...the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
This was my initial thought too. However what I don't understand is why the technology sword does not cut both ways. It is true that technology makes it far easier than it has ever been before to pirate material but it also makes it far easier than ever before to produce that material. Unlike the past there is no need to risk a massive budget on every new act. Give the riskier acts smaller budgets and see what they can do with them. After all if they are less popular they will probably also be less pirated and the ones which do take off can give you a great return on your small investment.
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
Times change. As a professor I'm not happy with the increasing anti-cheating methods being deployed and do my best to design exams to make it hard to cheat by design rather than by technology. However I am also not happy with the huge rise in cheating that we are seeing at Universities. The philosophy I would like to follow is the one I was used to as a student myself: you are basically trusted to some degree but when you seriously violate that trust by cheating the consequences are extremely severe. When I was at school in the UK if you were caught cheating on an exam you got an automatic failure ("I didn't know it was not allowed" was no excuse) and if the cheating was deemed to be deliberate then ALL your exams taken at that time were automatically failed on the basis that if you cheated on one you may well have been cheating on all. Believe me not many people cheated in those circumstances and everyone made sure they knew exactly what the rules were.
The problem today is that you cannot do that because parents and possibly lawyers get involved and the law then requires "appropriate punishment" given the exact actions and does not allow for severe punishments designed to set an example to others. The result is that, rather than being able to catch some fraction of cheats and throwing the book at them to discourage others, we end up having to catch almost every incidence of cheating which is not compatible with trusting the students. This of course perpetuates the problem since people who are strictly monitored for compliance are far more likely to comply to the degree that they are checked on whereas if you trust people to follow the rules they are far more likely to comply and will usually feel happier about doing so (as long as there is some chance they may get caught for violations!). Schools have it even worse since they have to deal with parents fighting the school when they try to punish pupils for cheating.
Today in a typical course of ~250 students I will usually have to report at least one for cheating every year, about twice the rate it was 5 years ago (rough estimate with admittedly low statistics). The result of this sea change in attitude is that we have increasing numbers of students entering university who are used to a culture of cheating and these need to be caught early and given an education in acceptable, ethical behaviour. So until society decides to start properly supporting teachers who discipline pupils in school and allow for severe punishments (in cases of clear guilt) this situation is likely to get worse, not better.
So what? There's also enough unemployed people it will help - recent graduates, those recently made redundant.
...and how many would it have helped if they had developed a website instead of an app? I'm not saying that it did not help some people but a little thought before hand could have helped far more.
One of the apps was for the Job Centre which tend to concentrate on lower paid jobs to help people on the dole find employment. So the target audience for the app are those least likely to be able to afford an iPhone to use it! If, instead of being distracted by a shiny new toy, even a minimal level of thought had been put into the planning stage this would have been obvious.
What the article completely seems to miss is that the scandal is about stupid, ineffective use of technology not the use of technology itself. Innovation is certainly to be encouraged but if your new innovation is a square wheel you should expect to get shouted at for wasting money.
My philosophy...is that the concepts and ideas of physics are represented by the math, but not defined by them.
Correct - maths is the language of physics and just like any language it is used to express ideas and concepts. As such you can certainly, albeit it crudely, explain the concepts in other languages such as English which lack the precision of maths, in much the same way that you lose a lot of the beauty and depth of Shakespeare if the bard is translated into, say, French. Similarly you are fooling yourself, and more importantly your readers, if you think you have communicated those concepts at the graduate level: that requires maths for a full and deep understanding of the ideas involved which is why certain topics are regarded as 'graduate level'.
I might as well say that I've covered graduate level physics concepts after giving an ATLAS outreach talk since Higgs, Supersymmetry etc are all topics covered in grad school. However it would be a pretty horrendous outreach talk if I covered those concepts in the same level as I would when teaching a grad course so it would be wrong and misleading to claim that I'd covered graduate level topics.
He only uses the math as the final step, to describe what he sees in his head, not because he enjoys it.
Exactly - in order to describe physics you have to use maths. It is certainly possible to teach the basic concepts but if you think you are learning "graduate level" physics you clearly have no idea what graduate level physics is because that requires maths in order to communicate a full understanding even though the understanding in your head will be in "pictures".
For example I can simply tell you that in nature every symmetry produces a conserved quantity. You can think about it for a while and perhaps convince yourself that this is true. However without understanding Noether's theorem and basic Lagrangian mechanics your understanding will be far from complete and, worse, you will have no way to be able to calculate what the conserved quantity is given a particular symmetry or vice verse....and this isn't even graduate level, its second year undergrad!
And medical equipment does not permit you to practice medicine by itself, either -- so does that mean an autoclave and a saucepan should cost the same?
Eh? Why should two completely different things cost the same? I'm assuming you know what a pan is so perhaps its worth looking up Autoclave. Passing similarities yes, the same, no. You might as well ask why a plane and a car don't cost the same because they are both modes of transport.
Sheet music and an MP3 of the same piece contain the same information only one has been interpreted by a skilled musician. Generally when a skilled individual employs their talents they increase the value of whatever they work on. A wood carving costs more than the block of wood it took to make it. A doctor is paid (generally far too much) to make a sick person well etc.
You mean to tell me that Alpha Decay is rare in the universe? I simply don't buy the argument.
Alpha decay is incredibly rare in the universe. The reason for this is that only heavy elements will decay by alpha particle emission that is elements like Uranium, Thorium etc. All of these are far, far heavier than iron which is important.
Next question is where do all the elements come from? The very light ones such as hydrogen and helium were formed in the Big Bang and the accurate prediction of the observed abundance's of these gases is one of the major achievements of the Big Bang model (the technical term is Big Bang nucleosynthesis).
The slightly heavier elements such as carbon, silicon, oxygen etc. can be formed in the heart of any star by nuclear fusion binding nuclei together in complex fusion cycles. However iron-56 is the most stable nucleus possible so once you have bound nuclei together to form this you cannot get any more energy out and, in fact it requires energy to make heavier nuclei.
So where do all the elements which can undergo alpha decay come from? Well if you have a sufficiently massive start (above 9 solar masses) when it finally turns its core into iron there is no more energy to be had and the entire core collapses under gravity and then rebounds in a super nova explosion. In this explosion there are massive numbers of neutrons produced which stream out through the star's outer atmosphere. This results a very complex chain of neutron capture and decay (which nuclear astrophysicists study at places like TRIUMF) resulting in the heavy elements like Uranium, lead etc. that we find on the earth today - in fact ALL the elements heavier than iron-56 were produced in this manner.
So to get alpha decay you have to have a radioactive element that was produced in the heart of a particular type of dying star. In terms of the total mass of the universe the about which exists in such a rare and hard to produce form is minuscule. Hence, although alpha decay is common on the Earth is is incredible rare in the Universe.
Who are you to say what *I* should do with the software I worked on for over 2 years full time?
In what way has anything I said told you what you can do with your software? Copyright law is about saying what others can do with your software once you sell, or give, them a copy. So to turn it around who are you to say what I should do with property that I have legally purchased?
You for example are not in charge what should happen with my work, I am. And I think that's fair, as I wrote it, spend all my time on it and payed for it from my own pocket
Yes but if I buy a copy from you I can make exactly the same argument: I bought it, its mine and I paid for it from my own pocket.
How am I then going to pay the bills?
That is the one good thing which copyright does do - it lets people like you make money from being creative. Unfortunately that good has to be set against the invasion of privacy, loss of fair-use rights, legal bullying, suppression of competition etc. which big businesses also use copyright for. Hence my point that whether copyright in its current form is still a net benefit to society is debatable.
Abolishing copyright would be an extreme position to take but what about reforming it? For example a copyright term of 10 or 20 years would still let you make money from your program as would codifying fair use rights and making DRM which violates them illegal. Even if copyright were abolished you can still make money - several big corporations make money from Open Source software that, while copyrighted, is free to copy. Even with your current business model perhaps you could make money selling support rather than the program itself?
I should be clear that my original post was not meant to advocate abolishing copyright. While I am not convinced that, in its current form, it is a net benefit to society it seems to me that the more sensible approach to take is to reform it into something which is.
I'd love to see an alternative that would mean that people could create without sacrificing their ability to live.
Before copyright existed composers, actors, singers etc. made money from live performances and/or patronage. True they did not live in large mansions and have lavish lifestyles nor did they provide support for large business corporations but they certainly did live.
And just as his morals about what she shouldn't be allowed to do are debatable, so are your morals about public performance debatable.
True but I would hold that a large fraction of the population of most western countries would agree that if you have legally purchased a copy of the music what you choose to do with it, including perform it, is up to you with the exception of copying and selling it....and yet we do not have those rights. No you could say that I'm wrong and a majority would not agree with that. However I suspect that IP based industry agree with me that this is the case which is why they employ means (that while legal I suspect a majority would also agree are unethical) to convince politicians that the existing system should stay. This also explains the frantic attempts by the RIAA and others to attempt to persuade people that copying music/films/etc. is morally wrong. If a majority of people agreed that it was there would be no need for this and copyright infringement would be a far smaller issue than it currently is (though of course it would still be there since humans are known to act immorally even by their own definitions!).
What is needed is a free, open and public debate on copyright without undue influence by media groups. Until then I would expect public resentment to keep growing and laws to keep getting stricter until either innovation and creativity is stiffled by the laws or the resentment results in a backlash that damages the industry to such an extent that innovation and creativity are stifled by lack of money.
If you assert that you have a moral right to X and believe it with all your heart, but few others agree, then you will never see your right exercised.
Completely true. However even if a lot of others agree but large corporations do not then I still think you will never get to see your right exercised which is a problem.
you can not claim that your "moral right" permits your behavior because that area's already legally covered.
There is a difference between 'legal' and 'moral'. It is certainly possible for something to be moral or ethical but illegal just as it is for something to be legal but immoral or unethical. So it depends what you mean by 'permit'. For example if I had purchased that sheet music my morals would permit me to perform that music in public since I paid for a copy of the music. However the law says that I cannot and so I might refrain in order to avoid paying the associated fines (something for which the public should be very glad of given my musical abilities!;-).
Clearly copying the sheet music is illegal, at least in the US, in Canada private copying between individuals like that is permitted and legal (at least that is my understanding). However the composer was arguing that the teenager was morally and ethically wrong...and that I think is far more debatable.
Hmm, sort of - but I think what we as scientists often forget is that the public are not stupid, only ignorant. Very often they want to know "Why" about a lot of things we take granted.
I agree exactly - that's why it is best to avoid some of the details and explain the rest. This does leave some gaps and if you have a smart member o the audience or interviewer then they can pick up on that and ask about it. This not only helps you - because now you are talking about something they clearly are interested in and understand at some level - but invariably makes them happy because they know that they have asked a smart question and will be encouraged to ask more!
...course concerning the QM of chemistry...I think subjects are too often presented as something mysterious
It is interesting that you should pick that particular example. One of the complaints that us physicists often have about QM taught by chemists is that they introduce it very early (because they need to use it for just about everything) and so cannot teach it in its proper detail i.e. solving the Hydrogen atom electron orbitals from scratch. Hence you end up with this recipe-based approach without a real understanding of where it all comes from at a fundamental level....which is probably exactly what mathematicians say about us physicists regarding maths!:-)
why not try something like "Well, we don't know what reality is like at so small a scale, because we can't make measurements that fine"
Well one reason is because that would be wrong. We do know how reality works on such a fine scale - it simply does not define position and momentum as single quantities (in fact it doesn't do that at any scale - but the difference is too small to see at large scales). An illustration: look really close at your display and you'll see pixels (don't try this on your new iPhone 4;-) so clearly your display does not define the position of a point to less that the dimensions of one pixel. The universe is similar - it does not define the position of an object to a fixed point. However unlike the screen the "resolution" is not a fixed value.
Getting rid of technical vocabulary often means being either more long winded, or over-simplifying, or risking being misunderstood.
How does getting rid of technical vocabulary risk you not being understood? Leaving it in guarantees you will not be understood! You avoid being long winded by NOT explaining all the details which the technical vocabulary implies i.e. pick the most important details and explain only them. Finally I have yet to be accused of over-simplifying anything...if you think you have really over-simplified something you are probably explaining it at about the right level of detail. Yes this does mean that you do not get all the details across but at least you have got some of the details across which is better than confusing the audience and getting nothing across.
One is for personal entertainment and the other is for providing a performance tool.
Except that the sheet music you buy does not allow you to perform the piece in public - you also need to purchase the right to perform it as well. So the only legal use purchasing the sheet music gives is personal entertainment as well.
Copyright law exists for the advancement of society
Copyright law was created for the advancement of society. It currently exists because of a historical precedence. Whether copyright law still benefits society is a debatable point.
The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
Clearly not the legal right but what about the moral right to do so? Creative works used to be funded by either patronage or live performances so clearly copyright is not required for composers, singers etc. to make a living. So is it morally right to prevent people from sharing simply because creators want to earn more money or be supported in a particular way? Perhaps a case can be made if the current copyright system could be shown to produce a larger variety of higher quality material than its predecessor but I've yet to see that argument made, or at least made convincingly.
When I see a paper that has a really high jargon to English ratio, it often seems to be cause the author is trying to hide his inability to understand what he did.
It depends - if someone in the field notices it as a lot of jargon that is very likely the case. However what most of us scientists forget is that a large fraction of the vocabulary we use everyday is jargon to the public.
For example in particle physics it would be completely acceptable to find a sentence such as "we selected minimum bias events with a lead muon pT greater than 5 GeV/c and with an eta less than 2.0" in a paper. Jargon such as pT, eta, lead muon and minimum bias are very commonly used in the field but I doubt someone outside the field would understand these. This is certainly not a sign that someone is hiding their lack of understanding - it is simply someone communicating with their peers in the precise vocabulary which has grown up to service particle physics.
When science informs society's policy decisions, there are going to be questions, concerns, and issues. Refusing to give them a legitimate hearing (and a reasoned response) is going to only foster conspiracy theories and harden the position of people who feel their valid concerns are being overlooked, ignored, and waved off.
While that is true the problem is that, no matter what you do, there will always be people who refuse to listen to anything you say and continue to claim that their concerns are being ignored - a good example of this is the LHC end-of-the-world scenario. So at some point you simply have to ignore these idiots otherwise you will never get anything done. The problem then arises where do you draw the line? Wherever you draw it there will always be some malcontents who, no matter how provably wrong they are, will continue to get some level of credibility in the eyes of non-experts from continuing media attention.
I think the fundamental issue scientists fail to 'grok' is that non-scientists simply don't share their curiosity.
I completely disagree. Almost all the non-scientists I've talked to are very interested and curious in the basic things that particle physicists are curious about. The problem is that they are not at all interested in all the complex details involved in trying to find the answers.
For example if I talk to the public about trying to understand the Big Bang, what Dark Matter is, why particles have mass or why the Universe is made of matter and not anti-matter etc. etc. and they get very interested. If I talked to them about the ATLAS Event Filter Jet Algorithm, my python analysis code or how to calculate a cross section from a Feynman diagram then I'm sure their eyes would glaze over and they'd fall asleep!
Don't mistake lack of interest in the details with lack of interest in the overall issue the research is addressing!
I think the key here is that people want a translation of the science into terms they understand.
Exactly! When explaining science to the public my aim is not so much to "dumb it down" as to not use technical jargon and to avoid worrying about unnecessary details. A large fraction of the public can generally understand the basic concepts once they are explained without the technical vocabulary and without all the unnecessary details.
The big problem with talking to the public is that we scientists have developed highly technical vocabularies with precise meanings in order to be able to communicate complex concepts very precisely to each other. Even if we remember not to use this vocabulary there is the strong urge to fill in all the details which less precise, "everyday" vocabulary does not specify.
I agree the phenomenon is interesting - I was simply trying to possibly explain it as a "I can find out all the details of going to X on the net so why do I need to go" type of attitude whereas something like travel to another planet would be so new and so different that you would not be able to research it in enough detail beforehand to know exactly what you would find. Hence it would be far more exciting and perhaps exciting enough to encourage a few jaded armchair web tourists to actually travel.
For example I love to travel and regularly do but I tend to go to more developed countries even when I have a choice of destination. This is partly because, while say Africa would be different so too would say Sweden. However it is a lot easier to travel to Sweden and see the sights and sounds there than Africa where you have to worry about crime, vaccinations, political stability, basic amenities etc. However give me the chance to visit planet X which has the same travel concerns as Africa but which is a lot more different and less well known and I'd probably want to brave those same 'risks' to see it.
So is it so unreasonable to expect that the the effect might be that some are more cautious than me on the risk vs. reward travel scale, just as there are others more adventurous than me? In this case an alien planet might be different enough that they could imagine themselves making the effort to travel there....even if they don't actually do it even if the opportunity arose! So definitely interesting observation but perhaps understandable?
Humans travel for the experience. Nobody knows what it would feel like to actually stand on the top of Olympus Mons and look out at the view or stare up at the cliffs from the bottom of one of the many canyon systems. Yes we can simulate the view but if that were enough then tourism on Earth would be dead because we would just look at photos.
if you are considering travel to see exotic new worlds and cultures - there really are a lot of options right here, on Earth.
While that's true to some extent (they are not exotic new worlds they are exotic parts of our world) these exotic 'worlds' have already been visited by people from our own cultures repeatedly and all you have to do is go to the web and read up on what to expect. That does not mean that it is not fun to visit (I love travelling) but going to a truly new and exotic world would be very different since, if you are one of the first to go, you will not have a good idea of what to expect hence it will be far more of an adventure than visiting country X on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
...the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
This was my initial thought too. However what I don't understand is why the technology sword does not cut both ways. It is true that technology makes it far easier than it has ever been before to pirate material but it also makes it far easier than ever before to produce that material. Unlike the past there is no need to risk a massive budget on every new act. Give the riskier acts smaller budgets and see what they can do with them. After all if they are less popular they will probably also be less pirated and the ones which do take off can give you a great return on your small investment.
If you wouldn't agree to it yourself, why would you inflict it upon others?
Times change. As a professor I'm not happy with the increasing anti-cheating methods being deployed and do my best to design exams to make it hard to cheat by design rather than by technology. However I am also not happy with the huge rise in cheating that we are seeing at Universities. The philosophy I would like to follow is the one I was used to as a student myself: you are basically trusted to some degree but when you seriously violate that trust by cheating the consequences are extremely severe. When I was at school in the UK if you were caught cheating on an exam you got an automatic failure ("I didn't know it was not allowed" was no excuse) and if the cheating was deemed to be deliberate then ALL your exams taken at that time were automatically failed on the basis that if you cheated on one you may well have been cheating on all. Believe me not many people cheated in those circumstances and everyone made sure they knew exactly what the rules were.
The problem today is that you cannot do that because parents and possibly lawyers get involved and the law then requires "appropriate punishment" given the exact actions and does not allow for severe punishments designed to set an example to others. The result is that, rather than being able to catch some fraction of cheats and throwing the book at them to discourage others, we end up having to catch almost every incidence of cheating which is not compatible with trusting the students. This of course perpetuates the problem since people who are strictly monitored for compliance are far more likely to comply to the degree that they are checked on whereas if you trust people to follow the rules they are far more likely to comply and will usually feel happier about doing so (as long as there is some chance they may get caught for violations!). Schools have it even worse since they have to deal with parents fighting the school when they try to punish pupils for cheating.
Today in a typical course of ~250 students I will usually have to report at least one for cheating every year, about twice the rate it was 5 years ago (rough estimate with admittedly low statistics). The result of this sea change in attitude is that we have increasing numbers of students entering university who are used to a culture of cheating and these need to be caught early and given an education in acceptable, ethical behaviour. So until society decides to start properly supporting teachers who discipline pupils in school and allow for severe punishments (in cases of clear guilt) this situation is likely to get worse, not better.
So what? There's also enough unemployed people it will help - recent graduates, those recently made redundant.
One of the apps was for the Job Centre which tend to concentrate on lower paid jobs to help people on the dole find employment. So the target audience for the app are those least likely to be able to afford an iPhone to use it! If, instead of being distracted by a shiny new toy, even a minimal level of thought had been put into the planning stage this would have been obvious.
What the article completely seems to miss is that the scandal is about stupid, ineffective use of technology not the use of technology itself. Innovation is certainly to be encouraged but if your new innovation is a square wheel you should expect to get shouted at for wasting money.
My philosophy...is that the concepts and ideas of physics are represented by the math, but not defined by them.
Correct - maths is the language of physics and just like any language it is used to express ideas and concepts. As such you can certainly, albeit it crudely, explain the concepts in other languages such as English which lack the precision of maths, in much the same way that you lose a lot of the beauty and depth of Shakespeare if the bard is translated into, say, French. Similarly you are fooling yourself, and more importantly your readers, if you think you have communicated those concepts at the graduate level: that requires maths for a full and deep understanding of the ideas involved which is why certain topics are regarded as 'graduate level'.
I might as well say that I've covered graduate level physics concepts after giving an ATLAS outreach talk since Higgs, Supersymmetry etc are all topics covered in grad school. However it would be a pretty horrendous outreach talk if I covered those concepts in the same level as I would when teaching a grad course so it would be wrong and misleading to claim that I'd covered graduate level topics.
He only uses the math as the final step, to describe what he sees in his head, not because he enjoys it.
Exactly - in order to describe physics you have to use maths. It is certainly possible to teach the basic concepts but if you think you are learning "graduate level" physics you clearly have no idea what graduate level physics is because that requires maths in order to communicate a full understanding even though the understanding in your head will be in "pictures".
For example I can simply tell you that in nature every symmetry produces a conserved quantity. You can think about it for a while and perhaps convince yourself that this is true. However without understanding Noether's theorem and basic Lagrangian mechanics your understanding will be far from complete and, worse, you will have no way to be able to calculate what the conserved quantity is given a particular symmetry or vice verse....and this isn't even graduate level, its second year undergrad!
And medical equipment does not permit you to practice medicine by itself, either -- so does that mean an autoclave and a saucepan should cost the same?
Eh? Why should two completely different things cost the same? I'm assuming you know what a pan is so perhaps its worth looking up Autoclave. Passing similarities yes, the same, no. You might as well ask why a plane and a car don't cost the same because they are both modes of transport.
Sheet music and an MP3 of the same piece contain the same information only one has been interpreted by a skilled musician. Generally when a skilled individual employs their talents they increase the value of whatever they work on. A wood carving costs more than the block of wood it took to make it. A doctor is paid (generally far too much) to make a sick person well etc.
You mean to tell me that Alpha Decay is rare in the universe? I simply don't buy the argument.
Alpha decay is incredibly rare in the universe. The reason for this is that only heavy elements will decay by alpha particle emission that is elements like Uranium, Thorium etc. All of these are far, far heavier than iron which is important.
Next question is where do all the elements come from? The very light ones such as hydrogen and helium were formed in the Big Bang and the accurate prediction of the observed abundance's of these gases is one of the major achievements of the Big Bang model (the technical term is Big Bang nucleosynthesis).
The slightly heavier elements such as carbon, silicon, oxygen etc. can be formed in the heart of any star by nuclear fusion binding nuclei together in complex fusion cycles. However iron-56 is the most stable nucleus possible so once you have bound nuclei together to form this you cannot get any more energy out and, in fact it requires energy to make heavier nuclei.
So where do all the elements which can undergo alpha decay come from? Well if you have a sufficiently massive start (above 9 solar masses) when it finally turns its core into iron there is no more energy to be had and the entire core collapses under gravity and then rebounds in a super nova explosion. In this explosion there are massive numbers of neutrons produced which stream out through the star's outer atmosphere. This results a very complex chain of neutron capture and decay (which nuclear astrophysicists study at places like TRIUMF) resulting in the heavy elements like Uranium, lead etc. that we find on the earth today - in fact ALL the elements heavier than iron-56 were produced in this manner.
So to get alpha decay you have to have a radioactive element that was produced in the heart of a particular type of dying star. In terms of the total mass of the universe the about which exists in such a rare and hard to produce form is minuscule. Hence, although alpha decay is common on the Earth is is incredible rare in the Universe.
"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."
Who are you to say what *I* should do with the software I worked on for over 2 years full time?
In what way has anything I said told you what you can do with your software? Copyright law is about saying what others can do with your software once you sell, or give, them a copy. So to turn it around who are you to say what I should do with property that I have legally purchased?
You for example are not in charge what should happen with my work, I am. And I think that's fair, as I wrote it, spend all my time on it and payed for it from my own pocket
Yes but if I buy a copy from you I can make exactly the same argument: I bought it, its mine and I paid for it from my own pocket.
How am I then going to pay the bills?
That is the one good thing which copyright does do - it lets people like you make money from being creative. Unfortunately that good has to be set against the invasion of privacy, loss of fair-use rights, legal bullying, suppression of competition etc. which big businesses also use copyright for. Hence my point that whether copyright in its current form is still a net benefit to society is debatable.
Abolishing copyright would be an extreme position to take but what about reforming it? For example a copyright term of 10 or 20 years would still let you make money from your program as would codifying fair use rights and making DRM which violates them illegal. Even if copyright were abolished you can still make money - several big corporations make money from Open Source software that, while copyrighted, is free to copy. Even with your current business model perhaps you could make money selling support rather than the program itself?
I should be clear that my original post was not meant to advocate abolishing copyright. While I am not convinced that, in its current form, it is a net benefit to society it seems to me that the more sensible approach to take is to reform it into something which is.
I'd love to see an alternative that would mean that people could create without sacrificing their ability to live.
Before copyright existed composers, actors, singers etc. made money from live performances and/or patronage. True they did not live in large mansions and have lavish lifestyles nor did they provide support for large business corporations but they certainly did live.
And just as his morals about what she shouldn't be allowed to do are debatable, so are your morals about public performance debatable.
True but I would hold that a large fraction of the population of most western countries would agree that if you have legally purchased a copy of the music what you choose to do with it, including perform it, is up to you with the exception of copying and selling it....and yet we do not have those rights. No you could say that I'm wrong and a majority would not agree with that. However I suspect that IP based industry agree with me that this is the case which is why they employ means (that while legal I suspect a majority would also agree are unethical) to convince politicians that the existing system should stay. This also explains the frantic attempts by the RIAA and others to attempt to persuade people that copying music/films/etc. is morally wrong. If a majority of people agreed that it was there would be no need for this and copyright infringement would be a far smaller issue than it currently is (though of course it would still be there since humans are known to act immorally even by their own definitions!).
What is needed is a free, open and public debate on copyright without undue influence by media groups. Until then I would expect public resentment to keep growing and laws to keep getting stricter until either innovation and creativity is stiffled by the laws or the resentment results in a backlash that damages the industry to such an extent that innovation and creativity are stifled by lack of money.
If you assert that you have a moral right to X and believe it with all your heart, but few others agree, then you will never see your right exercised.
Completely true. However even if a lot of others agree but large corporations do not then I still think you will never get to see your right exercised which is a problem.
you can not claim that your "moral right" permits your behavior because that area's already legally covered.
There is a difference between 'legal' and 'moral'. It is certainly possible for something to be moral or ethical but illegal just as it is for something to be legal but immoral or unethical. So it depends what you mean by 'permit'. For example if I had purchased that sheet music my morals would permit me to perform that music in public since I paid for a copy of the music. However the law says that I cannot and so I might refrain in order to avoid paying the associated fines (something for which the public should be very glad of given my musical abilities! ;-).
Clearly copying the sheet music is illegal, at least in the US, in Canada private copying between individuals like that is permitted and legal (at least that is my understanding). However the composer was arguing that the teenager was morally and ethically wrong...and that I think is far more debatable.
Hmm, sort of - but I think what we as scientists often forget is that the public are not stupid, only ignorant. Very often they want to know "Why" about a lot of things we take granted.
I agree exactly - that's why it is best to avoid some of the details and explain the rest. This does leave some gaps and if you have a smart member o the audience or interviewer then they can pick up on that and ask about it. This not only helps you - because now you are talking about something they clearly are interested in and understand at some level - but invariably makes them happy because they know that they have asked a smart question and will be encouraged to ask more!
...course concerning the QM of chemistry...I think subjects are too often presented as something mysterious
It is interesting that you should pick that particular example. One of the complaints that us physicists often have about QM taught by chemists is that they introduce it very early (because they need to use it for just about everything) and so cannot teach it in its proper detail i.e. solving the Hydrogen atom electron orbitals from scratch. Hence you end up with this recipe-based approach without a real understanding of where it all comes from at a fundamental level....which is probably exactly what mathematicians say about us physicists regarding maths! :-)
why not try something like "Well, we don't know what reality is like at so small a scale, because we can't make measurements that fine"
Well one reason is because that would be wrong. We do know how reality works on such a fine scale - it simply does not define position and momentum as single quantities (in fact it doesn't do that at any scale - but the difference is too small to see at large scales). An illustration: look really close at your display and you'll see pixels (don't try this on your new iPhone 4 ;-) so clearly your display does not define the position of a point to less that the dimensions of one pixel. The universe is similar - it does not define the position of an object to a fixed point. However unlike the screen the "resolution" is not a fixed value.
Getting rid of technical vocabulary often means being either more long winded, or over-simplifying, or risking being misunderstood.
How does getting rid of technical vocabulary risk you not being understood? Leaving it in guarantees you will not be understood! You avoid being long winded by NOT explaining all the details which the technical vocabulary implies i.e. pick the most important details and explain only them. Finally I have yet to be accused of over-simplifying anything...if you think you have really over-simplified something you are probably explaining it at about the right level of detail. Yes this does mean that you do not get all the details across but at least you have got some of the details across which is better than confusing the audience and getting nothing across.
One is for personal entertainment and the other is for providing a performance tool.
Except that the sheet music you buy does not allow you to perform the piece in public - you also need to purchase the right to perform it as well. So the only legal use purchasing the sheet music gives is personal entertainment as well.
Copyright law exists for the advancement of society
Copyright law was created for the advancement of society. It currently exists because of a historical precedence. Whether copyright law still benefits society is a debatable point.
The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
Clearly not the legal right but what about the moral right to do so? Creative works used to be funded by either patronage or live performances so clearly copyright is not required for composers, singers etc. to make a living. So is it morally right to prevent people from sharing simply because creators want to earn more money or be supported in a particular way? Perhaps a case can be made if the current copyright system could be shown to produce a larger variety of higher quality material than its predecessor but I've yet to see that argument made, or at least made convincingly.
When I see a paper that has a really high jargon to English ratio, it often seems to be cause the author is trying to hide his inability to understand what he did.
It depends - if someone in the field notices it as a lot of jargon that is very likely the case. However what most of us scientists forget is that a large fraction of the vocabulary we use everyday is jargon to the public.
For example in particle physics it would be completely acceptable to find a sentence such as "we selected minimum bias events with a lead muon pT greater than 5 GeV/c and with an eta less than 2.0" in a paper. Jargon such as pT, eta, lead muon and minimum bias are very commonly used in the field but I doubt someone outside the field would understand these. This is certainly not a sign that someone is hiding their lack of understanding - it is simply someone communicating with their peers in the precise vocabulary which has grown up to service particle physics.
When science informs society's policy decisions, there are going to be questions, concerns, and issues. Refusing to give them a legitimate hearing (and a reasoned response) is going to only foster conspiracy theories and harden the position of people who feel their valid concerns are being overlooked, ignored, and waved off.
While that is true the problem is that, no matter what you do, there will always be people who refuse to listen to anything you say and continue to claim that their concerns are being ignored - a good example of this is the LHC end-of-the-world scenario. So at some point you simply have to ignore these idiots otherwise you will never get anything done. The problem then arises where do you draw the line? Wherever you draw it there will always be some malcontents who, no matter how provably wrong they are, will continue to get some level of credibility in the eyes of non-experts from continuing media attention.
I think the fundamental issue scientists fail to 'grok' is that non-scientists simply don't share their curiosity.
I completely disagree. Almost all the non-scientists I've talked to are very interested and curious in the basic things that particle physicists are curious about. The problem is that they are not at all interested in all the complex details involved in trying to find the answers.
For example if I talk to the public about trying to understand the Big Bang, what Dark Matter is, why particles have mass or why the Universe is made of matter and not anti-matter etc. etc. and they get very interested. If I talked to them about the ATLAS Event Filter Jet Algorithm, my python analysis code or how to calculate a cross section from a Feynman diagram then I'm sure their eyes would glaze over and they'd fall asleep!
Don't mistake lack of interest in the details with lack of interest in the overall issue the research is addressing!
I think the key here is that people want a translation of the science into terms they understand.
Exactly! When explaining science to the public my aim is not so much to "dumb it down" as to not use technical jargon and to avoid worrying about unnecessary details. A large fraction of the public can generally understand the basic concepts once they are explained without the technical vocabulary and without all the unnecessary details.
The big problem with talking to the public is that we scientists have developed highly technical vocabularies with precise meanings in order to be able to communicate complex concepts very precisely to each other. Even if we remember not to use this vocabulary there is the strong urge to fill in all the details which less precise, "everyday" vocabulary does not specify.
I agree the phenomenon is interesting - I was simply trying to possibly explain it as a "I can find out all the details of going to X on the net so why do I need to go" type of attitude whereas something like travel to another planet would be so new and so different that you would not be able to research it in enough detail beforehand to know exactly what you would find. Hence it would be far more exciting and perhaps exciting enough to encourage a few jaded armchair web tourists to actually travel.
For example I love to travel and regularly do but I tend to go to more developed countries even when I have a choice of destination. This is partly because, while say Africa would be different so too would say Sweden. However it is a lot easier to travel to Sweden and see the sights and sounds there than Africa where you have to worry about crime, vaccinations, political stability, basic amenities etc. However give me the chance to visit planet X which has the same travel concerns as Africa but which is a lot more different and less well known and I'd probably want to brave those same 'risks' to see it.
So is it so unreasonable to expect that the the effect might be that some are more cautious than me on the risk vs. reward travel scale, just as there are others more adventurous than me? In this case an alien planet might be different enough that they could imagine themselves making the effort to travel there....even if they don't actually do it even if the opportunity arose! So definitely interesting observation but perhaps understandable?
Humans travel for the experience. Nobody knows what it would feel like to actually stand on the top of Olympus Mons and look out at the view or stare up at the cliffs from the bottom of one of the many canyon systems. Yes we can simulate the view but if that were enough then tourism on Earth would be dead because we would just look at photos.
if you are considering travel to see exotic new worlds and cultures - there really are a lot of options right here, on Earth.
While that's true to some extent (they are not exotic new worlds they are exotic parts of our world) these exotic 'worlds' have already been visited by people from our own cultures repeatedly and all you have to do is go to the web and read up on what to expect. That does not mean that it is not fun to visit (I love travelling) but going to a truly new and exotic world would be very different since, if you are one of the first to go, you will not have a good idea of what to expect hence it will be far more of an adventure than visiting country X on Earth.