What you write may be true, but a company *should* worry over high turn-over. People work better when they're familiar with the work situation. They cooperate better when they're familiar with each other. It's not a disaster, but it's less efficient.
You're welcome to try your luck in Sweden. As long as you have a job here, you can get a work visa indefinitely, and after five to ten yours, you become naturalised (meaning, you can choose to change your citizenship).
Just be aware that there are ups and downs to every country. I've never been to the USA, but I suspect the political correctness is much worse here. You're expected to fit in, be polite and avoid open conflicts, and that includes the workplace.
Swedish leadership culture may take some time to get used to; often, the boss and the staff sits around and talks until they find a solution everyone is reasonably happy with. For an outsider, it may seem like nothing has been decided at all, because the group slowly converges to the decision during the discussion.
It's very important to me to be able to fuck off from my job. I skip out early, I take days off, I ignore phone calls after hours. As long as I get the job done during the day, I don't care what people think. I am a slacker, and I enjoy it. Life's too short to fret over the grindstone. Don't take life too seriously!
I think there's a large difference between the European and American culture here. In the USA, laziness is the greater sin, while in Europe, greed is the greater sin.
For example, here in Sweden, it's perfectly okay to say, "I'm only working half-time now so I can spend more time with my family" or "... so I can spend more time on my hobbies." As long as you don't rely on others to support you, it may even be met with admiration, because it shows you have the right values. But if you said "I took an extra job so I could afford to buy a bigger house", people would raise their eyebrows and think you were a little greedy. I imagine it's the other way around in the USA.
I think paper is safer than e-voting machines, because they can be independently checked by representatives from different parties as they're counted. With electronic voting systems - at least the current ones - you have to give full trust to a single person in each locale (the expert who handles the machine).
Would banks keep buying ATMs from Diebold if they lost money from them frequently?
They do lose money from them frequently. Every now and then there's a newspaper article about how fraudsters skim money from the machines, for example, by placing a false front on them that traps the customers' money. And we only hear about the losses that directly affect customers - the banks keep quiet about the losses that only affects them internally, so as to not lose their customers' confidence.
I'm not a security expert by any stretch of the imagination but I could probably make a "good enough" ballot machine with about $1500 and a couple hours time. Secure it physically as much as possible, set up two-factor authentication with a SmartCard and password (or even 3-factor with biometrics if you want to get silly), set syslogd to silently log things remotely, and have the machine dump the votes to a central machine now and then over a VPN. Set up an analytics system which monitors the transactions in real time and reports irregularities to a central authority which can freeze the voting machines if necessary. This is an extremely basic setup but I honestly do not see how it's any less secure than paper ballots.
It sounds prohibitively expensive, though, when you consider the cost of handing out smartcards to all the millions of registered voters, and then handling millions of forgotten password requests a few days before the election.
It might work in a future where everyone is already using a multi-purpose smartcard.
And there are movies that don't make enough money to be profitable until they hit dvd racks. Not to mention movies and shows that are "straight to DVD". And the argument that straight to DVD is solely made up of poor quality and probably shouldn't be made is not valid because some people do enjoy those movies despite they don't have wide appeal. My niece's favorite movie when she was younger was Aladdin. She loved the straight to dvd sequels too.
In practice, this problem doesn't seem to be so big. There's a huge and profitable market that produces straight-to-DVD movies, and historically hasn't bothered to prosecute copyright infringement: the porn market.
One of the reasons it works, is probably becuase the producer invests less in movies which are released straight to DVD.
On the other hand, do people take the term "pirate" so seriously? When someone says "pirate", I think of someone in 17th century garb and a parrot on their shoulder. To me, it sounds more quaint than dangerous. But your mileage may vary.
Well, I see your point. Five years should be enough for most minor works. The bureaucracy would only increase for those few works who are profitable after five years.
How would that prevent them from becoming well-known? If x people read your book, they're just as likely to remember your name regardless of whether they read an authorised copy or a "pirated" one.
Even the Pirate Party wants to retain the creator's right to attribution.
More importantly: it's a well know fact today that their exists certain 'recipes' to make a successful work of art if what you are aiming for is money.
Oh dear God, is that why so American movies tend to have such stereotypical characters and story lines?
Bankrupting Hollywood would in itself be a good reason to abolish copyright... but unfortunately, I don't think abolishing copyright will affect their profits that much. There are many other ways to make a profit from commercial film.
These comments then get modded up by others, who also mistakenly believe copyright only exists for profit.
Do you ever feel it get you down, like it's a losing battle? You never seem to, even in face of people like these. For myself, it feels horribly depressing and futile even trying to get someone to click a provided link to the constitution, as they simply ignore it and continue to parrot this made up notion that art only exists to make money.
How do you do it?
I can't speak for the GP, but I feel good every time I go to the Pirate Bay and look at how many downloaders my torrents have. That's a battle I'm winning every day.
I can't be sure, but I think the current copyright system is so unsustainable it will collapse sooner or later. If the politicians don't change the law, it'll just be ignored and circumvented until it becomes irrelevant.
It means that if you grant a limited copyright, the corporations that benefit from it will lobby to extend it more and more, until we're stuck with ridiculously long copyright terms and a very limited definition of fair use again.
They'll use the very money they earn from the copyright monopoly to grow strong and fund the lobbyists that give them even longer copyright.
Now, if we could only get people to trade the pictures of said child rapes on the Internet, the profit would go out of the industry, and all child pornography producers would be forced to shut down, thus eliminating child pornography.
Or at least, that's how it works according to the proponents of copyright.
I used to ignore copyright... until I started producing works of my own, and realized that the effort that goes into creating a really great song, an entertaining movie, a well-crafted story, or a well-rendered illustration deserves compensation.
For me, it has worked the other way. Writing creatively has made me realise that I'm unlikely to make any huge profits even if I become very good at what I do, and the most important thing is to be read and enjoyed by people.
But the GGP suggested that nobody would bother to create anything if it could be freely copied... which is demonstrably false by example of Wikipedia and GNU.
Eliminate laws against stealing, and you can do anything you want! Genius!
Reality: do that and NO ONE will create much of anything. Only fucking douchebag communists think people are that generous with their lives. Usually by force.
Like free software authors. Those douchebag communists!
Copyright may have a good purpose, but even so, I find it very hard to justify a copyright term longer than a few years. Most of the revenue from most published works have already been collected within a few years. The rest of the copyright term only benefits a very small number of very successful artists, and, more importantly, corporations that have collected portfolios of successful works (think Disney, or the record companies that own Elvis Presley's and The Beatles' music).
And even in those cases, a longer copyright may create negative incentive - it becomes more profitable to capitalise on your old successes than to create something new.
If Walmart bothers to copy and sell your book, you're either pretty well-known or will become so. You can get people to visit your Internet site, get invited to talk shows, get people to pay for hearing your lectures, pay you to do consultancy jobs for them (for example, writing educational material, or writing an episode of a TV series), and so on.
If you're not so well-known from the start, having Walmart put your books in front of millions people could be the most profitable thing that happened to you...
And that difference, means it would be nearly impossible to monetize anything except physical products. So copyrights are needed and are important.
Counterexample: The fashion industry goes along quite well without protected designs. People pay more - a lot more - for a well-known brand like Dior or Chanel than for an identically-looking copy.
Counterexample: Shakespeare made good money by taking old plays written by other people, re-working them for a contemporary audience, and getting into the theatre business - all without copyright. As a side effect, he also created literature that over a hundred years after his death started to be regarded as some of the foremost in the English language.
Counterexample: Many modern music artists find it more profitable to give away their music as free downloads, and earn money on concerts and merchandise. On the whole, there are more artists, more albums released, and a higher revenue per artist than ten years ago. It's not as pardoxical as it sounds, when you consider that artists that publish through conventional record labels only get around 10% of the sales price of a CD. Eliminating the middlemen means more money for the creators.
Precisely... if I make a good product (say, a better mousetrap), I'm not automatically entitled to a financial reward for it. I also have to market it, get production and logistics to work well, find an outlet, and so on. Then, if I do a good job and am lucky, I may get a profit. But I'm not entitled to it. It's my own responsibility to make sure my product results in a profit, no matter how good it is.
The same is true for artists. They can't expect society to bend backwards to give them a profit, just because they make good art. If they want their good art to result in monetary rewards, it's their own responsibility to come up with a business idea, market it and carry it through.
But tell me again why they are bothering to even release these DVDs if their only option is to sell it at a 1 cent markup?
If they wouldn't bother to sell it at a 1 cent markup, then their competitors wouldn't bother either, which means they can sell it at a 2 cent markup without risking someone undercutting their price. If that's too little to be worth it, it's not worth it for their competitors either, which means they can sell it at a 3 cent markup, and so on. There's always a point where it's barely profitable to release the DVD, and therefore nobody tries to undecut your prices.
In fact, the exact same argument can be applied to any commodity on the market. For example, in the case of cars, you could say:
"If anybody could sell cars, competitors would start undercutting each other's prices, and the profit margin would go down to zero. Thus, nobody would bother to sell cars on an open market, and therefore, we need a monopoly on cars."
The argument is wrong for cars for precisely the same reason it's wrong for film DVDs. Since we're talking about films which have already been produced and recouped their investment at the theatres, selling DVDs of them is not different from selling any other physical product.
I'm missing something in this entire debate. If copyrights were abolished, why would "app store sized games [] be released by the millions?"
That may be an exaggeration by the GP, but I think copyright abolition would stimulate the creation of new works.
In the case of apps, you could take thousands of old console, arcade and home computer games and package them as cheap apps for cellphones, laptops and tablets. This doesn't get done under the copyright monopoly because it's too hard and expensive to even find out who owns the copyright to a game. The original production company is likely to be out of business or merged and sold several times, but thanks to pirates, it's possible to obtain copies of these old games.
Same thing with books - there are literally millions of books which can't be included in projects such as Gutenberg because they're still in copyright, but for most of the works, it's practically impossible to find the copyright holder. If copyright was reduced to a more sensible time frame, these millions of books could be available on any iPad, Kindle, tablet, cellphone or PC at the touch of a button.
Documentary film makers face a similar problem, since they use hundreds of film clips and photographs, and need to obtain the rights to them before they can release their documentary. There are actually documentaries which are completely finished but can't be released, because the maker can't afford the rights.
In the case of music, we can already see the creativity that happens when copyright is ignored on YouTube. People make remixes and combine music and video from different sources. Most of these are actually illegal, but often ignored by the copyright holders because they're harmless.
In the case of japanese comic books (manga), ignoring copyright has allowed a large number of them to be translated into English by fans, even though it's not commercially viable. The same is true for japanese animation (animé) - they're translated, subbed and put up on the Internet for free by fans, and thus become available to people who would otherwise never had the chance to read/watch them.
As for obtaining revenue... Most authors and music artists can't live off their art, and that's always been the case. Of those that can, most derive their income from secondary sources, such as performances and merchandise. Many music artists have already discovered that they're better off economically by giving their music away for free and get people to come to their concerts and buy their merchandise. I suspect the same will be true for literary authors: they'll discover they can give their books away as free downloads, and earn more money by selling bound and signed editions, holding lectures, workshops and private readings, and so on.
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he wants the government reduced to a single employee who is not paid by citizens but rather by their own existing wealth.
Ron Paul wants monarchy?
What you write may be true, but a company *should* worry over high turn-over. People work better when they're familiar with the work situation. They cooperate better when they're familiar with each other. It's not a disaster, but it's less efficient.
You're welcome to try your luck in Sweden. As long as you have a job here, you can get a work visa indefinitely, and after five to ten yours, you become naturalised (meaning, you can choose to change your citizenship).
Just be aware that there are ups and downs to every country. I've never been to the USA, but I suspect the political correctness is much worse here. You're expected to fit in, be polite and avoid open conflicts, and that includes the workplace.
Swedish leadership culture may take some time to get used to; often, the boss and the staff sits around and talks until they find a solution everyone is reasonably happy with. For an outsider, it may seem like nothing has been decided at all, because the group slowly converges to the decision during the discussion.
It's very important to me to be able to fuck off from my job. I skip out early, I take days off, I ignore phone calls after hours. As long as I get the job done during the day, I don't care what people think. I am a slacker, and I enjoy it. Life's too short to fret over the grindstone. Don't take life too seriously!
I think there's a large difference between the European and American culture here. In the USA, laziness is the greater sin, while in Europe, greed is the greater sin.
For example, here in Sweden, it's perfectly okay to say, "I'm only working half-time now so I can spend more time with my family" or "... so I can spend more time on my hobbies." As long as you don't rely on others to support you, it may even be met with admiration, because it shows you have the right values. But if you said "I took an extra job so I could afford to buy a bigger house", people would raise their eyebrows and think you were a little greedy. I imagine it's the other way around in the USA.
What if we do all that, and the best electronic system we can make is less secure than paper, or much more expensive?
I think paper is safer than e-voting machines, because they can be independently checked by representatives from different parties as they're counted. With electronic voting systems - at least the current ones - you have to give full trust to a single person in each locale (the expert who handles the machine).
Would banks keep buying ATMs from Diebold if they lost money from them frequently?
They do lose money from them frequently. Every now and then there's a newspaper article about how fraudsters skim money from the machines, for example, by placing a false front on them that traps the customers' money. And we only hear about the losses that directly affect customers - the banks keep quiet about the losses that only affects them internally, so as to not lose their customers' confidence.
I'm not a security expert by any stretch of the imagination but I could probably make a "good enough" ballot machine with about $1500 and a couple hours time. Secure it physically as much as possible, set up two-factor authentication with a SmartCard and password (or even 3-factor with biometrics if you want to get silly), set syslogd to silently log things remotely, and have the machine dump the votes to a central machine now and then over a VPN. Set up an analytics system which monitors the transactions in real time and reports irregularities to a central authority which can freeze the voting machines if necessary. This is an extremely basic setup but I honestly do not see how it's any less secure than paper ballots.
It sounds prohibitively expensive, though, when you consider the cost of handing out smartcards to all the millions of registered voters, and then handling millions of forgotten password requests a few days before the election.
It might work in a future where everyone is already using a multi-purpose smartcard.
And there are movies that don't make enough money to be profitable until they hit dvd racks. Not to mention movies and shows that are "straight to DVD". And the argument that straight to DVD is solely made up of poor quality and probably shouldn't be made is not valid because some people do enjoy those movies despite they don't have wide appeal. My niece's favorite movie when she was younger was Aladdin. She loved the straight to dvd sequels too.
In practice, this problem doesn't seem to be so big. There's a huge and profitable market that produces straight-to-DVD movies, and historically hasn't bothered to prosecute copyright infringement: the porn market.
One of the reasons it works, is probably becuase the producer invests less in movies which are released straight to DVD.
On the other hand, do people take the term "pirate" so seriously? When someone says "pirate", I think of someone in 17th century garb and a parrot on their shoulder. To me, it sounds more quaint than dangerous. But your mileage may vary.
Pirating is not justified - it's a duty.
Well, I see your point. Five years should be enough for most minor works. The bureaucracy would only increase for those few works who are profitable after five years.
How would that prevent them from becoming well-known? If x people read your book, they're just as likely to remember your name regardless of whether they read an authorised copy or a "pirated" one.
Even the Pirate Party wants to retain the creator's right to attribution.
More importantly: it's a well know fact today that their exists certain 'recipes' to make a successful work of art if what you are aiming for is money.
Oh dear God, is that why so American movies tend to have such stereotypical characters and story lines?
Bankrupting Hollywood would in itself be a good reason to abolish copyright... but unfortunately, I don't think abolishing copyright will affect their profits that much. There are many other ways to make a profit from commercial film.
These comments then get modded up by others, who also mistakenly believe copyright only exists for profit.
Do you ever feel it get you down, like it's a losing battle? You never seem to, even in face of people like these.
For myself, it feels horribly depressing and futile even trying to get someone to click a provided link to the constitution, as they simply ignore it and continue to parrot this made up notion that art only exists to make money.
How do you do it?
I can't speak for the GP, but I feel good every time I go to the Pirate Bay and look at how many downloaders my torrents have. That's a battle I'm winning every day.
I can't be sure, but I think the current copyright system is so unsustainable it will collapse sooner or later. If the politicians don't change the law, it'll just be ignored and circumvented until it becomes irrelevant.
It means that if you grant a limited copyright, the corporations that benefit from it will lobby to extend it more and more, until we're stuck with ridiculously long copyright terms and a very limited definition of fair use again.
They'll use the very money they earn from the copyright monopoly to grow strong and fund the lobbyists that give them even longer copyright.
Now, if we could only get people to trade the pictures of said child rapes on the Internet, the profit would go out of the industry, and all child pornography producers would be forced to shut down, thus eliminating child pornography.
Or at least, that's how it works according to the proponents of copyright.
I used to ignore copyright... until I started producing works of my own, and realized that the effort that goes into creating a really great song, an entertaining movie, a well-crafted story, or a well-rendered illustration deserves compensation.
For me, it has worked the other way. Writing creatively has made me realise that I'm unlikely to make any huge profits even if I become very good at what I do, and the most important thing is to be read and enjoyed by people.
But the GGP suggested that nobody would bother to create anything if it could be freely copied... which is demonstrably false by example of Wikipedia and GNU.
Eliminate laws against stealing, and you can do anything you want! Genius!
Reality: do that and NO ONE will create much of anything. Only fucking douchebag communists think people are that generous with their lives. Usually by force.
Like free software authors. Those douchebag communists!
Copyright may have a good purpose, but even so, I find it very hard to justify a copyright term longer than a few years. Most of the revenue from most published works have already been collected within a few years. The rest of the copyright term only benefits a very small number of very successful artists, and, more importantly, corporations that have collected portfolios of successful works (think Disney, or the record companies that own Elvis Presley's and The Beatles' music).
And even in those cases, a longer copyright may create negative incentive - it becomes more profitable to capitalise on your old successes than to create something new.
If Walmart bothers to copy and sell your book, you're either pretty well-known or will become so. You can get people to visit your Internet site, get invited to talk shows, get people to pay for hearing your lectures, pay you to do consultancy jobs for them (for example, writing educational material, or writing an episode of a TV series), and so on.
If you're not so well-known from the start, having Walmart put your books in front of millions people could be the most profitable thing that happened to you...
And that difference, means it would be nearly impossible to monetize anything except physical products. So copyrights are needed and are important.
Counterexample: The fashion industry goes along quite well without protected designs. People pay more - a lot more - for a well-known brand like Dior or Chanel than for an identically-looking copy.
Counterexample: Shakespeare made good money by taking old plays written by other people, re-working them for a contemporary audience, and getting into the theatre business - all without copyright. As a side effect, he also created literature that over a hundred years after his death started to be regarded as some of the foremost in the English language.
Counterexample: Many modern music artists find it more profitable to give away their music as free downloads, and earn money on concerts and merchandise. On the whole, there are more artists, more albums released, and a higher revenue per artist than ten years ago. It's not as pardoxical as it sounds, when you consider that artists that publish through conventional record labels only get around 10% of the sales price of a CD. Eliminating the middlemen means more money for the creators.
Precisely... if I make a good product (say, a better mousetrap), I'm not automatically entitled to a financial reward for it. I also have to market it, get production and logistics to work well, find an outlet, and so on. Then, if I do a good job and am lucky, I may get a profit. But I'm not entitled to it. It's my own responsibility to make sure my product results in a profit, no matter how good it is.
The same is true for artists. They can't expect society to bend backwards to give them a profit, just because they make good art. If they want their good art to result in monetary rewards, it's their own responsibility to come up with a business idea, market it and carry it through.
But tell me again why they are bothering to even release these DVDs if their only option is to sell it at a 1 cent markup?
If they wouldn't bother to sell it at a 1 cent markup, then their competitors wouldn't bother either, which means they can sell it at a 2 cent markup without risking someone undercutting their price. If that's too little to be worth it, it's not worth it for their competitors either, which means they can sell it at a 3 cent markup, and so on. There's always a point where it's barely profitable to release the DVD, and therefore nobody tries to undecut your prices.
In fact, the exact same argument can be applied to any commodity on the market. For example, in the case of cars, you could say:
"If anybody could sell cars, competitors would start undercutting each other's prices, and the profit margin would go down to zero. Thus, nobody would bother to sell cars on an open market, and therefore, we need a monopoly on cars."
The argument is wrong for cars for precisely the same reason it's wrong for film DVDs. Since we're talking about films which have already been produced and recouped their investment at the theatres, selling DVDs of them is not different from selling any other physical product.
I'm missing something in this entire debate. If copyrights were abolished, why would "app store sized games [] be released by the millions?"
That may be an exaggeration by the GP, but I think copyright abolition would stimulate the creation of new works.
In the case of apps, you could take thousands of old console, arcade and home computer games and package them as cheap apps for cellphones, laptops and tablets. This doesn't get done under the copyright monopoly because it's too hard and expensive to even find out who owns the copyright to a game. The original production company is likely to be out of business or merged and sold several times, but thanks to pirates, it's possible to obtain copies of these old games.
Same thing with books - there are literally millions of books which can't be included in projects such as Gutenberg because they're still in copyright, but for most of the works, it's practically impossible to find the copyright holder. If copyright was reduced to a more sensible time frame, these millions of books could be available on any iPad, Kindle, tablet, cellphone or PC at the touch of a button.
Documentary film makers face a similar problem, since they use hundreds of film clips and photographs, and need to obtain the rights to them before they can release their documentary. There are actually documentaries which are completely finished but can't be released, because the maker can't afford the rights.
In the case of music, we can already see the creativity that happens when copyright is ignored on YouTube. People make remixes and combine music and video from different sources. Most of these are actually illegal, but often ignored by the copyright holders because they're harmless.
In the case of japanese comic books (manga), ignoring copyright has allowed a large number of them to be translated into English by fans, even though it's not commercially viable. The same is true for japanese animation (animé) - they're translated, subbed and put up on the Internet for free by fans, and thus become available to people who would otherwise never had the chance to read/watch them.
As for obtaining revenue... Most authors and music artists can't live off their art, and that's always been the case. Of those that can, most derive their income from secondary sources, such as performances and merchandise. Many music artists have already discovered that they're better off economically by giving their music away for free and get people to come to their concerts and buy their merchandise. I suspect the same will be true for literary authors: they'll discover they can give their books away as free downloads, and earn more money by selling bound and signed editions, holding lectures, workshops and private readings, and so on.
Publishing someone's work without any attribution at all isn't plagiarism, but it still violates the right to attribution.
And yes, the "right to attribution" is explicitly written into European copyright laws.