Is it piracy when your girlfriend copies songs from you? Probably. The situation is fuzzy since it would come to an issue of "fair use" in the sense that the nature and quantity amount "shared" would have to be considered. but, if you are a typical college student, dating a girl who lives in the the next dorm for 8 months, and you share your CD collection with her via the network, then that is almost unquestionably copyright infringement (piracy). if she came to your room and listened with you, then that would not be.
When considering issues of fair use, there are no hard and fast rules, but guidelines that arbitrators must follow. However, in the examles I gave above, the current interpretations are pretty clear-cut.
I think you're giving them too much credit. That sounds like something that would involve too much work for the RIAA. I imagine they just assumed the sharing is going on and are waiting for the univeristies to prove them wrong.
The parent poster (quoted above) basically pulled an ad-hominem statement out of his ass. But, it's ad-hominem agains the RIAA, and this is slashdot, so it gets modded +5 Insightful. Come on, people - mod parent down. This is ridiculous. The parent didnt add anything to the discussion but his own baseless wet dream.
An equally plausible explanation is that RIAA's actions HAVE worked, and we see several clients precisely because the RIAA's actions have worked. To wit, while many (a substantial perentage) of my non-technical friends were using the original napster, basially none use any of the much more fragmented, harder to use, slower, "malware prone", and considerably more marginal services available today. Sure, there's a ton of stuff on the P2P networks listed, but it's very much now a case of fewer people having more stuff.
Additionally, it stands to note that in the case of music, anyway, the claim can really no longer be made that a) i dont know that it's illegal and b) there aren't any legal alternatives. There are. what's left are (after we filter away the layers of excuses that are piled upon in any slashdot discusson of the subject) basically willful copyright infringers who basically take the position that to them, the benefits of piracy outweight the likely punishment multiplied by the probability of getting caught (or whatever punishment metric you want to use).
Actually, you defeat your own "insightful" (cough cough) observation with your use of the word "another." Hollywood has been making fluff movies since forever regardless of the selective-memory / myth of a golden age syndrome you suffer from.
But hell, this is slashdot. If it makes a dig at the MPAA/RIAA and/or justifies piracy, it's "insightful."
It is just wrong that any business should have to compete with piracy. Does a car dealership price cars based on some estimation of how much an equivalent stolen car is worth + some percentage based on the risk/guilt a person might experience/feel based on stealing a car? NO! A car's priced is based on the market's willing to pay for that car (NOTE: NOT for the cost of production + some profit %! - the price of an item is WHAT A COMPETITIVE MARKET IS WILLING TO BEAR.)
Piracy is not a competitive market where buyers and sellers interact in a free exchange of goods for cash. Rather, it is a onesided market where costs are essentially nil and demand is large, thus pushing prices down down down. The pirate does not need to consider the costs of production NOR does the pirate (in the presence of other pirates, as is always need the case) really consider overall demand for the item (the price of the pirated DVD will generally be the same whether it's "from Justin to Kelley" or the latest popular blockbuster).
If we find publishers competing with pirate prices, it is basically a sad admission that law enforcement is inadequate and/or an attempt to train a new generation of consumers. However. as a basic principle, the underlying problem is a failure of the right to uphold the rights of the copyrightholder (ie, not curbing piracy), NOT that of the DVD being priced too high. Clearly, as numerous ejaculatory posts here have insinuated, if DVDs were priced at $1.50, you'd buy more of them. Well, duh, because that price is clearly priced well below the competitive equilibrium price and gives you (the consumer) an unfair surplus. As much as we like this as a short term thing as consumers, it is clearly unsustainable in the long run.
But when has anything but thinly-veiled self-interest ever motivated the slashdot piracy justifier?
Oh bullshit. You have NO FUCKING CLUE what you are talking about, but just heard the term "public good" somewhere.
National defense is a public good - by definition a non-market item because you can't take it away from somebody who has not paid for it, so, you just have to make sure they pay.
Music is not a public good because it's more than possible to keep somebody away from it. If i put you in a locked box, you will be covered by both the national defense and the pollution controls of the country. but, you wont be able to pirate music.
Come on man, put some thought into this! When you purchase a new, say, movie on DVD part of what you are paying for is that you can have the movie at your home while somebody else who did not pay can not. When other people pirate, they devalue your uniqueness and pride of ownership. If you bought the latest album, you're no longer the one hipster who knows where to get the latest tunes, suddenly you're the only sap in the room who paid for the damn thing.
In other words, media piracy has effects not unlike stowing away aboard a ship. The 'space' you are taking up is that club of exclusivity.
Don't believe me? Imagine if there were perfect (100% identical) LV handbag copies for real LV handbags, but the copies were sold for $1. Only suckers would pay for the real things! With digital content, the copies are basically 100%, especially in this age where many CDs go to ipods or music is listened to on the PC.
If "pirates dont care about quality", how come higher quality versions of pirated material frequently become available on P2P sits? how come pirate DVD places in china have the same movie in DVD5 an DVD9 at two different prices?
the problem with your idiotic view is that it shows that you have not the basic knowledge of anything related to economics.
It is obvious that in matters of IP, each individual has an incentive to pirate. After all, this means that every person gets something for free at the expense of the others (the payer). it's like pollution: if everybody else is 'clean' and you pollute (such that the total pollution is tiny), then the situation is fine. furthermore, since your polluting factory is cheaper to operate than a clean one, you make more money.
The problem is, that if everybody acts like this, you have mass pollution. therefore, the only reasonable alternative is to penalize people caught polluting.
And please don't even try the "but IP goods are nonrivalrous" bullshit (even if you knew what that meant). That is clearly not the case over the long term as is obvious to anybody who has looked at innovation and publishing rates in markets where strong IPR exists vs those where it does not.
I dont deny that SOME people have a legitimate reason to back things up. however, you'd bave to be either immensely naive or just willfully blind not to realize that most talk of 'back ups' in connection with DRM discussions is a "wink wink" term for outright piracy since the mechanisms are the same.
Though, I really love your touching heartfelt story of your daughter, her love for monsters inc, and her coiincidental love of touching the disks themselves. how convenient!
Don't lose sight of the fact. Sony doesn't want to be doing this. Nobody WANTS DRM.
The fact of the matter is that, whatever pseudophilosophical bullshit exceptions people give here (such as the "wink wink" 'backing up my DVDs' nonsense of the submitter), the underlying problem is still the willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement simply on the basis of the belief that their chances of being caught are low.
Let's review:
It doesn't matter if you think 70 years is too long for copyright. This in no way legitimizes your piracy of a movie from this year or the current year.
It doesn't matter if you think that what the record labels / hollywood studios put out is mindless overcommercialized shite and that somehow justifies your piracy.
You are not engaging in meaningful rebellion against 'the corporate overlords' by engaging in software piracy. you are not gandhi. gandhi boycotted the good (taxed corporate salt) altogether thus allowing alternate production channels (indigenous production) to arise. You help no artist with your piracy, period.
Piracy is a term that refers to copyright infringement, not just activity on the high seas. Deal with it.
It is not possible to successfully find some 'loophole' in the concept of fair use. There's simply no such thing because fair use by definition is a fungible thing that relies on reasonable human judgment to decide when too much is too much. Therefore, the very fact that you attempt to use some loophole pretty much in itself no longer makes your actions fair use.
Yes, companies occasionally trip over themselves and make mistakes while trying to protect their goods. but making that the central issue (as slashdot always does) as opposed to addressing the fundamental problem is just wrong.
Even if we take your silly examples of powertools and the like, if you went into a shop floor today and compared it with a shop floor of 50 years ago, you will notice one obvious difference:
The tools are fundamentally the same. However, today's tools have been designed to be SAFER and have fewer operator errors. The usability is INCREASED.
I am not suggesting replacing chainsaws with butterknives, or the idea that a chainsaw can ever be COMPLETELY safe. However, the history of UNIX usability in the 1990s was basically "let's build a car with a plate glass windshield instead of a safety glass one, because, even though the glass would be 100% the same from the standpoint of every day usability and essentially the same in terms of cost, only good drivers should be driving this car and good drivers dont crash (and if they do, they weren't good drivers)."
The results were many bloody drivers, many destroyed cars, and, perhaps least noticably but most importantly, the average speed of the cars was much slower than it could have been, as even the 'expert' drivers were compelled to go slower than they could have had they had better tools. Of course, if you complained, you were a n00b.
A word processor lets me write what I want. I am not limited to some arbitrary modal things that I can write with it.
However, it has a spellchecker and a grammar checking tool. They are not perfect, but you'd have to be willfully blind not to recognize that those things do catch spelling mistakes and help along the work of even English PhDs. If you want to write in another language, say, portuguese, you install a grammar checker for that. The installation process is simple and well signposted, since installing a portuguese dictionary is not something that is done often.
The installation of a spellchecker in no serious way slows down or detracts from my use of the word processor. All else being equal, a word processor with a spellchecker is better in the sense that it allows tasks to be done either more quickly or more accurately or both than one without. Its an INCREASE in usability.
You can drone all you want about the wonderful qualities of the CLI in the hands of a skilled user. You (and others) can go on endlessly telling me how it's "not SUPPOSED to be easy to use.. it's supposed to be to automate things..". You could, but you'd just evidence more that you just don't get it.
There COULD have been a CLI with enhancements equlivalent to a spellchecker (if you've ever seen, for example, the Visual Basic 6 IDE, which, for all its warts, has an absolutely lovely context-sensitive programming help which is an example along the lines of the sort of thing I'm talking about). The point is that nobody actually went and did one. Was the reason a technical limitation? NO. Was the reason that adding such a thing would have made the underlying item less useful and/or slower? NO. Was the reason that there was no demand for such a thing from users? NO. The reason that such things were not built was 100% completely because of a BAD MEME in the UNIX (and associated CS) commnunity which basically said "I spent the time learning these useless flags and other quirks and now I am a respected guru. I dont want to give up this 'status', and since I have learned this already, there is little to no incentive to make things better. Guruism is knowing useless shit and being a gatekeeper to computing power, NOT being an enabler of allowing OTHER PEOPLE to use computing power."
Yes, that's right. Don't let anybody challenge your comfortble, if severely outdated notions. Meanwhile, just ignore the fact that the words "usability" and "user-centered-design" were basically nowhere to be seen in virtually any computer science department until quite recently, and even then, it's as an elective "soft" subject basically irrelevant to the "main theme." The preaviling orthodoxy of how programming is "taught", which is "code before design" and that "user-related stuff is for the visual basic programmers at the community college down across town."
You think I'm wrong? Consider something like computer vision people in CS departments who arguably should have nothing to do with this discussion. How would they be affected by this cancer? Why, for the simple reason that they were forced by convention to do their research with tools completely inappropriate to the task - low level programming languages where they had to worry about malloc() instead of actually coding computer vision stuff. NLP people who spent more time worrying about LISP parentheses than actual NLP stuff because writing an actual IDE that didnt suck and/or take a "guru" user to use was taboo and "showed weakness." Always was missing was the general idea that there should be a hierarchy of tools to make life easier or the fact that the whole point of a computer was that you can make tools to automate and/or eliminate hard and/our routine tasks. The entire mentality at MIT/CMU/Harvard (those are the places I knew best in my graduate years) was that in order to show that you had the right mettle, you had to go through the agony of learning some pointless shite in order to do something that a PC user wouldnt have to think twice about.
Let's get specific, shall we? The CLI itself is not the problem - it's the way it was implemented. By the early 1990s, it would have been possible - trivial even - to make a context-sensitive CLI standard that, by prompting and hinting to the user at appropriate points, would have helped the user ensure that he was typing in appropriate things. this would have in no way impacted the speed or overall usefulness of the cli, and in fact undoubtedly would have resulted in fewer operator errors and overall efficiecny improvements. You know, something to the efect that as you typed in command-line arguments to gzip, would pop up english language help right there, helping you get it right the first time.
However, this was not done in any meaningful way. In other words, while it would have been SIMPLE to add additional usability with NO loss of functionality or speed, it was not done. Why? IDIOT PHILOSOPHY.
It was not done because UNIX back then (as now) was a combination big dick and competing standards contest fought between people who basically still subscribed to the idea that they were the gatekeepers of information- the intercessory priests to the god of computing. We see an echo of this jackass attitude in one of the responses to my posts - the idea that CLI is for "experts" and KDE is for "newbies." There is, amazingly, no middle ground mentioned because the whole system was explicitly designed by a deranged "elite" so that there would be no middle ground - no hierarchy.
It's not that the CLI is itself an evil invention - it's not. It's the attitude that surrounded its many, universally poor implementations that was evil, and again, the general belief and universal attitude by those pathetically clinging to their status as "UNIX Gurus" that it was the responsibility of the user to climb UP to the system (by learning various hacks, system-specific things, and so forth) rather than changing the system ONE IOTA to, you know, actually make it easier to use. The history of UNIX-like systems, until quite recently, has largely been the opposite - make MORE incompatible, often contradictory systems so that the user is left with even more rudimentarily simple tools to accomplish ever more complex tasks.
I think it comes down to this: when a user's input results in some unexpected output or if the user was unable or found it difficult to tell the computer what he wanted to do, the UNIXine (and this applies to GNU stuff, Linux stuff, and BSD stuff equally) response for many years was "the user made an error" or "the user's lack of knowledge is the core of the problem."
This attitude was (and to a great degree still is, though somewhat less than before) is the single most cancerous and evil mode of thinking in computer science, and yet it went widely accepted ("unchallenged" would be wrong) in Unix circles and associated hanger-on CS departments for years. The correct attitude should have been "if users are making the same mistakes and being tripped up in the same places over and over again, then clearly the fault lies with the tools themsleves."
Now, I'm sure if I go through the usual examples of this theory, I'll get back the usual result: some unenlightened idiot telling me that EMACS and/or the CLI are faster at the end of the day and therefore better, and that the problem is simply "more training." Thankfully, in 2006, I hope I don't have to explain why this mode of thinking is outdated (well, never right in the first place) nonsense, since most of you have finally woken up to these facts:
Usability and speed are orthogonal to each other. You do NOT need to give up speed to gain more usability, and vice versa. The trick is something called GOOD DESIGN. Bad design simply trades off one for another. Good design at least imporves on one front without diminishing another.
A long manual is a hallmark of bad design. Did you need to have a manual to start using, say, a web browser? No. Why should, say, a text editor be any different?
i) The UNIX philosophy of "make tools small and atomic" is not necessarily bad from a deep technical standpoint, but this doesnt mean the user necesarily has to directly interact with those tools and ii) one doesn't have to be a "Windows for Dummies" esque user to benefit from well built tools. There are lots of real life examples of progress in this, from the steady emergence of (still often highly flawed, but far better than what was before) high-level languages/environments like PhP, Perl, Gnome, KDE, and so forth. There is ABSOLUTELY no reason why I can't be a UNIX guru and haven't the slightest idea what the command-line arguments to 'tar' are off the top of my head.
Bring on the 'yesbuts...' from the dinosaurs and self-annointed high priests...
/ seriously thinks UNIX like systems need to go the way of VAXen. // well, actually not so much the systems themselves, but the assinine UNIX mentality of "harder is better" and "more documentation eliminates the need for good design.", which set back Computer Science departments and academia 15 years behind industry. /// fortunately, one of the unintended side-effects of Linux is that the mentality, at least amongst Linux users, is slowly, ever so slowly, fading away.
I'm not going waste time on you. You are clearly either an idiot or playing some twisted "game" with me.
You claim that apple itunes has sold billions (or whatever) of songs. Yet this would clearly be unrealistic and/or impossible under B&L's framework as the purchaser of the song (you) would be free to then turn this around and sell this without limit.
The rest of your argument is tired handwaving bullshit. You can go on accusing me of avoiding your argument - that's fine - i dont care.
This is high comedy from you, by the way:
First of all, passing any given pill through a machine that tells you what is in it, doesn't tell you how it was made. The formula for Coca Cola is, what? like a hundered years old, and survives without exact copy despite not being protected by any law.
Secondly, this process does take time and money, during which time the original inventor is busy selling their drug.
Thirdly, the companies that want to simply imitate (as opposed to innovate) will never make siginificant impact. They also have limited resources, and are going to go after the successful drugs, correct? Well, that means that they have to wait to see which drugs are selling well before they can start to perform their analysis. This does two things: it further increases the time during which the original inventor has a monopoly, and it means that they already made money -- it was a high selling innovation (in this case drug). They quote estimates between 2-5 years as the lead time that a drug company will have by simply using trade secret.
If you can come up with a reason why Paul Romer's critique is wrong, then you might have a leg to stand on. However, if Romer's critique is correct, as virtually everybody acknowledges that it is, then Boldrin and Levine's paper remains "clownshoes:" an academic exercise that may be "an eye opener" (or some other non-specific "praise" that the paper originally got), but without any basis in reality or applicability whatsoever. Simply put: you'd be damned hard pressed to find a person who actually believes that the doctrine of first sale actually could work.
It boggles my mind that you couldn't instantly see this problem with B&L's thesis if you actually read the paper.
Slashdot Mirror
When considering issues of fair use, there are no hard and fast rules, but guidelines that arbitrators must follow. However, in the examles I gave above, the current interpretations are pretty clear-cut.
The parent poster (quoted above) basically pulled an ad-hominem statement out of his ass. But, it's ad-hominem agains the RIAA, and this is slashdot, so it gets modded +5 Insightful. Come on, people - mod parent down. This is ridiculous. The parent didnt add anything to the discussion but his own baseless wet dream.
An equally plausible explanation is that RIAA's actions HAVE worked, and we see several clients precisely because the RIAA's actions have worked. To wit, while many (a substantial perentage) of my non-technical friends were using the original napster, basially none use any of the much more fragmented, harder to use, slower, "malware prone", and considerably more marginal services available today. Sure, there's a ton of stuff on the P2P networks listed, but it's very much now a case of fewer people having more stuff.
Additionally, it stands to note that in the case of music, anyway, the claim can really no longer be made that a) i dont know that it's illegal and b) there aren't any legal alternatives. There are. what's left are (after we filter away the layers of excuses that are piled upon in any slashdot discusson of the subject) basically willful copyright infringers who basically take the position that to them, the benefits of piracy outweight the likely punishment multiplied by the probability of getting caught (or whatever punishment metric you want to use).
But hell, this is slashdot. If it makes a dig at the MPAA/RIAA and/or justifies piracy, it's "insightful."
That's not saying very much now, is it?
Economics 101, man.
Piracy is not a competitive market where buyers and sellers interact in a free exchange of goods for cash. Rather, it is a onesided market where costs are essentially nil and demand is large, thus pushing prices down down down. The pirate does not need to consider the costs of production NOR does the pirate (in the presence of other pirates, as is always need the case) really consider overall demand for the item (the price of the pirated DVD will generally be the same whether it's "from Justin to Kelley" or the latest popular blockbuster).
If we find publishers competing with pirate prices, it is basically a sad admission that law enforcement is inadequate and/or an attempt to train a new generation of consumers. However. as a basic principle, the underlying problem is a failure of the right to uphold the rights of the copyrightholder (ie, not curbing piracy), NOT that of the DVD being priced too high. Clearly, as numerous ejaculatory posts here have insinuated, if DVDs were priced at $1.50, you'd buy more of them. Well, duh, because that price is clearly priced well below the competitive equilibrium price and gives you (the consumer) an unfair surplus. As much as we like this as a short term thing as consumers, it is clearly unsustainable in the long run.
But when has anything but thinly-veiled self-interest ever motivated the slashdot piracy justifier?
National defense is a public good - by definition a non-market item because you can't take it away from somebody who has not paid for it, so, you just have to make sure they pay.
Music is not a public good because it's more than possible to keep somebody away from it. If i put you in a locked box, you will be covered by both the national defense and the pollution controls of the country. but, you wont be able to pirate music.
In other words, media piracy has effects not unlike stowing away aboard a ship. The 'space' you are taking up is that club of exclusivity.
Don't believe me? Imagine if there were perfect (100% identical) LV handbag copies for real LV handbags, but the copies were sold for $1. Only suckers would pay for the real things! With digital content, the copies are basically 100%, especially in this age where many CDs go to ipods or music is listened to on the PC.
If you're going to count that way, then the hands-down winner is MS-Access. Or text files.
Karma whore +99999
Wow! You so smart. I say you go found a company. I hear the name "CMGI" is available.
Get a clue.
It is obvious that in matters of IP, each individual has an incentive to pirate. After all, this means that every person gets something for free at the expense of the others (the payer). it's like pollution: if everybody else is 'clean' and you pollute (such that the total pollution is tiny), then the situation is fine. furthermore, since your polluting factory is cheaper to operate than a clean one, you make more money.
The problem is, that if everybody acts like this, you have mass pollution. therefore, the only reasonable alternative is to penalize people caught polluting.
And please don't even try the "but IP goods are nonrivalrous" bullshit (even if you knew what that meant). That is clearly not the case over the long term as is obvious to anybody who has looked at innovation and publishing rates in markets where strong IPR exists vs those where it does not.
Though, I really love your touching heartfelt story of your daughter, her love for monsters inc, and her coiincidental love of touching the disks themselves. how convenient!
The fact of the matter is that, whatever pseudophilosophical bullshit exceptions people give here (such as the "wink wink" 'backing up my DVDs' nonsense of the submitter), the underlying problem is still the willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement simply on the basis of the belief that their chances of being caught are low.
Let's review:
Come again?
Even if we take your silly examples of powertools and the like, if you went into a shop floor today and compared it with a shop floor of 50 years ago, you will notice one obvious difference:
The tools are fundamentally the same. However, today's tools have been designed to be SAFER and have fewer operator errors. The usability is INCREASED.
I am not suggesting replacing chainsaws with butterknives, or the idea that a chainsaw can ever be COMPLETELY safe. However, the history of UNIX usability in the 1990s was basically "let's build a car with a plate glass windshield instead of a safety glass one, because, even though the glass would be 100% the same from the standpoint of every day usability and essentially the same in terms of cost, only good drivers should be driving this car and good drivers dont crash (and if they do, they weren't good drivers)."
The results were many bloody drivers, many destroyed cars, and, perhaps least noticably but most importantly, the average speed of the cars was much slower than it could have been, as even the 'expert' drivers were compelled to go slower than they could have had they had better tools. Of course, if you complained, you were a n00b.
However, it has a spellchecker and a grammar checking tool. They are not perfect, but you'd have to be willfully blind not to recognize that those things do catch spelling mistakes and help along the work of even English PhDs. If you want to write in another language, say, portuguese, you install a grammar checker for that. The installation process is simple and well signposted, since installing a portuguese dictionary is not something that is done often.
The installation of a spellchecker in no serious way slows down or detracts from my use of the word processor. All else being equal, a word processor with a spellchecker is better in the sense that it allows tasks to be done either more quickly or more accurately or both than one without. Its an INCREASE in usability.
You can drone all you want about the wonderful qualities of the CLI in the hands of a skilled user. You (and others) can go on endlessly telling me how it's "not SUPPOSED to be easy to use.. it's supposed to be to automate things..". You could, but you'd just evidence more that you just don't get it.
There COULD have been a CLI with enhancements equlivalent to a spellchecker (if you've ever seen, for example, the Visual Basic 6 IDE, which, for all its warts, has an absolutely lovely context-sensitive programming help which is an example along the lines of the sort of thing I'm talking about). The point is that nobody actually went and did one. Was the reason a technical limitation? NO. Was the reason that adding such a thing would have made the underlying item less useful and/or slower? NO. Was the reason that there was no demand for such a thing from users? NO. The reason that such things were not built was 100% completely because of a BAD MEME in the UNIX (and associated CS) commnunity which basically said "I spent the time learning these useless flags and other quirks and now I am a respected guru. I dont want to give up this 'status', and since I have learned this already, there is little to no incentive to make things better. Guruism is knowing useless shit and being a gatekeeper to computing power, NOT being an enabler of allowing OTHER PEOPLE to use computing power."
And this, is the core of the problem.
You think I'm wrong? Consider something like computer vision people in CS departments who arguably should have nothing to do with this discussion. How would they be affected by this cancer? Why, for the simple reason that they were forced by convention to do their research with tools completely inappropriate to the task - low level programming languages where they had to worry about malloc() instead of actually coding computer vision stuff. NLP people who spent more time worrying about LISP parentheses than actual NLP stuff because writing an actual IDE that didnt suck and/or take a "guru" user to use was taboo and "showed weakness." Always was missing was the general idea that there should be a hierarchy of tools to make life easier or the fact that the whole point of a computer was that you can make tools to automate and/or eliminate hard and/our routine tasks. The entire mentality at MIT/CMU/Harvard (those are the places I knew best in my graduate years) was that in order to show that you had the right mettle, you had to go through the agony of learning some pointless shite in order to do something that a PC user wouldnt have to think twice about.
However, this was not done in any meaningful way. In other words, while it would have been SIMPLE to add additional usability with NO loss of functionality or speed, it was not done. Why? IDIOT PHILOSOPHY.
It was not done because UNIX back then (as now) was a combination big dick and competing standards contest fought between people who basically still subscribed to the idea that they were the gatekeepers of information- the intercessory priests to the god of computing. We see an echo of this jackass attitude in one of the responses to my posts - the idea that CLI is for "experts" and KDE is for "newbies." There is, amazingly, no middle ground mentioned because the whole system was explicitly designed by a deranged "elite" so that there would be no middle ground - no hierarchy.
It's not that the CLI is itself an evil invention - it's not. It's the attitude that surrounded its many, universally poor implementations that was evil, and again, the general belief and universal attitude by those pathetically clinging to their status as "UNIX Gurus" that it was the responsibility of the user to climb UP to the system (by learning various hacks, system-specific things, and so forth) rather than changing the system ONE IOTA to, you know, actually make it easier to use. The history of UNIX-like systems, until quite recently, has largely been the opposite - make MORE incompatible, often contradictory systems so that the user is left with even more rudimentarily simple tools to accomplish ever more complex tasks.
This attitude was (and to a great degree still is, though somewhat less than before) is the single most cancerous and evil mode of thinking in computer science, and yet it went widely accepted ("unchallenged" would be wrong) in Unix circles and associated hanger-on CS departments for years. The correct attitude should have been "if users are making the same mistakes and being tripped up in the same places over and over again, then clearly the fault lies with the tools themsleves."
Now, I'm sure if I go through the usual examples of this theory, I'll get back the usual result: some unenlightened idiot telling me that EMACS and/or the CLI are faster at the end of the day and therefore better, and that the problem is simply "more training." Thankfully, in 2006, I hope I don't have to explain why this mode of thinking is outdated (well, never right in the first place) nonsense, since most of you have finally woken up to these facts:
- Usability and speed are orthogonal to each other. You do NOT need to give up speed to gain more usability, and vice versa. The trick is something called GOOD DESIGN. Bad design simply trades off one for another. Good design at least imporves on one front without diminishing another.
- A long manual is a hallmark of bad design. Did you need to have a manual to start using, say, a web browser? No. Why should, say, a text editor be any different?
- i) The UNIX philosophy of "make tools small and atomic" is not necessarily bad from a deep technical standpoint, but this doesnt mean the user necesarily has to directly interact with those tools and ii) one doesn't have to be a "Windows for Dummies" esque user to benefit from well built tools. There are lots of real life examples of progress in this, from the steady emergence of (still often highly flawed, but far better than what was before) high-level languages/environments like PhP, Perl, Gnome, KDE, and so forth. There is ABSOLUTELY no reason why I can't be a UNIX guru and haven't the slightest idea what the command-line arguments to 'tar' are off the top of my head.
Bring on the 'yesbuts...' from the dinosaurs and self-annointed high priests...it's funny AND true.
/ seriously thinks UNIX like systems need to go the way of VAXen.
// well, actually not so much the systems themselves, but the assinine UNIX mentality of "harder is better" and "more documentation eliminates the need for good design.", which set back Computer Science departments and academia 15 years behind industry.
/// fortunately, one of the unintended side-effects of Linux is that the mentality, at least amongst Linux users, is slowly, ever so slowly, fading away.
You claim that apple itunes has sold billions (or whatever) of songs. Yet this would clearly be unrealistic and/or impossible under B&L's framework as the purchaser of the song (you) would be free to then turn this around and sell this without limit.
The rest of your argument is tired handwaving bullshit. You can go on accusing me of avoiding your argument - that's fine - i dont care.
This is high comedy from you, by the way:
First of all, passing any given pill through a machine that tells you what is in it, doesn't tell you how it was made. The formula for Coca Cola is, what? like a hundered years old, and survives without exact copy despite not being protected by any law. Secondly, this process does take time and money, during which time the original inventor is busy selling their drug. Thirdly, the companies that want to simply imitate (as opposed to innovate) will never make siginificant impact. They also have limited resources, and are going to go after the successful drugs, correct? Well, that means that they have to wait to see which drugs are selling well before they can start to perform their analysis. This does two things: it further increases the time during which the original inventor has a monopoly, and it means that they already made money -- it was a high selling innovation (in this case drug). They quote estimates between 2-5 years as the lead time that a drug company will have by simply using trade secret.
Read the section "the critics."
If you can come up with a reason why Paul Romer's critique is wrong, then you might have a leg to stand on. However, if Romer's critique is correct, as virtually everybody acknowledges that it is, then Boldrin and Levine's paper remains "clownshoes:" an academic exercise that may be "an eye opener" (or some other non-specific "praise" that the paper originally got), but without any basis in reality or applicability whatsoever. Simply put: you'd be damned hard pressed to find a person who actually believes that the doctrine of first sale actually could work.
It boggles my mind that you couldn't instantly see this problem with B&L's thesis if you actually read the paper.