The natural partern of human society is to wide spread the info.
That's counter to the behavior of nearly every civilization (aka "society") we've ever seen. People at the individual level may share freely, but as soon as they develope into any kind of organized structure, restrictions are created.
"Information wants to be free", but "people want to own information". The churches and chieftians of all ancient nations tried to restrict data flow. Even prehistoric tribes competed to keep their neolithic innovations in axes and arrowheads secret from their neighbors.
If people with power want to restrict something, they will find a way, with or without the government's help. Of course, once they do this, you'd be hard pressed to claim they haven't evolved into a form of government (as the medieval European Church was virtually a government)
- - - -
You seem to think capitalism is unnatural. On the contrary, capitalism is the most natural of economic systems. That's why it works so well- because it doesn't try to fight the underlying laws of physics and Darwinism that forged humanity. Look at the Cold War- the reason communism lost is because it tried to deny the animal instincts of mankind. It asked people to work together for a common good. Instead, capitalism allowed people to greedily strive for private gain.
("Natural" doesn't imply "good", but it might mean "the best you can expect")
On the contrary, the fact that going from 1 -> 0 hitpoints means the difference from being unimpaired and dead can make it a lot harder to be heroic.
If the player knows he has 1/120 hitpoints left, then he'd be stupid to pursue the Baron (and the ever-present handful of bloodthirsty bodyguards). But the character is fully able to run, jump, and fight, and will have trouble explaining to his teammates why he's got to sit this one out. (Or why he's got a sudden urge to chug 17 healing potions)
It makes the game a poor simulation of fantasy Swords & Sorcery literature, which it is supposed to be a simulation of.
A common occurence in stories is the hero who is overwhelmed, knocked-out, or just held at swordpoint with no hope of escape. Of course, later on he'll lead a successful jailbreak- which is often a superior kind of adventure. But D&D (and all of the games which followed it in using the HP mechanic- including computer games like Half-Life), the game rules allowed no way for characters to be non-lethally defeated. So whenever the DM wanted to throw the party into a dungeon, he had to ignore the rules to do so.
"And then you get captured, and all your weapons are taken away". This feels to the PCs like they're being cheated. A better system would be for the game rules to allow capture to be the natural outcome of any lost battle, so the DM can toss the PCs into an escape/ransom/demon-sacrifice scenario without it seeming forced.
"Ow! That last hit cut my sword-hand!
"Guess I'll have to run off and evade the guards on a daring rooftop chase, and return to finish off the evil Duke some other day. We'll meet again, this I swear"
Reduced lethality levels in an RPG would permit PCs and NPC enemies to build long term relationships of animosity, instead of slaughtering goblins again and again. (This is how superhero comic books maintain interest- the hero doesn't just battle the same kinds of monsters repeatedly, but the very same villians)
People collect them, but the prices don't seem to be very high. Maybe the hardbound AD&D books from a few years later would be more expensive (if mint).
It hardly looks worthwhile to bother putting onto ebay.
Individuals have 70 years in addition to the rest of their lives
Yep, that is exactly what I said.
As for copyright, the difference between author's life + 70 and 95 is minimal.
Except if the "author" is somehow immortal- such as corporations are. That's why the law dictates a different length of copyright for corporations, since their "life" may never end.
Thus, if my proposal (that corporations be made to hold copyright in the same manner that an individual does) is to make any sense, all mention of "Author's Lifetime" must be removed from copyright duration.
(Basing a copyright on an author's life is a bad law, and unfair for several reasons, even aside from corporations)
Everything works greate as long as there is a delay before people copy you. You just need to make sure the time contraint doesn't get too close to zero.
There's 2 views a person can take on this, which suggest different ways our laws should be.
1. In the past, technological restrictions (time to print and ship books) provided a delay factor that reduced the damage of copying. The original author had a head start to the presses, so he had a persistent advantage over copiers.
However, as technology advanced, that delay period shortened to where one man can email a book to thousands in a second. Thus, copyrights should last longer to make up for delay that technology has removed.
That argument is simple, elegant, and wrong. Nonetheless, it formed the core motivation for the dual copyright extension laws the US has passed (even if proponents never stated it explicitly, it's an undercurrent). That view is wrong because it assumes that the "total time needed to make copies" is what should be held constant in the face of changing technology.
A better interpretation:
2. Try to hold the "author's opportunity to profit" at a constant. Recognize that once, it tooks 18 months to edit a book, 6 months to assemble presses, and additional 6 month periods to move it into different international markets. As time passed, all those times decreased, so today's authors can collect a majority of their total revenue in a much shorter period. ("Burn bright, die young").
Thus, copyright laws beyond that reduced time to collect are unnecessary to ensure profit, and furthermore create a "no-man's land". They produce a period of time where the publisher has little incentive to print a book (no longer very profitable), but the public is still forbidden from publishing it.
I fear that many works will sink into the No Man's Land, and never emerge. (This has already happened to many of the "pulp fiction" works from 1930-1950, whose paper expired before their copyrights)
The position that software is useful is defensible. People "use" software for important tasks all the time. (Patents, too, are all for something that might be useful)
However, the majority of things claiming copyright aren't software, or instructional books- they are items of entertaining fiction. Romance novels and action movies. There's no way those things can be called useful, except by a definition of "useful" so expansive that it loses all meaning.
A really constructionist court, therefore, would find that the US copyright law is broader than the Constitution allows, and should be repealed so a suitable version can be passed in it's place.
However, this will never happen. In the Eldred case, the Supreme Court demonstrated that they will value 100 years of unquestioned Congressional precedent over the text of the Constitution. ("Don't rock the boat")
Maybe we need to get a little more stingy with our patents and copyrights
I'd love to see the USPTO's annual output cut to 5% of what it is today. Then patents which get approved might actually mean something.
if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
By law, a patent owner can " exclude members of the public from making, using, or selling the claimed invention".
It's very hard to claim damages from noncommercial use, and traditionally lawsuits from that were rare. However, pre-internet, commercialization was just about the only way someone could spread an invention widely. So today, it's possible that a project like Debian may be claimed as damaging a company by infringing it's patents and distributing the results.
What a patent holder cannot do is stop someone from discussing or analyzing the invention. Even it they use full duplicates of the patent text to do so. (Patents are unlike copyrights in that way). But the age of the internet has muddled this point as well. Now that patents are handed out for software, what happens to the kind of person (and they do exist) that can execute source code in his head? (or just on paper?)
it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
The end result of a "free market" process will always be feudalism or totaltarianism, unless some force outside the market acts to maintain the "freedom".
(I don't think the parent post was really proposing elimiation of IP laws, but let's proceed from there anyhow)
Well, "If there were no IP laws", then there would be IP laws. This natural pattern occurs accross human societies. (Even without technology to build DRM machines)
If a law or regulating principle is useful (or seems useful to enough people), then it will be created, with or without the government's help. The government might be able to implement the law in more efficient or fair manner than the private sector could, but someone will create it.
For a fantasy example, take murder. If murder were governmentally legalized, soon enough murder would be illegal again- but the enforcers would be private contractors. Since murder is legal, revenge-killing of a murderer is also legal. When you sign up for life-insurance, you'd allocate a portion of the award to go towards hiring avengers (if you were murdered). Of course, the insurance company wouldn't pay if you had yourself been killed for venegance, so they'd create arbitration panels to determine culpability to see if a particular killing violated "policy" or not. Eventually, a near duplication of the existing criminal investigation/enforcement arms of a normal government would be created.
Likewise, if copyright law was abolished, then trade organizations of publishers, authors, and distributors would implement their own form of copyright law. Before Barnes&Noble allowed you to buy a book, you'd need to show your "Authorship Protection Association Membership Card". To get this card, you'd have to read and sign a big contract, wherein you promise to never duplicate (or maybe even re-sell) any APA works you might acquire. Violate this, and you've agreed to pay a big fine. (Don't pay, and they take the card and continue billing you).
So then, if the private sector can create necessary laws without government help, why should the government bother to have any laws? 2 reasons:
Government enforcement may be inherently more efficient and less-wasteful than private enforcement would be. (Some may laugh at the "government efficiency" oxymoron, but it can happen in some cases)
Because the government version of the laws will be more fair or permissive then what private companies would create.
The second point is the big one for copyright. As US copyright was established in 1777, a short period of enforcement was created (14-28 years). This was long enough to give publishers some peace of mind, but short enough to make ideas free within a single human lifetime. A much shorter period (so short that it truely reduced the profitability of publishers) would've been an incentive to create a "private sector copyright law" out of an interlocking set of contracts imposed on every customer (EULAs, you might call them).
And chances are, those contracts would last far longer than any governmental copyright would.
To prevent a private group from drafting a "virtual law", we need to offer some kind of copy-protection from the government. But this is a compromise- they should get only enough coverage so that building an alternative enforcement mechanism is more expensive than it's worth- and no more than that.
The first thing that came to mind, that they didn't address, was why doesn't the developing company glut the market?
The traditional pro-patent argument goes like this:
Inventors are solitary geniuses who toil in garage laboratories to create helpful new machines. They can eventually sell these and make a well-deserved fortune, but only if no large company can sneak a look at the idea first. Large companies have a pre-existing advtange in capacity for production, distribution, and marketing. They could glut the market far quicker than the original owner ever could, so he needs legal protection against them.
Whether or not you accept this argument for patents as having been valid one or two centuries ago (check out this series of books for a flawed dramatization of those benefits circa 1900), today additional problems with that argument have become clear.
The one which most interests me is that there is an additional pre-existing advantage a large company will have over a "lone inventor": an advantage in capacity for lawyers. That means they can file patents more quickly and more frequently than any individual can. Well in advance of knowing if a particular idea is workable or not, they can patent it- so, just in case someone figures out how to make it run, they can snatch it back from him.
Organizations like IBM and Kodak have mixed teams of lawyers and quasi-engineers registering 1000s of patents per year. There's a fair chance that if you come up with a clever idea to use in your next project, somewhere there's a mass-produced corporate patent out there, waiting to squash you if you ever attract the company's attention.
You're suggesting that an entire category of behavior be outlawed. A huge amount of laws would be required to effect it. There's two ways a legistative action like that could succeed: a) work "technically", but have no real effect b) usher in a totaltarian enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance (much less likely)
So supposing copyright was non-transferable. Publishers will start offering authors long-term contracts to "rent" those rights. (This happens sometimes in Japan. Authors there are much more likely to technically retain copyrights, but as they have long-term agreements with publishing houses, the overall effect is about the same)
You can try outlawing that too, and they'll come up with another way to work around the law, and another and another.
If the lawbooks eventually expand to plug all the holes, then you're left with authors who are unable to delegate the publications of their works to any others. A woman will write one book, and as long as it's successful go through a daily administrative grind of authorizing every printing or sale. Only when sales slow to a trickle is there time left in the day to start writing again.
(Any ability to hire others to help control your copyrights opens a door to enter a long-term contract with them, creating a loophole in the proposal. So assistants would have to be banned)
If I can't sell or transfer, or perform virtually equivalent acts, then it shouldn't be called IP (intellectual property) at all, because transferability of ownership is an essential feature of "property".
A more modest, and reasonable, start to a solution would be to eliminate corporate ownership of IP. Does that sound the same as what you proposed? It's not. I don't mean that transfer of copyrights should be banned- but that corporate IP holders should be treated the same as everyone else. That means no "Author's Life + 70 years, vs 90 years for a corporation"- all copyrights should last the same time (X years from date of publication), regardless of who holds it (or how long he lives).
The fact that you don't recognize most all of them indicates that your understand of anime is indeed restricted to the very best series. ("Best", as according to Slashdot-people: English speaking technology-nerds).
Starting in around 1981, US adults with disposable income and technology savy started importing anime, often by making fansubs (which weren't illegal at first, since Japanese copyrights only applied within their nation). They naturally focused on the "best" titles- ones that were mature and thought-provoking, or had whizzy science-fiction, or at least were dramatically different from US produced animation. (Which were Disney features and GI Joe cartoons).
The "cream-of-the-crop". Non-representative. Just like you might be able to pick 3-4 excellent shows from US television, doesn't mean that Sturgeon's Law has been repealed.
But then around 1997, globalization was far enough advanced that US companies wishing to import Japanese toys no longer had the leeway to alter the brand and make new cartoons. (Also the Japanese recession made their labor easier to buy). So, led by Pokemon, the drek that makes up the majority of Japanese animation began making inroads into wide US availability.
As long as anime translators were targeting only the college-educated, nerd-tendencies crowd, you were insulated from anime that had no chance of appealing to you. Now that there is a whole different demographic being marketed to, you'll face increased risk of encountering more things like Pokemon.
If Pokemon is the worst you've seen, just wait a bit. You could dig through the bottom of the barrel and discover whole new depths with just a little effort (But, why go searching for pain? Unless you enjoy bad viewing?
Don't you find that Pokemon caters to US (as *not* in Simpsons) cultural stereotypes, as opposed to, say, Sailor Moon?
Hmm, cultural sterotypes in Sailor Moon? I don't have time for a full list, but let's see...
Blondes are dumb and over-emotional.
Wearing glasses means you're a dorky nerd. But at least you're smart. (SuperNerds get spiral glasses and a whiny voice)
One member of every homosexual couple is a cross-dressing transexual.
Men are most attracted to young girls in school uniforms.
Girls are most attracted to wealthy men (who can afford tuxedos... can you say "enjo kosai"?).
Like Pokemon, Sailor Moon was largely a toy-commerical show. Just instead of video games and rubber animals, it sold pink, plastic jewlery. (Ok, and videogames too). Both had more than 200 episodes that are difficult to distinguish from each other. Maybe overall a little better than Pokemon, maybe not. I'd say it has 12 or so above-average episodes. (But I'm not inclined to become an expert in either show)
I'll agree that WHR appears to be cloning the style of La Femme Nikita, from US cable.
only one is by Miyazaki
In the English speaking world, the two most recognized anime (the ones able to get a front-page of Time magazine, or something) are Pokemon and Miyazaki's series. The highs, and the middles. But most anime produced (by volume, and by total viewage, despite Miyazaki's mega-blockbusters) is more like Pokemon than unlike.
I only recognize one title, "Wolf's Rain", which I haven't seen, but heard it was good.
Yes, Wolf's Rain is surely the current anime broadcast that American adults will most enjoy. Of the others, I don't know, prehaps L-R, MahouTsukai, and Big-O are decent. The rest are far, far lower on the scale. A few of them, YuGiOh and OnePiece, will soon be familiar to you as they come to US broadcast positions following Pokemon/Digimon.
The products from these companies go through subsidiaries or partners in the US.
Of course, only some of their products are released internationally. The rest, you're not allowed to view them at all. Region encoding on the DVD will make sure of that.
Your definition of anime must be filtered through some kind of goggles. Prehaps you've focused on what you've seen as most significant or interesting, and ignored the majority of japanese animation. (Or maybe you rely on importing companies to do the filtering for you)
The content of Pokemon is exactly in line with the majority of anime. 80% of anime series (and a higher proportion of total episodes) are basically childish trifles and/or longrunning toy commercials. The only major distinction between those anime and American cartoon shows is the language, the attitude towards musical lyrics, and the much higher degree of continuity (something Pokemon shares).
Look at the current Anime broadcast schedule to see what I mean. Only 2 or 3 titles approach your lofty definition.
That's not true at all. The 1st/2nd episodes reveal the big secrets to the audience, and then the characters spend 8-10 episodes trying to learn what the viewer already knows.
OTOH, Evangelion expected viewers to be familiar with the "standard Mecha world" of something like Gorion (Voltron), Mazinger Z, or Macross. If you haven't seen those things, or at least recognize their names, then you're not the NGE target audience.
The point of the show is that they took the conventions of an exhausted pop-culture genre (kids piloting giant war machines to defend the world from a series of alien monsters) and took it seriously. Given that absurd situation, how would real characters react to it? What possible explanation could there be for fighting monsters in such a style?
It's the same approach Alan Moore took in Watchmen, except that his ludicrous cliche was "costumed crimefighters of disparate origins team up to save the world from the forces of evil". It's a great series, but understanding it correctly depends upon a familiarity with the genre of American comic books. If a person hadn't read Superman and Batman, and been familiar with Spiderman, The Punisher, and The Shadow, then he's not prepared with the language of the story.
is the entire series an exercise of self indulgence in an in-joke by the authors?
Not an "in-joke", as it's not supposed to be funny, but yes, an "inside-reference" is a correct description. It only becomes truely self-indulgent in the last few episodes (and the following movie).
ISPs are common carriers. (The CDA tried to declare that they aren't, but it was overturned)
By definition, a common carrier is someone with a policy to transport things irregardless of what they are, discriminating only on the customer's ability to pay. (And size/weight of packages, if relevant). Since specific laws are silent on the subject, courts will treat ISPs as common carriers, according to the dictionary (or common-law) definition.
An individual ISP can, if it wishes, enact publicly stated policies to remove it's common-carrier status. Some people will pay extra to get porn censored from their networking. An ISP like that is not a common carrier, and loses some protections. They can be sued, for instance, if a user clicks a goatsex link that should've been blocked.
But common-carrier and local decency standards have nothing to do with child porn, which is a federal offense.
One isn't supposed to "block" child porn- in theory, this is a serious crime, and any responsible citizen will report it to the police/FBI, who will physically unplug the suspect's computer.
That's why they can't just willie nilly record your conversations.
Not all "phone companies" are monopolies. Some are smaller companies, using the government's "must carry" rules to borrow a bigger company's lines. Yet they can't spy on you either.
There are many other reasons. State laws against wiretapping, for example, can make it a crime to record any communication without informed consent of all parties. Those laws aren't uniform, though. In some states, it only applies to audio and not text/images. Also, some states require only one member of the conversation to give consent.
Today, with all films/pictures copyrighted by default, and the copyright period lasting since long before color movies were invented, law-enforcers and administrators can very safely assume that everything is copyrighted. Until proven otherwise.
They can make the task possible by shutting down every form of one-to-many peer file exchange.
Maybe, but Peppercoin has a few positive factors in its favor. The dot-com implosion is one of them:
1) Publicity and the chance to broadcast your message is important to a venture such as this. They have to become well-known quickly. 2 years ago, there were hundreds of absolutely mindless internet companies sprouting up, fertilized by abundand VC flows. They filled the advertising channels with incomprehensible, conflicting jibberish, so no one message could be understood.
Today, all that trash has washed away. The public may be ready to start taking new internet companies seriously again.
2) Big name cryptologist founder, whose credibility will influence vendors' IT managers, even if customers don't care about Rivest. (And hey, maybe his equations have some merit too)
Counting against them, of course, is the name. Nobody's going to recognize the financial reference of "peppercorn". And "Peppercoin.com" manages to sound both sophmoric and elitist at the same time.
They're not the first ones. The same incorrect terms used by many software vendors. (So Trolltech is speaking a language familar to big software buyers)
The word "commerical" is used to mean "proprietary". This has a bit of truth to it, as "commercial" implies "we can sell it", and non-proprietary software cannot be sold.
(Technically you can sell it, but not effectively. The first customer can undercut your prices to all the rest. To profit from non-proprietary software, you need to use it to feed some other revenue stream, like support, documentation, or hardware)
Microsoft in particular has used the "proprietary = commerical" belief to imply that the GPL, by being non-proprietary, is therefore uncommercial, which means anti-capitalist, socialist, and unAmerican.
The $200,000 "prize" is actually an attempted bribe to induce some random Microsoft employee to smuggle out the 2048 bits of data needed to sign an arbitrary program (Linux, or bootleg games).
Slashdot Mirror
The natural partern of human society is to wide spread the info.
That's counter to the behavior of nearly every civilization (aka "society") we've ever seen. People at the individual level may share freely, but as soon as they develope into any kind of organized structure, restrictions are created.
"Information wants to be free", but "people want to own information". The churches and chieftians of all ancient nations tried to restrict data flow. Even prehistoric tribes competed to keep their neolithic innovations in axes and arrowheads secret from their neighbors.
If people with power want to restrict something, they will find a way, with or without the government's help. Of course, once they do this, you'd be hard pressed to claim they haven't evolved into a form of government (as the medieval European Church was virtually a government)
- - - -
You seem to think capitalism is unnatural. On the contrary, capitalism is the most natural of economic systems. That's why it works so well- because it doesn't try to fight the underlying laws of physics and Darwinism that forged humanity. Look at the Cold War- the reason communism lost is because it tried to deny the animal instincts of mankind. It asked people to work together for a common good. Instead, capitalism allowed people to greedily strive for private gain.
("Natural" doesn't imply "good", but it might mean "the best you can expect")
The problems with IP aren't caused by the mere fact that a corporation owns IP.
If you've read the start of this thread, that is exactly what the original poster claimed:
The cause is very obvious: corporations.
He suggested an unreasonable solution, I made a more compromising counter-suggestion.
If you think he's wrong, you could reply up there.
On the contrary, the fact that going from 1 -> 0 hitpoints means the difference from being unimpaired and dead can make it a lot harder to be heroic.
If the player knows he has 1/120 hitpoints left, then he'd be stupid to pursue the Baron (and the ever-present handful of bloodthirsty bodyguards). But the character is fully able to run, jump, and fight, and will have trouble explaining to his teammates why he's got to sit this one out. (Or why he's got a sudden urge to chug 17 healing potions)
It makes the game a poor simulation of fantasy Swords & Sorcery literature, which it is supposed to be a simulation of.
A common occurence in stories is the hero who is overwhelmed, knocked-out, or just held at swordpoint with no hope of escape. Of course, later on he'll lead a successful jailbreak- which is often a superior kind of adventure. But D&D (and all of the games which followed it in using the HP mechanic- including computer games like Half-Life), the game rules allowed no way for characters to be non-lethally defeated. So whenever the DM wanted to throw the party into a dungeon, he had to ignore the rules to do so.
"And then you get captured, and all your weapons are taken away". This feels to the PCs like they're being cheated. A better system would be for the game rules to allow capture to be the natural outcome of any lost battle, so the DM can toss the PCs into an escape/ransom/demon-sacrifice scenario without it seeming forced.
"Ow! That last hit cut my sword-hand!
"Guess I'll have to run off and evade the guards on a daring rooftop chase, and return to finish off the evil Duke some other day. We'll meet again, this I swear"
Reduced lethality levels in an RPG would permit PCs and NPC enemies to build long term relationships of animosity, instead of slaughtering goblins again and again. (This is how superhero comic books maintain interest- the hero doesn't just battle the same kinds of monsters repeatedly, but the very same villians)
allows DM full control over damn near everything.
So, you can grab a polymorph scroll and change a vampire into some kind of giant Smurf(tm)?
The possibilities are still limited by the pre-created art resources supplied by the game.
Furthermore, the DM can't operate computer controls fast enough to create the same kind of dynamic changes a P&P game can have.
People collect them, but the prices don't seem to be very high. Maybe the hardbound AD&D books from a few years later would be more expensive (if mint).
It hardly looks worthwhile to bother putting onto ebay.
PS. It doesn't beg the question, it raises it.
Individuals have 70 years in addition to the rest of their lives
Yep, that is exactly what I said.
As for copyright, the difference between author's life + 70 and 95 is minimal.
Except if the "author" is somehow immortal- such as corporations are. That's why the law dictates a different length of copyright for corporations, since their "life" may never end.
Thus, if my proposal (that corporations be made to hold copyright in the same manner that an individual does) is to make any sense, all mention of "Author's Lifetime" must be removed from copyright duration.
(Basing a copyright on an author's life is a bad law, and unfair for several reasons, even aside from corporations)
There's 2 views a person can take on this, which suggest different ways our laws should be.
1. In the past, technological restrictions (time to print and ship books) provided a delay factor that reduced the damage of copying. The original author had a head start to the presses, so he had a persistent advantage over copiers.
However, as technology advanced, that delay period shortened to where one man can email a book to thousands in a second. Thus, copyrights should last longer to make up for delay that technology has removed.
That argument is simple, elegant, and wrong. Nonetheless, it formed the core motivation for the dual copyright extension laws the US has passed (even if proponents never stated it explicitly, it's an undercurrent). That view is wrong because it assumes that the "total time needed to make copies" is what should be held constant in the face of changing technology.
A better interpretation:
2. Try to hold the "author's opportunity to profit" at a constant. Recognize that once, it tooks 18 months to edit a book, 6 months to assemble presses, and additional 6 month periods to move it into different international markets. As time passed, all those times decreased, so today's authors can collect a majority of their total revenue in a much shorter period. ("Burn bright, die young").
Thus, copyright laws beyond that reduced time to collect are unnecessary to ensure profit, and furthermore create a "no-man's land". They produce a period of time where the publisher has little incentive to print a book (no longer very profitable), but the public is still forbidden from publishing it.
I fear that many works will sink into the No Man's Land, and never emerge. (This has already happened to many of the "pulp fiction" works from 1930-1950, whose paper expired before their copyrights)
The position that software is useful is defensible. People "use" software for important tasks all the time. (Patents, too, are all for something that might be useful)
However, the majority of things claiming copyright aren't software, or instructional books- they are items of entertaining fiction. Romance novels and action movies. There's no way those things can be called useful, except by a definition of "useful" so expansive that it loses all meaning.
A really constructionist court, therefore, would find that the US copyright law is broader than the Constitution allows, and should be repealed so a suitable version can be passed in it's place.
However, this will never happen. In the Eldred case, the Supreme Court demonstrated that they will value 100 years of unquestioned Congressional precedent over the text of the Constitution. ("Don't rock the boat")
Maybe we need to get a little more stingy with our patents and copyrights
I'd love to see the USPTO's annual output cut to 5% of what it is today. Then patents which get approved might actually mean something.
if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
By law, a patent owner can " exclude members of the public from making, using, or selling the claimed invention".
It's very hard to claim damages from noncommercial use, and traditionally lawsuits from that were rare. However, pre-internet, commercialization was just about the only way someone could spread an invention widely. So today, it's possible that a project like Debian may be claimed as damaging a company by infringing it's patents and distributing the results.
What a patent holder cannot do is stop someone from discussing or analyzing the invention. Even it they use full duplicates of the patent text to do so. (Patents are unlike copyrights in that way). But the age of the internet has muddled this point as well. Now that patents are handed out for software, what happens to the kind of person (and they do exist) that can execute source code in his head? (or just on paper?)
it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
The end result of a "free market" process will always be feudalism or totaltarianism, unless some force outside the market acts to maintain the "freedom".
Well, "If there were no IP laws", then there would be IP laws. This natural pattern occurs accross human societies. (Even without technology to build DRM machines)
If a law or regulating principle is useful (or seems useful to enough people), then it will be created, with or without the government's help. The government might be able to implement the law in more efficient or fair manner than the private sector could, but someone will create it.
For a fantasy example, take murder. If murder were governmentally legalized, soon enough murder would be illegal again- but the enforcers would be private contractors. Since murder is legal, revenge-killing of a murderer is also legal. When you sign up for life-insurance, you'd allocate a portion of the award to go towards hiring avengers (if you were murdered). Of course, the insurance company wouldn't pay if you had yourself been killed for venegance, so they'd create arbitration panels to determine culpability to see if a particular killing violated "policy" or not. Eventually, a near duplication of the existing criminal investigation/enforcement arms of a normal government would be created.
Likewise, if copyright law was abolished, then trade organizations of publishers, authors, and distributors would implement their own form of copyright law. Before Barnes&Noble allowed you to buy a book, you'd need to show your "Authorship Protection Association Membership Card". To get this card, you'd have to read and sign a big contract, wherein you promise to never duplicate (or maybe even re-sell) any APA works you might acquire. Violate this, and you've agreed to pay a big fine. (Don't pay, and they take the card and continue billing you).
So then, if the private sector can create necessary laws without government help, why should the government bother to have any laws? 2 reasons:
The second point is the big one for copyright. As US copyright was established in 1777, a short period of enforcement was created (14-28 years). This was long enough to give publishers some peace of mind, but short enough to make ideas free within a single human lifetime. A much shorter period (so short that it truely reduced the profitability of publishers) would've been an incentive to create a "private sector copyright law" out of an interlocking set of contracts imposed on every customer (EULAs, you might call them).
And chances are, those contracts would last far longer than any governmental copyright would.
To prevent a private group from drafting a "virtual law", we need to offer some kind of copy-protection from the government. But this is a compromise- they should get only enough coverage so that building an alternative enforcement mechanism is more expensive than it's worth- and no more than that.
As you may know, lobbyists have already pushed us far past that point.
The traditional pro-patent argument goes like this:
Inventors are solitary geniuses who toil in garage laboratories to create helpful new machines. They can eventually sell these and make a well-deserved fortune, but only if no large company can sneak a look at the idea first. Large companies have a pre-existing advtange in capacity for production, distribution, and marketing. They could glut the market far quicker than the original owner ever could, so he needs legal protection against them.
Whether or not you accept this argument for patents as having been valid one or two centuries ago (check out this series of books for a flawed dramatization of those benefits circa 1900), today additional problems with that argument have become clear.
The one which most interests me is that there is an additional pre-existing advantage a large company will have over a "lone inventor": an advantage in capacity for lawyers. That means they can file patents more quickly and more frequently than any individual can. Well in advance of knowing if a particular idea is workable or not, they can patent it- so, just in case someone figures out how to make it run, they can snatch it back from him.
Organizations like IBM and Kodak have mixed teams of lawyers and quasi-engineers registering 1000s of patents per year. There's a fair chance that if you come up with a clever idea to use in your next project, somewhere there's a mass-produced corporate patent out there, waiting to squash you if you ever attract the company's attention.
That's no simple solution.
You're suggesting that an entire category of behavior be outlawed. A huge amount of laws would be required to effect it. There's two ways a legistative action like that could succeed:
a) work "technically", but have no real effect
b) usher in a totaltarian enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance (much less likely)
So supposing copyright was non-transferable. Publishers will start offering authors long-term contracts to "rent" those rights. (This happens sometimes in Japan. Authors there are much more likely to technically retain copyrights, but as they have long-term agreements with publishing houses, the overall effect is about the same)
You can try outlawing that too, and they'll come up with another way to work around the law, and another and another.
If the lawbooks eventually expand to plug all the holes, then you're left with authors who are unable to delegate the publications of their works to any others. A woman will write one book, and as long as it's successful go through a daily administrative grind of authorizing every printing or sale. Only when sales slow to a trickle is there time left in the day to start writing again.
(Any ability to hire others to help control your copyrights opens a door to enter a long-term contract with them, creating a loophole in the proposal. So assistants would have to be banned)
If I can't sell or transfer, or perform virtually equivalent acts, then it shouldn't be called IP (intellectual property) at all, because transferability of ownership is an essential feature of "property".
A more modest, and reasonable, start to a solution would be to eliminate corporate ownership of IP. Does that sound the same as what you proposed? It's not. I don't mean that transfer of copyrights should be banned- but that corporate IP holders should be treated the same as everyone else. That means no "Author's Life + 70 years, vs 90 years for a corporation"- all copyrights should last the same time (X years from date of publication), regardless of who holds it (or how long he lives).
Starting in around 1981, US adults with disposable income and technology savy started importing anime, often by making fansubs (which weren't illegal at first, since Japanese copyrights only applied within their nation). They naturally focused on the "best" titles- ones that were mature and thought-provoking, or had whizzy science-fiction, or at least were dramatically different from US produced animation. (Which were Disney features and GI Joe cartoons).
The "cream-of-the-crop". Non-representative. Just like you might be able to pick 3-4 excellent shows from US television, doesn't mean that Sturgeon's Law has been repealed.
But then around 1997, globalization was far enough advanced that US companies wishing to import Japanese toys no longer had the leeway to alter the brand and make new cartoons. (Also the Japanese recession made their labor easier to buy). So, led by Pokemon, the drek that makes up the majority of Japanese animation began making inroads into wide US availability.
As long as anime translators were targeting only the college-educated, nerd-tendencies crowd, you were insulated from anime that had no chance of appealing to you. Now that there is a whole different demographic being marketed to, you'll face increased risk of encountering more things like Pokemon.
If Pokemon is the worst you've seen, just wait a bit. You could dig through the bottom of the barrel and discover whole new depths with just a little effort (But, why go searching for pain? Unless you enjoy bad viewing?
Don't you find that Pokemon caters to US (as *not* in Simpsons) cultural stereotypes, as opposed to, say, Sailor Moon?
Hmm, cultural sterotypes in Sailor Moon? I don't have time for a full list, but let's see...
Like Pokemon, Sailor Moon was largely a toy-commerical show. Just instead of video games and rubber animals, it sold pink, plastic jewlery. (Ok, and videogames too). Both had more than 200 episodes that are difficult to distinguish from each other. Maybe overall a little better than Pokemon, maybe not. I'd say it has 12 or so above-average episodes. (But I'm not inclined to become an expert in either show)
I'll agree that WHR appears to be cloning the style of La Femme Nikita, from US cable.
only one is by Miyazaki
In the English speaking world, the two most recognized anime (the ones able to get a front-page of Time magazine, or something) are Pokemon and Miyazaki's series. The highs, and the middles. But most anime produced (by volume, and by total viewage, despite Miyazaki's mega-blockbusters) is more like Pokemon than unlike.
I only recognize one title, "Wolf's Rain", which I haven't seen, but heard it was good.
Yes, Wolf's Rain is surely the current anime broadcast that American adults will most enjoy. Of the others, I don't know, prehaps L-R, MahouTsukai, and Big-O are decent. The rest are far, far lower on the scale. A few of them, YuGiOh and OnePiece, will soon be familiar to you as they come to US broadcast positions following Pokemon/Digimon.
and brains flew through space, and everybody ate lasers.
The products from these companies go through subsidiaries or partners in the US.
Of course, only some of their products are released internationally. The rest, you're not allowed to view them at all. Region encoding on the DVD will make sure of that.
No one can claim that Pokemon isn't anime.
Your definition of anime must be filtered through some kind of goggles. Prehaps you've focused on what you've seen as most significant or interesting, and ignored the majority of japanese animation. (Or maybe you rely on importing companies to do the filtering for you)
The content of Pokemon is exactly in line with the majority of anime. 80% of anime series (and a higher proportion of total episodes) are basically childish trifles and/or longrunning toy commercials. The only major distinction between those anime and American cartoon shows is the language, the attitude towards musical lyrics, and the much higher degree of continuity (something Pokemon shares).
Look at the current Anime broadcast schedule to see what I mean. Only 2 or 3 titles approach your lofty definition.
Miyazaki is an unrepresentative abberation.
there isn't very much blood
The show features millions of litres of blood. Eva-01 is impaled in episode 2, and the city is bathed in a spraying red liquid. (Not LCL either)
It doesn't come out of recognizable humans, though, so I guess that makes it OK.
That's not true at all. The 1st/2nd episodes reveal the big secrets to the audience, and then the characters spend 8-10 episodes trying to learn what the viewer already knows.
OTOH, Evangelion expected viewers to be familiar with the "standard Mecha world" of something like Gorion (Voltron), Mazinger Z, or Macross. If you haven't seen those things, or at least recognize their names, then you're not the NGE target audience.
The point of the show is that they took the conventions of an exhausted pop-culture genre (kids piloting giant war machines to defend the world from a series of alien monsters) and took it seriously. Given that absurd situation, how would real characters react to it? What possible explanation could there be for fighting monsters in such a style?
It's the same approach Alan Moore took in Watchmen, except that his ludicrous cliche was "costumed crimefighters of disparate origins team up to save the world from the forces of evil". It's a great series, but understanding it correctly depends upon a familiarity with the genre of American comic books. If a person hadn't read Superman and Batman, and been familiar with Spiderman, The Punisher, and The Shadow, then he's not prepared with the language of the story.
is the entire series an exercise of self indulgence in an in-joke by the authors?
Not an "in-joke", as it's not supposed to be funny, but yes, an "inside-reference" is a correct description. It only becomes truely self-indulgent in the last few episodes (and the following movie).
4. Streaming videophone
5. Local Counterstrike server
(Also UT, Quake, Halflife, MOA, BF1942, Wolf...)
ISPs are common carriers. (The CDA tried to declare that they aren't, but it was overturned)
By definition, a common carrier is someone with a policy to transport things irregardless of what they are, discriminating only on the customer's ability to pay. (And size/weight of packages, if relevant). Since specific laws are silent on the subject, courts will treat ISPs as common carriers, according to the dictionary (or common-law) definition.
An individual ISP can, if it wishes, enact publicly stated policies to remove it's common-carrier status. Some people will pay extra to get porn censored from their networking. An ISP like that is not a common carrier, and loses some protections. They can be sued, for instance, if a user clicks a goatsex link that should've been blocked.
But common-carrier and local decency standards have nothing to do with child porn, which is a federal offense.
One isn't supposed to "block" child porn- in theory, this is a serious crime, and any responsible citizen will report it to the police/FBI, who will physically unplug the suspect's computer.
That's why they can't just willie nilly record your conversations.
Not all "phone companies" are monopolies. Some are smaller companies, using the government's "must carry" rules to borrow a bigger company's lines. Yet they can't spy on you either.
There are many other reasons. State laws against wiretapping, for example, can make it a crime to record any communication without informed consent of all parties. Those laws aren't uniform, though. In some states, it only applies to audio and not text/images. Also, some states require only one member of the conversation to give consent.
Today, with all films/pictures copyrighted by default, and the copyright period lasting since long before color movies were invented, law-enforcers and administrators can very safely assume that everything is copyrighted. Until proven otherwise.
They can make the task possible by shutting down every form of one-to-many peer file exchange.
You seem fuzzy on how conspiracy theories work...
lack of evidence is the whole point.
(On the other hand, subverting a single developer is more likely than either Microsoft agreeing to sign the code, or outsiders cracking the key. )
Maybe, but Peppercoin has a few positive factors in its favor. The dot-com implosion is one of them:
1) Publicity and the chance to broadcast your message is important to a venture such as this. They have to become well-known quickly. 2 years ago, there were hundreds of absolutely mindless internet companies sprouting up, fertilized by abundand VC flows. They filled the advertising channels with incomprehensible, conflicting jibberish, so no one message could be understood.
Today, all that trash has washed away. The public may be ready to start taking new internet companies seriously again.
2) Big name cryptologist founder, whose credibility will influence vendors' IT managers, even if customers don't care about Rivest. (And hey, maybe his equations have some merit too)
Counting against them, of course, is the name. Nobody's going to recognize the financial reference of "peppercorn". And "Peppercoin.com" manages to sound both sophmoric and elitist at the same time.
They're not the first ones. The same incorrect terms used by many software vendors. (So Trolltech is speaking a language familar to big software buyers)
The word "commerical" is used to mean "proprietary". This has a bit of truth to it, as "commercial" implies "we can sell it", and non-proprietary software cannot be sold.
(Technically you can sell it, but not effectively. The first customer can undercut your prices to all the rest. To profit from non-proprietary software, you need to use it to feed some other revenue stream, like support, documentation, or hardware)
Microsoft in particular has used the "proprietary = commerical" belief to imply that the GPL, by being non-proprietary, is therefore uncommercial, which means anti-capitalist, socialist, and unAmerican.
The $200,000 "prize" is actually an attempted bribe to induce some random Microsoft employee to smuggle out the 2048 bits of data needed to sign an arbitrary program (Linux, or bootleg games).