Well on the one hand I agree with you, but on the other hand language is a shared idea, so causality is not so easily stated.
Actually the ability for language is genetic. The ability to form a sentence is genetic. You don't have to teach kids language, they learn it even if no-one teaches them. A group of deaf and dumb kids who were never exposed to any form of language created their own form of language. So, language is more genetic than an idea.
Who said it was more valuable? The point is not that it is priceless, but rather that it is not worthless.
It is a creative activity, and the purpose of copyright law is to promote creative activities, not to protect the jobs of professionals. We must encourage creativity from everyone, even those who turn out not to be very good at it; universal participation is the only way to guarantee that the talented will discover their abilities in time to contribute to society. If copyright law has evolved into something that is more concerned with protecting existing works than with incentivising new works -- if it has evolved into something that is stifling any form of creative expression, no matter how trivial or pointless you may think that form -- then it is broken, and should be fixed.
Besides, your "amateur piecing together work done by professionals" may be another person's "subversive genius deconstructing modern culture". Consider Duchamp's Fountain, one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century; to a connoiseur of ceramics, no doubt it's just an amateur rotating a urinal that was manufactured by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time to developing that urinal, but for some reason more people remember the guy who rotated it than the guy who actually designed it...
Most of the media people use are produced by professionals and copyright ensures that aspring artists have a way to make a living. Sorry, I've never heard of the example you gave. You really can't be serious about universal participation thing.
Assuming you intended to ask "how do we know whether it would do more harm or more good", the answer is that we don't know, but we can make a fairly shrewd guess by looking at history. From history, we see that lax copyright has rarely prevented creative geniuses from producing amazing works of art.
For example, Shakespeare's works were constantly copied, with poor-quality pirate editions often hitting the streets before his authorized publishers had finished setting their type. This did not prevent him from writing more plays. On the contrary, it created a situation where he had to keep writing more plays to earn a living! If Shakespeare lived today, he could just write Hamlet and then retire, secure in the knowledge that he, his children, and even his grandchildren would have a secure source of income from the royalties. He wouldn't have any pressing financial reason to write e.g. King Lear. Perhaps he'd write it anyway; perhaps he wouldn't. People are motivated by things other than money. The point is that copyright law deals primarily with money, and modern copyright law would reduce, rather than increase, the financial incentive for a modern Shakespeare to continue to produce plays.
Can you think of any counter-examples? Are there any geniuses we can identify who only produced great works of art because they would be protected by copyright, or geniuses who refused to produce great works of art because they considered copyright protections inadequate?
Even artists who do it for the sake of it must be supported. You can't expect someone to work at McDonalds at day and write plays at night with no expectation that it would ever change. Even at universities, tenure and the whole assistant, associate etc are dangled. I don't know how stuff worked during Shakespeare's era.
However, it Shakespeare was alive today, maybe he would write his first play, make lots of money that he could devote all his time to further writing plays only and actually end up writing more plays?
An amusing clip made an amateur piecing together work done by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time in making the work is more valueable than the work of the professionals?
I'm not saying I'm wholly supporting copyright but at the quality and amount of media that the US creates compared to other countries, they must be doing something right. The media cartel is terrible I agree too but maybe copyright isn't related to them.
The question is how do we know relaxing copyright would do harm than good?
I'm just suggesting the other side. It's a bad idea to fall in love with an idea and not examine the other side.
When the UK has the BBC (which broadcasts Dr. Who to Glastonbury (the only things from the UK I watch)), I doubt there is much advertising on TV in the UK.
The BBC news site http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is the best website for new since it DOES NOT HAVE ADS.
On the flip side though, even Dr. Who is really tacky and barely barely worth watching. All good really good high-budget TV series are from the US with the TV advertisment model.
Some of the Channel 4 stuff I've watched always gave me the impression that UK didn't have ads for small things like soap, pens, candy etc. It's ads for cars, banks and Scotland.
Maybe I'm wrong but there are other ways of doing asymmetrical encryption schemes (elliptic functions in Galois fields) that are not patent encumbered.
I could raise a bunch of my kids to be serial killers if I wanted to. Is that right?
NO.
There is a lot of research on twin studies that show that identical twins reared apart in different environments tend to become similar people with similar IQ, personality etc.
There is some influence of parents on rearing kids but it pretty much all goes away when they're around 30-40 years old (statistically speaking in terms on influence on measured metrics). Their genetic pre-disposition takes over.
So, the arguement that violent games make violent kids is still under debate.
In his first novel World of Ptaavs (now part of the Three Books of Known Space omnibus) Larry Niven suggested that over the next couple of centuries people would evolve to be able to more powerfully focus on relevant conversation and filter out noise. The growing population, he suggested, would result in all public spaces being much more full of chatter than now. People would be driven mad if they didn't adapt.
Maybe I'm totally wrong but this has very little basis in terms of theory of evolution.
You need selection pressure - be able to filter out noise or die (or fail to reproduce).
Unless 90+% of the population aren't reproducing, I don't think the human race is going anywhere evolutionarily.
Bittorrent only requests and exchanges parts or chunks of a file.
I guess it's enough to get you a lawsuit, but on the other hand even being associated with an IP address is now enough to get you sued. So, it really matters anyway. Somebody could be sending out packets with your IP address saying you're a BT client with the movie.
But, you're right. Bittorrent was mostly designed for speed of download and not privacy.
Like BitTorrent and eMule was fast-track developed because of RIAA.
Soon, possibly because of the RIAA - the world will see good ad-hoc network software where the IP-address doesn't give you away.
Re:You need to work it out...
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
I disagree. What you're saying is that people aren't trying hard enough. Yeah, I'm not a millionaire because I didn't try hard enough and so on. I haven't won the Nobel prize or the fields medal because I didn't try hard enough.
Yes, I totally agree DRM is evil and I don't like the idea of paying over and over again to undeserving people or unnatural barriers etc. I agree that there should be a revolution where authors write creative commons books and kill off publishers. I've thought about writing one myself when I go to a level when I'm not a mere TA and full control of the class.
I particularly hate textbooks and their $100+ price for the book version. They're milking it there and they are even further less incentive to change.
But, the sad fact is book publishers are sitting on all this information refusing to release it in a convinient searchable way and they are going to remain that way to the day I die since copyrights are that long if there is no DRM.
Look at those music subscription buisness like Real Rhapsody. They are able to offer a library of almost all music they can get their hands on and offer them only because of DRM. I can find some of the most obscure and weird stuff there since they have classical and folk recordings and also local bands from CDBaby which would be impossible to find in P2P which is all geared towards current popular music. Sure, it's not great sounding as CD and all but when you're looking for some specific music or style, it sure beats the hell out of P2P or the CD store. I wish we could have that without DRM but the sad fact is there doesn't seem to be a way (at least in our lifetimes).
It's not a necessary evil. It's just an evil. Let the information be free, but pay for information you find valuable.
No one will be able to make their fortune with proprietary information, but on the other hand everyone will be so enriched that we'll all be sufficiently better off to make paying out for valuable info much more likely. Then people can make a sane living off of producing good information.
It's like writing shareware. If you work at it, and ask for a small, reasonable donation, you can make decent money off of it.
A famous quote, "nice idea, wrong species".
We're not an ant colony; we're primates who live in small groups. This massive scale social-good schemes don't work for humans since we're genetically made to be working for our own good (or of the group) and not good for the society as a whole.
You don't see a lot of electronic books because nobody wants them. There have been several pilot programs with textbooks being sold in an electronic format at university book stores. Without exception, the print version sold far more than the electronic version.
First, they price the electronic book almost as high as the paper book. Secondly, I'm not saying as a student who has to read one book from the top to begining but as a researcher who has to find a specific piece of information on a certain topic.
Paper textbooks are much easier to read without excessive eye strain, especially when most of the time you're reading them for an hour or more at a stretch. Also, if the book has a half-decent index, many times it is easier to "search" the paper version than it is to use the search engine included in an electronic version.
A lot of times, especially in mathematically inclined subjects, a lot of results are not given names just numbers (e.g. Theorem 1.2 etc). A lot of famous results have names but you can find it in Wikipedia if it's famour enough.
Until they come up with a computer that looks and feels like a paper book (and is as durable), it's unlikely electronic books will ever sell better or be more available than paper books, DRM or not.
The barrier of ease of readability is for class textbooks and fiction book. On the other hand take for example, the documenataion in most software. It is included electronically and only a book that you'd expect to be read from top to bottom is included in the software. I remember Visual C++ used to ship with those huge books of the APIs and it took forever to find anything using that book. How many people actually use a paper dictionary anymore? If it's just 1 theorem or 1 chapter that's needed, then you buy a section of the book etc.
Actually, this is unlikely. And in any event, the benefit of making the book searchable is dubious given that the DRM could be used to limit your ability to search it, that searching isn't really important for some books (e.g. most works of fiction), and that the DRM could be set up so that it cost you money every time you used the book in particular ways, or at all.
First of all, it's a better option in terms of electronic searching than just having paper editions of a book out. If you find something in a search engine for the exact item you're looking for, then you'd be very likely to buy a copy of the book or lease the book for whatever. I go to the library and there are more than 2 dozens book about a topic. I have to stick with the classics and ignore all the other ones that might have the exact information I need since I can't sit around flipping pages looking for something.
Secondly, It costs me time and money to go down to the library to find one page out of a book mentioned in a reference.
Yes, I'm talking about textbooks and technical books and not fiction books.
I think that a better solution would be to a) prohibit authors et al from having copyrights if they use DRM at all, b) not just legalize circumventing DRM, but have the government help (with funding, coordination, and dissemination of the uncopyrightable plaintext), and c) to make some other alterations to copyright, such as beefing up deposit requirements (so that electronic copies are on file with the Library of Congress) and shortening term lengths (so that the book will enter the public domain quite rapidly, if the author et al even bothers to pursue copyright to begin with).
Yeah, book publishers are going to really eager to share their electronic version of the book with what you mentioned above.
Don't be such a defeatist. Stand up for a change, and fight for what you want!
I want to easily find information I want that is now currently hidden away in paper textbook which lack of DRM is making the publishers not want to release electronic copies. Yes, DRM is morally disturbing and all but if it's not there we will never see an electronic library ever. It will always be paper books or even only paper books for the overpriced textbooks.
I for one am tired of our DRM loving monopoly overlords!
Nobody likes DRM but it's neceassary evil.
Look at textbooks and technical books and such. They typeset it electronically, do everything electronically until they print the damn book and never make the electronic version available anywhere for anyone (except for some exceptions because there is no DRM). Now, if there was standard DRM then books would be released electroically that you could search through or have search engines search through. So much knowledge is just locked away in paper version of books that's hard to access.
Music and movies are already digital so they're fighting the visible battle. But, a lot of content is out there locked away by their owners because there is no DRM to protect it and choose to get it out in hard to copy methods.
See how many people go to Wikipedia for a theorem or a law that is replicated in almost 1000 textbooks but none available online.
The thing about all of these ideas is that they are not really very interesting or innovative. No slam on any of the VCs involved here (particularly the Draper Fisher Jurvetson folks as they are top notch), but these ideas are all about derived markets and products. It seems that the VC world has gotten lots more conservative over the past five years or so and they are looking at giving larger amounts of money to easier/simpler concepts rather than encouraging real cutting edge research.
Like in number theory, just because a problem can be stated simply does not mean it can be easily solved.
This of course is a major problem as the US has historically relied upon federal funding to help develop the real cutting edge stuff, yet federal funding for basic science research is being cut dramatically in favor of applied research. So, we now run the risk of losing out on our technological advantage from both traditional government funding and now private funding. (notable exceptions for a number of philanthropists such as Paul Allen, Bill Gates, John Moran and others).
So, the cause and solution to the problem is money?
It's harder for VCs to find basic science research projects that have a significant payoff, but the projects are out there. We're banking on our technology and approaches to an area of bioscience and metabolomics to pay off in a variety of spaces from agronomics to medicine, drug development, defense and nutrition among many other applications, but I've found most VCs to be remarkably limited in their approach preferring to focus only on the short term, 1-3 years, rather than the 5-6 necessary for many projects. Its an old story, but focusing on the short term is a good business model where you invest 50% of the capital (or less) for 70-80% of the profits only after 80% of the work has been done. Unfortunately, you miss out on prospects for real impact by focusing on the next marketing tool rather than the next disease cure.
Also, it is harder to find a NSF grant on a trivial use of an existing idea. I don't know why you would even wish VCs had so much control over basic science research.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the ability for language is genetic. The ability to form a sentence is genetic. You don't have to teach kids language, they learn it even if no-one teaches them. A group of deaf and dumb kids who were never exposed to any form of language created their own form of language. So, language is more genetic than an idea.
No, it's language that makes us different. Sharing of ideas is a consequence of language.
Complex to us, humans maybe but probably not that complex.
Most of the media people use are produced by professionals and copyright ensures that aspring artists have a way to make a living. Sorry, I've never heard of the example you gave. You really can't be serious about universal participation thing.
Even artists who do it for the sake of it must be supported. You can't expect someone to work at McDonalds at day and write plays at night with no expectation that it would ever change. Even at universities, tenure and the whole assistant, associate etc are dangled. I don't know how stuff worked during Shakespeare's era.
However, it Shakespeare was alive today, maybe he would write his first play, make lots of money that he could devote all his time to further writing plays only and actually end up writing more plays?
Yes I agree with you but I was not talking about the length of the copyright but what consititues copyright and it's uses and allowances.
You should think of the other side as well.
An amusing clip made an amateur piecing together work done by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time in making the work is more valueable than the work of the professionals?
I'm not saying I'm wholly supporting copyright but at the quality and amount of media that the US creates compared to other countries, they must be doing something right. The media cartel is terrible I agree too but maybe copyright isn't related to them.
The question is how do we know relaxing copyright would do harm than good?
I'm just suggesting the other side. It's a bad idea to fall in love with an idea and not examine the other side.
I secant that.
When the UK has the BBC (which broadcasts Dr. Who to Glastonbury (the only things from the UK I watch)), I doubt there is much advertising on TV in the UK.
The BBC news site http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is the best website for new since it DOES NOT HAVE ADS.
On the flip side though, even Dr. Who is really tacky and barely barely worth watching. All good really good high-budget TV series are from the US with the TV advertisment model.
Some of the Channel 4 stuff I've watched always gave me the impression that UK didn't have ads for small things like soap, pens, candy etc. It's ads for cars, banks and Scotland.
Maybe I'm wrong but there are other ways of doing asymmetrical encryption schemes (elliptic functions in Galois fields) that are not patent encumbered.
Maybe there was no will to develop it?
NO.
There is a lot of research on twin studies that show that identical twins reared apart in different environments tend to become similar people with similar IQ, personality etc.
There is some influence of parents on rearing kids but it pretty much all goes away when they're around 30-40 years old (statistically speaking in terms on influence on measured metrics). Their genetic pre-disposition takes over.
So, the arguement that violent games make violent kids is still under debate.
First there are digital outputs like SPDIF which are not analog.
Second, if you encode it again with AAC with the same settings, then the quality does not go down but remains the same.
Maybe I'm totally wrong but this has very little basis in terms of theory of evolution.
You need selection pressure - be able to filter out noise or die (or fail to reproduce).
Unless 90+% of the population aren't reproducing, I don't think the human race is going anywhere evolutionarily.
It's 4x4 so next step is 8x8 and ultimately to 64x64.
Maybe the number of cores will be the new Ghz?
Bittorrent only requests and exchanges parts or chunks of a file.
I guess it's enough to get you a lawsuit, but on the other hand even being associated with an IP address is now enough to get you sued. So, it really matters anyway. Somebody could be sending out packets with your IP address saying you're a BT client with the movie.
But, you're right. Bittorrent was mostly designed for speed of download and not privacy.
Hehe, brilliant.
Like BitTorrent and eMule was fast-track developed because of RIAA.
Soon, possibly because of the RIAA - the world will see good ad-hoc network software where the IP-address doesn't give you away.
I disagree. What you're saying is that people aren't trying hard enough. Yeah, I'm not a millionaire because I didn't try hard enough and so on. I haven't won the Nobel prize or the fields medal because I didn't try hard enough.
Yes, I totally agree DRM is evil and I don't like the idea of paying over and over again to undeserving people or unnatural barriers etc. I agree that there should be a revolution where authors write creative commons books and kill off publishers. I've thought about writing one myself when I go to a level when I'm not a mere TA and full control of the class.
I particularly hate textbooks and their $100+ price for the book version. They're milking it there and they are even further less incentive to change.
But, the sad fact is book publishers are sitting on all this information refusing to release it in a convinient searchable way and they are going to remain that way to the day I die since copyrights are that long if there is no DRM.
Look at those music subscription buisness like Real Rhapsody. They are able to offer a library of almost all music they can get their hands on and offer them only because of DRM. I can find some of the most obscure and weird stuff there since they have classical and folk recordings and also local bands from CDBaby which would be impossible to find in P2P which is all geared towards current popular music. Sure, it's not great sounding as CD and all but when you're looking for some specific music or style, it sure beats the hell out of P2P or the CD store. I wish we could have that without DRM but the sad fact is there doesn't seem to be a way (at least in our lifetimes).
HTA has been able to do that forever.
I think maybe firefox has XUL but it's a pain?
I sorely wish there was something like HTA for firefox.
He probably means like IE's HTA ( which has been stagnant for years and years and years).
It's a sore sore missing feature in Mozilla. There is XUL but seems be a major pain to run it.
A famous quote, "nice idea, wrong species".
We're not an ant colony; we're primates who live in small groups. This massive scale social-good schemes don't work for humans since we're genetically made to be working for our own good (or of the group) and not good for the society as a whole.
First, they price the electronic book almost as high as the paper book. Secondly, I'm not saying as a student who has to read one book from the top to begining but as a researcher who has to find a specific piece of information on a certain topic.
A lot of times, especially in mathematically inclined subjects, a lot of results are not given names just numbers (e.g. Theorem 1.2 etc). A lot of famous results have names but you can find it in Wikipedia if it's famour enough.
The barrier of ease of readability is for class textbooks and fiction book. On the other hand take for example, the documenataion in most software. It is included electronically and only a book that you'd expect to be read from top to bottom is included in the software. I remember Visual C++ used to ship with those huge books of the APIs and it took forever to find anything using that book. How many people actually use a paper dictionary anymore? If it's just 1 theorem or 1 chapter that's needed, then you buy a section of the book etc.
First of all, it's a better option in terms of electronic searching than just having paper editions of a book out. If you find something in a search engine for the exact item you're looking for, then you'd be very likely to buy a copy of the book or lease the book for whatever. I go to the library and there are more than 2 dozens book about a topic. I have to stick with the classics and ignore all the other ones that might have the exact information I need since I can't sit around flipping pages looking for something.
Secondly, It costs me time and money to go down to the library to find one page out of a book mentioned in a reference.
Yes, I'm talking about textbooks and technical books and not fiction books.
Yeah, book publishers are going to really eager to share their electronic version of the book with what you mentioned above.
I want to easily find information I want that is now currently hidden away in paper textbook which lack of DRM is making the publishers not want to release electronic copies. Yes, DRM is morally disturbing and all but if it's not there we will never see an electronic library ever. It will always be paper books or even only paper books for the overpriced textbooks.
Nobody likes DRM but it's neceassary evil.
Look at textbooks and technical books and such. They typeset it electronically, do everything electronically until they print the damn book and never make the electronic version available anywhere for anyone (except for some exceptions because there is no DRM). Now, if there was standard DRM then books would be released electroically that you could search through or have search engines search through. So much knowledge is just locked away in paper version of books that's hard to access.
Music and movies are already digital so they're fighting the visible battle. But, a lot of content is out there locked away by their owners because there is no DRM to protect it and choose to get it out in hard to copy methods.
See how many people go to Wikipedia for a theorem or a law that is replicated in almost 1000 textbooks but none available online.
Like in number theory, just because a problem can be stated simply does not mean it can be easily solved.
So, the cause and solution to the problem is money?
Also, it is harder to find a NSF grant on a trivial use of an existing idea. I don't know why you would even wish VCs had so much control over basic science research.