Osama bin Laden made all his money selling pirated DVD's of "The Sheikh of Araby"...
Let's see, what other commodity could possibly have been funding terrorism for FIFTY YEARS...
Oh, wait, could it be...OIL?
Now what does the Bush family traffic in...
And why has George been documented having business partners who also do business with the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia...?
And Dick Cheney's former company is up for a fat contract to rebuild the Iraq oil fields if they get blown up...
And P2P gets the blame?
Seriously, are there any studies which compare the total amount of diversion of revenues from so-called "legitimate" enterprises to terrorism vrs the total amount of "piracy" revenues? Until then, this argument is a joke by morons...
Is her complaint really about privacy or is it about the heat she may be taking for having an off-the-cuff report of the WEF spread around that perhaps is not congruent with the way the rest of the media wants such things reported - i.e., edited by editors with political axes of their own to grind?
Did she write an "official" report on the WEF - and if so, how does it square with her "unofficial" one?
Otherwise, the analysis makes no sense. Intellectual property is what's in your head. Once it's outside your head and outside your direct control (i.e., encrypted on your hard drive), it is no longer property and no longer yours. You can use encryption - which works only if the decryptor agrees to maintain the encryption. Or you can use a non-disclosure contract - which works only as long as the second party does not breach the contract and also imposes the same contract on anyone to whom they are allowed to forward. These things are merely delaying tactics.
Once one of these events occurs, do you then go back and complain about the whole history of technology that you didn't use a quill pen and the Pony Express?
And if you react irrationally and decide to forego the Net, is that supposed to alter the technological and economic impact of the Net such that we should be worried about it?
None of that makes any sense...
I think Garrett's complaint stems not so much from the privacy issue but from her concern over her public, social, and professional status as a result of off-the-cuff remarks. And this is not an issue anyone should be concerned with.
Well, clearly you have your own bias which basically says that anything Powell and Bush say is true and anything anyone else says is not.
Given that the government claimed that Patriot missles were 100% effective in the last war, and that the Tomahawks were 100% effective also, and subsequently had to admit the percentages were more like under 10%, I tend not to give government sources much credence. Especially when they make idiotic pronouncements as Bush did today when he promised peace after once again overthrowing another government and destablishing an entire area.
Ritter has pointed out that he does not trust Iraq either. What he trusts is the inspectors, and the inspectors have said the stuff isn't there. According to him, they use forensic analysis to establish the truth of an Iraqi claim and whenever the Iraqis have lied, they were caught out by the inspectors. So if the inspectors are told by the US that some spot is hot, and when they get there, their forensics say it isn't, Ritter tends to beleve the inspectors. You want to dismiss all that in favor of "intelligence estimates" by people you can't even put a name to who not only have their own axes to grind, but who are so incompetent that we bomb Chinese embassies...
You complain that the CBS journalist runs unconfirmed stories. What he runs are stories that someone said something. If that person said it, it is a confirmed story. Whether WHAT the person said is confirmed is an entirely different matter. I notice you have no problem with journalists running stories that say, "The President said Saddan has WMD's" - without any independent confirmation of that fact. In fact, you denigrate the people who could provide confirmation - the inspectors who say, "We can't find any evidence."
As to the distinction between proving WMDs and proving non-compliance, I fail to see how you can prove non-compliance with the requirement to destroy WMDs if you can't prove there are any WMDs, or that the WMDs that existed were destroyed or not. This is simply semantic hair-splitting.
And the notion that non-compliance (which you can't assess because you can't find what Saddam was supposed to comply with) is a justification for invading and occupying a country is simply bizarre...
I'm sure you won't mind if I also remain unconvinced...
Let me know when YOU have proof that Saddam has WMDs and that they are a threat to anyone other than his own troops and maybe Kuwait...
I don't keep links to random articles I read on the Net...
Here's the CBS News "intelligence garbage" link I found with a two-minute Google search.
It took a little longer to find this Japanese newspaper article on Scott Ritter's comments on the mobile weapons labs. BTW, since Ritter is supposedly compromised for having accepted $400K from an Iraqi to produce a documentatry, it should be pointed out that the current chief inspector, Blix, has also said they've never found any evidence of such vehicles.
for more stories of unprotected nuclear facilities...
Supposedly this stuff has been upgraded in recent years, but who knows?
As Dick Marcinko points out in his (supposedly fiction) books, security is not easy, and military base security is especially a joke.
One funny part in one of his stories was the security at some embassy building in Europe where you had to go through a turnstile past Marine guards to get in. So he went around the side of the building where the the open "smoker's door" was and walked right in past all the security... That was after he estimated the Marines post as being a chokepoint - for them, not him, once he punched holes through the "bulletproof" glass with shotgun sabot slugs and pumped in some tear gas rounds...
The only security is proactive, mobile, armed guys who are always on high alert and expecting anything - which means you need a lot of (expensive) guys because you can't keep anyone on constant high alert for more than a few hours...
Any security can be breached if you have the training, motivation, and if necessary, firepower...
Commenting on UNMOVIC, just read an article yesterday about how the inspectors are sick and tired of garbage US intelligence. They complain that the US feeds them all these tips about where the weapons are, and when they go there they find nothing and evidently nothing was ever there. One inspector referred to the US intelligence as "an even cruder word", i.e., "shit"...
Another interesting article by a former inspector points out that the so-called "movable bioweapons labs" never existed - they were a hypothetical idea thought up by the inspectors who never found any evidence that they ever existed. But the US insists they do...
Reminds me of Richart Marcinko's story (supposedly fictional) of how his Red Cell team got onto a Naval base. One of their cars drove past the gate hooting at the guards and throwing milk cartons at them - rest of the team jumped the fence while the guards were distracted...
The rest of the story is too funny to relate as Marcinko's team made idiots out of the base, the local police, and the FBI...
Marcinko also claims his team got two members and some C-4 within twenty yards of the President's cottage at Camp David. Upgrades of security based on their suggestions have prevented subsequent Seal Teams from duplicating the feat...
Thanks for the reference. I've read Valis and the followup book to that as well in the past - it was my first reference (aside from Wilson's Illuminatus) to the Gnostics, who were essentially the founders of the notion of Transhumanism (albeit in a mystical form).
- Natural rights are basically that you have the - right to take whatever you can take from whoever - you can take it from.
I don't know where you get that from, but all the natural rights advocates I've ever heard of would disagree with that definition. All the "rights" you're arguing for are supposed to be based on "natural rights".
I repeat, government is not and has never been an agreement by anybody to protect each other. That has been the EXCUSE used by those in power to justify their position. The reality - throughout history and in every culture - is as I stated it.
And the notion that I trade one so-called "natural right" for some others called "civil rights" which are "granted" to me is completely foreign to the "natural rights" supporters. Natural rights supporters argue that the so-called "civil rights" ARE natural rights and the government's function is to protect my natural rights. Civil rights are merely the implementation of my natural rights in a social context.
Your argument seems to me to be totally erroneous. Unless you can refer specifically to someone well-known in the natural rights arena who argues this way, I think you're completely incorrect.
And besides, since it is based on the erroneous and meaningless concept of "rights", it is irrelevant.
For my class projects, I find C++ easy to program in (a little harder now that I'm learning various data structures/ADT's, but still...).
Perl seems to be a very "sensitive" language - meaning I touch the program and it breaks.
Shell scripting is a fucking nightmare! It takes days to do anything whereas all my C++ projects are usually done in one day, two at the most.
My conclusion: it depends on whether the language is a "well-formed" language with consistent syntax and semantics and a decent selection of basic data types and operators and functions. C++ is the most mature and well developed of the languages. Perl has some things I'd like to see C++ get, but otherwise I'm starting not to like it. And UNIX shells are a barnacle-like accretion of twenty-year-old shit...which needs to be totally redesigned (or better, scrapped altogether in favor of more modern scripting languages like Python or even Perl... It's no surprise to me that many sys admins use Perl over shell scripting these days...)
One problem which affects this is the quality of the teaching materials. C++ has a wealth of books and teachers who know the language and can communicate it with some precision.
Perl has a number of books but they aren't deep or precise and rely on "learning by example" which is okay for getting up to speed but useless as a reference when you run into the details of the language that fell between the cracks - like keyboard buffer handling...
Shell scripts apparently depend entirely on "trial and error" learning and until you have at least five years of experience using it, you can't know it well enough to be sure you're using it correctly. And the teachers are all UNIX geeks who think this is the way it should be...
Instead, set up deals where you go play for people who are willing to pay to see you play and where you do not have to spend a fortune on some venue that rips you off.
I read a book on making your own music one time by some babe called Jana whatever, and she made $30K/year or whatever playing her music and selling her CD's at her appearances. She played for anybody who'd pay - corporate sales meetings, organization events, Kiwanis club, whatever.
She didn't get rich, but she made a living, had fun playing her music, got paid to travel all over the country, and generally regarded herself as a "star" - without waiting for the music industry to call her a star, as she put it.
Now, on to the 21st Century...
THE NET REPLACES THE TOUR!
You set up a streaming site, you charge subscription fees per month (cheap, like $10), you play live (or prerecorded live) in the studio which is streamed to the subscribers, say once or twice a week. Maybe you even have jam sessions the subscribers can listen in on.
The point is, in essence you are "touring" (i.e., live performances) every week without moving from your studio. Your only "tour" expense is your bandwidth and IT support and marketing.
If you have 10,000 fans paying you $10 a month, you make $100K/month, $1.2 million/year. If you net 15% profit, you net $180K/year. Spread over your 4-man band, you make $45K each.
And you haven't moved an inch and you paid nothing to a record label or anybody else but your bandwidth supplier and IT support (and maybe an advertising agency).
If you're Metallica, the numbers get bigger fast. One million fans paying $10/month is $10 million/month, $120 million/year. I suspect the profits scale faster than the expenses on the Net (unless you're a "dot.com" of course...)
$40K - even before taxes - is more than I ever made...
While it's hard to live on that in the big city, you can do in a smaller town...
It's called "making a living" - as in "too busy making a living to get rich"...
Personally, I would find making $40K a year to sit around and play music to be not a bad job (if I had the talent to do it of course - actually, even if I didn't have the talent, as many musicians don't...)
Anything over $40K would be a great bonus...
Not to mention the fringe benefits (groupies)...
Jodie Foster makes $15 million a movie. She points out that the average actor out of 40,000 or so actors makes less than $10K a year.
Why the hell would a patron of a musician keep 100,000 copies of the music for his own pleasure?
If what you mean is, he would keep the original recording and not make ANY copies, so what? Artists make and then don't release tons of music that you never hear because THEY think it wasn't good enough. Only after they're dead does someone release it and makes some publisher another $10 million because the people who bought it think it was good enough (or just wanted it for the nostalgia value).
The idea that every artist would have to be owned by some rich guy and none of their art would ever be released for public consumption is nonsense.
First of all, we do have a market economy today. No matter the so-called piracy, it will be quite possible for artists - even ones financed by others - to get their music into the market, as a loss leader for tours if nothing else.
Secondly, artists could refuse to produce music for their patrons unless the patron's contract specified allowing public release. Why would most patrons care if someone else hears the music?
The reason art hung in patron's mansions was because there was only one physical piece of it which could not be copied.
I swear, there is no common sense in these IP discussions...everybody is so busy establishing themselves as morally one-up on everyone else that they make the most ridiculous scenarios...
Did you every stop to consider a fourth possibility?
That rights are fictions, and that morality is irrelevant to proper (read: long-term effective) behavior?
There is "moral" behavior and there is "correct" behavior. The latter depends on doing what works, both in the short term and the long run. And that depends on knowing what works, which depends on science and rationality.
So-called "moral" behavior is primarily motivated by the desire to be "one-up" on everyone else by defining one's own behavior to be "moral" and everyone else's "immoral". And humans have thousands of years of experience doing just that.
"Correct" behavior depends on an objective analysis based on facts. This behavior has this effect (economic or physical), that behavior has that effect. The relevance of the effects depends on the purpose of human behavior. If you don't know what your nature as a human is, and what your purpose as a living entity is, you can't judge behavior as "correct or incorrect", let alone "right or wrong". There is no "right or wrong" except in the sense of "correct or incorrect".
Morality and rights are utterly irrelevant and until humans give up these mystical notions, the human race will continue to flounder in the mud.
Well, her music, maybe, and her personality, maybe... I wouldn't know, I've never listened to her music or heard her talk (except I heard about that stupid anti-priracy ad she did comparing downloading to CD theft - and that time in England she didn't even know who Tony Blair was...)
But I got hundreds of pictures on my hard disk says she ain't no horror to look at...
But then his costs are the same as any so-called pirate's - i.e., production and marketing. Being the original producer of the product, he should be able to improve on that product and maintain his "first mover" advantage (provided he handles all the other aspects such as marketing properly).
So being paid back your development costs immediately is valuable. That is, after all, why people think IP is needed - to enable recoupment of R&D costs. What they forget is that there are other ways to pay for those costs, such as bootstrapping (paying for the R&D with part of the profits you made on previous economic activities).
The point is there are many influences on these matters, and the notion that it all reduces to the necessity of "protecting" (i.e., forcing everyone else to not compete with) an inventor's concept is nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever see a hummingbird in space?
So much for that argument...
Osama bin Laden made all his money selling pirated DVD's of "The Sheikh of Araby"...
Let's see, what other commodity could possibly have been funding terrorism for FIFTY YEARS...
Oh, wait, could it be...OIL?
Now what does the Bush family traffic in...
And why has George been documented having business partners who also do business with the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia...?
And Dick Cheney's former company is up for a fat contract to rebuild the Iraq oil fields if they get blown up...
And P2P gets the blame?
Seriously, are there any studies which compare the total amount of diversion of revenues from so-called "legitimate" enterprises to terrorism vrs the total amount of "piracy" revenues? Until then, this argument is a joke by morons...
"Let me put it to you another way..."
You don't want life extension?
Fine, I don't want life extension FOR YOU either...
You're going to die. I won't.
Have a nice day.
In fifty years, nanotech will obsolete aging, infirmity, and oh, by the way, human bodies, human brains, and human nature...
Which, hopefully, will include morons like the authors of this study...
Environmental issues will be moot...
This kind of stupidity can't even be commented on...I'm wasting the bandwidth even responding to this crap...
that you cannot find a scientist to deny its validity...
Everything works both ways, y'know...
That's right - "quick shell script" is an oxymoron if you have less than five years experience writing the damn things...
And I'm finding out in my Perl class that Perl is not a hell of a lot better...
somebody has figured out that things in memory are faster than disk...
After twenty years, we finally get to...
the in-memory database!
Oh wait, didn't my Atari ST have that?
Is her complaint really about privacy or is it about the heat she may be taking for having an off-the-cuff report of the WEF spread around that perhaps is not congruent with the way the rest of the media wants such things reported - i.e., edited by editors with political axes of their own to grind?
Did she write an "official" report on the WEF - and if so, how does it square with her "unofficial" one?
Otherwise, the analysis makes no sense. Intellectual property is what's in your head. Once it's outside your head and outside your direct control (i.e., encrypted on your hard drive), it is no longer property and no longer yours. You can use encryption - which works only if the decryptor agrees to maintain the encryption. Or you can use a non-disclosure contract - which works only as long as the second party does not breach the contract and also imposes the same contract on anyone to whom they are allowed to forward. These things are merely delaying tactics.
Once one of these events occurs, do you then go back and complain about the whole history of technology that you didn't use a quill pen and the Pony Express?
And if you react irrationally and decide to forego the Net, is that supposed to alter the technological and economic impact of the Net such that we should be worried about it?
None of that makes any sense...
I think Garrett's complaint stems not so much from the privacy issue but from her concern over her public, social, and professional status as a result of off-the-cuff remarks. And this is not an issue anyone should be concerned with.
Well, clearly you have your own bias which basically says that anything Powell and Bush say is true and anything anyone else says is not.
Given that the government claimed that Patriot missles were 100% effective in the last war, and that the Tomahawks were 100% effective also, and subsequently had to admit the percentages were more like under 10%, I tend not to give government sources much credence. Especially when they make idiotic pronouncements as Bush did today when he promised peace after once again overthrowing another government and destablishing an entire area.
Ritter has pointed out that he does not trust Iraq either. What he trusts is the inspectors, and the inspectors have said the stuff isn't there. According to him, they use forensic analysis to establish the truth of an Iraqi claim and whenever the Iraqis have lied, they were caught out by the inspectors. So if the inspectors are told by the US that some spot is hot, and when they get there, their forensics say it isn't, Ritter tends to beleve the inspectors. You want to dismiss all that in favor of "intelligence estimates" by people you can't even put a name to who not only have their own axes to grind, but who are so incompetent that we bomb Chinese embassies...
You complain that the CBS journalist runs unconfirmed stories. What he runs are stories that someone said something. If that person said it, it is a confirmed story. Whether WHAT the person said is confirmed is an entirely different matter. I notice you have no problem with journalists running stories that say, "The President said Saddan has WMD's" - without any independent confirmation of that fact. In fact, you denigrate the people who could provide confirmation - the inspectors who say, "We can't find any evidence."
As to the distinction between proving WMDs and proving non-compliance, I fail to see how you can prove non-compliance with the requirement to destroy WMDs if you can't prove there are any WMDs, or that the WMDs that existed were destroyed or not. This is simply semantic hair-splitting.
And the notion that non-compliance (which you can't assess because you can't find what Saddam was supposed to comply with) is a justification for invading and occupying a country is simply bizarre...
I'm sure you won't mind if I also remain unconvinced...
Let me know when YOU have proof that Saddam has WMDs and that they are a threat to anyone other than his own troops and maybe Kuwait...
You can Google just like anyone else...
I don't keep links to random articles I read on the Net...
Here's the CBS News "intelligence garbage" link I found with a two-minute Google search.
It took a little longer to find this Japanese newspaper article on Scott Ritter's comments on the mobile weapons labs. BTW, since Ritter is supposedly compromised for having accepted $400K from an Iraqi to produce a documentatry, it should be pointed out that the current chief inspector, Blix, has also said they've never found any evidence of such vehicles.
for more stories of unprotected nuclear facilities...
Supposedly this stuff has been upgraded in recent years, but who knows?
As Dick Marcinko points out in his (supposedly fiction) books, security is not easy, and military base security is especially a joke.
One funny part in one of his stories was the security at some embassy building in Europe where you had to go through a turnstile past Marine guards to get in. So he went around the side of the building where the the open "smoker's door" was and walked right in past all the security... That was after he estimated the Marines post as being a chokepoint - for them, not him, once he punched holes through the "bulletproof" glass with shotgun sabot slugs and pumped in some tear gas rounds...
The only security is proactive, mobile, armed guys who are always on high alert and expecting anything - which means you need a lot of (expensive) guys because you can't keep anyone on constant high alert for more than a few hours...
Any security can be breached if you have the training, motivation, and if necessary, firepower...
Commenting on UNMOVIC, just read an article yesterday about how the inspectors are sick and tired of garbage US intelligence. They complain that the US feeds them all these tips about where the weapons are, and when they go there they find nothing and evidently nothing was ever there. One inspector referred to the US intelligence as "an even cruder word", i.e., "shit"...
Another interesting article by a former inspector points out that the so-called "movable bioweapons labs" never existed - they were a hypothetical idea thought up by the inspectors who never found any evidence that they ever existed. But the US insists they do...
I really rather doubt any journalist would protect a serial killer as a "source"...
Can you cite a case where this occurred? If not, your scenario is nonsense...
And even if it did, that does not justify preventing journalists from protecting sources...
Reminds me of Richart Marcinko's story (supposedly fictional) of how his Red Cell team got onto a Naval base. One of their cars drove past the gate hooting at the guards and throwing milk cartons at them - rest of the team jumped the fence while the guards were distracted...
The rest of the story is too funny to relate as Marcinko's team made idiots out of the base, the local police, and the FBI...
Marcinko also claims his team got two members and some C-4 within twenty yards of the President's cottage at Camp David. Upgrades of security based on their suggestions have prevented subsequent Seal Teams from duplicating the feat...
Thanks for the reference. I've read Valis and the followup book to that as well in the past - it was my first reference (aside from Wilson's Illuminatus) to the Gnostics, who were essentially the founders of the notion of Transhumanism (albeit in a mystical form).
- Natural rights are basically that you have the
- right to take whatever you can take from whoever
- you can take it from.
I don't know where you get that from, but all the natural rights advocates I've ever heard of would disagree with that definition. All the "rights" you're arguing for are supposed to be based on "natural rights".
I repeat, government is not and has never been an agreement by anybody to protect each other. That has been the EXCUSE used by those in power to justify their position. The reality - throughout history and in every culture - is as I stated it.
And the notion that I trade one so-called "natural right" for some others called "civil rights" which are "granted" to me is completely foreign to the "natural rights" supporters. Natural rights supporters argue that the so-called "civil rights" ARE natural rights and the government's function is to protect my natural rights. Civil rights are merely the implementation of my natural rights in a social context.
Your argument seems to me to be totally erroneous. Unless you can refer specifically to someone well-known in the natural rights arena who argues this way, I think you're completely incorrect.
And besides, since it is based on the erroneous and meaningless concept of "rights", it is irrelevant.
I'm learning C++, Perl, and UNIX shell scripting.
For my class projects, I find C++ easy to program in (a little harder now that I'm learning various data structures/ADT's, but still...).
Perl seems to be a very "sensitive" language - meaning I touch the program and it breaks.
Shell scripting is a fucking nightmare! It takes days to do anything whereas all my C++ projects are usually done in one day, two at the most.
My conclusion: it depends on whether the language is a "well-formed" language with consistent syntax and semantics and a decent selection of basic data types and operators and functions. C++ is the most mature and well developed of the languages. Perl has some things I'd like to see C++ get, but otherwise I'm starting not to like it. And UNIX shells are a barnacle-like accretion of twenty-year-old shit...which needs to be totally redesigned (or better, scrapped altogether in favor of more modern scripting languages like Python or even Perl... It's no surprise to me that many sys admins use Perl over shell scripting these days...)
One problem which affects this is the quality of the teaching materials. C++ has a wealth of books and teachers who know the language and can communicate it with some precision.
Perl has a number of books but they aren't deep or precise and rely on "learning by example" which is okay for getting up to speed but useless as a reference when you run into the details of the language that fell between the cracks - like keyboard buffer handling...
Shell scripts apparently depend entirely on "trial and error" learning and until you have at least five years of experience using it, you can't know it well enough to be sure you're using it correctly. And the teachers are all UNIX geeks who think this is the way it should be...
Okay, bands don't make money touring.
SO DON'T TOUR!
Instead, set up deals where you go play for people who are willing to pay to see you play and where you do not have to spend a fortune on some venue that rips you off.
I read a book on making your own music one time by some babe called Jana whatever, and she made $30K/year or whatever playing her music and selling her CD's at her appearances. She played for anybody who'd pay - corporate sales meetings, organization events, Kiwanis club, whatever.
She didn't get rich, but she made a living, had fun playing her music, got paid to travel all over the country, and generally regarded herself as a "star" - without waiting for the music industry to call her a star, as she put it.
Now, on to the 21st Century...
THE NET REPLACES THE TOUR!
You set up a streaming site, you charge subscription fees per month (cheap, like $10), you play live (or prerecorded live) in the studio which is streamed to the subscribers, say once or twice a week. Maybe you even have jam sessions the subscribers can listen in on.
The point is, in essence you are "touring" (i.e., live performances) every week without moving from your studio. Your only "tour" expense is your bandwidth and IT support and marketing.
If you have 10,000 fans paying you $10 a month, you make $100K/month, $1.2 million/year. If you net 15% profit, you net $180K/year. Spread over your 4-man band, you make $45K each.
And you haven't moved an inch and you paid nothing to a record label or anybody else but your bandwidth supplier and IT support (and maybe an advertising agency).
If you're Metallica, the numbers get bigger fast. One million fans paying $10/month is $10 million/month, $120 million/year. I suspect the profits scale faster than the expenses on the Net (unless you're a "dot.com" of course...)
they get goth chicks with piercing in 7 different places
You mean like Christina?
BTW, goth chicks have tits, you know... Some of them even have T AND A...
$40K - even before taxes - is more than I ever made...
While it's hard to live on that in the big city, you can do in a smaller town...
It's called "making a living" - as in "too busy making a living to get rich"...
Personally, I would find making $40K a year to sit around and play music to be not a bad job (if I had the talent to do it of course - actually, even if I didn't have the talent, as many musicians don't...)
Anything over $40K would be a great bonus...
Not to mention the fringe benefits (groupies)...
Jodie Foster makes $15 million a movie. She points out that the average actor out of 40,000 or so actors makes less than $10K a year.
Welcome to the real world of art...
Why the hell would a patron of a musician keep 100,000 copies of the music for his own pleasure?
If what you mean is, he would keep the original recording and not make ANY copies, so what? Artists make and then don't release tons of music that you never hear because THEY think it wasn't good enough. Only after they're dead does someone release it and makes some publisher another $10 million because the people who bought it think it was good enough (or just wanted it for the nostalgia value).
The idea that every artist would have to be owned by some rich guy and none of their art would ever be released for public consumption is nonsense.
First of all, we do have a market economy today. No matter the so-called piracy, it will be quite possible for artists - even ones financed by others - to get their music into the market, as a loss leader for tours if nothing else.
Secondly, artists could refuse to produce music for their patrons unless the patron's contract specified allowing public release. Why would most patrons care if someone else hears the music?
The reason art hung in patron's mansions was because there was only one physical piece of it which could not be copied.
I swear, there is no common sense in these IP discussions...everybody is so busy establishing themselves as morally one-up on everyone else that they make the most ridiculous scenarios...
He said "initially"...
Did you every stop to consider a fourth possibility?
That rights are fictions, and that morality is irrelevant to proper (read: long-term effective) behavior?
There is "moral" behavior and there is "correct" behavior. The latter depends on doing what works, both in the short term and the long run. And that depends on knowing what works, which depends on science and rationality.
So-called "moral" behavior is primarily motivated by the desire to be "one-up" on everyone else by defining one's own behavior to be "moral" and everyone else's "immoral". And humans have thousands of years of experience doing just that.
"Correct" behavior depends on an objective analysis based on facts. This behavior has this effect (economic or physical), that behavior has that effect. The relevance of the effects depends on the purpose of human behavior. If you don't know what your nature as a human is, and what your purpose as a living entity is, you can't judge behavior as "correct or incorrect", let alone "right or wrong". There is no "right or wrong" except in the sense of "correct or incorrect".
Morality and rights are utterly irrelevant and until humans give up these mystical notions, the human race will continue to flounder in the mud.
- Britney Spears, Oh the horror the horror.
Well, her music, maybe, and her personality, maybe... I wouldn't know, I've never listened to her music or heard her talk (except I heard about that stupid anti-priracy ad she did comparing downloading to CD theft - and that time in England she didn't even know who Tony Blair was...)
But I got hundreds of pictures on my hard disk says she ain't no horror to look at...
But then his costs are the same as any so-called pirate's - i.e., production and marketing. Being the original producer of the product, he should be able to improve on that product and maintain his "first mover" advantage (provided he handles all the other aspects such as marketing properly).
So being paid back your development costs immediately is valuable. That is, after all, why people think IP is needed - to enable recoupment of R&D costs. What they forget is that there are other ways to pay for those costs, such as bootstrapping (paying for the R&D with part of the profits you made on previous economic activities).
The point is there are many influences on these matters, and the notion that it all reduces to the necessity of "protecting" (i.e., forcing everyone else to not compete with) an inventor's concept is nonsense.