You're overlooking the costs involved in going from author's first draft to a high-quality book, such as editing and art. Those costs have to be amortized over a limited number of sales.
Your cite leads to a Slashdot article with all comments, and I didn't see anything at a glance about the cost of printing, distributing, and storing hardcover books. From what I know about the publishing industry, it's much, much less than 65% of the cover price. I've seen breakdowns that listed costs that high, but they've included fixed costs amortized over an assumed number of copies. The electronic version does have lower marginal costs, but most of the cost of a book is to cover the cost of making the initial copy, and that doesn't vary between hardcover and electronic.
Reducing the cost from $25 to $9 is probably not going to triple the number of copies sold, since the demand for books is fairly inelastic, so it would be a losing deal even with electronic books only.
I claim that eBooks do have value, and that paying money for their creation isn't just throwing money away. Therefore, we need some way to encourage people to do the work necessary, and this typically translates into paying them money. There are parts of the process of creating a good book that are fun, and parts that aren't, and if we're to have good books both are necessary. (There's also the fact that I'd like my favorite authors to not need to concentrate on making money elsewhere, so I want them paid for writing books.)
So, I think people who participate in the creation of the master copy should be paid. I haven't come up with a better idea than having a reasonable copyright law (not the one we've got now) and selling by the copy. Ideally, it would be possible to make arbitrarily many copies of an ebook, so that as many people as possible could enjoy it, but for practical purposes I don't see a good alternative to charging per copy.
Tracking the right only works when that means something to the end user. If twenty people have the book, and only one person has the right to read it, and the other nineteen are going to read it anyway, the right is of only theoretical interest.
It's going to be awful cumbersome to require eReaders to keep track of who has the right to read, and only allow that person to read the book.
That's also a good excuse for publishers to keep the electronic version prices up. The demand curve for books is not very elastic, since books have limited audiences and they have limited reading time, so less expensive books would not sell enough extra copies to make up for lost profit. It doesn't cost the publisher all that much to provide physical copies to bookstores, so it wouldn't be hard for them to cut the price by a few dollars if they thought it would get enough additional sales.
Let's say 100 people buy Ant-Man Blu-Ray disks. Given the Internet (including eBay and Craigslist) they can easily sell them, since mailing the package is cheap and easy. (You could go to eBay and see how many copies of Ant-Man are for sale. Without checking, I'd guess lots.) It's more clumsy than transferring digital file, but there's still a need to match buyer and seller, and I don't think many people really know how to transfer a file without a Web page button.
The copyright decision of the appeals court looks to me to be fully consistent with the law as written. I prefer the courts to stick to the law, rather than making up their own. A court that can override the statutes because they aren't what I'd want is capable of overriding them because they are what I'd want.
If you think APIs should not be copyrightable, or that there should be legal guarantees of their use, write to your representatives in Congress, or try to get a lobbying movement off the ground. It might help to get together with actual lawyers and figure out how the law should be worded.
That's why the appeals court ruled that APIs were copyrightable. The question is how much use is allowed without license.
The "nature of the copyrighted work", for APIs, is almost completely functional, and that's what's likely to predominate in the considerations.
One of Oracle's arguments was that Google was not using the Java APIs to be interoperable, but because they would be familiar to developers. They claimed that there wouldn't be a significant overlap of standard Java software and Android software (a claim of fact), and so the APIs were not used because they had to be. The appeals court appeared to see that as important, if true.
If you're using the APIs to implement a new version of the Java library for use with existing Java programs, you're using them because you have to. If you're using the APIs to implement a new language that will run on the JVM, you're using them because you have to. If you're writing a book on using Java, you get the idea. If you're implementing something that is not intended to run standard Java software, and doesn't run on the JVM, Oracle appears to think you can come up with your own APIs, since you aren't actually forced to use theirs.
Lisp has been used for some really serious stuff, and it's dynamically typed. Its only big drawback is that most people like parsers, whereas Lisp code resembles the output of the parser I wrote in compiler class, defined with nested parentheses.
The appeals court ruled that APIs are copyrightable, They do represent creative work, and they are in a fixed form. Given what I know of the law, that's perfectly reasonable.
However, a copyright is not supposed to do anything other than prevent copying in changed or unchanged form. It isn't supposed to be used to stop people from doing anything else, and so it's perfectly reasonable to consider use of APIs in contexts related to the language or library as not in violation of copyright.
What the software community needs is a legal principle that says that APIs can be used as we've always used them, for functional reasons. We don't need to consider them as not copyrightable, and we don't care if they may not be copied except for our traditional functional purposes.
You'd be better off if the War on Drugs ended. Except for the people who directly profit (law enforcement agencies, illegal drug dealers, private prison operators), everybody would be better off. It's a misuse of my tax money (so I'm paying for it) to erode civil liberties (which could bite me some day) for no useful purpose. Ending the War on Drugs will benefit me, even though my one foray into illegal drugs was a few joints over forty years ago.
I've done some readings on libertarian views, and they vary a lot. Some people who call themselves libertarians are anarchists, and their beliefs seem to shade into some other libertarians who want a small government. The only semi-official document I read, a Libertarian party platform, was thoroughly impractical.
The problem I have with libertarian philosophy is that it doesn't look to me like it would work well with humans under modern conditions, much like Marxism or assuming most users have a clue about computer security. The impression I get reading some of the more extreme Libertarian literature is that the writers can't imagine the perfidy of some humans. This may make them great human beings and wonderful to do business with, but it's not a basis for government. The impression I got from reading a Libertarian platform is that the writers didn't have a clue as to how to make things like pollution controls work, so they put down something ideologically pure and kept going.
Robinson, in his $COLOR Mars series, had a character describe libertarianism as people wanting police protection from their slaves. Pretty much no actual libertarian wants that, but it's obvious how libertarianism could wind up like that, given certain economic and social conditions.
The story, as I remember it, is that he gave something like $100K to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming legal. That's a rather large contribution to stop something that doesn't harm other people, and it potentially hurt a lot of people Mozilla was trying to be friendly with.
Also, I don't remember him being sued. He resigned because he'd become a liability to Mozilla as CEO.
Nobody's saying Eich couldn't make political contributions, just that he made himself some enemies that way, and became something of a hot potato.
It hasn't been possible for a group of enthusiastic warriors with personal weapons to defeat a real military force for a long time now. The Reagan administration ensured that civilians can't buy even standard infantry rifles. What such people can do is make areas essentially ungovernable, and I don't see robot soldiers doing anything about that for a long time. People who have something significant to lose aren't going to revolt like that, and that's how we've been keeping what domestic peace we have.
The 2000s appeared to go well because of large government deficits. Clinton wound up with a balanced budget (at least by the smoke-and-mirrors definition) along with prosperity. Bush didn't do nearly as well, despite having a Republican house for his first six years.
I'm not sure how useful a standard platform would be. If there's a standard algorithm, and everybody builds their own software, there's going to be a lot of duplicated effort but one standard software system has the possibility of having standard errors that everyone uses.
You're supposed to question scientists, but if you do you're expected to be able to provide evidence. Myrhrvold did his own analysis, and didn't release details of what he did differently. Even if he's completely correct, he isn't being helpful about it. Helpfulness would include a demonstration of why his results are better than NASA's, some explanation why NASA's results apparently agree with other measurements better than his, and specific improvements to the processing of the data ("throw yours out and use this instead" does count as a specific improvement, provided there's enough details on "this").
Instead, he makes sweeping statements, doesn't show how he got them, and ignores much of the evidence.
The conditions human civilization was created in did not include climate change on the scale we're seeing now, and the massive environmental changes tended to be on a more local basis. We're going outside the parameters that civilization was built for, and I see no reason to think that everything will just be OK.
The Eocene is fairly recent, and most fossil fuel was already in the ground. Back before we'd started getting massive oil and coal deposits, the Sun was significantly dimmer. The planet has never been in the same position as it would be with most fossil fuels burned and the Sun at its current brightness.
Seriously, I'm not an anthropologist, so I can't speak to a lot of cultures, and I don't know whether covering something means it has to be sexual. I can find large cultures where it is or was bad for a woman to let her hair be seen in public, but I don't think that's inherently sexual.
There have been a lot of cultures where bare breasts were fine, although I don't know how large they were or are. I don't know how strict the covering rules are over cultures, and I do know that some cultures are presented as having no bare boobs despite routinely baring them.
If we implemented your ideas, government would become privatized, and essentially feudal and dictatorial.
So you sign an agreement with Joe's Police Force. Who's going to investigate your robbery when Fred's Police Force puts the kibosh on it, and they've got twice the gunmen? Joe decides that you aren't paying enough and your daughter is hot. Too bad there's no court to sue him or independent police to rescue your daughter. We degenerate into gang rule pretty darn fast.
The next step is when some overlord moves in and crushes the gangs in a large area. If you like his policies, fine, I guess, but if you disagree with them, well, you know what happens to armed people who disagree with him, right?
There's some reason to think that really major wars are not going to happen again, and that the world is actually going to become more peaceful. There's also some reason to think that this is wishful thinking. I'm unlikely to be concerned with this fifty years from now, but if this continues for another half-century I'm going to be getting pretty optimistic.
That's such a (pun intended) God awful slipperly slope. After all, lots of Russians thought there were ten metric ass-loads of merit in the idea of raping hundreds of thousands German woman and girls. Japanese thought their actions in Nanking were highly meritorious, too.
By your reasoning, you find merit in pulling stuff out of your ass and putting it on Slashdot. It's possible to do something and not consider it an actual good thing to do. I haven't read claims that it was good to rape all those Germans, just that it was understandable. I don't think you're going to find very many references to Japanese claiming that the Rape of Nanking was actually a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all airlines are willing to pay for an always-on satellite connection.
You're overlooking the costs involved in going from author's first draft to a high-quality book, such as editing and art. Those costs have to be amortized over a limited number of sales.
Um, huh? The Berne convention says nothing about licenses, only copyrights.
Your cite leads to a Slashdot article with all comments, and I didn't see anything at a glance about the cost of printing, distributing, and storing hardcover books. From what I know about the publishing industry, it's much, much less than 65% of the cover price. I've seen breakdowns that listed costs that high, but they've included fixed costs amortized over an assumed number of copies. The electronic version does have lower marginal costs, but most of the cost of a book is to cover the cost of making the initial copy, and that doesn't vary between hardcover and electronic.
Reducing the cost from $25 to $9 is probably not going to triple the number of copies sold, since the demand for books is fairly inelastic, so it would be a losing deal even with electronic books only.
I claim that eBooks do have value, and that paying money for their creation isn't just throwing money away. Therefore, we need some way to encourage people to do the work necessary, and this typically translates into paying them money. There are parts of the process of creating a good book that are fun, and parts that aren't, and if we're to have good books both are necessary. (There's also the fact that I'd like my favorite authors to not need to concentrate on making money elsewhere, so I want them paid for writing books.)
So, I think people who participate in the creation of the master copy should be paid. I haven't come up with a better idea than having a reasonable copyright law (not the one we've got now) and selling by the copy. Ideally, it would be possible to make arbitrarily many copies of an ebook, so that as many people as possible could enjoy it, but for practical purposes I don't see a good alternative to charging per copy.
Tracking the right only works when that means something to the end user. If twenty people have the book, and only one person has the right to read it, and the other nineteen are going to read it anyway, the right is of only theoretical interest.
It's going to be awful cumbersome to require eReaders to keep track of who has the right to read, and only allow that person to read the book.
That's also a good excuse for publishers to keep the electronic version prices up. The demand curve for books is not very elastic, since books have limited audiences and they have limited reading time, so less expensive books would not sell enough extra copies to make up for lost profit. It doesn't cost the publisher all that much to provide physical copies to bookstores, so it wouldn't be hard for them to cut the price by a few dollars if they thought it would get enough additional sales.
Let's say 100 people buy Ant-Man Blu-Ray disks. Given the Internet (including eBay and Craigslist) they can easily sell them, since mailing the package is cheap and easy. (You could go to eBay and see how many copies of Ant-Man are for sale. Without checking, I'd guess lots.) It's more clumsy than transferring digital file, but there's still a need to match buyer and seller, and I don't think many people really know how to transfer a file without a Web page button.
The copyright decision of the appeals court looks to me to be fully consistent with the law as written. I prefer the courts to stick to the law, rather than making up their own. A court that can override the statutes because they aren't what I'd want is capable of overriding them because they are what I'd want.
If you think APIs should not be copyrightable, or that there should be legal guarantees of their use, write to your representatives in Congress, or try to get a lobbying movement off the ground. It might help to get together with actual lawyers and figure out how the law should be worded.
That's why the appeals court ruled that APIs were copyrightable. The question is how much use is allowed without license.
The "nature of the copyrighted work", for APIs, is almost completely functional, and that's what's likely to predominate in the considerations.
One of Oracle's arguments was that Google was not using the Java APIs to be interoperable, but because they would be familiar to developers. They claimed that there wouldn't be a significant overlap of standard Java software and Android software (a claim of fact), and so the APIs were not used because they had to be. The appeals court appeared to see that as important, if true.
If you're using the APIs to implement a new version of the Java library for use with existing Java programs, you're using them because you have to. If you're using the APIs to implement a new language that will run on the JVM, you're using them because you have to. If you're writing a book on using Java, you get the idea. If you're implementing something that is not intended to run standard Java software, and doesn't run on the JVM, Oracle appears to think you can come up with your own APIs, since you aren't actually forced to use theirs.
Lisp has been used for some really serious stuff, and it's dynamically typed. Its only big drawback is that most people like parsers, whereas Lisp code resembles the output of the parser I wrote in compiler class, defined with nested parentheses.
The appeals court ruled that APIs are copyrightable, They do represent creative work, and they are in a fixed form. Given what I know of the law, that's perfectly reasonable.
However, a copyright is not supposed to do anything other than prevent copying in changed or unchanged form. It isn't supposed to be used to stop people from doing anything else, and so it's perfectly reasonable to consider use of APIs in contexts related to the language or library as not in violation of copyright.
What the software community needs is a legal principle that says that APIs can be used as we've always used them, for functional reasons. We don't need to consider them as not copyrightable, and we don't care if they may not be copied except for our traditional functional purposes.
You'd be better off if the War on Drugs ended. Except for the people who directly profit (law enforcement agencies, illegal drug dealers, private prison operators), everybody would be better off. It's a misuse of my tax money (so I'm paying for it) to erode civil liberties (which could bite me some day) for no useful purpose. Ending the War on Drugs will benefit me, even though my one foray into illegal drugs was a few joints over forty years ago.
I've done some readings on libertarian views, and they vary a lot. Some people who call themselves libertarians are anarchists, and their beliefs seem to shade into some other libertarians who want a small government. The only semi-official document I read, a Libertarian party platform, was thoroughly impractical.
The problem I have with libertarian philosophy is that it doesn't look to me like it would work well with humans under modern conditions, much like Marxism or assuming most users have a clue about computer security. The impression I get reading some of the more extreme Libertarian literature is that the writers can't imagine the perfidy of some humans. This may make them great human beings and wonderful to do business with, but it's not a basis for government. The impression I got from reading a Libertarian platform is that the writers didn't have a clue as to how to make things like pollution controls work, so they put down something ideologically pure and kept going.
Robinson, in his $COLOR Mars series, had a character describe libertarianism as people wanting police protection from their slaves. Pretty much no actual libertarian wants that, but it's obvious how libertarianism could wind up like that, given certain economic and social conditions.
The story, as I remember it, is that he gave something like $100K to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming legal. That's a rather large contribution to stop something that doesn't harm other people, and it potentially hurt a lot of people Mozilla was trying to be friendly with.
Also, I don't remember him being sued. He resigned because he'd become a liability to Mozilla as CEO.
Nobody's saying Eich couldn't make political contributions, just that he made himself some enemies that way, and became something of a hot potato.
It hasn't been possible for a group of enthusiastic warriors with personal weapons to defeat a real military force for a long time now. The Reagan administration ensured that civilians can't buy even standard infantry rifles. What such people can do is make areas essentially ungovernable, and I don't see robot soldiers doing anything about that for a long time. People who have something significant to lose aren't going to revolt like that, and that's how we've been keeping what domestic peace we have.
The 2000s appeared to go well because of large government deficits. Clinton wound up with a balanced budget (at least by the smoke-and-mirrors definition) along with prosperity. Bush didn't do nearly as well, despite having a Republican house for his first six years.
I'm not sure how useful a standard platform would be. If there's a standard algorithm, and everybody builds their own software, there's going to be a lot of duplicated effort but one standard software system has the possibility of having standard errors that everyone uses.
You're supposed to question scientists, but if you do you're expected to be able to provide evidence. Myrhrvold did his own analysis, and didn't release details of what he did differently. Even if he's completely correct, he isn't being helpful about it. Helpfulness would include a demonstration of why his results are better than NASA's, some explanation why NASA's results apparently agree with other measurements better than his, and specific improvements to the processing of the data ("throw yours out and use this instead" does count as a specific improvement, provided there's enough details on "this").
Instead, he makes sweeping statements, doesn't show how he got them, and ignores much of the evidence.
The conditions human civilization was created in did not include climate change on the scale we're seeing now, and the massive environmental changes tended to be on a more local basis. We're going outside the parameters that civilization was built for, and I see no reason to think that everything will just be OK.
The Eocene is fairly recent, and most fossil fuel was already in the ground. Back before we'd started getting massive oil and coal deposits, the Sun was significantly dimmer. The planet has never been in the same position as it would be with most fossil fuels burned and the Sun at its current brightness.
Seriously, I'm not an anthropologist, so I can't speak to a lot of cultures, and I don't know whether covering something means it has to be sexual. I can find large cultures where it is or was bad for a woman to let her hair be seen in public, but I don't think that's inherently sexual.
There have been a lot of cultures where bare breasts were fine, although I don't know how large they were or are. I don't know how strict the covering rules are over cultures, and I do know that some cultures are presented as having no bare boobs despite routinely baring them.
If we implemented your ideas, government would become privatized, and essentially feudal and dictatorial.
So you sign an agreement with Joe's Police Force. Who's going to investigate your robbery when Fred's Police Force puts the kibosh on it, and they've got twice the gunmen? Joe decides that you aren't paying enough and your daughter is hot. Too bad there's no court to sue him or independent police to rescue your daughter. We degenerate into gang rule pretty darn fast.
The next step is when some overlord moves in and crushes the gangs in a large area. If you like his policies, fine, I guess, but if you disagree with them, well, you know what happens to armed people who disagree with him, right?
There's some reason to think that really major wars are not going to happen again, and that the world is actually going to become more peaceful. There's also some reason to think that this is wishful thinking. I'm unlikely to be concerned with this fifty years from now, but if this continues for another half-century I'm going to be getting pretty optimistic.
By your reasoning, you find merit in pulling stuff out of your ass and putting it on Slashdot. It's possible to do something and not consider it an actual good thing to do. I haven't read claims that it was good to rape all those Germans, just that it was understandable. I don't think you're going to find very many references to Japanese claiming that the Rape of Nanking was actually a good thing.