There are a number of ways of fixing the piracy problem.
1. If a port isn't worth the cost of security, then avoid it 100%. And I mean the TRUE cost of security - so if the US navy patrols some port that doesn't mean the cost is zero.
2. For areas that are worth trading with (ports where oil is offloaded, for example), then the US Navy should guarantee safe passage, and collect a tariff from anybody transiting the area. I'm fine with it being a UN body instead, as long as it is effective.
3. For areas like the Straits of Malacca, the US should just tell the local government to either shape up or they'll be taking care of things. If a US destroyer is transiting the straits and gets attacked it isn't like it is going to worry about local jurisdictions (in case they ever want to make a call in Iran I guess).
4. The US Military should pay visits to ports that pirates operate from and "encourage" the local government to do a better job. By all means fund them as well if they're interested in cooperating - just take it out of the tariffs. Troops can also be stationed at the port as well if needed (preferably with the cooperation of the local government).
It isn't like piracy is some new kind of problem. It was measures like those above that solved it hundreds of years ago everywhere else. The US has actually invaded countries over piracy in the past (and that was back when the US military was far from the biggest one out there).
I'm not suggesting that the US should annex african ports or anything like that. For the most part most 3rd world nations would be happy for the money to do it themselves.
If you find someone to front you some money to play roulette, someone who'll take most of your winnings but let you off the hook if you lose, that doesn't mean you're not gambling. It just means you're gambling with someone else's money.
What is gambling? Taking a risk? Hardly!
What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it. Well-executed movies do not have a guaranteed return, but they do have a strong net positive rate of return. Investing in movies (plural) is not a foolish move.
If you want a fair comparison, why not abolish copyright and let people who choose that model bear the true costs of maintaining their position as the only distributor of copies?
Simple - I want the government enforcing the laws - not some private company imposing its own laws. I think that the costs of enforcing the law is far outweighed by the benefits of IP law in general - when those laws have reasonable limits. I'm not in favor of $200k statutory damage claims against people who have not made a dime from copying works. I'm not in favor of Steamboat Willie still being under copyright. However, I see nothing wrong with the latest Harry Potter book not being available in 50 cent paperback editions in every store or for free on ubiquitous ebooks two weeks before the official release date.
He does exactly the job he was paid to do, and if he does it competently, that's not mediocre at all -- it's perfect.
Nothing on this world is perfect. It is in fact mediocre. In the fields you cited mediocre tends to be good enough (I'd question that for medicine, but that is a whole different mess). I think you'd still have mediocre services without IP law. What you wouldn't have is a lot of invention. Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?
To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it. In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for. In the real world, consumers are almost NEVER the inventors - they buy products they like, they don't come up with them.
If you're really that concerned that you might not get what you paid for, then you can work out another payment arrangement that depends on some post-hoc measurement of quality.
Uh, good luck with that. How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR? Would you use some kind of a vote? The voters actually have incentive to NEVER find a work satisfactory, since that means that they keep the $100M and can commission another movie, while still enjoying the results of the now-bankrupt production company that made the first attempt. If they do it a few times then maybe nobody will go after that bounty, but that is no worse than if the bounty is paid in the first place. This is a great example of the tragedy of the commons - everybody has an incentive to exploit and nobody has an incentive to produce.
Without the expensive, stifling system of copyright law, it would not be efficient.
Ok, what is the cost of the law? I doubt it will exceed even the tax revenues from the industries that it fosters. At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced. Note that I'm all for shortening copyrights and in many cases patents as well. I'm also for getting rid of abuses that amount to gaming the system.
Copyright requires massive amounts of work: it's expensive to enforce, a lot of time and money is sunk into DRM and other anti-piracy measures, and anyone creating a new work has to tread carefully to avoid borrowing too much from other works
True enough, but what about start-ups? Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses. Banks wouldn't lend them the money they need if they didn't have any chance of a return.
Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years. I'm all for getting rid of abuses in IP law (submarine patents, patents for the obvious, etc). However, I think that we're in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water here. The problem isn't that copyright exists, it is that we have stuff like insane statutory damages, 100 year copyrights, patents that last 17 years in industries that move on in 2, etc.
No... the current, copyright-based system is the lottery. You invest time and money into something without knowing if it'll pay off. Many will enter, few will win.
This is hardly the case.
Look at the movie example - every person on the production crew earns an ordinary salary. For the most part they don't make a lot of money if the movie booms, and they don't lose anything if the movie busts. The production company can afford to pay them because it knows that some percentage of their movies will pay off, so they surf the peaks and the valleys. If you eliminated the incentive to create the movie, then nobody would get paid.
My system lets everyone assign their own value: no one has to do a lick of work without knowing exactly what they'll be paid for it. You won't become a millionaire overnight by surprise, but you won't waste your effort on something you thought was profitable only to find out that no one wants it, either.
The beauty of your system is that it works fine even with copyright laws remaining exactly as they are. Why don't you go ahead and start collecting bounties for 100 million dollar movies and see how that works for you? If your system works so well, then it will be able to compete effectively with the risk-based system we have now. If you have to abolish the current system to try out yours, that just tells me that you're unable to compete with it.
I don't think your system will ever work for movies, unless it becomes possible to do them on a small budget. However, I think your system might actually be plausible today for music, since it doesn't actually take that much in the way of resources to produce an album (you could ditch 80% of what most studios spend money on and still come out with a pretty nice product). You could collect bounties and release everything under the creative commons. I don't think your model will fail due to problems creating the music - your problem will be getting people to pay for something they can't sample in advance. However, if you let people sample it in advance, then you need copyright to be able to sell much of anything at all.
Except in the thousands of industries where it doesn't, you mean?
Name one. Virtually every industry that doesn't involve selling products AFTER they're made strives for exactly mediocre performance. When you hire a plumber does he do exactly the job he was paid to do, or does he try to make your pipes a work of art on the off chance that you'll be so impressed that you'll throw more money at him? In most non-content industries you also have the advantage that the products aren't very differentiated - any plumber in town can fix your sink and any who consistently messes up goes out of business. Not just anybody could create a movie like FOTR, and I'm not sure that if you hired Peter Jackson to do your next big hit that it would be likely to do as well. Lots of stuff came together that made it great, and it might never happen quite that way again. With copyright you can read the reviews and THEN decide whether to go see the movie 5 times. With a bounty system you can only hire Peter and hope it turns out for the best, and that you don't get King Kong instead.
They don't inherently depend on IP, they've just settled on that model out of convenience and laziness.
Convenience and laziness are just another way of saying it is the best way to get something done for the least effort - ie it is efficient! If you find a planet where EVERYBODY on it doesn't try to get by with the least effort possible maybe your system will work out just fine. I want my government to establish systems that are convenient and work best when we don't have to do any work at all - that means that it is practical. The alternative is systems that depend on idealism to work, and you can see where that got the Soviets...
I think they deserve to get paid a fair price for the time they spent writing that one good song, and then if they want more money after that, they s
They broadcast music over the radio, on TV, etc., and then "charge" for it not by demanding money, but by demanding restrictions on what I can do with my own property unless I pay them money. Remember the scandal over "home taping"? Why should my right to use the record button on my own stereo require someone else's permission?
Short of redistribution, I agree with you completely here. I'm all for legislation that strengthens and codifies fair use, and that should include DVRs/etc. I'm even fine with limited redistribution. DVR directly uploads to TPB, however, is pushing it.
By supporting limited copyright I give people incentive to create those shows in the first place. I think it is a fair trade. If those shows offend you so much, then don't watch them.
A real musician is a better artist than me, not because of the songs he has recorded in the past -- I can produce copies of his albums just as well as he can -- but because of his ability to produce songs in the future.
What about artists who only have a few great hits (that would be most of them)? Most scientists don't even have one truly great discovery, and almost nobody has more than 1 or 2. Your system assigns zero value to people before they create a great work, and then it assigns great value to somebody who will almost certainly never produce another great work. Sure, they're more likely to do so than some others, but it amounts to a big lottery, with lots of people not getting any benefit or sponsorship of any kind.
The Fellowship of the Ring grossed around $870 million worldwide. Varying ticket prices and multiple viewings make it hard to gauge how many people bought tickets, but it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The movie had a budget of $93 million: if 10-20% of people who were interested in seeing it had contributed an average of $10 each, they could have funded the movie in advance.
Yup, and they wouldn't have ended up with FOTR. They'd have put $100 million in some pool, and then hired some famous director to make some entirely different movie. Do you think that 1/10th of the people who bought FOTR tickets had even heard of Tolkien before the movie came out? They heard and saw that it was a great movie, so they bought tickets - perhaps more than once. The only people buying tickets before the films were made would be the slashdot crowd...:)
The sequels might actually have been fundable via this formula. However, since the production crew would already be paid before they even started filming they wouldn't really have incentive to make it as great a production as it was, since they get paid the same either way. Sure, they'd do a decent job so that they get future assignments, but pay-in-advance tends to create mediocre works in general. That's why start-ups almost always outperform established companies. And start-ups only work because they can make their profits AFTER the product goes to market.
Look, I'm all for having reasonable tradeoffs with IP rules. However, I do think that copyrights and patents, in limited form, tend to encourage far more innovation than they quell. Virtually all high-wage jobs depend on IP in some form. The main exception would be more trade-related jobs, and honestly quite a bit of that has to do with laws that artificially limit the pool of labor (just try to become a carpenter or a plumber and you'll find there is a lot more involved than buying tools and learning how to actually do the work - you can't even charge to cut hair without going through what is essentially a medieval trade guild in most places).
Sounds like the guys in my IT department at work who insist that it doesn't matter who you hire as long as you follow the right process. The process does matter, but the people matter too.
Where the creation of ideas is concerned it is even trickier. You can hire "innovative" ideas, but that doesn't mean that this guarantees that you'll be the one coming out with the next iphone killer, or whatever. The fact is that a group of 100 highly paid innovative people could miss an idea that some guy in his garage figures out in his spare time.
The RIAA is basically employing the venture capital approach - get your feelers into everything, and hope that you get lucky. Be liberal with your money, but also be demanding in your return.
I'm not really a big fan of the RIAA approach, but I'm not sure there is any other approach that is likely to generate consistent results.
My guess is that if you tried to do a marketing-requirements-construction approach (as you seem to advocate) to the iphone, you'd never get off the ground. How many people who now own an iphone would have vocalized their interest in such a product if it didn't exist at all (even in concept)? Most people don't know what they want - but they buy it when they see it. So, it isn't like you can just go out there and ask what kinds of movies people like and just come up with something that follows a formula...
Please explain why law should protect a business model which produces tons of crap. This is not the most efficient way to produce art, and I resent my tax dollars being used to place restrictions on my behavior to produce shitty music which can be sold to the maximum number of recipients.
Uh, if it is so lousy, then why are so many people eager to download it?
If you think that listening to this kind of music rots the brain, or whatever, then you should be in favor of making it harder to obtain. Then maybe people will listen to "good quality" art instead. Whatever that is...
If I mow your lawn without asking, merely expecting that you'll pay me once you've seen what a good job I did, does that mean you're obligated to pay? Or does it just mean I'm a fool who gave his labor away for free?
If the RIAA were playing records in the public square and then walking around charging people for happening to be there listening to it, I'd say you have a point. Nobody is forcing you to download songs you don't want.
Artists don't need to protect the content they produce, any more than lawyers need to protect the things they say in court, or accountants need to protect the numbers they write down on tax forms. The real value is in their labor.
Agreed. However, there are lots of other industries where the primary value of an employee ISN'T in their labor, but in the information they produce. Most sciences and entertainment industries fall into that category.
The fact is that nobody would make major production movies if there were no copyright law. Making a movie like LOTR costs many millions of dollars. Nobody does something like that for fun. It isn't 12 actors on a stage - it is 12 actors plus 100 people on the camera crew, plus 25 electricians, plus 50 highly skilled guys going frame by frame editing effects, plus the guys feeding them, and so on... Nobody does that kind of thing in their spare time. Nobody is going to pay to commission a work like that just for their personal edification, either.
Ditto for the typical non-academic research lab in almost any industry. Sure, every industry will spend a little effort on R&D just on their own initiative. However, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars creating new products that anybody can knock off for 1/100th the cost. Your modern academic lab also benefits from this sort of thing as well - often indirectly. They might get funding from industry, or their university sells off the patents they obtain. They also rely on a flow of cheap labor (grad students), and they only exist because of lucrative jobs in the associated industries. Sure, there will still be scientists if there were no patents/etc, but there would not be nearly as many.
I enjoy some of the content they produce, and I would rather see them adapt now so they're able to keep producing it, instead of clinging to a failed model and going bankrupt.
Ok, go ahead and explain how to fund the next LOTR or whatever without the use of IP laws. I'm certainly all for fewer artificial restrictions on commerce - I just don't see how it is going to happen.
Don't get me wrong - I strongly dislike the..AA's tactics. I'm all for some laws to reign things in a bit, including greatly reigning in the duration of copyrights. Patents should be shorter as well in today's age, although you do need to be careful there as not all industries move along at the same pace. When 0.01% of an album's revenue goes to the artist, there is something wrong with that. Also, music is far lower-labor to produce and I think we can do a lot more to reign things in without really damaging the amount of actual art that gets produced. Movies are a different problem - there are lots of issues around DRM/etc that need to be reigned in, but fundamentally a movie isn't the product of a couple of actors but a whole production company.
By all means let's cut down on the abuses. But I'm not sure that throwing the baby out with the bathwater makes sense. I'm all for maximizing the size of the "creative commons," but let's try to do that while avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
In the case of server hacking - if the server was on US soil then the server is governed by US law. Most likely the hacking was illegal under local law as well, so extradition won't be a problem. If it isn't against the law, the local government will be quickly under pressure to stop it just the same. Hacking into military servers is also a bit of an unusual case, since armies by their very nature are designed to disregard national sovereignty.
If somebody genuinely commits libel I'm fine with charging them under local jurisdictions, but of course enforcement might be a problem. Now, some countries have really crazy definitions of libel and that I'm opposed to regardless of how it is applied. If a person is convicted in some country where the definition is insane, then at least they're unlikely to be extradited by their local government.
The internet creates all kinds of national sovereignty problems by its very nature. Not much can really be done to fix that unless everybody wants to agree on one set of standards.
How about the pictures of Rice dressed as an african native? Somebody didn't consider that racially offensive? Or is that accusation reserved for people who make fun of Democrats?:)
Last time I checked those images were still hosted by Google and the NAACP hasn't been pitching a fit.
"There is something out there that might be effected."
Uh, when did I say that?
Getting sound to work is not a problem. Getting a more advanced feature or application can be a problem and that's an entirely different sort of issue.
Well, that depends on whether you define having more than one application playing sound at the same time is considered an advanced feature or not. Some of the linux sound systems have resource conflicts.
I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to configure pulseaudio - so far I've managed to avoid this...
This is not a concern of your n00b end user that can't figure out their printer.
Hey, I wasn't the one that brought up the mysteries involved in getting cups and foomatic to work...:)
Keep in mind that memory performance isn't the only factor limiting realtime mixing. Every channel requires two operations (add, multiply, divide) per sample - or you can cut down on the divisions if you have a register big enough to sum all your channels (such as mixing 16 to 32).
A typical p4 can't run that many integer operations in parallel (not sure what the number is), so at some point there will be a limit.
Still, I agree with your point that you can do a lot in cpu these days.
Note that something like software defined radio tends to do the more protocolish functions in software - the actual signal generation tends to be done in hardware, or on something like a DSP (which is technically software-controlled). It isn't like you can just tune something to 2.4 GHz and sample a few hundred MHz and have a CPU pull the signals out in realtime via FFT...
Uh, I attended high school in the northeastern US in a school that was at least 20% african american. Might have been closer to 30-40%. I've never actually heard that term before. Maybe I just didn't have enough racist friends or something. Come to think of it, I don't think I really got to know anybody who was really racist until I moved out of that area.
Personally I think that photos likening politicians to monkeys, or african tribesmen, are just dumb. If anything the photos of Rice from a few years ago were far more racist in their nature, but for some reason those got a free pass (Google still indexes them, so they're easy to find).
Racism will never die until people get beyond this sort of stuff. Unfortunately, it appears that most people are idiots - just look at elections these days. So, I'm not optimistic that this will happen in my lifetime...
Hmm, while you're at it why don't you start a protest to get them to take down all the Condoleezza Rice parody photos floating around on the internet. I'd ask you to mount a protest to clear up the Bush monkey pics, but it is apparent that any monkey-like depiction of an african american must be racially motivated, while any monkey-like depiction of a white person must be purely a political commentary. Or is it only a racial attack if the african american is a registered Democrat?
I'm sorry - the political re-education must not have taken correctly. Let me know what the rules are and I'll be sure to regulate my thoughts accordingly.
I think we do agree on one thing - these kinds of photos reflect more on the people making them than the people they depict.
Uh, if you didn't know what the link was going to tell you just from reading the URL one of two things is true:
1. You're from outside the USA (in which case you can be forgiven - even though I'd think that any culture could benefit from reading the aforementioned article).
2. You're from inside the USA, and are a perfect illustration of what is wrong with the US educational system.
I'm now going to ask a few teenagers about the saying, and I'm prepared to cringe...
Would you complain about mswindows if some application developers used a broken third party sound system?
Could you explain which of those 7 is the broken third party sound system? I'm sure you'll find 300 fanboys ready to mod you down.:)
My point is that windows manages to work without having a third party sound system. The standard one works good enough for 95% of all workflows. As another poster indicated, you can even use the win 3.1 apis and your program will play nicely with the latest FPS.
In linux it seems like nobody can live with the alsa standard, so we have a half-dozen other standards. They all have pros and cons.
From what I've read on LWN/etc it seems like pulseaudio is the future, but it has some issues around latency (in the multi-second range sometimes).
The figure would be a bit lower than that for a cpu that is a few years old (we can't assume people bought their computer last week), and I don't think you factored in the wavetable bit - we're not mixing wavs, we're mixing sound-fonts and sequence data. Each note on event requires you to find the closest samples, maybe interpolate a few, and then to scale them up and put them in the mix (and then do all that other stuff you counted on). I agree that it isn't as big a deal as it once was.
My point was more about the fact that there is no single standard way of doing things, and the various standards that do exist compete for memory, resource utilization, etc. The fact that you can't set up a midi sound card just illustrates the point...
And this thread just sums up the problem - in three posts we have now made mention of four different sound systems, and I'll go ahead and mention JACK, oss, and esd right here to make it 7. Various programs are written for each of these, and while some are more deprecated than others, the fact is that getting sound to work on linux is a LOT harder than it needs to be.
Sound stopped being a pain in windows with the advent of Win95 and PnP. Before that the windows bit of it wasn't actually that bad (midi mapping was a little painful, but generally the defaults weren't bad). Getting the DMAs/IRQs right was the real pain.
My linux system has a pretty nice wavetable audio board, but to be honest if I want to play something I just use timidity since I've given up on trying to get the hardware to actually work right. If I needed more than rudimentary sound I'd be really up the creek.
Well, it isn't like Bush personally performed warrantless searches on drug dealers under the Patriot Act. However, he can still be held accountable for the actions of his administration. The president sets the tone for the administration, and if he really wanted to send a message that stuff like this was not acceptable he could do so.
The president can't be in all places in all times. However, he governs the largest budget on the entire planet, which means he can hire people to be in places for him. This subordinate was one of those people, and the people he chooses reflect on him...
Yup, this sort of thing just makes it harder for companies like GM (with similar union relationships/etc) to secure future financing. It increases the risk to future lenders since they no longer can count on priority in a bankruptcy, which means a reluctance to lend. When the company can't compete then the union loses out with the workers, unless the taxpayers keep stepping in with blank checks.
There needs to be some method of having a firewall where you can have an independent group of investigators go through the siezed evidence and produce a report. Then a judge screens that report before it is handed to the primary team prosecuting the crime. The two groups otherwise don't communicate.
Then if they get a warrant for more info from the original source they can go back and ask for more data. There would be no "fruit of the poisoned tree" or anything like that since nobody on the team requesting the warrant was able to see the original evidence.
Kind of like the approach used to reverse engineer an interface without fear of some kind of trade secrets claim - the group taking apart the product doesn't have any interaction with the group building an interface to it, aside from a few well-written sets of specifications that are carefully preserved in case there is a lawsuit to show that they are above board.
Companies do this sort of thing when suing each other all the time. Company A wants to look at company B's files to show they're doing something wrong. Since they're competitors they just agree on a 3rd party who looks at everything and reports on whether the claim has merit. They're otherwise sworn to secrecy.
Assuming that Chrome runs Chromium as the browser (haven't read up on it much), that could be a problem. The last time I browsed a gears-enabled site using Chromium I got an error that my browser didn't support gears. My IE 6 browser at work had no issues. Oh, the irony...
All insurance is a net loss when viewed from a collective perspective. All bonds are a net loss compared to stocks from a long-term perspective. That doesn't make either insurance or bonds worthless - they are financial products that have a legitimate purpose. Per my earlier email health insurance is a bit odd because it isn't really true insurance, and the whole healthcare system is messed up in a lot of ways. However, for most other kinds of insurance the market is pretty efficient.
The insured transfers their risk of loss to the insurer. The insurer collects a small fee from the insured in exchange for accepting this risk. This is the essence of any kind of insurance - you pay a fee for financial security.
I have life insurance so that if I die my family isn't on the streets, as my wife cannot afford to be the sole provider for our family. I fully hope and expect to never collect a dime from that policy (I'd almost certainly drop it or reduce coverage once I hit an advanced age). However, I don't consider it a waste. Nor do I walk around fearing death. I'm just financially responsible and choose to pay a few bucks every month just in case.
Now, if you have independent wealth, or your family has sufficient wealth to cover any loss, then by all means don't get insurance. I certainly wouldn't. However, for the 99% of Americans that can't afford to saddle their family with the cost of rebuilding their home, insurance is a pretty smart option.
In my case it is cheaper to pay $0 per year for home repairs than to pay $1000 (or whatever) for fire insurance. That is, unless I'm unlucky enough to have a fire.
The whole point of insurance is that it ISN'T supposed to pay as much as it takes in for a typical person.
Of course, in the US health insurance isn't really insurance - it is more of a purchasing plan for healthcare services. It would work a whole lot better if: 1. Insurance was catastrophic care only. Premiums would be a LOT lower, and everybody would have something like a $5k deductible. Most people would go almost all of their lives without filing a claim. However, if somebody does need bypass surgery or whatever they won't lose their home. 2. Care providers could only charge exactly one rate to all people. It could be based on medical complexity, but it couldn't be based on how you pay as long as you pay on time. No more group rates. They essentially discriminate against people who aren't in a group and force everybody to have to haggle every little bill. 3. All rates must be published. Unless you're unable to make decisions you cannot be billed a dime if you didn't agree to the amount BEFORE services are rendered. Sure, there can be allowances for complications during surgery, or whatever, but they need to be rare and their likelihood must be disclosed in advance.
All of this will make health insurance a lot more like auto insurance, which most people would agree is expensive but probably not unreasonably so in light of the liabilities/etc involved. When you need an oil change you don't file an insurance claim for it.
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There are a number of ways of fixing the piracy problem.
1. If a port isn't worth the cost of security, then avoid it 100%. And I mean the TRUE cost of security - so if the US navy patrols some port that doesn't mean the cost is zero.
2. For areas that are worth trading with (ports where oil is offloaded, for example), then the US Navy should guarantee safe passage, and collect a tariff from anybody transiting the area. I'm fine with it being a UN body instead, as long as it is effective.
3. For areas like the Straits of Malacca, the US should just tell the local government to either shape up or they'll be taking care of things. If a US destroyer is transiting the straits and gets attacked it isn't like it is going to worry about local jurisdictions (in case they ever want to make a call in Iran I guess).
4. The US Military should pay visits to ports that pirates operate from and "encourage" the local government to do a better job. By all means fund them as well if they're interested in cooperating - just take it out of the tariffs. Troops can also be stationed at the port as well if needed (preferably with the cooperation of the local government).
It isn't like piracy is some new kind of problem. It was measures like those above that solved it hundreds of years ago everywhere else. The US has actually invaded countries over piracy in the past (and that was back when the US military was far from the biggest one out there).
I'm not suggesting that the US should annex african ports or anything like that. For the most part most 3rd world nations would be happy for the money to do it themselves.
If you find someone to front you some money to play roulette, someone who'll take most of your winnings but let you off the hook if you lose, that doesn't mean you're not gambling. It just means you're gambling with someone else's money.
What is gambling? Taking a risk? Hardly!
What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it. Well-executed movies do not have a guaranteed return, but they do have a strong net positive rate of return. Investing in movies (plural) is not a foolish move.
If you want a fair comparison, why not abolish copyright and let people who choose that model bear the true costs of maintaining their position as the only distributor of copies?
Simple - I want the government enforcing the laws - not some private company imposing its own laws. I think that the costs of enforcing the law is far outweighed by the benefits of IP law in general - when those laws have reasonable limits. I'm not in favor of $200k statutory damage claims against people who have not made a dime from copying works. I'm not in favor of Steamboat Willie still being under copyright. However, I see nothing wrong with the latest Harry Potter book not being available in 50 cent paperback editions in every store or for free on ubiquitous ebooks two weeks before the official release date.
He does exactly the job he was paid to do, and if he does it competently, that's not mediocre at all -- it's perfect.
Nothing on this world is perfect. It is in fact mediocre. In the fields you cited mediocre tends to be good enough (I'd question that for medicine, but that is a whole different mess). I think you'd still have mediocre services without IP law. What you wouldn't have is a lot of invention. Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?
To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it. In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for. In the real world, consumers are almost NEVER the inventors - they buy products they like, they don't come up with them.
If you're really that concerned that you might not get what you paid for, then you can work out another payment arrangement that depends on some post-hoc measurement of quality.
Uh, good luck with that. How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR? Would you use some kind of a vote? The voters actually have incentive to NEVER find a work satisfactory, since that means that they keep the $100M and can commission another movie, while still enjoying the results of the now-bankrupt production company that made the first attempt. If they do it a few times then maybe nobody will go after that bounty, but that is no worse than if the bounty is paid in the first place. This is a great example of the tragedy of the commons - everybody has an incentive to exploit and nobody has an incentive to produce.
Without the expensive, stifling system of copyright law, it would not be efficient.
Ok, what is the cost of the law? I doubt it will exceed even the tax revenues from the industries that it fosters. At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced. Note that I'm all for shortening copyrights and in many cases patents as well. I'm also for getting rid of abuses that amount to gaming the system.
Copyright requires massive amounts of work: it's expensive to enforce, a lot of time and money is sunk into DRM and other anti-piracy measures, and anyone creating a new work has to tread carefully to avoid borrowing too much from other works
True enough, but what about start-ups? Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses. Banks wouldn't lend them the money they need if they didn't have any chance of a return.
Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years. I'm all for getting rid of abuses in IP law (submarine patents, patents for the obvious, etc). However, I think that we're in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water here. The problem isn't that copyright exists, it is that we have stuff like insane statutory damages, 100 year copyrights, patents that last 17 years in industries that move on in 2, etc.
No... the current, copyright-based system is the lottery. You invest time and money into something without knowing if it'll pay off. Many will enter, few will win.
This is hardly the case.
Look at the movie example - every person on the production crew earns an ordinary salary. For the most part they don't make a lot of money if the movie booms, and they don't lose anything if the movie busts. The production company can afford to pay them because it knows that some percentage of their movies will pay off, so they surf the peaks and the valleys. If you eliminated the incentive to create the movie, then nobody would get paid.
My system lets everyone assign their own value: no one has to do a lick of work without knowing exactly what they'll be paid for it. You won't become a millionaire overnight by surprise, but you won't waste your effort on something you thought was profitable only to find out that no one wants it, either.
The beauty of your system is that it works fine even with copyright laws remaining exactly as they are. Why don't you go ahead and start collecting bounties for 100 million dollar movies and see how that works for you? If your system works so well, then it will be able to compete effectively with the risk-based system we have now. If you have to abolish the current system to try out yours, that just tells me that you're unable to compete with it.
I don't think your system will ever work for movies, unless it becomes possible to do them on a small budget. However, I think your system might actually be plausible today for music, since it doesn't actually take that much in the way of resources to produce an album (you could ditch 80% of what most studios spend money on and still come out with a pretty nice product). You could collect bounties and release everything under the creative commons. I don't think your model will fail due to problems creating the music - your problem will be getting people to pay for something they can't sample in advance. However, if you let people sample it in advance, then you need copyright to be able to sell much of anything at all.
Except in the thousands of industries where it doesn't, you mean?
Name one. Virtually every industry that doesn't involve selling products AFTER they're made strives for exactly mediocre performance. When you hire a plumber does he do exactly the job he was paid to do, or does he try to make your pipes a work of art on the off chance that you'll be so impressed that you'll throw more money at him? In most non-content industries you also have the advantage that the products aren't very differentiated - any plumber in town can fix your sink and any who consistently messes up goes out of business. Not just anybody could create a movie like FOTR, and I'm not sure that if you hired Peter Jackson to do your next big hit that it would be likely to do as well. Lots of stuff came together that made it great, and it might never happen quite that way again. With copyright you can read the reviews and THEN decide whether to go see the movie 5 times. With a bounty system you can only hire Peter and hope it turns out for the best, and that you don't get King Kong instead.
They don't inherently depend on IP, they've just settled on that model out of convenience and laziness.
Convenience and laziness are just another way of saying it is the best way to get something done for the least effort - ie it is efficient! If you find a planet where EVERYBODY on it doesn't try to get by with the least effort possible maybe your system will work out just fine. I want my government to establish systems that are convenient and work best when we don't have to do any work at all - that means that it is practical. The alternative is systems that depend on idealism to work, and you can see where that got the Soviets...
I think they deserve to get paid a fair price for the time they spent writing that one good song, and then if they want more money after that, they s
They broadcast music over the radio, on TV, etc., and then "charge" for it not by demanding money, but by demanding restrictions on what I can do with my own property unless I pay them money. Remember the scandal over "home taping"? Why should my right to use the record button on my own stereo require someone else's permission?
Short of redistribution, I agree with you completely here. I'm all for legislation that strengthens and codifies fair use, and that should include DVRs/etc. I'm even fine with limited redistribution. DVR directly uploads to TPB, however, is pushing it.
By supporting limited copyright I give people incentive to create those shows in the first place. I think it is a fair trade. If those shows offend you so much, then don't watch them.
A real musician is a better artist than me, not because of the songs he has recorded in the past -- I can produce copies of his albums just as well as he can -- but because of his ability to produce songs in the future.
What about artists who only have a few great hits (that would be most of them)? Most scientists don't even have one truly great discovery, and almost nobody has more than 1 or 2. Your system assigns zero value to people before they create a great work, and then it assigns great value to somebody who will almost certainly never produce another great work. Sure, they're more likely to do so than some others, but it amounts to a big lottery, with lots of people not getting any benefit or sponsorship of any kind.
The Fellowship of the Ring grossed around $870 million worldwide. Varying ticket prices and multiple viewings make it hard to gauge how many people bought tickets, but it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The movie had a budget of $93 million: if 10-20% of people who were interested in seeing it had contributed an average of $10 each, they could have funded the movie in advance.
Yup, and they wouldn't have ended up with FOTR. They'd have put $100 million in some pool, and then hired some famous director to make some entirely different movie. Do you think that 1/10th of the people who bought FOTR tickets had even heard of Tolkien before the movie came out? They heard and saw that it was a great movie, so they bought tickets - perhaps more than once. The only people buying tickets before the films were made would be the slashdot crowd... :)
The sequels might actually have been fundable via this formula. However, since the production crew would already be paid before they even started filming they wouldn't really have incentive to make it as great a production as it was, since they get paid the same either way. Sure, they'd do a decent job so that they get future assignments, but pay-in-advance tends to create mediocre works in general. That's why start-ups almost always outperform established companies. And start-ups only work because they can make their profits AFTER the product goes to market.
Look, I'm all for having reasonable tradeoffs with IP rules. However, I do think that copyrights and patents, in limited form, tend to encourage far more innovation than they quell. Virtually all high-wage jobs depend on IP in some form. The main exception would be more trade-related jobs, and honestly quite a bit of that has to do with laws that artificially limit the pool of labor (just try to become a carpenter or a plumber and you'll find there is a lot more involved than buying tools and learning how to actually do the work - you can't even charge to cut hair without going through what is essentially a medieval trade guild in most places).
Sounds like the guys in my IT department at work who insist that it doesn't matter who you hire as long as you follow the right process. The process does matter, but the people matter too.
Where the creation of ideas is concerned it is even trickier. You can hire "innovative" ideas, but that doesn't mean that this guarantees that you'll be the one coming out with the next iphone killer, or whatever. The fact is that a group of 100 highly paid innovative people could miss an idea that some guy in his garage figures out in his spare time.
The RIAA is basically employing the venture capital approach - get your feelers into everything, and hope that you get lucky. Be liberal with your money, but also be demanding in your return.
I'm not really a big fan of the RIAA approach, but I'm not sure there is any other approach that is likely to generate consistent results.
My guess is that if you tried to do a marketing-requirements-construction approach (as you seem to advocate) to the iphone, you'd never get off the ground. How many people who now own an iphone would have vocalized their interest in such a product if it didn't exist at all (even in concept)? Most people don't know what they want - but they buy it when they see it. So, it isn't like you can just go out there and ask what kinds of movies people like and just come up with something that follows a formula...
Please explain why law should protect a business model which produces tons of crap. This is not the most efficient way to produce art, and I resent my tax dollars being used to place restrictions on my behavior to produce shitty music which can be sold to the maximum number of recipients.
Uh, if it is so lousy, then why are so many people eager to download it?
If you think that listening to this kind of music rots the brain, or whatever, then you should be in favor of making it harder to obtain. Then maybe people will listen to "good quality" art instead. Whatever that is...
If I mow your lawn without asking, merely expecting that you'll pay me once you've seen what a good job I did, does that mean you're obligated to pay? Or does it just mean I'm a fool who gave his labor away for free?
If the RIAA were playing records in the public square and then walking around charging people for happening to be there listening to it, I'd say you have a point. Nobody is forcing you to download songs you don't want.
Artists don't need to protect the content they produce, any more than lawyers need to protect the things they say in court, or accountants need to protect the numbers they write down on tax forms. The real value is in their labor.
Agreed. However, there are lots of other industries where the primary value of an employee ISN'T in their labor, but in the information they produce. Most sciences and entertainment industries fall into that category.
The fact is that nobody would make major production movies if there were no copyright law. Making a movie like LOTR costs many millions of dollars. Nobody does something like that for fun. It isn't 12 actors on a stage - it is 12 actors plus 100 people on the camera crew, plus 25 electricians, plus 50 highly skilled guys going frame by frame editing effects, plus the guys feeding them, and so on... Nobody does that kind of thing in their spare time. Nobody is going to pay to commission a work like that just for their personal edification, either.
Ditto for the typical non-academic research lab in almost any industry. Sure, every industry will spend a little effort on R&D just on their own initiative. However, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars creating new products that anybody can knock off for 1/100th the cost. Your modern academic lab also benefits from this sort of thing as well - often indirectly. They might get funding from industry, or their university sells off the patents they obtain. They also rely on a flow of cheap labor (grad students), and they only exist because of lucrative jobs in the associated industries. Sure, there will still be scientists if there were no patents/etc, but there would not be nearly as many.
I enjoy some of the content they produce, and I would rather see them adapt now so they're able to keep producing it, instead of clinging to a failed model and going bankrupt.
Ok, go ahead and explain how to fund the next LOTR or whatever without the use of IP laws. I'm certainly all for fewer artificial restrictions on commerce - I just don't see how it is going to happen.
Don't get me wrong - I strongly dislike the ..AA's tactics. I'm all for some laws to reign things in a bit, including greatly reigning in the duration of copyrights. Patents should be shorter as well in today's age, although you do need to be careful there as not all industries move along at the same pace. When 0.01% of an album's revenue goes to the artist, there is something wrong with that. Also, music is far lower-labor to produce and I think we can do a lot more to reign things in without really damaging the amount of actual art that gets produced. Movies are a different problem - there are lots of issues around DRM/etc that need to be reigned in, but fundamentally a movie isn't the product of a couple of actors but a whole production company.
By all means let's cut down on the abuses. But I'm not sure that throwing the baby out with the bathwater makes sense. I'm all for maximizing the size of the "creative commons," but let's try to do that while avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
In the case of server hacking - if the server was on US soil then the server is governed by US law. Most likely the hacking was illegal under local law as well, so extradition won't be a problem. If it isn't against the law, the local government will be quickly under pressure to stop it just the same. Hacking into military servers is also a bit of an unusual case, since armies by their very nature are designed to disregard national sovereignty.
If somebody genuinely commits libel I'm fine with charging them under local jurisdictions, but of course enforcement might be a problem. Now, some countries have really crazy definitions of libel and that I'm opposed to regardless of how it is applied. If a person is convicted in some country where the definition is insane, then at least they're unlikely to be extradited by their local government.
The internet creates all kinds of national sovereignty problems by its very nature. Not much can really be done to fix that unless everybody wants to agree on one set of standards.
How about the pictures of Rice dressed as an african native? Somebody didn't consider that racially offensive? Or is that accusation reserved for people who make fun of Democrats? :)
Last time I checked those images were still hosted by Google and the NAACP hasn't been pitching a fit.
"There is something out there that might be effected."
Uh, when did I say that?
Getting sound to work is not a problem. Getting a more advanced feature or application can be a problem and that's an entirely different sort of issue.
Well, that depends on whether you define having more than one application playing sound at the same time is considered an advanced feature or not. Some of the linux sound systems have resource conflicts.
I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to configure pulseaudio - so far I've managed to avoid this...
This is not a concern of your n00b end user that can't figure out their printer.
Hey, I wasn't the one that brought up the mysteries involved in getting cups and foomatic to work... :)
Keep in mind that memory performance isn't the only factor limiting realtime mixing. Every channel requires two operations (add, multiply, divide) per sample - or you can cut down on the divisions if you have a register big enough to sum all your channels (such as mixing 16 to 32).
A typical p4 can't run that many integer operations in parallel (not sure what the number is), so at some point there will be a limit.
Still, I agree with your point that you can do a lot in cpu these days.
Note that something like software defined radio tends to do the more protocolish functions in software - the actual signal generation tends to be done in hardware, or on something like a DSP (which is technically software-controlled). It isn't like you can just tune something to 2.4 GHz and sample a few hundred MHz and have a CPU pull the signals out in realtime via FFT...
Never heard the phrase 'Porch Monkey' even?
Uh, I attended high school in the northeastern US in a school that was at least 20% african american. Might have been closer to 30-40%. I've never actually heard that term before. Maybe I just didn't have enough racist friends or something. Come to think of it, I don't think I really got to know anybody who was really racist until I moved out of that area.
Personally I think that photos likening politicians to monkeys, or african tribesmen, are just dumb. If anything the photos of Rice from a few years ago were far more racist in their nature, but for some reason those got a free pass (Google still indexes them, so they're easy to find).
Racism will never die until people get beyond this sort of stuff. Unfortunately, it appears that most people are idiots - just look at elections these days. So, I'm not optimistic that this will happen in my lifetime...
Hate-speech is verbal violence and thus there must be laws against it.
Hear, hear!
Let's all write to our elected representatives and demand a two day waiting period to buy a copy of photoshop!
Hmm, while you're at it why don't you start a protest to get them to take down all the Condoleezza Rice parody photos floating around on the internet. I'd ask you to mount a protest to clear up the Bush monkey pics, but it is apparent that any monkey-like depiction of an african american must be racially motivated, while any monkey-like depiction of a white person must be purely a political commentary. Or is it only a racial attack if the african american is a registered Democrat?
I'm sorry - the political re-education must not have taken correctly. Let me know what the rules are and I'll be sure to regulate my thoughts accordingly.
I think we do agree on one thing - these kinds of photos reflect more on the people making them than the people they depict.
Uh, if you didn't know what the link was going to tell you just from reading the URL one of two things is true:
1. You're from outside the USA (in which case you can be forgiven - even though I'd think that any culture could benefit from reading the aforementioned article).
2. You're from inside the USA, and are a perfect illustration of what is wrong with the US educational system.
I'm now going to ask a few teenagers about the saying, and I'm prepared to cringe...
Would you complain about mswindows if some application developers used a broken third party sound system?
Could you explain which of those 7 is the broken third party sound system? I'm sure you'll find 300 fanboys ready to mod you down. :)
My point is that windows manages to work without having a third party sound system. The standard one works good enough for 95% of all workflows. As another poster indicated, you can even use the win 3.1 apis and your program will play nicely with the latest FPS.
In linux it seems like nobody can live with the alsa standard, so we have a half-dozen other standards. They all have pros and cons.
From what I've read on LWN/etc it seems like pulseaudio is the future, but it has some issues around latency (in the multi-second range sometimes).
The figure would be a bit lower than that for a cpu that is a few years old (we can't assume people bought their computer last week), and I don't think you factored in the wavetable bit - we're not mixing wavs, we're mixing sound-fonts and sequence data. Each note on event requires you to find the closest samples, maybe interpolate a few, and then to scale them up and put them in the mix (and then do all that other stuff you counted on). I agree that it isn't as big a deal as it once was.
My point was more about the fact that there is no single standard way of doing things, and the various standards that do exist compete for memory, resource utilization, etc. The fact that you can't set up a midi sound card just illustrates the point...
And this thread just sums up the problem - in three posts we have now made mention of four different sound systems, and I'll go ahead and mention JACK, oss, and esd right here to make it 7. Various programs are written for each of these, and while some are more deprecated than others, the fact is that getting sound to work on linux is a LOT harder than it needs to be.
Sound stopped being a pain in windows with the advent of Win95 and PnP. Before that the windows bit of it wasn't actually that bad (midi mapping was a little painful, but generally the defaults weren't bad). Getting the DMAs/IRQs right was the real pain.
My linux system has a pretty nice wavetable audio board, but to be honest if I want to play something I just use timidity since I've given up on trying to get the hardware to actually work right. If I needed more than rudimentary sound I'd be really up the creek.
Well, it isn't like Bush personally performed warrantless searches on drug dealers under the Patriot Act. However, he can still be held accountable for the actions of his administration. The president sets the tone for the administration, and if he really wanted to send a message that stuff like this was not acceptable he could do so.
The president can't be in all places in all times. However, he governs the largest budget on the entire planet, which means he can hire people to be in places for him. This subordinate was one of those people, and the people he chooses reflect on him...
Yup, this sort of thing just makes it harder for companies like GM (with similar union relationships/etc) to secure future financing. It increases the risk to future lenders since they no longer can count on priority in a bankruptcy, which means a reluctance to lend. When the company can't compete then the union loses out with the workers, unless the taxpayers keep stepping in with blank checks.
There needs to be some method of having a firewall where you can have an independent group of investigators go through the siezed evidence and produce a report. Then a judge screens that report before it is handed to the primary team prosecuting the crime. The two groups otherwise don't communicate.
Then if they get a warrant for more info from the original source they can go back and ask for more data. There would be no "fruit of the poisoned tree" or anything like that since nobody on the team requesting the warrant was able to see the original evidence.
Kind of like the approach used to reverse engineer an interface without fear of some kind of trade secrets claim - the group taking apart the product doesn't have any interaction with the group building an interface to it, aside from a few well-written sets of specifications that are carefully preserved in case there is a lawsuit to show that they are above board.
Companies do this sort of thing when suing each other all the time. Company A wants to look at company B's files to show they're doing something wrong. Since they're competitors they just agree on a 3rd party who looks at everything and reports on whether the claim has merit. They're otherwise sworn to secrecy.
Assuming that Chrome runs Chromium as the browser (haven't read up on it much), that could be a problem. The last time I browsed a gears-enabled site using Chromium I got an error that my browser didn't support gears. My IE 6 browser at work had no issues. Oh, the irony...
Agreed.
All insurance is a net loss when viewed from a collective perspective. All bonds are a net loss compared to stocks from a long-term perspective. That doesn't make either insurance or bonds worthless - they are financial products that have a legitimate purpose. Per my earlier email health insurance is a bit odd because it isn't really true insurance, and the whole healthcare system is messed up in a lot of ways. However, for most other kinds of insurance the market is pretty efficient.
The insured transfers their risk of loss to the insurer. The insurer collects a small fee from the insured in exchange for accepting this risk. This is the essence of any kind of insurance - you pay a fee for financial security.
I have life insurance so that if I die my family isn't on the streets, as my wife cannot afford to be the sole provider for our family. I fully hope and expect to never collect a dime from that policy (I'd almost certainly drop it or reduce coverage once I hit an advanced age). However, I don't consider it a waste. Nor do I walk around fearing death. I'm just financially responsible and choose to pay a few bucks every month just in case.
Now, if you have independent wealth, or your family has sufficient wealth to cover any loss, then by all means don't get insurance. I certainly wouldn't. However, for the 99% of Americans that can't afford to saddle their family with the cost of rebuilding their home, insurance is a pretty smart option.
In my case it is cheaper to pay $0 per year for home repairs than to pay $1000 (or whatever) for fire insurance. That is, unless I'm unlucky enough to have a fire.
The whole point of insurance is that it ISN'T supposed to pay as much as it takes in for a typical person.
Of course, in the US health insurance isn't really insurance - it is more of a purchasing plan for healthcare services. It would work a whole lot better if:
1. Insurance was catastrophic care only. Premiums would be a LOT lower, and everybody would have something like a $5k deductible. Most people would go almost all of their lives without filing a claim. However, if somebody does need bypass surgery or whatever they won't lose their home.
2. Care providers could only charge exactly one rate to all people. It could be based on medical complexity, but it couldn't be based on how you pay as long as you pay on time. No more group rates. They essentially discriminate against people who aren't in a group and force everybody to have to haggle every little bill.
3. All rates must be published. Unless you're unable to make decisions you cannot be billed a dime if you didn't agree to the amount BEFORE services are rendered. Sure, there can be allowances for complications during surgery, or whatever, but they need to be rare and their likelihood must be disclosed in advance.
All of this will make health insurance a lot more like auto insurance, which most people would agree is expensive but probably not unreasonably so in light of the liabilities/etc involved. When you need an oil change you don't file an insurance claim for it.