But what is amazing is that all of these problems were solved with paper-based technology 20 years ago. So to break it down for you:
Ever tried to edit long lists in a 49 cent notepad? (cross out till unreadable, copy, recopy, rerecopy, etc.)
Notepads are not for advanced editing of documents, they are for jotting down rough drafts. (A PDA is not very ideal either with a very tiny view of the document.) Actually for lists a better technology works much better. Index cards and a big table. Whiteboards are also very good.
Ever tried to find a note about something you wrote many months ago?
This is actually less of a problem with well-ordered notebooks than with computer files. Keyword searches frequently deliver the wrong matches, or too many matches. With sequential logbooks, you pull the logbook for the correct month, and find what you need in a matter of seconds. In the meantime, you also automatically get the CONTEXT of that note so you know what happened before and after.
Ever tried to make backup copies of important data in that notepad?
My grandfather (an industrial chemist) used carbon. But one of the advantages to paper is that backup copies are needed less frequently. Both computers that I use have been reformatted twice in the last year. In addition there is the problem of legacy software. What happens when the custom compressed Palm text format is no longer available?
How much time do you spend copying data by hand out of email and web pages into that notepad?
This is actually an oportunity rather than a problem. Notebooks are for notes, rough drafts, etc., etc.. The entered text becomes a second draft. For that matter, every day I get notes that were composed directly into an electronic format and I wish that someone had looked over them before cutting and pasting into email.
Do you carry a flashlight to read that notepad in complete darkness?
No, on the other hand my notebook text is readable under more different light conditions than a Palm screen due to the higher contrast and the absence of glare. I also have never been in a situation where light wasn't available and in addition, I've never been in a situation where I wasn't able to enter text because the batteries were running low.
And, of course, in addition to that notepad, you might also need to carry a calculator and an alarm wristwatch which has such a easy interface with which to set alarms for your aunts birthday (yeah, right.)
It's called a callendar, positioned somewhere where you see it every day. I find it interesting that my grandparents and parents-in-law never miss a birthday, or anniversary without alarms. They simply checked the callendar every day.
I think perhaps the worst things about geeks is their ignorance of history.
For over 500 years scientists have been able to work with logbooks and pieces of paper. In fact when I was trained as a biologist in the 1990s I was trained to use paper logbooks for a very specific reason. It is much more difficult to alter a paper logbook than it is to alter an electronic file. In fact the reason why scientific notebooks have numbered pages is so you can't arbitrarily remove data. Notebooks depend on sequential searching and history, while computers usually work from random-access searching. This actually results in very fast searchers and humans using notebooks can leverage the context of the search. "That was the first step of the process, therefore what I want comes later."
In practice, I find that the people who were trained to use paper notes are better at finding archived information than the people who were not trained but depend on electronic technology. The technophobes in my department can find the original hard copy of assignments from 3 years ago in a few minutes while the technophiles are twiddling their thumbs looking for the right keyword. Random access text searching is great but with a large number of files you quickly run into a problem of either no results for the search string, or too many results for the search string.
And in addition, there is the problem that PDAs are extremely limited in their ability to record and search non-textual data. If I need to look up my rough draft of a clustering diagram. I simply flip through the notebook stopping at those pages where there are clustring diagrams. Because I know what the diagram looks like, it jumps right out at me.
One of the big problems here is that the people dismissing notebooks and logbooks are comparing worst practices of paper-based information management with typical electronic information management. A better test would be to compare best practices of paper-based information management with best practices of electronic information management. Current PDA designs don't enforce good practice in regards to information management, and in fact, in many ways they encourage bad practice in regards to information management.
On the other hand there are the disadvantages. Slowed imput. Reading reduced to a frame a little larger than an index card. Minimal ability to define spacial relationships in a document. I found a PDA to be quite a bit more limited in my ability to represent information and there was always the problem of running out of power at bad moments. My visual search abilities rival that of the palm's (espcially since I date the upper-right corner of every note).
Personally, I've never seen the need to have an email-client or webbrowser in my pocket. Where I work I can't swing a stick without hitting a workstation.
And as for reading novels on a PDA? You gotta be kidding. Reading a novel on a PDA is rather like trying to eat a steak through a straw.
Okay, so you think you've found the cookie crumbs back to your parents' bed? Great! Who's in the bed? You don't know. You can theorize how a lot of stuff came to be (and that's great, that's what science is). However, you still don't know about those first five seconds.
But as Hawking points out, the more we know about those first 5 seconds, the more it appears that God is unnecessary to explain those first 5 seconds or even the first 5 nanoseconds. In other words, every year we find out that the universe exists in its current form because it could exist no other way.
In addition, the further back you push God, the more likely it is that God becomes morally irrelevant. Certainly there may have been a "God" lurking behind the big bang but what we know about the universe strongly suggests that singularities such as the big bang are the end of the road in regards to analysis.
Doesn't one of the laws have to do with matter not being able to be created, but only moved around? If so, then there must be something outside of science, outside of limited human understanding, that originated the Universe. And why not it be God?
I think you need to step forward to the 1950s. The fact is that matter is popping into existence and out of existence all the time around us.
But lets turn the question around. Why not it be god? Why must it be god? Why is a morally irrelevant Santa Claus locked away behind the Big Bang more likely than alternative theories of how the universe came into existence? Why is a Christian "God" more likely than an a cyclic universe with a big bang followed by a big crunch? The universe as the result of quantum fluctuation? The universe as the result of colliding universes in a metaverse? In other words, I have the courage, and the honesty to say "I don't know what happened before the big bang." While theists say, "I don't know, therefore it must be God?" Instant closed mind.
How then, can you believe that, for example, the moon, or a tree, or your body, all of which are much more complex then a log cabin, be formed randomly?
Ahh, the 4th big myth of this discussion: scientific processes are random. At which point I would like to suggest that diamonds are a fairly obvious disproof of this. Through entirely natural and reproducable phenomena a collection of relatively disordered carbon atims are turned into a highly ordered lattice crystal. The same thing happens with ice crystals, and supercell thunderstorms. And yet no one argues that ice crystals and supercell thunderstorms (the latter are far more complex than a cabin) are the result of intentional design.
But again, in both cases we can look at the evidence. With the log cabin we can make and test theories of how the cabin was built. You can look for fragments of refined metal in the cuts. You can look for evidence of human habitation, you can look for evidence of processes that are not the result of weathering.
Indeed, the reason why Creationism fails, is because there exists no evidence that any organism or structure in nature was intentionally created. There is considerable evidence that organisms and structures are the result natural forces. The moon demonstrates the pattern of features we would expect from a naturally formed early universe. The Earth demonstrates the pattern of features we would expect from a natural universe. Organisms demonstrate a pattern of features that we would expect from a natural universe.
In regards to trees, photosynthesis is a classic case of a process that if it were to be designed, would probably be designed differently. Green plant photosynthesis is a cobbled-together set of functions inhereted from ancestors (that are still existing) to deal with the twin problems of fixing carbon from carbon dioxide using sunlight, and getting rid of the highly toxic oxigen that results. Green photosynthesis is less efficient than other forms of photosynthesis, and many plants use a form of photosyntheis that is still less efficient!
Other patterns are even more inexplicable if there is a creator or designer. Why design the eye 5 different times from native proteins when in that one day the creator could design it once in one fell swoop! Why borrow metabolism from anaerobic bacteria and create an error-prone method of getting rid of oxygen for aerobic organisms? Why do whales have leg-bones when they don't have legs, and for that matter, why develop a whale anyway?
We KNOW how the earth, organisms, and the moon developed. And nowhere in the natural history of these things do we find the cabin-builder.
Staunch atheism is ultimately only an active attempt at ignoring the question what is the divine if it is not G-d, not at answering it.
Of course, there is the big question as to what qualifies as "divine". What I get from reading most atheists from Asamov to Sagan to Wilson is not ducking the question, but rather a very specific answer. You could call it a "WYSIWYG spirituality." There is this profound sense that the universe as it exists is so awsome, so beautiful, so shit-your-pants terrible and wonderful and amazing that there is no reason to look for a hidden man behind the curtain.
A lot of it boils down to how you define "divine". If you define divine as strictly the assumption that there must be another world, another plane of existence, another force of which this universe is just a shadow or playground, or test until the true kingdom of heaven is achieved, then no there is not a divine. On the other hand, if the "divine" is defined as something that inspires awe, reverence, beauty, terror, wonder, then there is nothing as awesome, worth revering, beautiful, terriful and wonderful than the universe as it IS.
Theists view atheism as a denial. I view my beliefs as an affirmation of the here and now, of the life lived, of the beauty around us.
If gifts spontaneously appeared under trees every Christmas, and there honestly was no accounting for them, we could formulate two theories:
Certainly. If indeed there was a complete absence of evidence to show that the universe existed before the magical eve of creation described by the Bible as taking place about 6000 years ago, then you would have a point.
However, the amazing thing about this debate is that we can account for far more than we can't explain. For example, we can put a minimum age on the universe using multiple independent lines of evidence that reveals that the Earth as it exists now did not "spontaneously appear" but developed over an unimaginably long period of time. We can explain how the atomic building-blocks of the Earth developed through multiple generations of stellar evolution. We have the chemical signature of the star that gave birth to our solar system.
We know enough about physics and chemistry to say that once the big bang happened, the end result was inevetable somewhere. Once the universe gave birth to the proper ratios of hydrogen and helium (and even that ratio appears to be inevetable) the creation of stars and galaxies was invevitable, the creation of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sillicon and iron was inevetable. The clumping of those elements into planetoids was inevetable. The chemical reactions that create life are inevetable. All of this can be explained quite well. Your hypothetical Santa Claus has long-ago been unmasked and shown to be a factory and a Sears store.
In comparison there is very little we don't know. We don't know what happened in the first few seconds of the Universe. After that first five seconds we know more about the evolution of the universe than we know about what really happened at Jamestown. We don't know how the first life on Earth got started. We do know what happened to that life from the time it started forming colonies to the present day.
I've never heard that before, and I think it's probably just one, isolated psycho. Furthermore, what about fossils is contradictory to Creationism?
Of course, liberal Christians can take an easy way out and simply invoke a God of the gaps. You can say that God popped into the scene in the first five seconds, then disappeared until it was time for humanity to become something other than humanity. You could argue for an Einstein's God that was both remote and irrelevant. You could argue that the Bible should be taken figuratively but then you run into the problem of what should be taken figuratively and what should be taken literally.
So to get back to your metaphor, creationists argue that we should, in spite of the evidence, still believe in Santa Claus, even after we found the receipts and followed the trail of cookies back to our parent's bed.
The question is, at what point can we start putting our chips down on a theory. The odds on evolution being correct are quite a bit better than the odds of Io being a Satilite of Jupiter. The odds of the universe being Billions of years old is an even better bet. In contrast, I take a much greater risk in believing that I won't get hit by a car, or the bus will arrive on time, or that I won't get mauled by a wild beast in my back yard.
Your odds of getting hit by lighting are higher than the odds that we live in a young universe.
Also note that science ( in the past and somewhat now ) doesn't wish to say anything is absolutely certain unless an experiment can reproduce the behaviour, event or action. Creationism vs. Big Bang vs. ??? is a debate and no particular side is right as far as science is concerned. Personally, I believe in Creationism, others do not. Please Please Please people, before you must say that we all evolved or that the earth is millions of years old and that those who say otherwise are incorrect remember that you are no more correct than they as far as science is concerned ( and it's you using science to make the claims )
Ohh, this is one of my pet peeves. Basically this post demonstrates a profound absence of understaning of the scientific process.
As a result, I feel it is necessary to go through the errors one by one.
Error #1: Experiment is the only way to tell if something is "true" in regards to science.
Fact: Experimental studies are only one method through which one can obtain valid scientific knowledge. Other ways of getting scientific knowledge include correlation/regression studies, and repeated observation.
For an example, experiments are rarely done in Astronomy. And yet we are able to say with a fairly high degree of scientific certainty that the moon has a specific mass, that Jupiter has moons, and that the planets travel in an elipse with the sun at one of the foci of the elipse. We can't conduct an experiment to show the structure of the solar system. But we have thousands of observations that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kepler was right and Aristotle, Ptolemy and even Copernicus and Tycho were wrong. (For that matter, we have thousands of observations that prove Einstein is right and Newton was wrong but that's another story.) By a similar note, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Alpha Centari is approximately 4 light years away from our sun. We can't conduct an experiment that involves creating a star, but we do have thousands of observations that support that Alpha Centauri has a high paralax while most other stars have no measurable paralax.
Error #2: We can't say something is true unless we've seen it.
This ignores proof by inference. To use the above example, we don't have any direct evidence to show that the earth is not the center of the universe. Instead we have several lines of indirect evidence (the paralax of nearby stars, the apparent shift of stars during the year due to the speed of light, the simplicity of Kepler's model (as revised by Einstein) compared to other models for explaining the same phenomena.) At some point, the number of lines of indirect evidence becomes great enough that we must consider the hypothesis true.
This is perhaps the biggest error of the bunch. The advantage of an experiment is not that it provides certainty but it provides a measure of the ammount of uncertainty inherent in the experiment. This is expressed in the form of the probability that the results are only due to the random effects of chance. When I conduct an experiment, I can't say, "I'm certain my hypothesis is true/false." What I can say is, "There is less than a %X chance my results were obtained due to random error." In addition this ignores the fact that my result might not be due to random error, but due to bad methods. As a result, an experiment is only accepted as evidence if similar experiments obtain similar results with equal or less possibility for error.
So getting back to evolution. Certainly no one has seen the universe develop over billions of years. However there are more independent lines of evidence to show that the universe is billions of years old, than there is to show that the Earth is not the center of the universe. At some point, we have to weigh the evidence for an ancient earth against the evidence for a young earth and make a decision.
basically your not upgrading are you. You're not paying for the next software. what guarantees do you have that your need will be in their next software. If you didn't have good old ie to fall back on you could still code something for mozilla for the good of all humankind. for free.
I can't respond to your questions because they are incomprehensible. What does "their next software" refer to? Microsoft or Mozilla?
There are some good reasons to think that Microsoft will continue to include acessibility through MSAA (Microsoft Active Acessability) in future versions of Internet Explorer. One of those reasons is that Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio.NET build MSAA-active interfaces by default with minimal effort by the application programmer (although some effort is required if you want to go beyond default behavior.) The second reason is legal compliance with ADA.
There is certainly some good indications that Mozilla, Sun and IBM are working on a competing framework but there is the other problem. At the moment, acessability development is mired in a standards war between Microsoft (MSAA) and Mozilla, Sun, Gnome and IBM working on derivatives of a Java acessability framework. Hopefully out of this will come a good framework but at the moment, I don't have the option of waiting for the proposals to become reality. Meanwhile this is a serious legal threat in regards to the adoption of most existing open-source software which is inacessable due to an absence of applications that speak both MSAA and Java Acessability.
Certainly I could code my own but there are a few problems with that. Coding a solution that works with one program isn't going to help me work with another program or even future versions of the same program. At this time, I don't wish to learn C++ or Mozilla internals in order to create a solution. Ultimately the problem needs to be addressed on the graphical toolkit level so that any object created with a graphical toolkit can be described or activated by acessable software.
In addition you raise an interesting Catch 22 which demonstrates how open-source ideology favors the developer rather than the end-user. You can't even start to roll your own if you can't use the system, but you can't use the system until you roll your own custom interfaces. I really hope that IBM, Mozilla, Gnome and Sun manage to produce something useful but there is no point in me adopting software that I can't fully use yet or is unecessarily more difficult to use.
From what I've seen of Mozilla, I really like it. However there are some quirky things with assessability through a speech recognition program that makes it a bit more difficult to use. One of the big issues is that bookmarks are not recognized by the speech recognition interface. Another nice feature that would really hope the assessability is the feature of being able to browse a link by saying the link name.
One of the things that I would like to say about the access Mozilla project is that they seem to have a clue that assessability is important. The open office group downgraded the complaint that even basic menu functionality is not visible to speech recognition software from a bug to a feature request. However until Mozilla works just as well with existing speech recognition software as Internet Explorer interacts with existing speech recognition software I'm not going to use Mozilla on a regular basis.
Hrm, am I the only one who finds the car metaphor rather strained? One of the big problems with defining freedom in terms of availability to source code (and then proposing a right to have source code as a basic requirement of free speech) is that it seems both philosophically and practically out of touch with the realities of how software gets used.
In cost, most software fits into the same price bracket as consumer electronics. Open up most consumer electronic devices made in the last 20 years and you are confronted with a sticker that says "no user-servisable parts inside" and a massive quantity of tiny SMCs and ICs connected on a printed circuit board with hair-thin traces. This has seriously reduced the old fashioned art of hacking hardware. (And I say this as a kid who spent many hours with a multimeter and a sodering gun re-wiring "Simon.") If it breaks get a new one. If none of them work, do without. I don't believe that Sony is infringing on my rights by selling me a radio on an IC chip rather than made from big m&m capacators and hand-wound coils.
Software works under similar economics. Even with the source code only an elite minority have the ability to look under the hood, and even fewer have the desire to. Even if the idea that free speech demands open-source had a philosophical position stronger than a wet tissue, it would be a hard sell. Most bugs, glitches and gremlens are easily worked around and simply ignored. No one cares if software crashes your desktop computer once a day because it provides an excuse for a coffee break. The problems associated with that software are frequently well-balanced by the abilities you get from using that software.
So one of the first mistakes that open-source fundamentalists make is in translating their personal preferences for access to source code as a feature into a moral issue. Closed-source software places no constraints on you. If you don't like the absence of source code as a feature, you probably don't have to use it. You can vote with your feet and your wallet. Caveat emptor.
Well there is the core of the issue. Free-software absolutists have a tendency to confuse things that we do because they are nice for people (like holding the door for others) and things that are moral perogatives (thou shalt not kill). I put as much of my work as possible into open-content or public domain not because it is wrong to do otherwise, but because I'm a nice guy who wants to give something back to the community.
There is no moral perogative to publish source code. We don't argue that every novel should include an easily modifiable source, Attack of the Clones should be packaged with the story boards, scripts and musical scores, or that Frank Zappa records must include chording charts. It is nice to do so, it is beneficial to do so, it even may be the best way to release software. But my rights are not violated if a vendor does not open-source software, if I don't like how it works, I brew my own and the software goes in the trash.
It seems to me that there are two choices: The GPL is adopted for purely pragmatic reasons because we can outcompete closed source development. The other is that the GPL is adopted as a principled position.
If we take the first position, then will we stop using Linux the moment something better comes along in terms of features, useability and stability? After all, the existence of BitKeeper proves that, at least in some contexts, that closed source development is superior to Open Source Development models. Doesn't it?
Let me ask you. Should we adopt MicroSoft software if it offers better features and useability? Or... are there other concerns than the narrow "best tool for the job" consideration?
Some of us use closed source because its not just an issue of "best tool for the job" but the closed source is the only tool that works! For an example, my ability to work depends on speech recognition software where I have the choice between and L&H commercial product and an IBM commercial product (although the interface for ViaVoice is open, the speech engine is not.)
Given that in many cases the closed-source commercial software is not only the "best for the job" but stalling on deployment may have a fairly large negative human cost, the purist position is not morally defensible.
I think there are a few things about the definition of libel that have gotten lost in this thread.
1: libel simply establishes the grounds for a civil suit, not criminal penalties. This just means that the plaintiff gets the opportunity to sue.
2: proving libel requires demonstrating not only that your reputation was harmed, but that the published information demonstrates an intentional or negligent disregard for the truth, and cannot be regarded as satire.
3: a quick retraction is frequently a very good defense.
4: even where there certainly appears to be clear negligence on the part of the publisher, the legal environment strongly favors the defendant. For example, while the Blumenthal vs. Drudge case involved a fairly clear case of negligence (an anonymous source along with no attempt to contact the Blumenthals prior to publication) the case went nowhere primarily because Drudge used the First Amendment privilege to keep his sources anonymous. The Blumenthals were faced with a legal fishing expedition for evidence that Drudge's accusations were false and politically motivated, while simultaneously drudge's defense promised to grill everyone associated with the Blumenthals on the stand to prove the accusation. AOL was found blameless in this case also.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work, without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
However, I don't see this competative advantage as large enough to ensure that the big distributors don't grab creative works. The commercial example of the X-Box reveals that the big boys are willing to take a hefty loss on each unit sold in order to muscle out any competition. I don't see how anything less than an exclusive limited monopoly has any hope of protecting the artist.
There are literally dozens if not hundreds of possible approaches and variations on this kind of concept, where systems could be put in place that are relatively unobtrusive, help stack the free market in favor of the creative artist without throwing away the free market altogether and granting artificial monopolies the government then has to go around in jackboots enforcing.
Here is probably a fundamental point of disagreement. I don't see copyright as incompatible with a free market. Copywritten works are still just as vunerable to market forces as any other commodity. If you want a copy of my code, my novel, or my movie, you need to negotiate with me on the price. If I price it too high, you buy someone else's code, novel or movie. If you don't like that I am the supplier for my code, my novel or my movie, you can compete and make a better one.
Really calling copyright a monopoly is a bit of a misnomer. It is not as if the government is granting the exclusive right to publish all novels, all audio recordings, to a single person. It only protects one particular instance of an intellectual work, a single string of words, sounds or pixels in a particular order.
In other words, getting back to my original call for an exploration of alternatives to copyright, we should consider designing, from the ground up, a system designed to maximize the freedom of the artist and the society while insuring just compensation (which I would not equate with 'the right to get rich' or 'the right to make sure no one else can make anything on the work', but rather the right to get paid for the work, and perhaps the right to an advantage in the marketplace in trying to get paid for the work) and, most importantly, without trampling on the freedoms of the rest of society at large.
The funny thing is, that right to get paid for work, that right to get an advantage in the marketplace sounds supiciously like a copyright.
I guess a fundamental difference of opinion is that I see the right to control the commercial use of the products I create to be one of those essential freedoms. Isn't there a free speech argument to be made here? If I create something as a political act, what recourse do I have when it gets appropriated without copyright?
There is something ethically lacking in this attitude of, "I have the fundamental right to copy, modify and redistribute anything that is created." Quite a few things that I create are not created to be spread out in the world. I would hate to read the love letters I've created for people published elsewhere.
In fact, I think that copyright fills a serious need that occurs because of ethical lapses. In an ideal world, it shouldn't be a problem to ask for and get permission to use a work. I try to ask for permission whenever I use other people's work, first because I know they appreciate it, and second, out of respect for the artist I don't want to use their work if they don't want it to be used.
And part of the issue is that I don't see that the core notion of copyright, artists have a right to profit from the commercial use of their works, and a right to set the terms of distribution and redistribution, to be the problem here. (Although I do see problems with the current state of copyright law.) Instead, the problem is economic and political. The abuses of copyright are a symptom of a bigger problem, not the cause of our intellectual property woes. ANY form of framework whether it be copyright, copyleft, no copyright, or public domain will be abused in this context. Fix our political and economic system, the problems with copyright vanish.
In my opinion the solution is the creation of alternative economies in which the big boys don't get a chance to play because the copyright is held in common.
Balancing different sets of rights
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The problem is the need to balance competing sets of rights.
Rights of the content creator: 1: To have a work recognized as his/her creation. 2: To receive some of the economic benefits of the use of that work. 3: To place reasonable restrictions on how that work is used to make money. I don't mind giving away work for free, I do mind if it is used to make certain companies richer.
Rights of the content consumer: 1: To create unlimited copies for personal use. 2: To fully enjoy all the benefits of the content. 3: To make personal modifications for non-commercial use.
In addition, I think people are ignoring the fact that copyright can be a powerful tool for political protest. I enjoy the power that copyright gives me to specify that my work can be used freely, as long as it is for non-commercial purposes. This prevents my work from being published by another company.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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The problem with treating the GPL as a subversion of copyright is because the GPL goes quite a bit beyond insuring Stallman's 4 freedoms. In the absence of copyright the freedom to use, and the freedom to copy would be enforced. But in the absence of copyright there is no demand for me to release my sorce code. Without copyright there is nothing to prevent microsoft from grabbing GCC, forking its own incompatible version, and releasing it as just executable code (or even wrapping it in an ecrypted layer to prevent decompling). The GPL depends on copyright to force creators of derivative works to release source code along with modifications.
I have offered up some criticisms of your alternative business models. Lets revisit them one by one.
1: Patronage. Patronage has frequently been a serious problem for both free speech and the free market as patrons try to assert control over the artist's work. In addition, there are a number of cases where the person just doesn't get paid.
But there is another issue here which is that patronage reduces the creation of works to simply an hourly job. So lets take a typical case. Studio pays Britney Spears to make a record, they charge a modest fee for distributing copies and being the first on the market. They make a mint, Britney Spears makes $20 an hour. A patronage-only scheme in which only labor is compensated, and the actual created work is considered to be not property doesn't give the artist much room to negotiate more compensation.
2: Buskering. This falls prey to the Wallmart/Starbucks attack. I sell my work for $2.00 a download on kirkjobsluder.org covering the cost of my website and getting pocket money. Disney moves in to kirkjobsluder.com and sells it for $.25. Disney can use its advertising muscle to get my work into the top 100 and it makes thousands of dollars. When my page is shut down, they raise their prices. Most people could consider it to be very unfair that my work only earned me a few dollars while Disney pocketed thousands of dollars.
In addition under a public domain they can always rebrand it as a Britney Spears song.
I think that there is a danger in treating copyright as an evil while ignoring the fact that in many ways it does help independent artists and content creators. There are some creator rights that go along with copyright that are also asserted by the GPL.
1: Legal grounds for proof of authorship. This allows my works to be recognized as my works and not as the work of another entity. This is provided for in the GPL by requiring documentation of changes along with the original GPL license.
2: Control over how the work and derivative work is used. The GPL places quite a few demands on people who redistribute GPL software and create derivative works from GPL software. If I redistribute software I must also redistribute the source code. If I distribute modifications I must also distribute the source code. Neither of these restrictions could exist simply by removing copyright.
In addition, I feel that artists should have some form of image control over their work. For example, I would hate it if I wrote a protest song, only for it to be used by Nike to sell shoes.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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The GPL exists for the sole purpose of insuring the 4 freedoms as laid out by the Free Software Foundation: the freedom to use, the freedom to copy, the freedom to modify, and the freedom to share your modifications with others. Without copyright you would have all of these freedoms, and as Richard Stallman himself, the author of the GPL, has said, without copyright the GPL wouldn't be necessary at all.
Without copyright, the GPL can not enforce its demand that redistribution of modifications include either the source code or documentation. Free software ONLY exists because copyright law exists. In the absence of copyright I can repackage any free software as a closed-source program. Granted the binary would be public domain but the source code would be inaccessable.
Thus far, I have backed up my assertions with real world examples of it functioning (albeit not always perfectly). You, on the other hand, have just made a very broad statement without a single shred of evidence to back it up. I do hope your academic publications were a little more rigorous than that.
And I went through one by one and demonstrate how those alterantives are not sufficient to prevent me from robbing you blind.
Re:Wrong on all counts
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Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Only because the goals he wished to achieve, namely the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation stands for, are denied everyone by default because of copyright. He had no other choice but to use copyright to subvert itself... the alternative was to be unable to insure others the 4 basic freedoms he holds so dear... indeed he was in the same quandary an artists would be in if they followed the suggestion to just dump their material into the public domain, which copyright then allows others to pilfer without giving back.
A world in which everything is in the public domain can place no restrictions on how works are derived, or how to redistribute those derivative works. The GPL goes quite a bit beyond just negating copyright, it demands that derivative works must include specific types of documentation and source code. In the absence of a copyright, nothing can prevent microsoft from using gcc, making changes, and redistributing it as Visual C++ in a binary-only format without the source code. This of course negates the entire point of the GPL.
I find it fascinating that I am being shouted down for having the audacity to suggest we might include in our discussion the possibility that there might be other regimes that would work better than government mandated monopolies for compensating artists. It is even more interesting now that, when I point to historical examples that exemplify this, you are saying we shouldn't think about those examples.
Of course, patent law goes back to the 15th century so most of the artists you cite worked under an assumption of intelectual property in which plagarism for profit was discouraged, if not forbidden.
No, what I'm saying is more subtle than that. I am saying that, if Time-Warner takes my work and incorporates it into their work, aspects of my work become inaccessible to others because of the TW copyright on their extentions. An example: TW makes a space opera based on my work, using my characters, etc. Now, if someone else wants to make a space opera based on my work and characters, they are confronted with a series of legal landmines they must avoid, lest the infringe on TW's copyrights. As there are only so many ways one can take a particular work and change it around, the danger of stumbling onto one of these landmines, even by accident, is sufficiently great that anyone with any sense would avoid the possiblity altogether... meaning that my work has thus become less accessible to those who would like to build upon it as a result.
But lets take a look at the view without copyright. Time-Warner can take your work without having to pay for it (because it is in the public domain.) They convert it into a movie that grosses millions of dollars (charging reasonable costs for distributing the derivative work in a high-quality format to cinemas) and you end up without a red cent.
Most people would consider this blatantly unfair.
Granted anybody else can create their own derivate work from that derivative work but still, they don't have the money, the contracts with cinemas, or the networks to compete.
As a result, the public domain suffers from a failure of the commons. The biggest voice with the most money gets the credit. Furthermore, look at what the public domain has done to our conception of Grim's fairy tales. Your original work gets weighed not on its own merits, but against the Disney version.
In other words, it isn't an admission of approval of copyright laws, it is a repudiation of copyright law at its most fundamental level.
Wipe out copyright law. How can a public domain enforce the restrictions of the GPL to publish derivative works with source code? Without copyright law it simply can't. Without copyright law anyone can fork their own version of GCC without source code.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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Fair IP Laws?
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Ok, this is just my point of view as a person who has three academic papers in press. The reason why I want copyright is NOT because I expect to make lots of money off my work, but because I want for my work to be credited to my co-authors and myself rather than to some third party. In fact, I would prefer my work be open-content simply because it would permit other educators to copy and distribute my works in course packets.
One, as others have mentioned, is patronage. It is, in one sense, how most programmers are paid today (most of us work on inhouse software, NOT retail software being sold under copyright. Some of us are fortunate enough to be working on free software or open source projects). It is also how most acters are paid, in another sense. Indeed, arguably it is how any artist or professional is paid who does a "work for hire" where the artist (or professional) in question never enjoys "ownership" of the copyright on the work they produce, or the patent on the work they invent.
However, the restrictions that go along with patronage are even more hostile to the free market than copyright. (For example, patronage can place restrictions such that I can't take my expertise with me when I leave. In addition this just shifts the issue from an individual creator holding a copyright to a corporation holding the copyright.
Another possibility is derivative income. Example: you don't make money on the music, you make money on the performance of the music. Again, this won't change how most bands make money, for example, as they receive most of their revinues from concerts (while their publishers, the record companies, rake in millions via their control of the copyright itself, selling copies of the music on CDs, etc.).
The problem I see with this is for example, I create something for the local church. Since in your world I have no copyright on that work and only get paid for performance, a recording somehow gets sent to somone at Disney who uses the work in their next film. Suddenly, Disney is making millions from their own derivative works while I don't get a penny. Is this necessarily a fair deal? In the absence of copyright law, I can't go to them and say, "hey wait a minute, a song that I made for a specific audience just won an Academy Award and made you millions of dollars.
Another possibility is "busking" or the electronic equivelent thereof via micropayments of one sort or another.
Well again, what is to prevent Disney from copying the file, and setting up their own micropayment system in the absence of copyright? Disney can use its size to leverage promotion getting thousands of dollars on content I produced while my home page gets a few dollars a week.
Another possibility is simply creating wealth and sharing it to ones advantage, much as free software has done for many of us. I make my living off of the deployment of free software, which I can, share, and modify freely despite having not written it myself. The developers in turn make good money, because they are well known and thus in demand. We all win (and though free software is copyrighted by definition, the license is designed to negate the restrictions of copyright). I give back a little in my own way, which further enriches others (perhaps in ways I don't even know about or expect).
I certainly agree that releasing open-source and open-content is a good thing but the GPL IS NOT DESIGNED TO NEGATE THE RESTRICTIONS OF COPYRIGHT, INSTEAD IT DEPENDS ON THEM TO ENSURE THAT DERIVATIVE WORKS ARE ALSO FREE. Without copyright, there can be no copyleft. The ONLY thing that keeps free software free is the existence of a copyright law that permits users to control derivative works.
None of these approaches are perfect, all of them have problems and challenges, but no more so than copyright itself, and assuming your goal is to insure the artist is compensated, and the society is enriched, they are all superior to the copyright regime we now have, or even in its much more benign form as initially implimented in the United States.
In fact, all of these approaches insure the exact opposite.
Re:There ARE other ways
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Fair IP Laws?
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I'm not convinced by this. Intellectual property insures two things. First that I am given credit for the works that I create. Second that I can make money distributing the works I create.
So first of all, there is a myth that intellectual property didn't exist when Shakespeare was writing and performing his plays. I have my doubts about this. After all, we don't hear of 'John Crapper's Macbeth' primarily because there were social sanctions against writing down the good parts and setting up your own theatre next door.
Without copyright, the credit goes to anyone who publishes first. If I hand you a draft of my screenplay, copyright is the only thing to prevent you from putting your name on it and selling it before I do. You can snoop the next great American novel from someone's hard drive, pay to publish and take home the Pulizer. Even those alternative schemes for compensating artists requires some way of legally identifying the artist as the creator of the work.
There are also other things that are antithetical to both free speech and free markets. For example fraud, claiming your product is something that it is not. Copyright provides a mechanism for certifying that a work was created by the claimed creator rather than the person selling the work. Second, the free market does not demand the sale of stolen works.
I would be happy to see other ways of compensating artists for their work, if their work is not property, then why compensate them?
There is a fundamental fallacy in Stallman's thinking which rests in his conceptualization of software freedom as an extension of free speech. One of the difficulties is that Stallman conceptualizes information in such a way that privacy is nonexistent, because it is ethically wrong for me to place limits on how people use the information I give them. As a researcher, I regularly contract away my freedom to do whatever I want with information in order to ethically protect the people who give me that information. Before I do an interview I give my research participants a piece of paper that says I will keep their data confidential, I will only publish aggregate abstracts of the information they give me without revealing personal names or even information that might be used to identify them, (for example, chief supervisor at Magic Corp.) Not only do I place restrictions on how I can use information, but I also promise that if a participant ever wants to quit the study, I will destroy all of their information. From a GNU perspective making these compromises that are essential to respecting the privacy of my participants and clients is unreasonable.
The freedoms that Stallman declares to be an absolute right are not absolute, they are negotiated between people who provide information and the people who use information. Stallman's insistence on his narrow interpretation of those rights ignores the fact that content and software producers have a right to exclusively profit for and get credit from their work for a limited duration of time. It is interesting that Stallman insists on branding gnu software, while insisting on a intellectual property model which makes such a branding very difficult. Open sourcing software like public domain is an optional service, one that should be encouraged just as we encourage software to be bundled with documentation, but not an absolute right.
In addition, Stallman's perspective makes sense from a programmer's point of view. What Stallman wants is the ability to crack open the source code for any bit of software, modify it, make "improvements" to it, and redistribute those improvements under his own copyright. However, from an end users point of view the freedom to "use" software in order to make money and to be productive is more important than the ability to see under the hood. Technical merit is not just a convenience for end-users, it is a requirement. For example, since I have got repetitive stress injury, my ability to use a computer depends on a commercial speech recognition software that runs under Microsoft Windows. The claim that support of open source requires an open source only desktop would mean doing nothing (except perhaps for tearing tickets at the local movie theater) until an open source speech recognition tool matures (ViaVoice uses a proprietary speech engine). In addition advancing speech recognition as an application is an area that is probably unsuited to open source because it is built on basic research that costs money. Carnegie-Melon's Sphinx is heavily subsidized by the Department of Defense, which is itself ethically problematic for many of us. The groups producing commercial speech recognition software have a right (or rather the freedom) to shrink wrap their product in order to protect their competitive advantage. Another application area where open source is lacking is in non-BibTex bibliography database software. Yest another area where open source not only is lacking in terms of technical merit, but in sheer technical availability is in qualitative research tools for document analysis. As far as I can tell there is only one open source project in this area.
Granted, I don't buy the claim that consumers have no rights at all in regards to software or content other than the rights granted by information providers. But Linus's challenge that if you object to the fact that I am using proprietary software, the me a better application applies. If I did wait for the open source community to develop high-quality speech recognition applications, bibliography database software, and document analysis software, my unemployment would probably run out. Is it better for me to be ethically clean and produce nothing (assuming that I agree with the notion that proprietary software is ethically tainted) or is it better to use open source software where I can, use closed source software where no equivalent exists or is practical, and produce open content of my own?
At any rate I am tempted to apply a GNG liscence to the projects I'm working on (GNG is not Gnu) primarily because I find the claim that referencing closed source, and seeking interoperability with closed source applications is ethically problematic to be itself an ethically problematic statement.
Not only that, but what about the music? The music for Episode I was the first really good work from John Williams in years. The Jedi Fight Scene music is an amazing dramatic work and if you listen to the very end of the credits for Episode one you are treated to a bit of musical foreshadowing as the Episode I theme subtly transforms into Darth Vader's theme.
The music for Attack of the Clones just seems to be lifted directly off of the original Star Wars. Nothing sticks out in my mind two days later.
I agree with you that restrictions are imcompatible with a public domain which is why I don't want my works in a public domain. (What I want is something between GPL and a traditional copyright.) In fact, the GPL is is not "public domain" either.
Pragmatically, non-commercial licenses fill an important need for individual educators and nonprofit groups to share works without having those works gobbled up by commercial interests. If I do work for a nonprofit project, it is not fair to me or to the nonprofit if a publisher were to make money by redistributing that work. Personal and nonprofit clauses fill an important need to get information out while preventing commercial poaching.
Re:Licenses are the biggest threat to a true commo
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Creative Commons
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Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.
I guess they don't understand the problem you're raising here, or how that problem is any greater than doing media development under any other licensing scheme. If anything, this would simplify the matter because you can assess compatibility based on the key freedoms: copying, distribution of derivative works, attribution, and copyleft.
So since you're planning to distribute your work as a possibly commercial, copyleft, derivative works permitted you would just go search for public domain or licenses that permit derivative works for commercial use.
At least one of the things that really appeals to me about this scheme is that it is modular and it treats the various aspects of licensing independently. I have been looking for a license that would open source some of the things I am currently working on while reserving the exclusive option of closing the copyright on future revisions of the product. I don't agree that the ability to use all works is really essential or even desirable. For example, I might design something specifically for a nonprofit, and I might want to keep that license as a nonprofit in order to prevent commercial enterprises from poaching it.
Or I might want to exercise some ethical screening on how my product is used in order to make money. So while I might want to open distribution and derivative works for noncommercial purposes, I might restrict commercial distribution on a case-by-case basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you even keeping passwords on a memo-pad?
But what is amazing is that all of these problems were solved with paper-based technology 20 years ago. So to break it down for you:
Ever tried to edit long lists in a 49 cent notepad? (cross out till unreadable, copy, recopy, rerecopy, etc.)
Notepads are not for advanced editing of documents, they are for jotting down rough drafts. (A PDA is not very ideal either with a very tiny view of the document.) Actually for lists a better technology works much better. Index cards and a big table. Whiteboards are also very good.
Ever tried to find a note about something you wrote many months ago?
This is actually less of a problem with well-ordered notebooks than with computer files. Keyword searches frequently deliver the wrong matches, or too many matches. With sequential logbooks, you pull the logbook for the correct month, and find what you need in a matter of seconds. In the meantime, you also automatically get the CONTEXT of that note so you know what happened before and after.
Ever tried to make backup copies of important data in that notepad?
My grandfather (an industrial chemist) used carbon. But one of the advantages to paper is that backup copies are needed less frequently. Both computers that I use have been reformatted twice in the last year. In addition there is the problem of legacy software. What happens when the custom compressed Palm text format is no longer available?
How much time do you spend copying data by hand out of email and web pages into that notepad?
This is actually an oportunity rather than a problem. Notebooks are for notes, rough drafts, etc., etc.. The entered text becomes a second draft. For that matter, every day I get notes that were composed directly into an electronic format and I wish that someone had looked over them before cutting and pasting into email.
Do you carry a flashlight to read that notepad in complete darkness?
No, on the other hand my notebook text is readable under more different light conditions than a Palm screen due to the higher contrast and the absence of glare. I also have never been in a situation where light wasn't available and in addition, I've never been in a situation where I wasn't able to enter text because the batteries were running low.
And, of course, in addition to that notepad, you might also need to carry a calculator and an alarm wristwatch which has such a easy interface with which to set alarms for your aunts birthday (yeah, right.)
It's called a callendar, positioned somewhere where you see it every day. I find it interesting that my grandparents and parents-in-law never miss a birthday, or anniversary without alarms. They simply checked the callendar every day.
I think perhaps the worst things about geeks is their ignorance of history.
For over 500 years scientists have been able to work with logbooks and pieces of paper. In fact when I was trained as a biologist in the 1990s I was trained to use paper logbooks for a very specific reason. It is much more difficult to alter a paper logbook than it is to alter an electronic file. In fact the reason why scientific notebooks have numbered pages is so you can't arbitrarily remove data. Notebooks depend on sequential searching and history, while computers usually work from random-access searching. This actually results in very fast searchers and humans using notebooks can leverage the context of the search. "That was the first step of the process, therefore what I want comes later."
In practice, I find that the people who were trained to use paper notes are better at finding archived information than the people who were not trained but depend on electronic technology. The technophobes in my department can find the original hard copy of assignments from 3 years ago in a few minutes while the technophiles are twiddling their thumbs looking for the right keyword. Random access text searching is great but with a large number of files you quickly run into a problem of either no results for the search string, or too many results for the search string.
And in addition, there is the problem that PDAs are extremely limited in their ability to record and search non-textual data. If I need to look up my rough draft of a clustering diagram. I simply flip through the notebook stopping at those pages where there are clustring diagrams. Because I know what the diagram looks like, it jumps right out at me.
One of the big problems here is that the people dismissing notebooks and logbooks are comparing worst practices of paper-based information management with typical electronic information management. A better test would be to compare best practices of paper-based information management with best practices of electronic information management. Current PDA designs don't enforce good practice in regards to information management, and in fact, in many ways they encourage bad practice in regards to information management.
On the other hand there are the disadvantages. Slowed imput. Reading reduced to a frame a little larger than an index card. Minimal ability to define spacial relationships in a document. I found a PDA to be quite a bit more limited in my ability to represent information and there was always the problem of running out of power at bad moments. My visual search abilities rival that of the palm's (espcially since I date the upper-right corner of every note).
Personally, I've never seen the need to have an email-client or webbrowser in my pocket. Where I work I can't swing a stick without hitting a workstation.
And as for reading novels on a PDA? You gotta be kidding. Reading a novel on a PDA is rather like trying to eat a steak through a straw.
But as Hawking points out, the more we know about those first 5 seconds, the more it appears that God is unnecessary to explain those first 5 seconds or even the first 5 nanoseconds. In other words, every year we find out that the universe exists in its current form because it could exist no other way.
In addition, the further back you push God, the more likely it is that God becomes morally irrelevant. Certainly there may have been a "God" lurking behind the big bang but what we know about the universe strongly suggests that singularities such as the big bang are the end of the road in regards to analysis.
I think you need to step forward to the 1950s. The fact is that matter is popping into existence and out of existence all the time around us.
But lets turn the question around. Why not it be god? Why must it be god? Why is a morally irrelevant Santa Claus locked away behind the Big Bang more likely than alternative theories of how the universe came into existence? Why is a Christian "God" more likely than an a cyclic universe with a big bang followed by a big crunch? The universe as the result of quantum fluctuation? The universe as the result of colliding universes in a metaverse? In other words, I have the courage, and the honesty to say "I don't know what happened before the big bang." While theists say, "I don't know, therefore it must be God?" Instant closed mind.
Ahh, the 4th big myth of this discussion: scientific processes are random. At which point I would like to suggest that diamonds are a fairly obvious disproof of this. Through entirely natural and reproducable phenomena a collection of relatively disordered carbon atims are turned into a highly ordered lattice crystal. The same thing happens with ice crystals, and supercell thunderstorms. And yet no one argues that ice crystals and supercell thunderstorms (the latter are far more complex than a cabin) are the result of intentional design.
But again, in both cases we can look at the evidence. With the log cabin we can make and test theories of how the cabin was built. You can look for fragments of refined metal in the cuts. You can look for evidence of human habitation, you can look for evidence of processes that are not the result of weathering.
Indeed, the reason why Creationism fails, is because there exists no evidence that any organism or structure in nature was intentionally created. There is considerable evidence that organisms and structures are the result natural forces. The moon demonstrates the pattern of features we would expect from a naturally formed early universe. The Earth demonstrates the pattern of features we would expect from a natural universe. Organisms demonstrate a pattern of features that we would expect from a natural universe.
In regards to trees, photosynthesis is a classic case of a process that if it were to be designed, would probably be designed differently. Green plant photosynthesis is a cobbled-together set of functions inhereted from ancestors (that are still existing) to deal with the twin problems of fixing carbon from carbon dioxide using sunlight, and getting rid of the highly toxic oxigen that results. Green photosynthesis is less efficient than other forms of photosynthesis, and many plants use a form of photosyntheis that is still less efficient!
Other patterns are even more inexplicable if there is a creator or designer. Why design the eye 5 different times from native proteins when in that one day the creator could design it once in one fell swoop! Why borrow metabolism from anaerobic bacteria and create an error-prone method of getting rid of oxygen for aerobic organisms? Why do whales have leg-bones when they don't have legs, and for that matter, why develop a whale anyway?
We KNOW how the earth, organisms, and the moon developed. And nowhere in the natural history of these things do we find the cabin-builder.
Of course, there is the big question as to what qualifies as "divine". What I get from reading most atheists from Asamov to Sagan to Wilson is not ducking the question, but rather a very specific answer. You could call it a "WYSIWYG spirituality." There is this profound sense that the universe as it exists is so awsome, so beautiful, so shit-your-pants terrible and wonderful and amazing that there is no reason to look for a hidden man behind the curtain.
A lot of it boils down to how you define "divine". If you define divine as strictly the assumption that there must be another world, another plane of existence, another force of which this universe is just a shadow or playground, or test until the true kingdom of heaven is achieved, then no there is not a divine. On the other hand, if the "divine" is defined as something that inspires awe, reverence, beauty, terror, wonder, then there is nothing as awesome, worth revering, beautiful, terriful and wonderful than the universe as it IS.
Theists view atheism as a denial. I view my beliefs as an affirmation of the here and now, of the life lived, of the beauty around us.
Certainly. If indeed there was a complete absence of evidence to show that the universe existed before the magical eve of creation described by the Bible as taking place about 6000 years ago, then you would have a point.
However, the amazing thing about this debate is that we can account for far more than we can't explain. For example, we can put a minimum age on the universe using multiple independent lines of evidence that reveals that the Earth as it exists now did not "spontaneously appear" but developed over an unimaginably long period of time. We can explain how the atomic building-blocks of the Earth developed through multiple generations of stellar evolution. We have the chemical signature of the star that gave birth to our solar system.
We know enough about physics and chemistry to say that once the big bang happened, the end result was inevetable somewhere. Once the universe gave birth to the proper ratios of hydrogen and helium (and even that ratio appears to be inevetable) the creation of stars and galaxies was invevitable, the creation of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sillicon and iron was inevetable. The clumping of those elements into planetoids was inevetable. The chemical reactions that create life are inevetable. All of this can be explained quite well. Your hypothetical Santa Claus has long-ago been unmasked and shown to be a factory and a Sears store.
In comparison there is very little we don't know. We don't know what happened in the first few seconds of the Universe. After that first five seconds we know more about the evolution of the universe than we know about what really happened at Jamestown. We don't know how the first life on Earth got started. We do know what happened to that life from the time it started forming colonies to the present day.
Of course, liberal Christians can take an easy way out and simply invoke a God of the gaps. You can say that God popped into the scene in the first five seconds, then disappeared until it was time for humanity to become something other than humanity. You could argue for an Einstein's God that was both remote and irrelevant. You could argue that the Bible should be taken figuratively but then you run into the problem of what should be taken figuratively and what should be taken literally.
So to get back to your metaphor, creationists argue that we should, in spite of the evidence, still believe in Santa Claus, even after we found the receipts and followed the trail of cookies back to our parent's bed.
The question is, at what point can we start putting our chips down on a theory. The odds on evolution being correct are quite a bit better than the odds of Io being a Satilite of Jupiter. The odds of the universe being Billions of years old is an even better bet. In contrast, I take a much greater risk in believing that I won't get hit by a car, or the bus will arrive on time, or that I won't get mauled by a wild beast in my back yard.
Your odds of getting hit by lighting are higher than the odds that we live in a young universe.
Ohh, this is one of my pet peeves. Basically this post demonstrates a profound absence of understaning of the scientific process.
As a result, I feel it is necessary to go through the errors one by one.
Error #1: Experiment is the only way to tell if something is "true" in regards to science.
Fact: Experimental studies are only one method through which one can obtain valid scientific knowledge. Other ways of getting scientific knowledge include correlation/regression studies, and repeated observation.
For an example, experiments are rarely done in Astronomy. And yet we are able to say with a fairly high degree of scientific certainty that the moon has a specific mass, that Jupiter has moons, and that the planets travel in an elipse with the sun at one of the foci of the elipse. We can't conduct an experiment to show the structure of the solar system. But we have thousands of observations that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kepler was right and Aristotle, Ptolemy and even Copernicus and Tycho were wrong. (For that matter, we have thousands of observations that prove Einstein is right and Newton was wrong but that's another story.) By a similar note, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Alpha Centari is approximately 4 light years away from our sun. We can't conduct an experiment that involves creating a star, but we do have thousands of observations that support that Alpha Centauri has a high paralax while most other stars have no measurable paralax.
Error #2: We can't say something is true unless we've seen it.
This ignores proof by inference. To use the above example, we don't have any direct evidence to show that the earth is not the center of the universe. Instead we have several lines of indirect evidence (the paralax of nearby stars, the apparent shift of stars during the year due to the speed of light, the simplicity of Kepler's model (as revised by Einstein) compared to other models for explaining the same phenomena.) At some point, the number of lines of indirect evidence becomes great enough that we must consider the hypothesis true.
Error #3 Experiment provides scientific certainty.
This is perhaps the biggest error of the bunch. The advantage of an experiment is not that it provides certainty but it provides a measure of the ammount of uncertainty inherent in the experiment. This is expressed in the form of the probability that the results are only due to the random effects of chance. When I conduct an experiment, I can't say, "I'm certain my hypothesis is true/false." What I can say is, "There is less than a %X chance my results were obtained due to random error." In addition this ignores the fact that my result might not be due to random error, but due to bad methods. As a result, an experiment is only accepted as evidence if similar experiments obtain similar results with equal or less possibility for error.
So getting back to evolution. Certainly no one has seen the universe develop over billions of years. However there are more independent lines of evidence to show that the universe is billions of years old, than there is to show that the Earth is not the center of the universe. At some point, we have to weigh the evidence for an ancient earth against the evidence for a young earth and make a decision.
I can't respond to your questions because they are incomprehensible. What does "their next software" refer to? Microsoft or Mozilla?
There are some good reasons to think that Microsoft will continue to include acessibility through MSAA (Microsoft Active Acessability) in future versions of Internet Explorer. One of those reasons is that Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio .NET build MSAA-active interfaces by default with minimal effort by the application programmer (although some effort is required if you want to go beyond default behavior.) The second reason is legal compliance with ADA.
There is certainly some good indications that Mozilla, Sun and IBM are working on a competing framework but there is the other problem. At the moment, acessability development is mired in a standards war between Microsoft (MSAA) and Mozilla, Sun, Gnome and IBM working on derivatives of a Java acessability framework. Hopefully out of this will come a good framework but at the moment, I don't have the option of waiting for the proposals to become reality. Meanwhile this is a serious legal threat in regards to the adoption of most existing open-source software which is inacessable due to an absence of applications that speak both MSAA and Java Acessability.
Certainly I could code my own but there are a few problems with that. Coding a solution that works with one program isn't going to help me work with another program or even future versions of the same program. At this time, I don't wish to learn C++ or Mozilla internals in order to create a solution. Ultimately the problem needs to be addressed on the graphical toolkit level so that any object created with a graphical toolkit can be described or activated by acessable software.
In addition you raise an interesting Catch 22 which demonstrates how open-source ideology favors the developer rather than the end-user. You can't even start to roll your own if you can't use the system, but you can't use the system until you roll your own custom interfaces. I really hope that IBM, Mozilla, Gnome and Sun manage to produce something useful but there is no point in me adopting software that I can't fully use yet or is unecessarily more difficult to use.
From what I've seen of Mozilla, I really like it. However there are some quirky things with assessability through a speech recognition program that makes it a bit more difficult to use. One of the big issues is that bookmarks are not recognized by the speech recognition interface. Another nice feature that would really hope the assessability is the feature of being able to browse a link by saying the link name.
One of the things that I would like to say about the access Mozilla project is that they seem to have a clue that assessability is important. The open office group downgraded the complaint that even basic menu functionality is not visible to speech recognition software from a bug to a feature request. However until Mozilla works just as well with existing speech recognition software as Internet Explorer interacts with existing speech recognition software I'm not going to use Mozilla on a regular basis.
Hrm, am I the only one who finds the car metaphor rather strained? One of the big problems with defining freedom in terms of availability to source code (and then proposing a right to have source code as a basic requirement of free speech) is that it seems both philosophically and practically out of touch with the realities of how software gets used.
In cost, most software fits into the same price bracket as consumer electronics. Open up most consumer electronic devices made in the last 20 years and you are confronted with a sticker that says "no user-servisable parts inside" and a massive quantity of tiny SMCs and ICs connected on a printed circuit board with hair-thin traces. This has seriously reduced the old fashioned art of hacking hardware. (And I say this as a kid who spent many hours with a multimeter and a sodering gun re-wiring "Simon.") If it breaks get a new one. If none of them work, do without. I don't believe that Sony is infringing on my rights by selling me a radio on an IC chip rather than made from big m&m capacators and hand-wound coils.
Software works under similar economics. Even with the source code only an elite minority have the ability to look under the hood, and even fewer have the desire to. Even if the idea that free speech demands open-source had a philosophical position stronger than a wet tissue, it would be a hard sell. Most bugs, glitches and gremlens are easily worked around and simply ignored. No one cares if software crashes your desktop computer once a day because it provides an excuse for a coffee break. The problems associated with that software are frequently well-balanced by the abilities you get from using that software.
So one of the first mistakes that open-source fundamentalists make is in translating their personal preferences for access to source code as a feature into a moral issue. Closed-source software places no constraints on you. If you don't like the absence of source code as a feature, you probably don't have to use it. You can vote with your feet and your wallet. Caveat emptor.
Well there is the core of the issue. Free-software absolutists have a tendency to confuse things that we do because they are nice for people (like holding the door for others) and things that are moral perogatives (thou shalt not kill). I put as much of my work as possible into open-content or public domain not because it is wrong to do otherwise, but because I'm a nice guy who wants to give something back to the community.
There is no moral perogative to publish source code. We don't argue that every novel should include an easily modifiable source, Attack of the Clones should be packaged with the story boards, scripts and musical scores, or that Frank Zappa records must include chording charts. It is nice to do so, it is beneficial to do so, it even may be the best way to release software. But my rights are not violated if a vendor does not open-source software, if I don't like how it works, I brew my own and the software goes in the trash.
It seems to me that there are two choices: The GPL is adopted for purely pragmatic reasons because we can outcompete closed source development. The other is that the GPL is adopted as a principled position.
If we take the first position, then will we stop using Linux the moment something better comes along in terms of features, useability and stability? After all, the existence of BitKeeper proves that, at least in some contexts, that closed source development is superior to Open Source Development models. Doesn't it?
Let me ask you. Should we adopt MicroSoft software if it offers better features and useability? Or... are there other concerns than the narrow "best tool for the job" consideration?
Some of us use closed source because its not just an issue of "best tool for the job" but the closed source is the only tool that works! For an example, my ability to work depends on speech recognition software where I have the choice between and L&H commercial product and an IBM commercial product (although the interface for ViaVoice is open, the speech engine is not.)
Given that in many cases the closed-source commercial software is not only the "best for the job" but stalling on deployment may have a fairly large negative human cost, the purist position is not morally defensible.
I think there are a few things about the definition of libel that have gotten lost in this thread.
1: libel simply establishes the grounds for a civil suit, not criminal penalties. This just means that the plaintiff gets the opportunity to sue.
2: proving libel requires demonstrating not only that your reputation was harmed, but that the published information demonstrates an intentional or negligent disregard for the truth, and cannot be regarded as satire.
3: a quick retraction is frequently a very good defense.
4: even where there certainly appears to be clear negligence on the part of the publisher, the legal environment strongly favors the defendant. For example, while the Blumenthal vs. Drudge case involved a fairly clear case of negligence (an anonymous source along with no attempt to contact the Blumenthals prior to publication) the case went nowhere primarily because Drudge used the First Amendment privilege to keep his sources anonymous. The Blumenthals were faced with a legal fishing expedition for evidence that Drudge's accusations were false and politically motivated, while simultaneously drudge's defense promised to grill everyone associated with the Blumenthals on the stand to prove the accusation. AOL was found blameless in this case also.
Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work, without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
However, I don't see this competative advantage as large enough to ensure that the big distributors don't grab creative works. The commercial example of the X-Box reveals that the big boys are willing to take a hefty loss on each unit sold in order to muscle out any competition. I don't see how anything less than an exclusive limited monopoly has any hope of protecting the artist.
There are literally dozens if not hundreds of possible approaches and variations on this kind of concept, where systems could be put in place that are relatively unobtrusive, help stack the free market in favor of the creative artist without throwing away the free market altogether and granting artificial monopolies the government then has to go around in jackboots enforcing.
Here is probably a fundamental point of disagreement. I don't see copyright as incompatible with a free market. Copywritten works are still just as vunerable to market forces as any other commodity. If you want a copy of my code, my novel, or my movie, you need to negotiate with me on the price. If I price it too high, you buy someone else's code, novel or movie. If you don't like that I am the supplier for my code, my novel or my movie, you can compete and make a better one.
Really calling copyright a monopoly is a bit of a misnomer. It is not as if the government is granting the exclusive right to publish all novels, all audio recordings, to a single person. It only protects one particular instance of an intellectual work, a single string of words, sounds or pixels in a particular order.
In other words, getting back to my original call for an exploration of alternatives to copyright, we should consider designing, from the ground up, a system designed to maximize the freedom of the artist and the society while insuring just compensation (which I would not equate with 'the right to get rich' or 'the right to make sure no one else can make anything on the work', but rather the right to get paid for the work, and perhaps the right to an advantage in the marketplace in trying to get paid for the work) and, most importantly, without trampling on the freedoms of the rest of society at large.
The funny thing is, that right to get paid for work, that right to get an advantage in the marketplace sounds supiciously like a copyright.
I guess a fundamental difference of opinion is that I see the right to control the commercial use of the products I create to be one of those essential freedoms. Isn't there a free speech argument to be made here? If I create something as a political act, what recourse do I have when it gets appropriated without copyright?
There is something ethically lacking in this attitude of, "I have the fundamental right to copy, modify and redistribute anything that is created." Quite a few things that I create are not created to be spread out in the world. I would hate to read the love letters I've created for people published elsewhere.
In fact, I think that copyright fills a serious need that occurs because of ethical lapses. In an ideal world, it shouldn't be a problem to ask for and get permission to use a work. I try to ask for permission whenever I use other people's work, first because I know they appreciate it, and second, out of respect for the artist I don't want to use their work if they don't want it to be used.
And part of the issue is that I don't see that the core notion of copyright, artists have a right to profit from the commercial use of their works, and a right to set the terms of distribution and redistribution, to be the problem here. (Although I do see problems with the current state of copyright law.) Instead, the problem is economic and political. The abuses of copyright are a symptom of a bigger problem, not the cause of our intellectual property woes. ANY form of framework whether it be copyright, copyleft, no copyright, or public domain will be abused in this context. Fix our political and economic system, the problems with copyright vanish.
In my opinion the solution is the creation of alternative economies in which the big boys don't get a chance to play because the copyright is held in common.
The problem is the need to balance competing sets of rights.
Rights of the content creator:
1: To have a work recognized as his/her creation.
2: To receive some of the economic benefits of the use of that work.
3: To place reasonable restrictions on how that work is used to make money. I don't mind giving away work for free, I do mind if it is used to make certain companies richer.
Rights of the content consumer:
1: To create unlimited copies for personal use.
2: To fully enjoy all the benefits of the content.
3: To make personal modifications for non-commercial use.
In addition, I think people are ignoring the fact that copyright can be a powerful tool for political protest. I enjoy the power that copyright gives me to specify that my work can be used freely, as long as it is for non-commercial purposes. This prevents my work from being published by another company.
The problem with treating the GPL as a subversion of copyright is because the GPL goes quite a bit beyond insuring Stallman's 4 freedoms. In the absence of copyright the freedom to use, and the freedom to copy would be enforced. But in the absence of copyright there is no demand for me to release my sorce code. Without copyright there is nothing to prevent microsoft from grabbing GCC, forking its own incompatible version, and releasing it as just executable code (or even wrapping it in an ecrypted layer to prevent decompling). The GPL depends on copyright to force creators of derivative works to release source code along with modifications.
I have offered up some criticisms of your alternative business models. Lets revisit them one by one.
1: Patronage. Patronage has frequently been a serious problem for both free speech and the free market as patrons try to assert control over the artist's work. In addition, there are a number of cases where the person just doesn't get paid.
But there is another issue here which is that patronage reduces the creation of works to simply an hourly job. So lets take a typical case. Studio pays Britney Spears to make a record, they charge a modest fee for distributing copies and being the first on the market. They make a mint, Britney Spears makes $20 an hour. A patronage-only scheme in which only labor is compensated, and the actual created work is considered to be not property doesn't give the artist much room to negotiate more compensation.
2: Buskering. This falls prey to the Wallmart/Starbucks attack. I sell my work for $2.00 a download on kirkjobsluder.org covering the cost of my website and getting pocket money. Disney moves in to kirkjobsluder.com and sells it for $.25. Disney can use its advertising muscle to get my work into the top 100 and it makes thousands of dollars. When my page is shut down, they raise their prices. Most people could consider it to be very unfair that my work only earned me a few dollars while Disney pocketed thousands of dollars.
In addition under a public domain they can always rebrand it as a Britney Spears song.
I think that there is a danger in treating copyright as an evil while ignoring the fact that in many ways it does help independent artists and content creators. There are some creator rights that go along with copyright that are also asserted by the GPL.
1: Legal grounds for proof of authorship. This allows my works to be recognized as my works and not as the work of another entity. This is provided for in the GPL by requiring documentation of changes along with the original GPL license.
2: Control over how the work and derivative work is used. The GPL places quite a few demands on people who redistribute GPL software and create derivative works from GPL software. If I redistribute software I must also redistribute the source code. If I distribute modifications I must also distribute the source code. Neither of these restrictions could exist simply by removing copyright.
In addition, I feel that artists should have some form of image control over their work. For example, I would hate it if I wrote a protest song, only for it to be used by Nike to sell shoes.
The GPL exists for the sole purpose of insuring the 4 freedoms as laid out by the Free Software Foundation: the freedom to use, the freedom to copy, the freedom to modify, and the freedom to share your modifications with others. Without copyright you would have all of these freedoms, and as Richard Stallman himself, the author of the GPL, has said, without copyright the GPL wouldn't be necessary at all.
Without copyright, the GPL can not enforce its demand that redistribution of modifications include either the source code or documentation. Free software ONLY exists because copyright law exists. In the absence of copyright I can repackage any free software as a closed-source program. Granted the binary would be public domain but the source code would be inaccessable.
Thus far, I have backed up my assertions with real world examples of it functioning (albeit not always perfectly). You, on the other hand, have just made a very broad statement without a single shred of evidence to back it up. I do hope your academic publications were a little more rigorous than that.
And I went through one by one and demonstrate how those alterantives are not sufficient to prevent me from robbing you blind.
Only because the goals he wished to achieve, namely the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation stands for, are denied everyone by default because of copyright. He had no other choice but to use copyright to subvert itself ... the alternative was to be unable to insure others the 4 basic freedoms he holds so dear ... indeed he was in the same quandary an artists would be in if they followed the suggestion to just dump their material into the public domain, which copyright then allows others to pilfer without giving back.
A world in which everything is in the public domain can place no restrictions on how works are derived, or how to redistribute those derivative works. The GPL goes quite a bit beyond just negating copyright, it demands that derivative works must include specific types of documentation and source code. In the absence of a copyright, nothing can prevent microsoft from using gcc, making changes, and redistributing it as Visual C++ in a binary-only format without the source code. This of course negates the entire point of the GPL.
I find it fascinating that I am being shouted down for having the audacity to suggest we might include in our discussion the possibility that there might be other regimes that would work better than government mandated monopolies for compensating artists. It is even more interesting now that, when I point to historical examples that exemplify this, you are saying we shouldn't think about those examples.
Of course, patent law goes back to the 15th century so most of the artists you cite worked under an assumption of intelectual property in which plagarism for profit was discouraged, if not forbidden.
No, what I'm saying is more subtle than that. I am saying that, if Time-Warner takes my work and incorporates it into their work, aspects of my work become inaccessible to others because of the TW copyright on their extentions. An example: TW makes a space opera based on my work, using my characters, etc. Now, if someone else wants to make a space opera based on my work and characters, they are confronted with a series of legal landmines they must avoid, lest the infringe on TW's copyrights. As there are only so many ways one can take a particular work and change it around, the danger of stumbling onto one of these landmines, even by accident, is sufficiently great that anyone with any sense would avoid the possiblity altogether ... meaning that my work has thus become less accessible to those who would like to build upon it as a result.
But lets take a look at the view without copyright. Time-Warner can take your work without having to pay for it (because it is in the public domain.) They convert it into a movie that grosses millions of dollars (charging reasonable costs for distributing the derivative work in a high-quality format to cinemas) and you end up without a red cent.
Most people would consider this blatantly unfair.
Granted anybody else can create their own derivate work from that derivative work but still, they don't have the money, the contracts with cinemas, or the networks to compete.
As a result, the public domain suffers from a failure of the commons. The biggest voice with the most money gets the credit. Furthermore, look at what the public domain has done to our conception of Grim's fairy tales. Your original work gets weighed not on its own merits, but against the Disney version.
In other words, it isn't an admission of approval of copyright laws, it is a repudiation of copyright law at its most fundamental level.
Wipe out copyright law. How can a public domain enforce the restrictions of the GPL to publish derivative works with source code? Without copyright law it simply can't. Without copyright law anyone can fork their own version of GCC without source code.
Ok, this is just my point of view as a person who has three academic papers in press. The reason why I want copyright is NOT because I expect to make lots of money off my work, but because I want for my work to be credited to my co-authors and myself rather than to some third party. In fact, I would prefer my work be open-content simply because it would permit other educators to copy and distribute my works in course packets.
One, as others have mentioned, is patronage. It is, in one sense, how most programmers are paid today (most of us work on inhouse software, NOT retail software being sold under copyright. Some of us are fortunate enough to be working on free software or open source projects). It is also how most acters are paid, in another sense. Indeed, arguably it is how any artist or professional is paid who does a "work for hire" where the artist (or professional) in question never enjoys "ownership" of the copyright on the work they produce, or the patent on the work they invent.
However, the restrictions that go along with patronage are even more hostile to the free market than copyright. (For example, patronage can place restrictions such that I can't take my expertise with me when I leave. In addition this just shifts the issue from an individual creator holding a copyright to a corporation holding the copyright.
Another possibility is derivative income. Example: you don't make money on the music, you make money on the performance of the music. Again, this won't change how most bands make money, for example, as they receive most of their revinues from concerts (while their publishers, the record companies, rake in millions via their control of the copyright itself, selling copies of the music on CDs, etc.).
The problem I see with this is for example, I create something for the local church. Since in your world I have no copyright on that work and only get paid for performance, a recording somehow gets sent to somone at Disney who uses the work in their next film. Suddenly, Disney is making millions from their own derivative works while I don't get a penny. Is this necessarily a fair deal? In the absence of copyright law, I can't go to them and say, "hey wait a minute, a song that I made for a specific audience just won an Academy Award and made you millions of dollars.
Another possibility is "busking" or the electronic equivelent thereof via micropayments of one sort or another.
Well again, what is to prevent Disney from copying the file, and setting up their own micropayment system in the absence of copyright? Disney can use its size to leverage promotion getting thousands of dollars on content I produced while my home page gets a few dollars a week.
Another possibility is simply creating wealth and sharing it to ones advantage, much as free software has done for many of us. I make my living off of the deployment of free software, which I can, share, and modify freely despite having not written it myself. The developers in turn make good money, because they are well known and thus in demand. We all win (and though free software is copyrighted by definition, the license is designed to negate the restrictions of copyright). I give back a little in my own way, which further enriches others (perhaps in ways I don't even know about or expect).
I certainly agree that releasing open-source and open-content is a good thing but the GPL IS NOT DESIGNED TO NEGATE THE RESTRICTIONS OF COPYRIGHT, INSTEAD IT DEPENDS ON THEM TO ENSURE THAT DERIVATIVE WORKS ARE ALSO FREE. Without copyright, there can be no copyleft. The ONLY thing that keeps free software free is the existence of a copyright law that permits users to control derivative works.
None of these approaches are perfect, all of them have problems and challenges, but no more so than copyright itself, and assuming your goal is to insure the artist is compensated, and the society is enriched, they are all superior to the copyright regime we now have, or even in its much more benign form as initially implimented in the United States.
In fact, all of these approaches insure the exact opposite.
I'm not convinced by this. Intellectual property insures two things. First that I am given credit for the works that I create. Second that I can make money distributing the works I create.
So first of all, there is a myth that intellectual property didn't exist when Shakespeare was writing and performing his plays. I have my doubts about this. After all, we don't hear of 'John Crapper's Macbeth' primarily because there were social sanctions against writing down the good parts and setting up your own theatre next door.
Without copyright, the credit goes to anyone who publishes first. If I hand you a draft of my screenplay, copyright is the only thing to prevent you from putting your name on it and selling it before I do. You can snoop the next great American novel from someone's hard drive, pay to publish and take home the Pulizer. Even those alternative schemes for compensating artists requires some way of legally identifying the artist as the creator of the work.
There are also other things that are antithetical to both free speech and free markets. For example fraud, claiming your product is something that it is not. Copyright provides a mechanism for certifying that a work was created by the claimed creator rather than the person selling the work. Second, the free market does not demand the sale of stolen works.
I would be happy to see other ways of compensating artists for their work, if their work is not property, then why compensate them?
There is a fundamental fallacy in Stallman's thinking which rests in his conceptualization of software freedom as an extension of free speech. One of the difficulties is that Stallman conceptualizes information in such a way that privacy is nonexistent, because it is ethically wrong for me to place limits on how people use the information I give them. As a researcher, I regularly contract away my freedom to do whatever I want with information in order to ethically protect the people who give me that information. Before I do an interview I give my research participants a piece of paper that says I will keep their data confidential, I will only publish aggregate abstracts of the information they give me without revealing personal names or even information that might be used to identify them, (for example, chief supervisor at Magic Corp.) Not only do I place restrictions on how I can use information, but I also promise that if a participant ever wants to quit the study, I will destroy all of their information. From a GNU perspective making these compromises that are essential to respecting the privacy of my participants and clients is unreasonable.
The freedoms that Stallman declares to be an absolute right are not absolute, they are negotiated between people who provide information and the people who use information. Stallman's insistence on his narrow interpretation of those rights ignores the fact that content and software producers have a right to exclusively profit for and get credit from their work for a limited duration of time. It is interesting that Stallman insists on branding gnu software, while insisting on a intellectual property model which makes such a branding very difficult. Open sourcing software like public domain is an optional service, one that should be encouraged just as we encourage software to be bundled with documentation, but not an absolute right.
In addition, Stallman's perspective makes sense from a programmer's point of view. What Stallman wants is the ability to crack open the source code for any bit of software, modify it, make "improvements" to it, and redistribute those improvements under his own copyright. However, from an end users point of view the freedom to "use" software in order to make money and to be productive is more important than the ability to see under the hood. Technical merit is not just a convenience for end-users, it is a requirement. For example, since I have got repetitive stress injury, my ability to use a computer depends on a commercial speech recognition software that runs under Microsoft Windows. The claim that support of open source requires an open source only desktop would mean doing nothing (except perhaps for tearing tickets at the local movie theater) until an open source speech recognition tool matures (ViaVoice uses a proprietary speech engine). In addition advancing speech recognition as an application is an area that is probably unsuited to open source because it is built on basic research that costs money. Carnegie-Melon's Sphinx is heavily subsidized by the Department of Defense, which is itself ethically problematic for many of us. The groups producing commercial speech recognition software have a right (or rather the freedom) to shrink wrap their product in order to protect their competitive advantage. Another application area where open source is lacking is in non-BibTex bibliography database software. Yest another area where open source not only is lacking in terms of technical merit, but in sheer technical availability is in qualitative research tools for document analysis. As far as I can tell there is only one open source project in this area.
Granted, I don't buy the claim that consumers have no rights at all in regards to software or content other than the rights granted by information providers. But Linus's challenge that if you object to the fact that I am using proprietary software, the me a better application applies. If I did wait for the open source community to develop high-quality speech recognition applications, bibliography database software, and document analysis software, my unemployment would probably run out. Is it better for me to be ethically clean and produce nothing (assuming that I agree with the notion that proprietary software is ethically tainted) or is it better to use open source software where I can, use closed source software where no equivalent exists or is practical, and produce open content of my own?
At any rate I am tempted to apply a GNG liscence to the projects I'm working on (GNG is not Gnu) primarily because I find the claim that referencing closed source, and seeking interoperability with closed source applications is ethically problematic to be itself an ethically problematic statement.
Not only that, but what about the music? The music for Episode I was the first really good work from John Williams in years. The Jedi Fight Scene music is an amazing dramatic work and if you listen to the very end of the credits for Episode one you are treated to a bit of musical foreshadowing as the Episode I theme subtly transforms into Darth Vader's theme.
The music for Attack of the Clones just seems to be lifted directly off of the original Star Wars. Nothing sticks out in my mind two days later.
I agree with you that restrictions are imcompatible with a public domain which is why I don't want my works in a public domain. (What I want is something between GPL and a traditional copyright.) In fact, the GPL is is not "public domain" either.
Pragmatically, non-commercial licenses fill an important need for individual educators and nonprofit groups to share works without having those works gobbled up by commercial interests. If I do work for a nonprofit project, it is not fair to me or to the nonprofit if a publisher were to make money by redistributing that work. Personal and nonprofit clauses fill an important need to get information out while preventing commercial poaching.
Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.
I guess they don't understand the problem you're raising here, or how that problem is any greater than doing media development under any other licensing scheme. If anything, this would simplify the matter because you can assess compatibility based on the key freedoms: copying, distribution of derivative works, attribution, and copyleft.
So since you're planning to distribute your work as a possibly commercial, copyleft, derivative works permitted you would just go search for public domain or licenses that permit derivative works for commercial use.
At least one of the things that really appeals to me about this scheme is that it is modular and it treats the various aspects of licensing independently. I have been looking for a license that would open source some of the things I am currently working on while reserving the exclusive option of closing the copyright on future revisions of the product. I don't agree that the ability to use all works is really essential or even desirable. For example, I might design something specifically for a nonprofit, and I might want to keep that license as a nonprofit in order to prevent commercial enterprises from poaching it.
Or I might want to exercise some ethical screening on how my product is used in order to make money. So while I might want to open distribution and derivative works for noncommercial purposes, I might restrict commercial distribution on a case-by-case basis.