. Yes, Windows is easier to use in some cases, but quite generally, people use Windows because everyone else does. It does not matter if it is frustrating or difficult. It just has to be frustrating and difficult in the same way as everyone else's is. Windows is not supported by Microsoft. It is supported by your next door neighbor. In fact, if it were not for Slashdot, I would not have even known that Microsoft offered "support" for its "products" at all.
Apple's poor marketshare is proof of this. The Mac has been easier to use than Windows for years, but its share of the market has remained relatively constant. Your neighbor does not have one, so he cannot help you when you have a problem with your Mac. If you have a Windows box, however, you can even choose a neighbor you like to help you out.
The other reason for low Linux adoption is that Microsoft controls all the hardware manufacturers. Walk into any store and try to buy a Linux laptop -- I dare you. They will laugh in your face. Ask if you can just buy the laptop with no OS. They will laugh again. Given that people rarely even update -- much less replace -- the operating system that came with their computer, how can Linux be compared with Microsoft for average users? If they cannot get it even when they want it, how are they going to make a choice? These unauthorized copies of Windows are not being installed at home. They are being installed at the store or by a compotent friend. Most users would not know what to do with a bootable disk if they were given one. I knew one user that could not understand the difference between a "program" and a "web browser" thinking the web browser was the same thing as the OS. After hours of explanation, this user's new understanding was forgotten within 24 hours.
People like this need to have a computer put in front of them. It does not really matter if it is Linux, Windows, BeOS, or Symbian. They have to be told it is a computer and told a little about how to do what they want to do. It is never going to matter to them what the software is called. Try it. Give a first time user a Linux box, and see if they have any problems a newbie Windows user does not. In fact, they will probably think it is "Windows", anyway.
Yes, which means no-one can reproduce the anthology in its entirety without my permission. I never claimed that I suddenly owned copyright on Shakespeare's plays, but I do own copyright on all the 'ownable' components of the anthology. You cannot photocopy my anthology & sell it to others, notwithstanding it's been derived from works in the public domain.
This is incorrect. If you only collected the works and did not add any writing of your own, you cannot claim a copyright on it. If I copied your copies of Shakespeare, I would not be violating anything. If I copied your commentary, on the other hand, I would be violating your copyright. If you compiled a list of good parts of Shakespeare's books, you might be able to copyright that. That would be touch and go in court, though, as things like recipes are not copyrightable. Lists and other non-artistic works originally were not copyrightable. However, nowadays the judge might be persuaded.
The fact still remains that Shakespeare's words are Shakespeare's words, not yours. You cannot have a copyright on a Public Domain work. Period. That is why it is called the Public Domain. If the parts you added are stripped, the work remains in the Public Domain.
With the GPL or the Public Domain, the people who improved and distributed the code would not be able to stop the original authors or anybody from having the right to use the modifications
This is incorrect - you have no right to 'use' (I assume you mean 'copy/modify/distribute') my annotations to Shakespeare by virtue of the actual plays being in the public domain. You do under the GPL as I've implicitly granted you that right by agreeing to the license.
I should have been more clear. My meaning was this: In a world where the Public Domain was universal, by this I mean applied to everything or a world without copyright, the GPL and the Public Domain would be the same. The reason I put it that way is because the Public Domain is currently the world without copyright, and I see its expansion to everything as the logical opposite the the copyright lobby's attempts to expand copyright into everything. However, the leap of logic was made in my mind, and I should have spared everybody else such unclear statements. For that, I apologize.
I don't have a better solution than the current one, with a few tweaks to restore balance. I certainly don't think that 'abolish copyright' is a smart option, even if it were remotely feasible. I suspect most abolitionists can't look past the obvious copyright abuses to recognise the significant benefits this mechanism gives us.
I would like somebody to prove the existence of any benefits. I have yet to see any conclusive or even convincing evidence that copyright causes anything to be created at all. The creativity that has happened before my eyes on the Internet is an order of magnitude greater than all the creativity I had previously seen in my entire life. Nearly all of that was either behind the back of copyright or avoiding copyright or actively violating it.
The harm, on the other hand, is readily apparent. The RIAA has sued thousands of people. Who knows if any of them were actually guilty of anything? Whether or not they were, they are all without substantial amounts of money, taken from them by the RIAA (the rich stealing from the poor). Copyright prevents us from viewing nearly all of the film footage generated over the last half century. This is our own history and culture that is locked away from Us the People. The People for whom this information was generated in the first place. Much progress is not happening in art and culture because of the lack of access to that material. Many books that might be useful are unavailable because they are not profitable or might compete with the publisher's flavor of the month.
I'm obviously having difficulty reading, as I'm struggling to make sense of your post. Are you saying that it's not possible to own copyright on a work derived from an item that is in the public domain? Eg if I publish an annotated anthology of Shakespearean plays, I don't hold copyright over reproduction of the full work?
I was not saying that, but what you are talking about sounds like hijacking the author's copyright in the current scheme of things. I will get back to that in a moment, but first, let us look at the question you just asked.
No, "it's not possible to own copyright on a work derived from an item that is in the public domain". This is obvious from the scenario you have given as an example. Let us say you published that anthology online. I or anyone else takes the anthology and removes your annotations. Would you consider the work to be yours or Shakespeare's? It is obvious that the copyright only applies to your additions to a Public Domain work or your creative work in general. You only hold the copyright over the parts of the work you created.
I could easily go online and create a website composed of the same Public Domain works as a published anthology, and the publisher could do little or nothing about it. If you want an analogy, it is as if you came to my house and saw my book collection and went out and bought the same books. Is there some law that says you cannot have the exact same book collection as I have? No, there is not.
What you seem to believe is that it is possible for you to take another author's work from the Public Domain or wherever and make it "yours". This is a strange idea. You can never own the copyright over Shakespeare's words. You can only copyright what you add to them. And if you claim his words are yours, you are not violating copyright, but plagiarizing. While this might impress your girlfriend, most people will not think highly of you for it.
Here is another thing to consider: You quoted my comments without my expressed permission, and I yours. However, by your argument, what I said would now be "yours" because you included it with your statements.
And, by your argument, your statements have now become mine. Do I own the copyright for the whole comment? Or just the part that I wrote?
If I go through your post and replace the term 'Public Domain' with 'world without copyright', I think I glean your intent (and it's one that I've acknowledged here. I think it's an excessively optimistic view of how a copyright-free world would operate, but you're entitled to your opinion and I'm comfortable that for you, there's no inconsistency.
There is no inconsistency because in a world without copyright, everything is in the Public Domain. I am therefore assuming a world with an unlimited Public Domain. I use the term Public Domain because I believe the Public Domain should be expanded until it encompasses all works.
As for being optimistic, I just do not want to be ripped off anymore. In college, I was apalled at the way the textbooks constantly had "new editions" with minor changes forcing students to constanly buy new books. CD prices have increased as the unit cost has decreased. These prices are and impediment to education and cultural participation, and copyright has proven itself an impediment to free communication.
If you can invent a better solution to the problem, I am all for it. I definitely have not seen one, and supporting the current system which is based on Royal monopolies and censorship and European feudalism is utterly inconsistent with the reasons the United States exists in the first place. The United States was created to resist European tyranny, not enforce it.
supporting both GPL-style sharing & copyright abolition is inconsistent, as they're mutually exclusive - if you're a genuine copyright abolitionist, you'd support BSD instead.
You should think of the GPL as a virtual Public Domain. It basically says, "If you distribute this to one person, you distribute it to everybody." That is exactly like the Public Domain because in the Public Domain, no one would be able to control distribution. The BSD license, however, allows people to take BSD code, modify it, and claim it is proprietary again. The upshot of this is that the improvements only benefit those who modified the code. The improvements do not even have to benefit the original author or authors of the work (This, by the way, is precisely the opposite of the stated intent of every copyright law ever enacted: Few people would support a copyright law that said that the works of the author were created to benefit others but not himself). With the GPL or the Public Domain, the people who improved and distributed the code would not be able to stop the original authors or anybody from having the right to use the modifications. Conclusion: the BSD license is less like the Public Domain than the GPL.
TFA appears to propose some sort of nebulous copyright replacement legislation which would enforce GPL sharing
That was not a proposal, it was a thought exercise. It was meant to help you conceive of the legal opposite of the restrictions based information environment we live in today. Also, the author was not arguing against copyright in this particular article. He was arguing that supporting the abolition of copyright is not inconsistent with supporting the GPL.
So, I must conclude one of two things: a) You have difficulty reading and should take more English classes before you graduate from high school or college, or b) You are a marketing droid from the *AAs or some other publishing industry trying to confuse the clear intent of a well written essay. Either way, you are incorrect.
However, employees could also copy any code they wanted and distribute it to whomever they like without the fear of any jail time or expensive lawsuits. A college graduate could get a job at, say, Microsoft and walk away with parts or even all of the source. After posting this on the net, Windows would be "Open Sourced". In fact, there would be no way that Microsoft could legally force anyone to take the source off of their website.
Considering the number of freeware developers that even closed source Windows has, I doubt very much that it would not be improved massively. Vendor lockin would cease to exist. Software would return to being a service as opposed to being an artificial "product".
BeOS could be used and improved instead of being locked away in a closet by a company that has no use for it. The best parts of BeOS could be merged with Linux or even Windows or vice versa. OSes would be better for everyone.
As for secrecy and -- at the very least software based -- DRM, we all know how long these things last with legal enforcement, so we can also assume that without such a threat hanging over people's heads, the period for the demise of a given instance of either or both would quickly become too short to measure. The idea that large corporations could effectively manage such things without recourse to their lawyer henchmen is just ridiculous. For examples, just look at their implementations of things like CSS or FairPlay or even AACS. Remember, anybody who distributes DRMed code has to distribute the keys to use it. Hiding something from somebody who is already in possession of it is an exercise in futility.
I am assuming this discussion only applies to software, but if copyright were abolished, there would be a world of information that has formerly been locked away in closets. Nearly every movie made in the 20th century is locked away in closets. Maybe it will not make anyone money when sold, but a given movie might be valuable to a small number of people or perhaps even a single individual who might receive from it a brilliant epiphany. Copyright prevents access and therefore restricts education.
The GPL is a hack to create a semblance of the Public Domain in a world where information is territorialised, to protect us from a world where the Public Domain has been effectively obliterated. Admittedly, it is a good hack, and has done many good things. But a world without such boundaries would be better. Imagine Google Books with free access to all of the books. Imagine YouTube with every video from all of history. Imagine every bibliographic reference in every book pointing to the book or even the exact page or pages it referenced.
The last thing I feel I must say is this: Copyright is and always has been about money. Originally, the idea was that if anybody made money on the work, the author should be the one. I think most people would consider that fair. I certainly do.
However, we now live in a world where formerly copyrighted works have become speech. I do not write comments on Slashdot for money. I write them because I have something to say. The paradigm that monetary incentives are necessary for people to create has been effectively disproven by the internet. People post because they want to post. People take pictures, make videos, sing songs, and create many other works merely because they want to communicate. Other people write programs because they have an itch to scratch. Artists paint or draw because they have something to say. Commercial art does not need copyright because advertising more than pays for it, and if more people copy a popular ad, its message is more widely dispersed creating more value for the advertiser.
In short, monetary incentives are for fat men in business suits who create nothing and keep their artists working at McDonald's. Copyright harms everyone else for these people's profits. Copyright therefore is a form of legal theft from the People, and a powerful weapon against the First Amendment.
You don't have any exclusive rights to your writings [read performance] other than the ones that the congress grants you. Congress has decided not give you exclusive rights to published performaces of your songs and also to grant SoundExchange the right to collect taxes on people playing copyrighted musical performances.
Congress cannot do anything that is not specifically listed in secion 8. Therefore, Congress does not have the power to give the rights for your performances or songs to other people without your consent. They could, of course, not grant any rights, but granted rights have to be those of the author(s) or artist(s), not any third party.
"to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" means only the author or inventor gets the right. Congress cannot change that without amending the Constitution.
SoundExchange is neither an Author nor an Inventor, so they have no rights that are not contractually given to them by the authors themselves. SoundExchange's statement contradicts the wording of the Constitution.
Congress has been tasked with the mission "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" by the United States Constitution. Implementation strategy is up to them.
SoundExchange is claiming the right to the authors' workswithout the consent of the authors themselves. If the authors have the exclusive right, how can SoundExchange justify this? Their claim is in volation of the Constitution itself, and the Library of Congress is violating 300 million people's rights by authorizing and or supporting such a claim.
On an individual basis, you can argue that it is Constitutional to grant monopolies. However, granting a blanket monopoly on all copyrights regardless of the will of individual authors is nothing less than stealing from the authors and limiting their Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Think of how many cases they have filed, knowing they can't win all of them but hoping the defendants will cave to pressure and settle.
Should be:
Think of how many cases they have filed, knowing they can't win any of them but hoping the defendants will cave to pressure and settle.
The RIAA's plan must have been to get everybody to settle. Otherwise, how could they go to court with such flimsy evidence?
These lawsuits are a scam: pure and simple. They are frivolous, and it is about time somebody filed a class action suit to return thousands of individuals their life savings.
I thought the OLPC project was based on getting the hardware cost below US$100. Obviously, the cost of the software is not an issue since it is all based on volunteer work and even the distro was compiled by donated time and effort.
So, Microsoft is offering nothing. According to the article, the governments have to figure out how to buy and configure the hardware themselves. Only then can the governments purchase Windows and Office to put on the computers they have already bought.
Oh, wait . . . Is it not true that WindowsXP is going to be discontinued at the end of this year? So what happens then? US$3 up front and a US$500 per box upgrade in January? Or are they going to audit all the schools in India the way they did in Washington State?
It sounds like -- if the governments do not happen to be intelligent enough to use Free Software -- the governments should just give the hardware to the kids and let the kids figure it out. That way, at least, "illegitimate" copies of Windows would not be the responsibility of the government or school administrations. Maybe then Microsoft will start suing children like the RIAA.
If Microsoft was really pro-education, Windows would be free on all educational computers period. They would be reasonable to think that was a good enough advertisement. At least when Apple sold schools computers the hardware was included. Microsoft is offering aether.
Slashdot Mirror
How does note taking improve learning? I have never experienced this. This is probably an individual thing, but every time I took notes in university, I more or less missed the lecture. I also found that I had difficulty understanding what I wrote afterwards. So, in essence, I was wasting my class time writing down something that I would not be able to read later.
While this may not be everyone's experience, note taking certainly cannot be assumed to make people learn. Further, a more complete record of what went on in the class would be more useful when it came time to review. Students learn in different ways, but everyone learns when they review class material -- unless of course the student has a photographic memory.
Basically, the students should spend their time learning from the teacher what they cannot learn from books or fixed materials. They should not be spending their time writing. If copying down everything the professor says helps you learn, use the video or audio of the lecture to copy when you are studying.
You have hit my point exactly. I have said in previous discussions that the lecture has been old technology since the invention of the book -- and note taking is even further back on the educational evolutionary scale.
With all these other technologies, the professor can get the prerequisite knowledge out of the way, and concentrate on asking questions. Since archiving is easy, excellent questions of the past could be included in the material given to the students. Students could then be expected to invent new questions each time.
This would keep professors on their toes. They would have to make sure they had thorough answers to previous questions, and they would have to think quickly (or even once in a while actually say "I don't know").
This would also keep students on their toes. They might be able to claim they did not have time to read a book, but who does not have time to listen to an audio recording while on the bus or jogging? Everybody has mp3 players nowadays. And all the students would benefit more if they were better informed when they came to class.
So, if you missed my point, it was this: The classroom is not a place for a lecture or taking notes, it is a place to play with the information one has learned and to ask a more experienced or knowledgeable person about the parts one does not understand. Digital technology only helps in getting the preliminaries out of the way.
Maybe it is just me, but I always thought note taking was a distraction keeping my attention on writing and away from what the professor was actually saying.
In any case, this is all irrelevant. Now that it is possible, do professors actually have any excuse not to give full compressed video, audio, text, and even slides or any other supplementary materials from every lecture they give? A single TA could compile all this material in a single semester, and it would be ready for all future students. I doubt if such information would exceed a CD per semester, and such materials would be of far greater use that notes rapidly scribbled as one tries to keep up with class.
If students have laptops in class or computers at home, why should they have to take notes at all?
I will first respond to your last statement and then address the rest of your post in its original order.
You are a very interesting person. Like most people from North America, or perhaps the English speaking world, you consider it acceptable to repeatedly call someone's arguments "bullshit" and then claim you are finished with the argument and that the discussion is a waste of time. If it was a waste of time, why did you bother to respond in the first place? Is this the way you always back out of arguments that you are losing?
Given that you are forcing me to defend my point of view by attacking it, I feel compelled to do just that. I also cannot let your arguments, however irrational, pass into the future unanswered. Your opinions are too threatening to the very concept of Free Speech to be allowed to stand unchallenged.
Do you honestly think that this argument is not costly for me as well? Do you think you are the only person that has better things to do with his free time? If it was not for this whole copyright thing, I would be able to devote more time to creating and learning. It may surprise you to learn that copyright suppresses a lot of art as well as encouraging it.
Finally, I have to make it clear that these arguments are not merely intended for you. They are primarily intended to add my voice to the growing public outcry against unjust and immoral information land grab perpetrated by monetarily lascivious businessmen and facilitated by the nefarious manipulation of legal systems and treaties worldwide and a few generations of indoctrinated sheep like yourself.
Touché. I have made some assumptions, and for instances where I was wrong, I apologise.
In that case, you should read more about the tradition and the intent of copyright. The letter of the law often does not correctly respect its spirit. Recognising bad contracts for yourself as an individual is one thing, but the law is very much like a contract for everyone. While the contract embodied in the Statute of Anne was one that might be acceptable to societies in general, the current state of copyright law worldwide should be considered unacceptable by everyone. In my previous post, I listed a few of the reasons why the Berne Convention, specifically, has harmed our common intellectual landscape greatly.
I have no difficulty believing you have been accused of many things, but you are a victim of groupthink. Whether or not you learned about copyright on your own, your reasoning
Well, it appears we disagree more than I anticipated. You have a rather liberal attitude toward the definitions of words. However, I can never slight someone for an abundance of creativity. Let me see if I can shed some light on your points here:
It is funny how people who work with publishers of this and that frequently think they are knowledgeable about copyright after listening to their publishers tell them about the issue. I often find, as well, that this understanding is tainted by its source. Then again, the publishers created copyright to protect their position, so they have a vested interest in getting you to believe what you believe.
This is one of those liberal definitions I was talking about. Let us see what Mr. Webster has to say:
So, an anarchist by the dictionary and nearly everyone I have ever had the pleasure to speak with -- except for you -- is a person who opposes government and laws as a general principal and advocates the abolition of both. I doubt very much that this can be limited to greedy, self-indulgent teenagers who enjoy trolling on Slashdot or whatever fora that catch their fancy. I think referring to this very constrained category as "greedy teenagers" or something similarly accurate would have been a very much better choice.
While I am now quite certain I do not fit your definition of an anarchist, the fact still does stand that you used the term rather wantonly -- rather like an irresponsible news reporter is apt to do.
Well, considering that the Berne Convention is one of the worst things ever to happen to the intellectual landscape of the world, it is nice to hear that someone is proud to be oppressed by such an evil set of laws. In short, the Berne Convention is evil because:
While I agree with your comment in general, I do not agree with your characterisation of people who oppose copyright as "anarchists". I think it is a bad term for a number of reasons.
For these reasons and many others, people who oppose copyright cannot be considered "anarchists". In fact, calling such people anarchists would be similar to claiming that Thomas Jefferson was an anarchist, especially since, according to his writings, he would have been right along side the people calling for the abolishment of copyright.
Other than that, I have one other point of contention: He is a university professor and an adult. I am certain that he will not take his questions verbatim from Slashdot. Even if he did, there are enough trolls and *AA sympathisers to balance the viewpoint somewhat. From the comments I have read, it appears that there are quite a few people who think Mr. Taylor will be reasonable -- an astonishing thought considering his employer and position.
The question is: Does the BBC have the right to wall off this content which has already been paid for just to guarantee future profits on DVD sales? If the programming is paid for by government mandated TV Licenses (which it appears to be), is it fair -- or even legal -- for the BBC to even charge money for DVDs? The public already paid for those shows. Why should they have to pay again?
That does not change the fact that RealPlayer is a) proprietary and b) bloatware. RealPlayer haters are not limited to MS sympathisers. Yes, it is more cross platform than WMP, but it sucks about as much. It is slow. It hogs memory -- on a desktop. On mobile devices, it is worse. In fact, it is the only real drawback to my mobile phone.
Why does the BBC not just standardise on a some format that everybody can use with any A/V player? Why should one company's product control all of the BBC content?
I do not see this as a double standard at all. If open or free is good and secretive or proprietary is bad, anybody that tends toward openness and freedom should be encouraged, and anybody that leans toward secrecy or monopolism should be punished -- or at least insulted.
How is this inconsistent?
This supply and demand argument cannot be more false. The fact is that monopoly economics are the only thing that can explain the US cell phone market. Considering the high prices, lack of choices, lack of feature competition, lack of service competition, and lack of coverage, anyone who argues supply and demand in the US cellphone market ought to have their head examined.
Let me list several types of vendor lockin in the US:
Handsets are locked to specific service providers. When one changes service, one cannot transfer an old phone to a new service provider, even when the provider offers compatible network. Even the iPhone which works on GSM networks is not a true GSM phone. It does not have a SIM card and cannot be used with any other service provider.
By not having a standard network like the rest of the world, the service providers all have different incompatible hardware. This means two things: a) a duplication of effort, like many cell towers using different technology covering the same area, and b) degraded coverage. b) becomes an issue when you think of ubiquity. Subways, for instance, are underground and cannot have ten cell network's infrastructure built into them. If all the cell networks ran GSM or some other standard architecture, one set of transmitters would work for all service providers. This standardization would also eliminate spotty coverage that is so frequently experienced in US cities. Handsets also, even when unlocked, do not work on different network architectures, so they are essentially locked anyway.
Because phones are bought by the service providers and not the customers themselves, the choice of which phones are likely to be most popular is made by market research, not the actual public. This limitation is HUGE. In other parts of the world, there are magazines that review literally tens or hundreds of phones every month! (with feature comparison charts at the back). I can go to any of thousands of stores and buy a phone without having to buy service, and, better yet, I know for a fact that my phone will work. This is not possible in the US. Conclusion: since service providers are choosing phone features, the public is not, and supply and demand is absent.
Another obvious pointer to the monopolistic nature of the US cellphone market is that teenagers are not driving the market. Some time way back in the 80s, some genius at some service provider got the notion that business customers were the people to market cell phones to. Let's face it. Business customers suck compared to teenagers. They are stingy, they keep their phones forever, they do not spend much time talking, and they worry about high phone bills. This is why all the payment plans in the US have prepaid blocks. In Japan, by comparison, the market is driven by teenages who have to have new phones every six months and rack up tons of money in bills to talk to their latest acquaintances. Anybody who has fought with a sibling over the phone in the house would appreciate the social pressure to talk on phones a lot here. However, the vendors just do not get it, and US customers are paying for the vendors' decision.
In the rest of the world, cellphone handset prices have dropped rapidly. I have watched a cellphone go from US$700 to less than US$300 in less than 6 months -- by which time it is often replaced by a newer version at near half the price of the older model. This is in the absence of the service provider subsidy. This subsidy is available any time I purchase service for any new device I wish to purchase whether or not the service provider is selling it. In the US, I could not look to other vendors for a particular phone because the vendor is the service provider, and no other phones will work with the provider's network.
. . . There are probably quite a few more I have not thought of at the moment, but that fairly well demonstrates the situation US customers are in.
Do you still believe that the market in the US is driven by supply and demand?
It is interesting for you to call his article a troll when you prove his point in your second statement. I quote:
That was precisely his point: Why is it that no phone with functionality rivalling the iPhone was available until now? Why is it that these phones have been available in Japan for years?
In his article, he was not comparing his phone for the sake of saying "My phone is better than your phone", he was pointing out that people waited in line all night to get functionality that has been available in Japan for nearly a decade and in the rest of the world for a few years. Who cares if the Casio phone has a touchscreen? The question is: does it allow you to do all or most of the things the iPhone does? It does not have to allow you to do those things in the same way.
So, you are saying the US phone market does not suck because the iPhone has Safari. If that is not a red herring, we might as well choose another color. The argument also assumes that Safari is definitively better than Opera which is arguable at best.
I certainly hope you are right, but I doubt it very much. Linux has a shell, too, and Motorola has been entirely successful in making it difficult or impossible to get access to it on their Linux phones. Apple will certainly behave similarly. Also, only people with a lot of cash and a need to show off buy iPhones, so the majority of its userbase are not geeks but yuppies. As you are probably aware, yuppies are about as intelligent as cattle and will doubtless be able to do little more than make calls with their iPhones.
Vendor lockin is precisely what it is. I have been listening to mp3s on my phones for the last 4 years or so. Has the iPhone or even iTunes been available that long? My phone also has a USB port and mounts as a hard drive on any computer with zero software installation, so I can play or move my music to or from anyone's computer. Neither the Casio nor the iPhone can do that.
But that is not the point. The point is that iTunes is not a standard. It is proprietary. Mp3s work with everything And please do not argue that iTunes audio tracks somehow sound better than mp3s.
So, in the end, your argument is just a defense of the iPhone per se, and not a reasonable defense of the cellphone market in the US. In the end, it is your post that is both off topic and a troll.
This has everything to do with the *AAs, and Microsoft for that matter. The idea is that no DRM system, which is what the *AAs and MS are trying to force on us, can be completely enforced in hardware and to prevent hardware manufacturers from disabling the rights granted by the GPL.
If anyone can use hardware to stop you from modifying software, what is the point of having the "right" or "freedom" to modify it?
The cellphone manufacturers want the right to benefit from the GPL without giving their customers the right to do the same, and the *AAs are a driving force and an excuse for this circumvention attempt. If it were not businesses behaving this way, it would be called squatting.
It is unfortunate that Linus has been convinced by this old argument -- I first heard it about 2001 or 2002 -- that the FSF is a "religious movement", especially since that term originally was used to refer to Linux. Fact: If it were not for the FSF and the GPL, Linux would never have been viable for any business use. Linus would be working for low wages as a programmer in Finland, and no one would know his name.
This sounds excellent. The schools can just make the storage policy 24 hours and have a nightly cron job that deletes any documents over 24 hours old. A script could delete any documents that are older than that when a USB disk was inserted (Students should be warned of this, of course, as they could lose all of their data to the school's memory hole). Administrative documents could have some sort of exemption, but student data should all be expunged quickly. Then, when Big Brother comes a knocking, the schools can say they complied and they have nothing to offer. It is perfect, really.
Nicely argued. That certainly takes some of the zip out of my post.
Well, it seems I should have looked into that "watermarking" claim before I repeated it. It does not appear from the discussion or any other source that watermarking technology was actually used. Also, this post has an excellent alternative argument I had not even thought of. However, benefits such as this are often used to get people to convert to more privacy invasive systems. Look at all the incentives to get people away from using cash and start using credit (which is an information gold mine for banks).
While I could not agree more that the article was badly written and heavy on the fear mongering, I still must say that including such information in the files does qualify as DRM (watermarking), and does represent a significant risk to customers. The thief example is not very threatening. However, all sorts of customer tracking are privacy invasive, and this system could definitely be abused by a malicious person.
Imagine an estranged lover, bitter over a recent breakup, who is still in possession of your iPod or maybe just the songs on the lover's computer which you used to download part or all of your collection. This person uploads your collection to every P2P service the individual can think of. Now the RIAA comes knocking on your door saying that you have shared such and such files and you owe them millions of dollars, but you can just settle by giving them your life savings.
Do you really think the RIAA is going to care about your breakup with your lover or if they can actually win the case? They have watermarked songs with your personal information bought from an account with your credit card on a computer you regularly and admittedly used. When and if you broke up with that lover would be difficult to establish in court, and the RIAA does not care about a rock solid case, they know it is cheaper for you to settle. Would Apple's embedded watermarking DRM hurt you then?
The whole premise for this is that usability actually matters. Yes, Windows is easier to use in some cases, but quite generally, people use Windows because everyone else does. It does not matter if it is frustrating or difficult. It just has to be frustrating and difficult in the same way as everyone else's is. Windows is not supported by Microsoft. It is supported by your next door neighbor. In fact, if it were not for Slashdot, I would not have even known that Microsoft offered "support" for its "products" at all.
Apple's poor marketshare is proof of this. The Mac has been easier to use than Windows for years, but its share of the market has remained relatively constant. Your neighbor does not have one, so he cannot help you when you have a problem with your Mac. If you have a Windows box, however, you can even choose a neighbor you like to help you out.
The other reason for low Linux adoption is that Microsoft controls all the hardware manufacturers. Walk into any store and try to buy a Linux laptop -- I dare you. They will laugh in your face. Ask if you can just buy the laptop with no OS. They will laugh again. Given that people rarely even update -- much less replace -- the operating system that came with their computer, how can Linux be compared with Microsoft for average users? If they cannot get it even when they want it, how are they going to make a choice? These unauthorized copies of Windows are not being installed at home. They are being installed at the store or by a compotent friend. Most users would not know what to do with a bootable disk if they were given one. I knew one user that could not understand the difference between a "program" and a "web browser" thinking the web browser was the same thing as the OS. After hours of explanation, this user's new understanding was forgotten within 24 hours.
People like this need to have a computer put in front of them. It does not really matter if it is Linux, Windows, BeOS, or Symbian. They have to be told it is a computer and told a little about how to do what they want to do. It is never going to matter to them what the software is called. Try it. Give a first time user a Linux box, and see if they have any problems a newbie Windows user does not. In fact, they will probably think it is "Windows", anyway.
Ignorant people do not make choices.
This is incorrect. If you only collected the works and did not add any writing of your own, you cannot claim a copyright on it. If I copied your copies of Shakespeare, I would not be violating anything. If I copied your commentary, on the other hand, I would be violating your copyright. If you compiled a list of good parts of Shakespeare's books, you might be able to copyright that. That would be touch and go in court, though, as things like recipes are not copyrightable. Lists and other non-artistic works originally were not copyrightable. However, nowadays the judge might be persuaded.
The fact still remains that Shakespeare's words are Shakespeare's words, not yours. You cannot have a copyright on a Public Domain work. Period. That is why it is called the Public Domain. If the parts you added are stripped, the work remains in the Public Domain.
I should have been more clear. My meaning was this: In a world where the Public Domain was universal, by this I mean applied to everything or a world without copyright, the GPL and the Public Domain would be the same. The reason I put it that way is because the Public Domain is currently the world without copyright, and I see its expansion to everything as the logical opposite the the copyright lobby's attempts to expand copyright into everything. However, the leap of logic was made in my mind, and I should have spared everybody else such unclear statements. For that, I apologize.
I would like somebody to prove the existence of any benefits. I have yet to see any conclusive or even convincing evidence that copyright causes anything to be created at all. The creativity that has happened before my eyes on the Internet is an order of magnitude greater than all the creativity I had previously seen in my entire life. Nearly all of that was either behind the back of copyright or avoiding copyright or actively violating it.
The harm, on the other hand, is readily apparent. The RIAA has sued thousands of people. Who knows if any of them were actually guilty of anything? Whether or not they were, they are all without substantial amounts of money, taken from them by the RIAA (the rich stealing from the poor). Copyright prevents us from viewing nearly all of the film footage generated over the last half century. This is our own history and culture that is locked away from Us the People. The People for whom this information was generated in the first place. Much progress is not happening in art and culture because of the lack of access to that material. Many books that might be useful are unavailable because they are not profitable or might compete with the publisher's flavor of the month.
Artists c
I was not saying that, but what you are talking about sounds like hijacking the author's copyright in the current scheme of things. I will get back to that in a moment, but first, let us look at the question you just asked.
No, "it's not possible to own copyright on a work derived from an item that is in the public domain". This is obvious from the scenario you have given as an example. Let us say you published that anthology online. I or anyone else takes the anthology and removes your annotations. Would you consider the work to be yours or Shakespeare's? It is obvious that the copyright only applies to your additions to a Public Domain work or your creative work in general. You only hold the copyright over the parts of the work you created.
I could easily go online and create a website composed of the same Public Domain works as a published anthology, and the publisher could do little or nothing about it. If you want an analogy, it is as if you came to my house and saw my book collection and went out and bought the same books. Is there some law that says you cannot have the exact same book collection as I have? No, there is not.
What you seem to believe is that it is possible for you to take another author's work from the Public Domain or wherever and make it "yours". This is a strange idea. You can never own the copyright over Shakespeare's words. You can only copyright what you add to them. And if you claim his words are yours, you are not violating copyright, but plagiarizing. While this might impress your girlfriend, most people will not think highly of you for it.
Here is another thing to consider: You quoted my comments without my expressed permission, and I yours. However, by your argument, what I said would now be "yours" because you included it with your statements. And, by your argument, your statements have now become mine. Do I own the copyright for the whole comment? Or just the part that I wrote?
There is no inconsistency because in a world without copyright, everything is in the Public Domain. I am therefore assuming a world with an unlimited Public Domain. I use the term Public Domain because I believe the Public Domain should be expanded until it encompasses all works.
As for being optimistic, I just do not want to be ripped off anymore. In college, I was apalled at the way the textbooks constantly had "new editions" with minor changes forcing students to constanly buy new books. CD prices have increased as the unit cost has decreased. These prices are and impediment to education and cultural participation, and copyright has proven itself an impediment to free communication.
If you can invent a better solution to the problem, I am all for it. I definitely have not seen one, and supporting the current system which is based on Royal monopolies and censorship and European feudalism is utterly inconsistent with the reasons the United States exists in the first place. The United States was created to resist European tyranny, not enforce it.
You should think of the GPL as a virtual Public Domain. It basically says, "If you distribute this to one person, you distribute it to everybody." That is exactly like the Public Domain because in the Public Domain, no one would be able to control distribution. The BSD license, however, allows people to take BSD code, modify it, and claim it is proprietary again. The upshot of this is that the improvements only benefit those who modified the code. The improvements do not even have to benefit the original author or authors of the work (This, by the way, is precisely the opposite of the stated intent of every copyright law ever enacted: Few people would support a copyright law that said that the works of the author were created to benefit others but not himself). With the GPL or the Public Domain, the people who improved and distributed the code would not be able to stop the original authors or anybody from having the right to use the modifications. Conclusion: the BSD license is less like the Public Domain than the GPL.
That was not a proposal, it was a thought exercise. It was meant to help you conceive of the legal opposite of the restrictions based information environment we live in today. Also, the author was not arguing against copyright in this particular article. He was arguing that supporting the abolition of copyright is not inconsistent with supporting the GPL.
So, I must conclude one of two things: a) You have difficulty reading and should take more English classes before you graduate from high school or college, or b) You are a marketing droid from the *AAs or some other publishing industry trying to confuse the clear intent of a well written essay. Either way, you are incorrect.
However, employees could also copy any code they wanted and distribute it to whomever they like without the fear of any jail time or expensive lawsuits. A college graduate could get a job at, say, Microsoft and walk away with parts or even all of the source. After posting this on the net, Windows would be "Open Sourced". In fact, there would be no way that Microsoft could legally force anyone to take the source off of their website.
Considering the number of freeware developers that even closed source Windows has, I doubt very much that it would not be improved massively. Vendor lockin would cease to exist. Software would return to being a service as opposed to being an artificial "product".
BeOS could be used and improved instead of being locked away in a closet by a company that has no use for it. The best parts of BeOS could be merged with Linux or even Windows or vice versa. OSes would be better for everyone.
As for secrecy and -- at the very least software based -- DRM, we all know how long these things last with legal enforcement, so we can also assume that without such a threat hanging over people's heads, the period for the demise of a given instance of either or both would quickly become too short to measure. The idea that large corporations could effectively manage such things without recourse to their lawyer henchmen is just ridiculous. For examples, just look at their implementations of things like CSS or FairPlay or even AACS. Remember, anybody who distributes DRMed code has to distribute the keys to use it. Hiding something from somebody who is already in possession of it is an exercise in futility.
I am assuming this discussion only applies to software, but if copyright were abolished, there would be a world of information that has formerly been locked away in closets. Nearly every movie made in the 20th century is locked away in closets. Maybe it will not make anyone money when sold, but a given movie might be valuable to a small number of people or perhaps even a single individual who might receive from it a brilliant epiphany. Copyright prevents access and therefore restricts education.
The GPL is a hack to create a semblance of the Public Domain in a world where information is territorialised, to protect us from a world where the Public Domain has been effectively obliterated. Admittedly, it is a good hack, and has done many good things. But a world without such boundaries would be better. Imagine Google Books with free access to all of the books. Imagine YouTube with every video from all of history. Imagine every bibliographic reference in every book pointing to the book or even the exact page or pages it referenced.
The last thing I feel I must say is this: Copyright is and always has been about money. Originally, the idea was that if anybody made money on the work, the author should be the one. I think most people would consider that fair. I certainly do.
However, we now live in a world where formerly copyrighted works have become speech. I do not write comments on Slashdot for money. I write them because I have something to say. The paradigm that monetary incentives are necessary for people to create has been effectively disproven by the internet. People post because they want to post. People take pictures, make videos, sing songs, and create many other works merely because they want to communicate. Other people write programs because they have an itch to scratch. Artists paint or draw because they have something to say. Commercial art does not need copyright because advertising more than pays for it, and if more people copy a popular ad, its message is more widely dispersed creating more value for the advertiser.
In short, monetary incentives are for fat men in business suits who create nothing and keep their artists working at McDonald's. Copyright harms everyone else for these people's profits. Copyright therefore is a form of legal theft from the People, and a powerful weapon against the First Amendment.
Congress cannot do anything that is not specifically listed in secion 8. Therefore, Congress does not have the power to give the rights for your performances or songs to other people without your consent. They could, of course, not grant any rights, but granted rights have to be those of the author(s) or artist(s), not any third party.
"to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" means only the author or inventor gets the right. Congress cannot change that without amending the Constitution.
SoundExchange is neither an Author nor an Inventor, so they have no rights that are not contractually given to them by the authors themselves. SoundExchange's statement contradicts the wording of the Constitution.
SoundExchange is claiming the right to the authors' works without the consent of the authors themselves. If the authors have the exclusive right, how can SoundExchange justify this? Their claim is in volation of the Constitution itself, and the Library of Congress is violating 300 million people's rights by authorizing and or supporting such a claim.
On an individual basis, you can argue that it is Constitutional to grant monopolies. However, granting a blanket monopoly on all copyrights regardless of the will of individual authors is nothing less than stealing from the authors and limiting their Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Should be:
The RIAA's plan must have been to get everybody to settle. Otherwise, how could they go to court with such flimsy evidence?
These lawsuits are a scam: pure and simple. They are frivolous, and it is about time somebody filed a class action suit to return thousands of individuals their life savings.
I thought the OLPC project was based on getting the hardware cost below US$100. Obviously, the cost of the software is not an issue since it is all based on volunteer work and even the distro was compiled by donated time and effort.
So, Microsoft is offering nothing. According to the article, the governments have to figure out how to buy and configure the hardware themselves. Only then can the governments purchase Windows and Office to put on the computers they have already bought.
Oh, wait . . . Is it not true that WindowsXP is going to be discontinued at the end of this year? So what happens then? US$3 up front and a US$500 per box upgrade in January? Or are they going to audit all the schools in India the way they did in Washington State?
It sounds like -- if the governments do not happen to be intelligent enough to use Free Software -- the governments should just give the hardware to the kids and let the kids figure it out. That way, at least, "illegitimate" copies of Windows would not be the responsibility of the government or school administrations. Maybe then Microsoft will start suing children like the RIAA.
If Microsoft was really pro-education, Windows would be free on all educational computers period. They would be reasonable to think that was a good enough advertisement. At least when Apple sold schools computers the hardware was included. Microsoft is offering aether.