I totally agree, whats more is that he doesn't say that overall innovation rates have slowed. We have more world changing innovations a year now than ever before. Its just when you look at a "per population" number that it looks bleak. However, as you point out, who cares about "per population?!" These types of inventions affect everyone, their value isn't diluted the more people they help.
Overall global innovation rates haven't slowed at all. The statement that we have more world changing innovations per year than ever before I'd call rather questionable though. It is true that inventions affect everyone, although the ever growing artifical barrier to useage that intellectual property represents does deny the benefit of most of them to many people.
The articles premise that each generation of people is less innovative than the generation before them is still a disturbing one, and worthy of note and concern if there is evidence to support it.
It's really easy to chuck out the argument mentioned in the article, that invention is a finite thing and that we are close to discovering all of it, it consequently becoming more and more difficult, expensive, and unusual relative to the human effort put into it.
It's irresponsible to accept it though, because it's an easy out. Accepting this premise rules out all of human behaviors capacity to influence how inventive we are in the future, releases us from any collective responsibility for our decreasing inventiveness, and dismisses our collective capacity to correct the situation should we deem it appropriate.
I can think of a great many other possible explanations for a decreasingly inventive population, and none of them are as vulnerable to Occam's razor as the "we've almost discovered it all" argument.
France and Holland are autonomous states, and because of good administration and social conscience, which the population there insisted upon, they are wealthy and well off states. They are surrounded by neighbours who are poor and exploited by the ruling class.
If you were in such a position, would you want to surrender your national autonomy to a massive "democratic" monster which isn't really and which you no longer have any power to influence when they attempt to reduce you to the level of your neighbours?
It's really simple. If you want to get the people from these countries to play ball, and I mean the people, not the bribed officials, you need to give them a reason to want to do so, or they will rightfully tell you to where to go and how to get there.
It's pretty clear that if there exists such a reason, the people of France and Holland don't see it.
They appear to be very happy with the way things are run, and they seem to be very happy about the fact that a great many things that piss off powerful corporations are firmly ingrained into their culture and legal system to such a degree that the only way to change them is to entirely circumvent both their democracy and their legal system. And they're intelligent and informed enough to see that this is exactly what is being attempted and governing themselves accordingly.
They certainly have MY respect. I wish more nations had people of such character.
Personally, I'm distrustful of them because the US veto has consistently kept them from being effective. When the #1 threat to world peace and prosperity has a veto on anything you do, your options are pretty limited...
Your wrong. DHCP is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. You only need it if you haven't been assigned a static network configuration by your upstream. If IP addresses weren't a limited resource for no better reason than an obsolete design, there would be much less reason to use DHCP.
The number one reason it is used is to allow an ISP to have more customers than they have IP addresses to assign to them, operating on the assumption that not all of them will be online at the same time. It's also a good for network administrators who don't have very good organizational skills.
Take for granted or assume the truth of the very thing being questioned. For example, Shopping now for a dress to wear to the ceremony is really begging the question; she hasn't been invited yet. This phrase, whose roots are in Aristotle's writings on logic, came into English in the late 1500s. In the 1990s, however, people sometimes used the phrase as a synonym of "ask the question" (as in The article begs the question: "What are we afraid of?").
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms
Another example of proper use: Commenting on the complicated nature of AJAX is really begging the question; he hasn't established that he's competent to comment on the nature of AJAX yet.
Why don't you try reading the comment as it was written? You went beyond the realm of snarkiness deep into the land of annoyingly stupid this time...
I will, however, concede that I should have used a semi-colon: Which begs the question; if you think...
That's not off topic in any way. He has faith that it does, and so it does. He's attacking your faith and attempting to replace it with his own. Could he be anymore on topic?
A growing number of proponents argue that applications created with AJAX perform better than today's Web browser-based applications.
Because as we all know, AJAX applications don't run in the browser.
"People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said.
While I do feel that the intellect of rocket scientists is greatly overrated by the general public, I don't think he was commenting as to the simplicity of AJAX here. Which begs the question, if you think AJAX is complicated, Mr. Fitzgerald, what exactly are you doing in the IT profession? AJAX is about as complicated as a ruler. Perhaps you should stick to playing with brightly colored bits of string and leave the thinking jobs to the "rocket scientists".
Uh, if you alias "video.google.com" to 127.0.0.1 then you wont be able to view any videos that aren't hosted locally.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Your services are no longer needed. Back to your Obvious Cave to rest and fight another day.
If it was so obvious, why did you present it as a way to get around their domain based filter and view video from other websites? Are you a habitual moron who spends so much time posting stuff that is wrong that we are supposed to recognize your name and dismiss your post as "obviously wrong" or what?
You sell 980 units of product x per day, down from 990 a day last year. You sell 20 units of product y per day, up from 10 per day last year.
Company x calls you up on the phone, and tells you that if you don't stop selling product y, they have a bad feeling that the cheque with the money they owe you will end up lost in the mail, and a clerical error might result in your stock will be delayed by a few months, possibly putting you out of business.
This is not the same as Wal-Mart coming into town with cheaper prices. When Wal-Mart comes to town, they come offering the customer deals they can't resist and the market decides. When Intel pulls this kind of shit on their vendors, on the other hand, the customer doesn't get to choose, because when they get to the store, there's no competing product on the shelf TO choose.
If you aren't astroturfing and really can't appreciate the difference between the two situations, you must be fucking retarded.
It says something when Wal-Mart pushes Linux to the back burner in favor of Windows MCE at $1000-#1500 and considers Linux marketable only with Windows emulation and proprietary add-ons.
Wal-Mart is a lowest-common-denominator shop from the ground up and always has been. That being the case, another way to phrase might be "It says something when Wal-Mart considers Linux with Windows emulation marketable".
You're mistaken. Lindows doesn't need the evil Microsoft Empire to sustain it. It has the evil Wal-Mart Empire behind it, and as long as Lindows is for sale preinstalled at Wal-Mart, they remain one of the most significant distributions going.
If your the duties of your vocation can be performed with trained monkeys, you might also consider a more meaningful line of work.
That is a blatant lie. It would take at least two dozen trained monkeys to replace hector_uk, and it's a lot more expensive to house, feed and care for two dozen monkeys than it is to pay hector_uk. His job is completely secure. At least, until they start offshoring to Africa.
Given that the model apparently works quite successfully to promote benefits for the developers as was intended (see my example above), and doesn't actually inhibit any of the alternative approaches you mentioned if a company thinks it will do better that way, I don't see any strong argument for changing it as things stand today.
That's what gets me so goddamned pissed off. It's like you've got blinders on. We're very close technologically to the point where we can effectively build a device with every book ever written by mankind stored within it and distribute these devices to every person on earth for no more than the cost to pump them out of a factory. Think about that for a second. You could whip your tablet out and read anything ever written at any time, and so could any other human on earth. If you honestly don't think that's compelling, if you can't see how that one thing could change our entire world for the better, there's something seriously wrong with you. Are you blind? Goddamn, does everything have to be about money? We shouldn't do this, even though we can, even though it would improve the lives of 6 billion people and enrich your life in the process simply by consequence of there being 6 billion people around you who are more educated and thus more productive, because businesses might have to restructure themselves?
Take your fucking blinders off. I'd be the first to concede that the necessary restructuring would take work, be hard, have problems, inevitably cause economic hardship in the transition, and that we probably would need to invent a new model to fund creative works. It's not a small task. But when you and others like you say you can't even see the reason when someone lays it right out in front of you, it makes me want to pull my hair and bash my head on the desk in frustration.
Why don't we try dropping the "needs copyright protection to survive and make a fair profit" charade while we're at it? I can think of many different ways that a software company can make money without copyright.
1) Contract work. You get paid upfront to write it, and once it's written, it's there for anyone that wants it, and you move on to the next job.
2) Support. In addition to the standard technical support type work, there are also lots of opportunities to get paid to speak and consult out there.
3) Ransom auction. You make everyone aware that you've got a new piece of software to release and set a price. Anyone can throw their money into a pot towards the price, and when the price gets met, you are contractually obligated to release. At any time, you can take what money is there and release. At any time, someone whos money is in the pot can take it back if they get tired of waiting or change their mind. Reputation based economy. Work great for the entire entertainment industry I bet, especially if you made it accessable to the teenage market.
4) Sponsorship. There are all sorts of opportunities out there for any creative endeavor to be sponsored. Telecommunication providers would have a vested interest in there continuing to be new stuff created, and if they sponsored someone who produced very popular stuff, that would be a great advertisement. Tell me you couldn't see "The new Britney Spears video brought to you by Bell and Maybelline".
We don't need copyright. People will pay upfront to have things made. We need a new economic model for creative works, and now that the internet is here we can build one. We ransom our culture from our people and remove access to it from them because no one can afford to buy everything. We don't need to do this to each other. Hell, if we could do without copyright you'd have to be crazy-mean not to want it to happen, because it would enrich the lives of everyone on earth. We could move the manufacturing right to the storefront and have the library of alexandria at everyones fingertips. We could have have citywide wireless servers streaming every recording ever made to everything from earbuds to stereo equipment for a few bucks a month. We could provide complete access to every educational resource ever created to every person on the face of the earth via cheap tablets and the incredible new advancements being made in storage technology without any wires at all. Hell, it probably won't be much longer before you can story the sum of human creativity in your keychain via 3D optical data storage or the next big advancement to follow it. When we have that power, and we will soon, are we really going to pretend that it's in our best interest not to do so?
How can you seriously say that libraries don't reduce the revenue for authors? All those people who read the books for free are very unlikely to buy a copy unless they are collectors. All those students who borrow books to do their homework assignments are unlikely to buy copies that they might otherwise have had to buy. Seems like a pretty strong analogy to me, varied only by degree.
More relevant, how can you possibly deny that providing increased access to creative works benefits society in the ways I have mentioned, when the very existance of public libraries with books and other assorted media has always been justified in those ways.
Doesn't seem to me like the problem is my analogy so much as you not liking my points and having no way to refute them, because thus far, you've failed to do so. All I see you doing is repeating that tired old "without money, there would be no creative works" argument and disregarding any other factors.
I can personally think of half a dozen different ways to provide financial motivation for creative works without the need for copyright and can furthermore think of myriad different non-financial reasons why a person might wish to engage themselves in creative works.
I am also aware, as are most people I should think, that the existing corporate monsters that control the media, far from providing increased access to those works that are created, actually squash most of them so they never see the light of day because it's not profitable to have too many of their "products" competing with each other.
Someone is making some pretty tired, weak arguments here, but I don't think it's me.
This is actually illegal in some if not most countries, and I know it definately is in Canada. It's called price fixing. You are flat out not allowed to sell something to Canadians for $20 and prevent them from purchasing it elsewhere for less if it is available, and this has been enforced more than once. It's not in the national interest to allow foreign interests to rip off your citizens, and I would be very suprised to hear that other countries permit it.
The only reason the MPAA was ever able to get away with it was because they bundled region coding into CSS, passed it off as an anti-piracy measure, and took steps to prevent multi-region players on the grounds that they were a copy-protection-circumvention tool. If you wanted to go to Singapore and legally purchase those DVDs for resale, stick em on a boat, bring em home and sell them in your store, they could not legally stop you. They got around it with their anti-piracy bullshit by ensuring that if you do try to do this, there'll be no market for the discs. It should never have been permitted in the first place.
Not so. Laws are also made to protect individuals from society and "the greater good". It obviously is in everybody's best interest to seize someone's land to build a high school or freeway... except if you're the person whose land is being seized. Still, we have laws to prevent that sort of thing (or at least grant the landowner certain rights if it happens).
Providing a safe, secure and stable environment for private individuals to live in is considered by the majority to be in everyones best interest, therefore we institute laws to provide that security. Case in point, the laws about private land ownership rights. If we as a society believed that this was not in our collective best interest, we would structure our laws in a fashion that did not respect private land ownership. It's not a new idea, and had been done many times before.
Exactly. Allowing people to freely copy music is in everyone's best interest... unless you happen to be that musician hoping to earn a living by selling CDs. Besides, if less people decide to produce works of art because they cannot prevent people from copying it as they please, society's interests are not being served either.
Ok... I was addressing your position that people have a "moral right" to control what other people do where their creative works are concerned. Are you suggesting that this moral right is based on peoples moral right to support themselves selling CDs? I'd like to support myself by selling my toenail clippings, perhaps we should make a law that ensures that I can?
That's what taxes are for. Taxes on royalties and record sales help fund the infrastructure needed to enforce copyrights, just like your income taxes help pay for the police protection you enjoy.
Your entire logic is flawed here. Taxes, money, these are just symbols to manage the allocation of resources. You can print money or burn it, it's irrelevant, because you're still using that money to manage the same finite pool of human and material resources. The simple fact is that having an increased portion of your population doing non-wealth-generating tasks such as policing, accounting, advertising, etc decreases the wealth of your society when compared with an alternative system where those people are engaged in wealth-generating tasks like construction, farming, mining and manufacturing. Where the money comes from doesn't even enter the picture.
With this in mind, the benefit, if any, to the society that is reaped by having these people engaged in these wasteful policing tasks should be weighed against the benefit that would be generated if they were freed from this responsibility so they could engage in productive tasks instead. If there would be greater benefit by having those people do something productive rather than running around policing peoples behavior, then they flat out should not be doing it.
Hell, we could very easily introduce a nose-picking fine that people have to pay if they are caught, hire one person in ten to be a nose-picking cop, and set the fines high enough that they are sufficient to pay all the wages for all the nose-picking cops. By your logic, there would be no cost to society for this, because the money to pay for it is coming from the fines. But in actuality, having one in ten people running around staring at peoples noses would have a tremendous cost to society. We would all be the poorer for it.
Unless there is a compelling reason to have all these people running around policing what people do with creative works in the privacy of their homes, they shouldn't be doing it. They should be doing something else. If you really believe that copyright is a benefit to society, you should be able to outline what these benefits are and justify why they are worth the price.
Hmmm... lets see how sensible your premise is when we apply it to an example where it's already happened.
I don't have any strong reason to see why being exposed to libraries makes people all that much more creative themselves. There are already more books out there than any one person could ever sample. Also, even if you're right, and it somehow increases the creativity of the populace, building libraries that provide free access to books would MASSIVELY decrease the incentive to actually use that creativity to write books, by making it more profitable to do something else, like, say, flip burgers, due to the massively reduced revenue possibilities, and overall lead to less books, which by your own logic means less creativity long term too.
So obviously, we should make sure there are no libraries out there, because their benefit is dubious, and they will inevitably lead to less books being written and less creativity long term.
Suggesting that we build free public libraries, while a great attempt to karma whore by appealing to the ever-popular "free stuff for all!" politics, is a massively shortsighted and oversimplified view.
Yeah. I don't bother making points or anything, I'm just here for the karma. If I can save up enough before I die, I'm hoping I might get to come back as a vibrator.
As to your last point: There are some people, myself included, who believe that artists should be able to reap the fruits of their work, and retain full rights to them. I think that copyright is a basic moral right that in principle belongs with the artist, and is not something to be lightly toyed with in order to maximise the benefit to society, as if we're communists dividing up the harvest.
Yes, there are some people who feel that way, particularly amongst those who have a vested interest in such a system being perpetuated. But, like the article says, people who feel that way are in the minority.
One thing that "basic moral rights" generally have in common is that a person needs to initiate an interaction with you in order to violate them, and that if people just leave you alone, your basic moral rights end up being respected. Like the right to life... to violate that right I must kill you. I can't think of any "basic moral rights" that can be taken from a person without interacting with that person.
But copyright isn't like that at all. You can write a song and perform it, someone overhears you and sings it walking down the street where I hear it and write it down and sing it around the campfire. Not only have I not interacted with you, unless you go running around trying to catch people, you won't even be aware that I've done it. And if you aren't a musician by profession who earns their livelihood by their music, I've done you no harm whatsoever.
As far as your comment about "toying with things in order to maximise benefit to society as if we're communists dividing up the harvest", lets get real for a minute here. Copyright would not exist if it weren't for "societies" resources being used to compel compliance. Laws are ALWAYS about maximising the benefit to society except in cases where the laws are not imposed by the society but by a non-representative ruling body. There is no other reason for a law to exist in a democracy. We outlaw murder because we collectively determine it's a benefit to us all to do so, and worthy of the resources we allocate to preventing it from occurring. We don't outlaw picking your nose because, even though it's kind of gross and distasteful, wasting our resources enforcing such a law isn't in our best interest.
So yeah, perhaps I'm wrong and you really DO have some moral right to come into my life dictating that I must stop singing a song I like unless I meet your terms, even if I don't know who you are and wasn't even aware you existed until you came looking for me. But unless it's in our collective best interests as a society to support cops, lawyers and judges while they look for me and take me to task for violating your so-called moral rights, we shouldn't be doing it.
Yeah, we have the same setup in Canada. And our government is currently in the process of bowing to corporate pressures and instituting DMCA style legislation in Canada. I've been seriously wondering if there's a lawsuit in there somewhere... I'd love to be the one to sue those bastards.
IMHO there is an undergoing lame attempt to try and make copyright infringement look like a really bad thing when common sense actually tells us that there's no big deal about it.
Common sense might even tell you that increasing peoples exposure to varied creative works makes them more creative by inspiring them, makes them more intelligent by exposing them to various ideas and forcing them to decide amongst them, makes them more tolerant of others by increasing their awareness of cultural diversity and enriches their lives.
Common sense might even tell you that copyright legislation harms our society and everyone who lives in it, and that we should take a serious look at getting rid of it.
Have you noticed how uncommon common sense is these days?
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I totally agree, whats more is that he doesn't say that overall innovation rates have slowed. We have more world changing innovations a year now than ever before. Its just when you look at a "per population" number that it looks bleak. However, as you point out, who cares about "per population?!" These types of inventions affect everyone, their value isn't diluted the more people they help.
Overall global innovation rates haven't slowed at all. The statement that we have more world changing innovations per year than ever before I'd call rather questionable though. It is true that inventions affect everyone, although the ever growing artifical barrier to useage that intellectual property represents does deny the benefit of most of them to many people.
The articles premise that each generation of people is less innovative than the generation before them is still a disturbing one, and worthy of note and concern if there is evidence to support it.
It's really easy to chuck out the argument mentioned in the article, that invention is a finite thing and that we are close to discovering all of it, it consequently becoming more and more difficult, expensive, and unusual relative to the human effort put into it.
It's irresponsible to accept it though, because it's an easy out. Accepting this premise rules out all of human behaviors capacity to influence how inventive we are in the future, releases us from any collective responsibility for our decreasing inventiveness, and dismisses our collective capacity to correct the situation should we deem it appropriate.
I can think of a great many other possible explanations for a decreasingly inventive population, and none of them are as vulnerable to Occam's razor as the "we've almost discovered it all" argument.
I was personally thinking of the international criminal court, but that's another good example... and then there's always kyoto... and...
Ah fuck it... you ain't listening anyways.
France and Holland are autonomous states, and because of good administration and social conscience, which the population there insisted upon, they are wealthy and well off states. They are surrounded by neighbours who are poor and exploited by the ruling class.
If you were in such a position, would you want to surrender your national autonomy to a massive "democratic" monster which isn't really and which you no longer have any power to influence when they attempt to reduce you to the level of your neighbours?
It's really simple. If you want to get the people from these countries to play ball, and I mean the people, not the bribed officials, you need to give them a reason to want to do so, or they will rightfully tell you to where to go and how to get there.
It's pretty clear that if there exists such a reason, the people of France and Holland don't see it.
They appear to be very happy with the way things are run, and they seem to be very happy about the fact that a great many things that piss off powerful corporations are firmly ingrained into their culture and legal system to such a degree that the only way to change them is to entirely circumvent both their democracy and their legal system. And they're intelligent and informed enough to see that this is exactly what is being attempted and governing themselves accordingly.
They certainly have MY respect. I wish more nations had people of such character.
Personally, I'm distrustful of them because the US veto has consistently kept them from being effective. When the #1 threat to world peace and prosperity has a veto on anything you do, your options are pretty limited...
Your wrong. DHCP is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. You only need it if you haven't been assigned a static network configuration by your upstream. If IP addresses weren't a limited resource for no better reason than an obsolete design, there would be much less reason to use DHCP.
The number one reason it is used is to allow an ISP to have more customers than they have IP addresses to assign to them, operating on the assumption that not all of them will be online at the same time. It's also a good for network administrators who don't have very good organizational skills.
Take for granted or assume the truth of the very thing being questioned. For example, Shopping now for a dress to wear to the ceremony is really begging the question; she hasn't been invited yet. This phrase, whose roots are in Aristotle's writings on logic, came into English in the late 1500s. In the 1990s, however, people sometimes used the phrase as a synonym of "ask the question" (as in The article begs the question: "What are we afraid of?").
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms
Another example of proper use: Commenting on the complicated nature of AJAX is really begging the question; he hasn't established that he's competent to comment on the nature of AJAX yet.
Why don't you try reading the comment as it was written? You went beyond the realm of snarkiness deep into the land of annoyingly stupid this time...
I will, however, concede that I should have used a semi-colon: Which begs the question; if you think...
That's not off topic in any way. He has faith that it does, and so it does. He's attacking your faith and attempting to replace it with his own. Could he be anymore on topic?
Amen.
This was a very funny article. My favorite bits:
A growing number of proponents argue that applications created with AJAX perform better than today's Web browser-based applications.
Because as we all know, AJAX applications don't run in the browser.
"People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said.
While I do feel that the intellect of rocket scientists is greatly overrated by the general public, I don't think he was commenting as to the simplicity of AJAX here. Which begs the question, if you think AJAX is complicated, Mr. Fitzgerald, what exactly are you doing in the IT profession? AJAX is about as complicated as a ruler. Perhaps you should stick to playing with brightly colored bits of string and leave the thinking jobs to the "rocket scientists".
Uh, if you alias "video.google.com" to 127.0.0.1 then you wont be able to view any videos that aren't hosted locally.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Your services are no longer needed. Back to your Obvious Cave to rest and fight another day.
If it was so obvious, why did you present it as a way to get around their domain based filter and view video from other websites? Are you a habitual moron who spends so much time posting stuff that is wrong that we are supposed to recognize your name and dismiss your post as "obviously wrong" or what?
You sell 980 units of product x per day, down from 990 a day last year.
You sell 20 units of product y per day, up from 10 per day last year.
Company x calls you up on the phone, and tells you that if you don't stop selling product y, they have a bad feeling that the cheque with the money they owe you will end up lost in the mail, and a clerical error might result in your stock will be delayed by a few months, possibly putting you out of business.
This is not the same as Wal-Mart coming into town with cheaper prices. When Wal-Mart comes to town, they come offering the customer deals they can't resist and the market decides. When Intel pulls this kind of shit on their vendors, on the other hand, the customer doesn't get to choose, because when they get to the store, there's no competing product on the shelf TO choose.
If you aren't astroturfing and really can't appreciate the difference between the two situations, you must be fucking retarded.
It says something when Wal-Mart pushes Linux to the back burner in favor of Windows MCE at $1000-#1500 and considers Linux marketable only with Windows emulation and proprietary add-ons.
Wal-Mart is a lowest-common-denominator shop from the ground up and always has been. That being the case, another way to phrase might be "It says something when Wal-Mart considers Linux with Windows emulation marketable".
You're mistaken. Lindows doesn't need the evil Microsoft Empire to sustain it. It has the evil Wal-Mart Empire behind it, and as long as Lindows is for sale preinstalled at Wal-Mart, they remain one of the most significant distributions going.
If your the duties of your vocation can be performed with trained monkeys, you might also consider a more meaningful line of work.
That is a blatant lie. It would take at least two dozen trained monkeys to replace hector_uk, and it's a lot more expensive to house, feed and care for two dozen monkeys than it is to pay hector_uk. His job is completely secure. At least, until they start offshoring to Africa.
Given that the model apparently works quite successfully to promote benefits for the developers as was intended (see my example above), and doesn't actually inhibit any of the alternative approaches you mentioned if a company thinks it will do better that way, I don't see any strong argument for changing it as things stand today.
That's what gets me so goddamned pissed off. It's like you've got blinders on. We're very close technologically to the point where we can effectively build a device with every book ever written by mankind stored within it and distribute these devices to every person on earth for no more than the cost to pump them out of a factory. Think about that for a second. You could whip your tablet out and read anything ever written at any time, and so could any other human on earth. If you honestly don't think that's compelling, if you can't see how that one thing could change our entire world for the better, there's something seriously wrong with you. Are you blind? Goddamn, does everything have to be about money? We shouldn't do this, even though we can, even though it would improve the lives of 6 billion people and enrich your life in the process simply by consequence of there being 6 billion people around you who are more educated and thus more productive, because businesses might have to restructure themselves?
Take your fucking blinders off. I'd be the first to concede that the necessary restructuring would take work, be hard, have problems, inevitably cause economic hardship in the transition, and that we probably would need to invent a new model to fund creative works. It's not a small task. But when you and others like you say you can't even see the reason when someone lays it right out in front of you, it makes me want to pull my hair and bash my head on the desk in frustration.
Why don't we try dropping the "needs copyright protection to survive and make a fair profit" charade while we're at it? I can think of many different ways that a software company can make money without copyright.
1) Contract work. You get paid upfront to write it, and once it's written, it's there for anyone that wants it, and you move on to the next job.
2) Support. In addition to the standard technical support type work, there are also lots of opportunities to get paid to speak and consult out there.
3) Ransom auction. You make everyone aware that you've got a new piece of software to release and set a price. Anyone can throw their money into a pot towards the price, and when the price gets met, you are contractually obligated to release. At any time, you can take what money is there and release. At any time, someone whos money is in the pot can take it back if they get tired of waiting or change their mind. Reputation based economy. Work great for the entire entertainment industry I bet, especially if you made it accessable to the teenage market.
4) Sponsorship. There are all sorts of opportunities out there for any creative endeavor to be sponsored. Telecommunication providers would have a vested interest in there continuing to be new stuff created, and if they sponsored someone who produced very popular stuff, that would be a great advertisement. Tell me you couldn't see "The new Britney Spears video brought to you by Bell and Maybelline".
We don't need copyright. People will pay upfront to have things made. We need a new economic model for creative works, and now that the internet is here we can build one. We ransom our culture from our people and remove access to it from them because no one can afford to buy everything. We don't need to do this to each other. Hell, if we could do without copyright you'd have to be crazy-mean not to want it to happen, because it would enrich the lives of everyone on earth. We could move the manufacturing right to the storefront and have the library of alexandria at everyones fingertips. We could have have citywide wireless servers streaming every recording ever made to everything from earbuds to stereo equipment for a few bucks a month. We could provide complete access to every educational resource ever created to every person on the face of the earth via cheap tablets and the incredible new advancements being made in storage technology without any wires at all. Hell, it probably won't be much longer before you can story the sum of human creativity in your keychain via 3D optical data storage or the next big advancement to follow it. When we have that power, and we will soon, are we really going to pretend that it's in our best interest not to do so?
Apparently it's going to be called SSS - Sorta Simple Syndication.
How can you seriously say that libraries don't reduce the revenue for authors? All those people who read the books for free are very unlikely to buy a copy unless they are collectors. All those students who borrow books to do their homework assignments are unlikely to buy copies that they might otherwise have had to buy. Seems like a pretty strong analogy to me, varied only by degree.
More relevant, how can you possibly deny that providing increased access to creative works benefits society in the ways I have mentioned, when the very existance of public libraries with books and other assorted media has always been justified in those ways.
Doesn't seem to me like the problem is my analogy so much as you not liking my points and having no way to refute them, because thus far, you've failed to do so. All I see you doing is repeating that tired old "without money, there would be no creative works" argument and disregarding any other factors.
I can personally think of half a dozen different ways to provide financial motivation for creative works without the need for copyright and can furthermore think of myriad different non-financial reasons why a person might wish to engage themselves in creative works.
I am also aware, as are most people I should think, that the existing corporate monsters that control the media, far from providing increased access to those works that are created, actually squash most of them so they never see the light of day because it's not profitable to have too many of their "products" competing with each other.
Someone is making some pretty tired, weak arguments here, but I don't think it's me.
This is actually illegal in some if not most countries, and I know it definately is in Canada. It's called price fixing. You are flat out not allowed to sell something to Canadians for $20 and prevent them from purchasing it elsewhere for less if it is available, and this has been enforced more than once. It's not in the national interest to allow foreign interests to rip off your citizens, and I would be very suprised to hear that other countries permit it.
The only reason the MPAA was ever able to get away with it was because they bundled region coding into CSS, passed it off as an anti-piracy measure, and took steps to prevent multi-region players on the grounds that they were a copy-protection-circumvention tool. If you wanted to go to Singapore and legally purchase those DVDs for resale, stick em on a boat, bring em home and sell them in your store, they could not legally stop you. They got around it with their anti-piracy bullshit by ensuring that if you do try to do this, there'll be no market for the discs. It should never have been permitted in the first place.
Now you're just twisting things around.
Not so. Laws are also made to protect individuals from society and "the greater good". It obviously is in everybody's best interest to seize someone's land to build a high school or freeway... except if you're the person whose land is being seized. Still, we have laws to prevent that sort of thing (or at least grant the landowner certain rights if it happens).
Providing a safe, secure and stable environment for private individuals to live in is considered by the majority to be in everyones best interest, therefore we institute laws to provide that security. Case in point, the laws about private land ownership rights. If we as a society believed that this was not in our collective best interest, we would structure our laws in a fashion that did not respect private land ownership. It's not a new idea, and had been done many times before.
Exactly. Allowing people to freely copy music is in everyone's best interest... unless you happen to be that musician hoping to earn a living by selling CDs. Besides, if less people decide to produce works of art because they cannot prevent people from copying it as they please, society's interests are not being served either.
Ok... I was addressing your position that people have a "moral right" to control what other people do where their creative works are concerned. Are you suggesting that this moral right is based on peoples moral right to support themselves selling CDs? I'd like to support myself by selling my toenail clippings, perhaps we should make a law that ensures that I can?
That's what taxes are for. Taxes on royalties and record sales help fund the infrastructure needed to enforce copyrights, just like your income taxes help pay for the police protection you enjoy.
Your entire logic is flawed here. Taxes, money, these are just symbols to manage the allocation of resources. You can print money or burn it, it's irrelevant, because you're still using that money to manage the same finite pool of human and material resources. The simple fact is that having an increased portion of your population doing non-wealth-generating tasks such as policing, accounting, advertising, etc decreases the wealth of your society when compared with an alternative system where those people are engaged in wealth-generating tasks like construction, farming, mining and manufacturing. Where the money comes from doesn't even enter the picture.
With this in mind, the benefit, if any, to the society that is reaped by having these people engaged in these wasteful policing tasks should be weighed against the benefit that would be generated if they were freed from this responsibility so they could engage in productive tasks instead. If there would be greater benefit by having those people do something productive rather than running around policing peoples behavior, then they flat out should not be doing it.
Hell, we could very easily introduce a nose-picking fine that people have to pay if they are caught, hire one person in ten to be a nose-picking cop, and set the fines high enough that they are sufficient to pay all the wages for all the nose-picking cops. By your logic, there would be no cost to society for this, because the money to pay for it is coming from the fines. But in actuality, having one in ten people running around staring at peoples noses would have a tremendous cost to society. We would all be the poorer for it.
Unless there is a compelling reason to have all these people running around policing what people do with creative works in the privacy of their homes, they shouldn't be doing it. They should be doing something else. If you really believe that copyright is a benefit to society, you should be able to outline what these benefits are and justify why they are worth the price.
Hmmm... lets see how sensible your premise is when we apply it to an example where it's already happened.
I don't have any strong reason to see why being exposed to libraries makes people all that much more creative themselves. There are already more books out there than any one person could ever sample. Also, even if you're right, and it somehow increases the creativity of the populace, building libraries that provide free access to books would MASSIVELY decrease the incentive to actually use that creativity to write books, by making it more profitable to do something else, like, say, flip burgers, due to the massively reduced revenue possibilities, and overall lead to less books, which by your own logic means less creativity long term too.
So obviously, we should make sure there are no libraries out there, because their benefit is dubious, and they will inevitably lead to less books being written and less creativity long term.
Suggesting that we build free public libraries, while a great attempt to karma whore by appealing to the ever-popular "free stuff for all!" politics, is a massively shortsighted and oversimplified view.
Yeah. I don't bother making points or anything, I'm just here for the karma. If I can save up enough before I die, I'm hoping I might get to come back as a vibrator.
As to your last point: There are some people, myself included, who believe that artists should be able to reap the fruits of their work, and retain full rights to them. I think that copyright is a basic moral right that in principle belongs with the artist, and is not something to be lightly toyed with in order to maximise the benefit to society, as if we're communists dividing up the harvest.
Yes, there are some people who feel that way, particularly amongst those who have a vested interest in such a system being perpetuated. But, like the article says, people who feel that way are in the minority.
One thing that "basic moral rights" generally have in common is that a person needs to initiate an interaction with you in order to violate them, and that if people just leave you alone, your basic moral rights end up being respected. Like the right to life... to violate that right I must kill you. I can't think of any "basic moral rights" that can be taken from a person without interacting with that person.
But copyright isn't like that at all. You can write a song and perform it, someone overhears you and sings it walking down the street where I hear it and write it down and sing it around the campfire. Not only have I not interacted with you, unless you go running around trying to catch people, you won't even be aware that I've done it. And if you aren't a musician by profession who earns their livelihood by their music, I've done you no harm whatsoever.
As far as your comment about "toying with things in order to maximise benefit to society as if we're communists dividing up the harvest", lets get real for a minute here. Copyright would not exist if it weren't for "societies" resources being used to compel compliance. Laws are ALWAYS about maximising the benefit to society except in cases where the laws are not imposed by the society but by a non-representative ruling body. There is no other reason for a law to exist in a democracy. We outlaw murder because we collectively determine it's a benefit to us all to do so, and worthy of the resources we allocate to preventing it from occurring. We don't outlaw picking your nose because, even though it's kind of gross and distasteful, wasting our resources enforcing such a law isn't in our best interest.
So yeah, perhaps I'm wrong and you really DO have some moral right to come into my life dictating that I must stop singing a song I like unless I meet your terms, even if I don't know who you are and wasn't even aware you existed until you came looking for me. But unless it's in our collective best interests as a society to support cops, lawyers and judges while they look for me and take me to task for violating your so-called moral rights, we shouldn't be doing it.
If you are pirating software at least be honest about the fact the you are doing something wrong.
Don't you mean "Doing something illegal?". Right/wrong, good/bad, moral/immoral, ethical/unethical haven't got a damned thing to do with the law.
I know, I just love getting the opportunity to put that viewpoint forth in such a public forum, and you were the best "straight man" going :P
Yeah, we have the same setup in Canada. And our government is currently in the process of bowing to corporate pressures and instituting DMCA style legislation in Canada. I've been seriously wondering if there's a lawsuit in there somewhere... I'd love to be the one to sue those bastards.
IMHO there is an undergoing lame attempt to try and make copyright infringement look like a really bad thing when common sense actually tells us that there's no big deal about it.
Common sense might even tell you that increasing peoples exposure to varied creative works makes them more creative by inspiring them, makes them more intelligent by exposing them to various ideas and forcing them to decide amongst them, makes them more tolerant of others by increasing their awareness of cultural diversity and enriches their lives.
Common sense might even tell you that copyright legislation harms our society and everyone who lives in it, and that we should take a serious look at getting rid of it.
Have you noticed how uncommon common sense is these days?