That being said, I don't think abolishing copyright will mean the end of commercial media, since there are many other ways to make money from them. For example, most blockbuster movies make most of their profit in the first one or two weeks, and people are willing to pay a premium to see the film early, with high quality, and added value features like 3D and advanced sound systems. TV productions are almost entirely financed by advertisements, not future DVD sales. Most artists already earn most of their income from concerts, not from CD/downloadable music sales. And so on.
There are thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who bought a Nintendo DS and an R4 (or other type of flash card) and have not bought any games since. Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?
No, but the question is, would those people have bought a Nintendo DS at all if they couldn't use pirate copies on it?
A pirated copy does not always mean a lost sale but it is equally wrong to assume that no sales are lost due to piracy. Overall a pirated copy from a statistical POV represents a fraction of a lost sale.
That's what common sense would lead you to believe, but there are now a number of studies showing that piracy acts as a marketing device and stimulates sales, and that the net effect on sales is roughly zero.
With piracy, people also tend to save the money they buy music for (of which only about 10% reaches the artist), and instead use them on concerts and merchandise (on which a much higher percentage reaches the artist). This could help explain why the average income of music artists have actually increased in the last decade, despite file sharing and the total number of artists also increasing. In Norway, the average income has increased by 66%, and in Sweden, by over 30%, despite the total number of music artists increasing in both countries during the same period.
Back in the real world, if you turned off the tap water the sale of bottled water would increase even if people could drink milk or juice or soda or beer. Maybe if people had to pay for water they'd drink less or drink something else, but trying to argue it would have no effect is burying your head deeply in the sand.
True, but then you have to argue that piracy has a substantial damaging effect on the incomes of artists, and that argument is effectively crushed both by the fact that artists' incomes have increased, and by independent academic studies showing that piracy doesn't lead to a net loss in sales.
So what? It's a fact. In the case of music published by record companies, most artists only see about 10% of the retail price of their music (a little more for CDs, a little less for online sales). A large number of music artists have discovered they can earn more money by publishing the music themselves, or giving the music away for free and getting their income from concerts and merchandised, since that enables them to keep a much larger percentage of the revenues.
These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
I think your reasoning is perfectly sound, but that it may be based on an erroneous assumption. Surprisingly enough, piracy doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the revenues generated from songs, films and other media, and may even increase the percentage of the revenue which reaches the author.
There are now a number of studies showing that 1) the people who pirate the most music are also the ones who attend the most concerts and spend the most money overall on music, 2) the total revenues generated by music have steadily increased during the decade in which file sharing has exploded (1999 and onwards), 3) the vast majority of music artists never got most of their income from CD sales, but instead from sources like concerts and merchandise, 4) the average income per music artist has increased substantially during the last decade, *even though* the number of artists have also increased substantially, and 5) the number of music albums produced and published has exploded during the last decade.
(Please note that these studies are from all over the world; not all of them are based on the US-American market, even though they should tell us something about how music markets in general work.)
The case is not as clear-cut for other media, since there is less data and less studies, but the total revenues generated by films and computer games have also increased steadily during the last decade, despite the explosion in file sharing.
This has lead me to believe that the world may actually be better off with no copyright at all, although it would be a good idea to decrease the strength of copyright gradually and look at the effects.
Without a hard limit, there's always the risk that some time in the future, processing power will take a sudden leap, and the market will be flooded with a huge number of BitCoins.
Actually, I think using World of Warcraft gold as currency should work very well in the short term for those who want to trade real-world goods of lesser value, but it has a number of drawbacks:
1. It's dependent on a centralised server, so can be easily tracked or disrupted. 2. It's controlled by a single company, so it may lose its value the day Blizzard decides to discontinue the game. 3. The supply isn't fixed, but may be changed at a whim when the rules of the World of Warcraft game are changed. This could cause the value to fluctuate wildly.
BitCoins solve all three of these problems, by being 1) P2P-based, 2) defined by math and convention instead of being controlled by an organisation, and 3) having a mathematically defined limited supply.
That wouldn't be grammatical... "in half a decade" means "half a decade into the future", while "over half a decade" means "during the course of half a decade".
Someone should not be discriminated against because they disagree on any subject--as long as their research and performance don't suffer.
I would agree with you, if not for the fact that the proposal singles out one particular loony opinion and legitimises it. It's clearly designed to favour one particular brand of religion.
Furthermore, the law proposal could be interpreted in such a way that a college professor can't be fired for teaching creationism in science class.
I think it's a mistake to look at the storyline in a computer game and compare it to literature, look at the graphics and compare it to movies or paintings, etc. You need to look at the game as a whole to make a meaningful assessment. And to do that, you need to get your hands dirty and actually play it for an extended period of time. Only then do the strengths of computer games appear: interactivity, immersion and problem-solving.
Different forms of art compete in different categories. If motion pictures had been judged by the standard of stage plays when they first appeared, they'd have been dismissed as shallow, crude and completely lacking in dialogue. And it would have been just as unfair as comparing computer games to literature or visual arts.
Perhaps there are no computer games which can be considered truly great works of art (although I think the original Civilization game should qualify), but popular art is also an important form of art.
I agree. At my workplace, a lot of sites are blocked. But when you try to access a blocked site, it says roughly: "This site has been blocked to safeguard bandwidth for core business processes. If you are sure you have a business reason to visit this site, please click here." And if you click the link, you're redirected to the actual site. And that's enough to discourage people - if they click the link, they can't say they went to the site by mistake, or didn't know it wasn't allowed.
All power in our Constitution therefore derives from the States, not the Federal government itself. It was just a construct of convenience, making it easier for them to trade among themselves and provide for a common defense.
That's very similar to how the EU started. It has it roots in (mostly) voluntary trade agreements, before the member nations gave it independent legislative power and aspirations at becoming a European super-state. There's even talk about appointing a common European president.
I think it's a general principle that governments and beareucracies tend to grow and extend their sphere of influence over time, unless something drastic happens. Even the parties which are against the EU (like the Greens) quickly discover that lobbying within the EU is the most efficient way to achieve their political goals (regarding the environment). The rewards with central legislation are direct and tempting, while the negative side effects are spread out and accumulate over time.
I think it's only recently that defense has been coordinated within the EU, though, since Western European nations had their own armies and coordinated their defense with eachother and with the USA within the NATO agreement.
So regardless of anybody's opinion of how it stood morally, the Federal government acted quite illegally and outside its authority in making war against the South. And nothing has changed in that regard. If it did the same today, it would be just as illegal and outside its authority as it was then.
I guess we agree then. I just thought it sounded odd to say that the South was partially responsible for the war, since they refused to stay in the union. To me, it sounded a little like saying that a victim of robbery has partial responsibility in being shot, since he refused to give up his money.
But to explain my original point more fully: the Civil War did nothing to change anything in (or out of) the Constitution in regard to States' rights.
I'll have to trust you on this one.
We have roughly the same situation in Europe since the European Union formed - the member nations of the EU give up part of their legislative power and have to accept what the majority decides.
EU "laws" don't apply directly in the member nations, though. The EU only issues directives telling the member nations what their laws should look like. Each member nation is then obliged to change and amend their own laws so they conform to the minimum requirements in the EU directive. The directive doesn't apply within a nation until it has been implemented in national law.
So there's no equivalent to a "Federal crime" in the EU - only the national laws apply to the people within a country.
After seeing what a mire of beareucracy, lobbying and corruption the EU has become, I'm starting to think it's better if each nation keeps their full legislative power, and only cooperate through voluntary agreements. It's easier to keep checks on your national government than on the huge and distant EU government. Most people have no idea what's going on there, or even how the EU's legislative process works.
Well, I was referring to the USA, not democracies. I meant that the USA could put a constitutional cap on the budget to prevent overspending. Sorry for being unclear.
That being said, you're using a very strict definition of "democracy". In modern usage, the word doesn't refer to specific form of government. It refers to any form of government which fulfills a number of minimum requirements, like free elections and freedom of speech.
The bill the article refers to uses the term "pure democracy", and if you rephrase your statement using that term, I would agree.
Not exactly. The northern states told the southern states (very possibly incorrectly) that they had no right to secede. The southern states then resolved to do so anyway, by force if necessary.
The North may have been the aggressor, but both sides were prepared to go to war over the issue.
I may be missing something, but that sounds like weasel talk to me. if the Northern states tried to make the Southern states stay in the union, and the Southern states just wanted to be left alone, then it was the Northern states who used force.
There's a huge difference between forcing someone to do something, and using force to defend yourself when someone tries to force you to do something. In the former case, you're trying to impose your will on someone, in the latter case, you are only trying to keep someone from imposing their will on you.
Of course, the Civil War may be justified for a number of other reasons, I'm just objecting to what I perceive to be a distortion of the facts.
hink you are wrong, I don't see the US system covered by the wikipedia definition for democracy, or any other "sane" definition I have heard. Some people will claim the US is indeed a "representative democracy", however that cannot be correct, since the US citizens do not elect their representatives. Instead, the elect the people who will elect their representatives.
I don't think that's enough to disqualify the USA as a democracy. It only means there are two levels of indirection between the people and the actual decisions, instead of just one. Technically speaking, you don't vote for your political representatives in parliamentary systems either - you vote for a party which has pre-appointed a list of representatives, who are then assigned to parliamentary seats according to how many votes the party gets.
I don't think that's a generally accepted meaning of the word "democracy" - a "democracy" can be with or without individual rights, without or without a constitution, with or without elected representatives, etc.
Calling the USA a "republic" doesn't make it clear that it guarantees individual rights, either - a better way would be to include the word "constitutional", since it's the constitution which limits the power of the majority.
Slashdot Mirror
I will hide here: http://www.jamendo.com/
... and a myriad of other places on the Internet, including those where I publish my own works.
Or here: http://listen.grooveshark.com/
And here: http://www.fsf.org/
And definitely here: http://creativecommons.org/
And why not here: http://www.fanfiction.net/
Or here: http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
That being said, I don't think abolishing copyright will mean the end of commercial media, since there are many other ways to make money from them. For example, most blockbuster movies make most of their profit in the first one or two weeks, and people are willing to pay a premium to see the film early, with high quality, and added value features like 3D and advanced sound systems. TV productions are almost entirely financed by advertisements, not future DVD sales. Most artists already earn most of their income from concerts, not from CD/downloadable music sales. And so on.
Eh... it matters for most users. We want everyone to contribute to pirating, not just the tech experts, don't we?
There are thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who bought a Nintendo DS and an R4 (or other type of flash card) and have not bought any games since. Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?
No, but the question is, would those people have bought a Nintendo DS at all if they couldn't use pirate copies on it?
A pirated copy does not always mean a lost sale but it is equally wrong to assume that no sales are lost due to piracy. Overall a pirated copy from a statistical POV represents a fraction of a lost sale.
That's what common sense would lead you to believe, but there are now a number of studies showing that piracy acts as a marketing device and stimulates sales, and that the net effect on sales is roughly zero.
With piracy, people also tend to save the money they buy music for (of which only about 10% reaches the artist), and instead use them on concerts and merchandise (on which a much higher percentage reaches the artist). This could help explain why the average income of music artists have actually increased in the last decade, despite file sharing and the total number of artists also increasing. In Norway, the average income has increased by 66%, and in Sweden, by over 30%, despite the total number of music artists increasing in both countries during the same period.
Back in the real world, if you turned off the tap water the sale of bottled water would increase even if people could drink milk or juice or soda or beer. Maybe if people had to pay for water they'd drink less or drink something else, but trying to argue it would have no effect is burying your head deeply in the sand.
True, but then you have to argue that piracy has a substantial damaging effect on the incomes of artists, and that argument is effectively crushed both by the fact that artists' incomes have increased, and by independent academic studies showing that piracy doesn't lead to a net loss in sales.
So what? It's a fact. In the case of music published by record companies, most artists only see about 10% of the retail price of their music (a little more for CDs, a little less for online sales). A large number of music artists have discovered they can earn more money by publishing the music themselves, or giving the music away for free and getting their income from concerts and merchandised, since that enables them to keep a much larger percentage of the revenues.
These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
I think your reasoning is perfectly sound, but that it may be based on an erroneous assumption. Surprisingly enough, piracy doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the revenues generated from songs, films and other media, and may even increase the percentage of the revenue which reaches the author.
There are now a number of studies showing that 1) the people who pirate the most music are also the ones who attend the most concerts and spend the most money overall on music, 2) the total revenues generated by music have steadily increased during the decade in which file sharing has exploded (1999 and onwards), 3) the vast majority of music artists never got most of their income from CD sales, but instead from sources like concerts and merchandise, 4) the average income per music artist has increased substantially during the last decade, *even though* the number of artists have also increased substantially, and 5) the number of music albums produced and published has exploded during the last decade.
(Please note that these studies are from all over the world; not all of them are based on the US-American market, even though they should tell us something about how music markets in general work.)
The case is not as clear-cut for other media, since there is less data and less studies, but the total revenues generated by films and computer games have also increased steadily during the last decade, despite the explosion in file sharing.
This has lead me to believe that the world may actually be better off with no copyright at all, although it would be a good idea to decrease the strength of copyright gradually and look at the effects.
Without a hard limit, there's always the risk that some time in the future, processing power will take a sudden leap, and the market will be flooded with a huge number of BitCoins.
Also, the value of existing BitCoins rise as more people want to buy it (deflation).
Actually, I think using World of Warcraft gold as currency should work very well in the short term for those who want to trade real-world goods of lesser value, but it has a number of drawbacks:
1. It's dependent on a centralised server, so can be easily tracked or disrupted.
2. It's controlled by a single company, so it may lose its value the day Blizzard decides to discontinue the game.
3. The supply isn't fixed, but may be changed at a whim when the rules of the World of Warcraft game are changed. This could cause the value to fluctuate wildly.
BitCoins solve all three of these problems, by being 1) P2P-based, 2) defined by math and convention instead of being controlled by an organisation, and 3) having a mathematically defined limited supply.
That wouldn't be grammatical... "in half a decade" means "half a decade into the future", while "over half a decade" means "during the course of half a decade".
Someone should not be discriminated against because they disagree on any subject--as long as their research and performance don't suffer.
I would agree with you, if not for the fact that the proposal singles out one particular loony opinion and legitimises it. It's clearly designed to favour one particular brand of religion.
Furthermore, the law proposal could be interpreted in such a way that a college professor can't be fired for teaching creationism in science class.
Actually, Dickens wrote to address social issues, like poverty, but your point stands.
I think it's a mistake to look at the storyline in a computer game and compare it to literature, look at the graphics and compare it to movies or paintings, etc. You need to look at the game as a whole to make a meaningful assessment. And to do that, you need to get your hands dirty and actually play it for an extended period of time. Only then do the strengths of computer games appear: interactivity, immersion and problem-solving.
Different forms of art compete in different categories. If motion pictures had been judged by the standard of stage plays when they first appeared, they'd have been dismissed as shallow, crude and completely lacking in dialogue. And it would have been just as unfair as comparing computer games to literature or visual arts.
Perhaps there are no computer games which can be considered truly great works of art (although I think the original Civilization game should qualify), but popular art is also an important form of art.
I agree. At my workplace, a lot of sites are blocked. But when you try to access a blocked site, it says roughly: "This site has been blocked to safeguard bandwidth for core business processes. If you are sure you have a business reason to visit this site, please click here." And if you click the link, you're redirected to the actual site. And that's enough to discourage people - if they click the link, they can't say they went to the site by mistake, or didn't know it wasn't allowed.
Note: it is a federal/customs issue because copyright involves treaties with other nations.
I don't dispute that is the reasoning used, but the argument only makes sense if the copyrighted material in question comes from other nations.
It may be "socially conditioned" of me, but whenever I see an argument like this, I think "hopeless nerds!" :-P
All power in our Constitution therefore derives from the States, not the Federal government itself. It was just a construct of convenience, making it easier for them to trade among themselves and provide for a common defense.
That's very similar to how the EU started. It has it roots in (mostly) voluntary trade agreements, before the member nations gave it independent legislative power and aspirations at becoming a European super-state. There's even talk about appointing a common European president.
I think it's a general principle that governments and beareucracies tend to grow and extend their sphere of influence over time, unless something drastic happens. Even the parties which are against the EU (like the Greens) quickly discover that lobbying within the EU is the most efficient way to achieve their political goals (regarding the environment). The rewards with central legislation are direct and tempting, while the negative side effects are spread out and accumulate over time.
I think it's only recently that defense has been coordinated within the EU, though, since Western European nations had their own armies and coordinated their defense with eachother and with the USA within the NATO agreement.
So regardless of anybody's opinion of how it stood morally, the Federal government acted quite illegally and outside its authority in making war against the South. And nothing has changed in that regard. If it did the same today, it would be just as illegal and outside its authority as it was then.
I guess we agree then. I just thought it sounded odd to say that the South was partially responsible for the war, since they refused to stay in the union. To me, it sounded a little like saying that a victim of robbery has partial responsibility in being shot, since he refused to give up his money.
But to explain my original point more fully: the Civil War did nothing to change anything in (or out of) the Constitution in regard to States' rights.
I'll have to trust you on this one.
We have roughly the same situation in Europe since the European Union formed - the member nations of the EU give up part of their legislative power and have to accept what the majority decides.
EU "laws" don't apply directly in the member nations, though. The EU only issues directives telling the member nations what their laws should look like. Each member nation is then obliged to change and amend their own laws so they conform to the minimum requirements in the EU directive. The directive doesn't apply within a nation until it has been implemented in national law.
So there's no equivalent to a "Federal crime" in the EU - only the national laws apply to the people within a country.
After seeing what a mire of beareucracy, lobbying and corruption the EU has become, I'm starting to think it's better if each nation keeps their full legislative power, and only cooperate through voluntary agreements. It's easier to keep checks on your national government than on the huge and distant EU government. Most people have no idea what's going on there, or even how the EU's legislative process works.
Well, I was referring to the USA, not democracies. I meant that the USA could put a constitutional cap on the budget to prevent overspending. Sorry for being unclear.
That being said, you're using a very strict definition of "democracy". In modern usage, the word doesn't refer to specific form of government. It refers to any form of government which fulfills a number of minimum requirements, like free elections and freedom of speech.
The bill the article refers to uses the term "pure democracy", and if you rephrase your statement using that term, I would agree.
Not exactly. The northern states told the southern states (very possibly incorrectly) that they had no right to secede. The southern states then resolved to do so anyway, by force if necessary.
The North may have been the aggressor, but both sides were prepared to go to war over the issue.
I may be missing something, but that sounds like weasel talk to me. if the Northern states tried to make the Southern states stay in the union, and the Southern states just wanted to be left alone, then it was the Northern states who used force.
There's a huge difference between forcing someone to do something, and using force to defend yourself when someone tries to force you to do something. In the former case, you're trying to impose your will on someone, in the latter case, you are only trying to keep someone from imposing their will on you.
Of course, the Civil War may be justified for a number of other reasons, I'm just objecting to what I perceive to be a distortion of the facts.
hink you are wrong, I don't see the US system covered by the wikipedia definition for democracy, or any other "sane" definition I have heard.
Some people will claim the US is indeed a "representative democracy", however that cannot be correct, since the US citizens do not elect their representatives. Instead, the elect the people who will elect their representatives.
I don't think that's enough to disqualify the USA as a democracy. It only means there are two levels of indirection between the people and the actual decisions, instead of just one. Technically speaking, you don't vote for your political representatives in parliamentary systems either - you vote for a party which has pre-appointed a list of representatives, who are then assigned to parliamentary seats according to how many votes the party gets.
I'm just a European, so please bear with me, but wasn't it the Northern states who attacked the Southern states when they chose to peacefully secede?
Actually, some corporations benefit from antitrust laws, since they can be used as weapons against their competitors.
I don't think that's a generally accepted meaning of the word "democracy" - a "democracy" can be with or without individual rights, without or without a constitution, with or without elected representatives, etc.
Calling the USA a "republic" doesn't make it clear that it guarantees individual rights, either - a better way would be to include the word "constitutional", since it's the constitution which limits the power of the majority.
I assume this is a reference to Berlusconi's shenanigans which seem to have lead Italy a good way to despotism?