This cannot be enforced. If they could restrict the distribution of data, they'd already have restricted mp3s. Since they can't, they will also fail at restricting P2P applications.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier.
They don't NEED to. They already have some 95% market share. All they need to do is convince current windows users to UPGRADE. When you start thinking of MS's software development strategy as a surrogate subscription model, their decisions make sense.
"Look, world, another version of Office! This one does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except break compatibility with the previous version! Form one line, please!"
Creating a properietry format disk like Nintendo, rather than just using cheap DVDs is stupid. The cost of throwing a DVD player into the mix has to be tiny compared with the additional sales you will get.
Perhaps, but one must make a couple considerations that work against your thesis:
Copyright infringement HUGELY burdens profits of worldwide console revenue. Scrapping the proprietary format almost single-handedly incurs these costs, yet enabling DVD playback requires it.
DVD playback capability is not only a question of technological capability (and the costs associated with it) but of licensing fees and restrictions. Manufacturers individually negotiate the terms with the giant, fascist cartels we all love to hate, and agreements typically involve not only a massive fixed cost but also a substantial per-unit royalty. When console manufactuerers already break even or even lead a loss on every console sale and engage in brutal price wars with their competitors, an additional $30-70 per console inflicts tremendous disadvantage, particularly when the boxes otherwise retail for $180-300 to begin with.
Bloat is the consumption of additional computational resources WITHOUT a commensurate increase in utility.
Those spinny flashy bits of eye candy in OS X make it significantly easier for me to use. Therefore OS X is not bloated. You may disagree, but you have the option to go command-line.
I hope that artists do not become driven to work on "hits" and ignore the practice of making the songs that they themselves enjoy.
One alternate view: With the rise of singles and the fall of the album, I can be completely sure that I enjoy every single track I purchase. I couldn't give two hoots what the artist likes; it's my money.
I'd say this is the more egalitarian, meritocratic method of economic survival of the fittest.
I don't think this quite follows. Samus spends a good deal of time in third-person (morphed) and a good deal of time not shooting enemies (solving puzzles instead). One might also say that because Link spends some time shooting enemies in first-person mode (think bow and arrow), Wind Waker is a first-person shooter. And it's really, really not.
Despite all his conspiratorial talk and financial maneuverings, what Cringely is basically talking about is an online music library, like the one you go to to borrow books. You listen to music by electronically checking it out, and no one else can listen to it while it is checked out. The question is, do the Fair Use provisions and First Sale doctrines that protect physical book libraries also protect online music libraries?
Well, it's up to the judge. Both sides have a strong argument:
In defense of Snapster, ordinary libraries are definitely legal, and the doctrines that protect one could be argued to protect the other.
On the other hand, the mp3.com precedent is not sympathetic to the effort, and the ease of making a copy of a streaming download might suggest to the judge that Snapster is yet another means for facilitating copyright infringement. There's clear precedent for banning programs that do that (napster, morpheus), so once infringement is seen as the primary purpose, it's all over.
On the other hand, physical libraries permit patrons to borrow CDs, and these can easily be ripped. Such does not make infringement the primary purpose of borrowing CDs, as evidenced by the fact that libraries are still legal.
So the million dollar question is whether Snapster is seen as a scheme to facilitate infringement or a legitimate library. It's up to the judge, really.
The upshot is that Cringely ought to drop his conspiratorial muttering and winking, and he REALLY needs to pick a different name for it. Why not something like "Music Library"?
First you assume that I illegally share files. This assumption is irrelevant to the discussion; the only motivation I need to object is commitment to the English language and the integrity of thought, unburdened by the infringement-is-stealing propaganda you would espouse. If you can't argue reasonably, without propping your aguments up with ad hominems, don't post.
if you tell most people that file sharing is copyright infringement, not stealing, then since they don't understand what copyright infringement is, they will assume it's ok.
What a low opinion you have of "most people." I don't think of the masses as unwashed, I don't consider them hoi polloi, and I can't think of anyone I know who would not understand the phrase "copyright infringement." If your friends can't get their minds around it, you can call it "breaking copyright" without abandoning truth. And you should probably also get new friends, since they're dumb as bricks.
Explain what copyright infringment is and why it's bad without using any concept of stealing or theft.
Okay. Copyright infringement is illegally copying a creative work. It's bad because if everyone did it, the creative types wouldn't get paid and then they would have no reason to make more works. Then there would be no more commercial music or films or software. Is that simple enough for the masses?
"The difference [between filesharing and shoplifting] is that in the case of the store, they have to pay money to make another copy of the item, and in the case of copyright infringment, they don't really have to pay money to make another copy."
Yes. That's a really frickin huge difference: a really good reason why copyright infringement is NOT AS BAD as theft. Therefore, perhaps we shouldn't conflate the former with the latter.
I won't steal their stuff. I will just refuse to give them money and not use their stuff.
Pragmatically, what's the difference? They can't tell the difference, so you are going just as far toward leaving us all with "content boxes" as a regular infringer.
"Look's like as six syllable phrase... must be just too much for someone as stupid as me to discern.... Either that or I'm not deluding myself into thinking that I'm fighting the good fight."
"Copyright infringement" is the accurate phrase. Talk to your lawyer if you don't believe me. He gets paid by the hour to pound similar wisdom into your head; I don't think I'm willing to take on such a mammoth task without similar remuneration.
As to whether "sharing" or "stealing" is a better two-syllable abbreviation for the, ah, less verbally inclined among us, I argue that it's "sharing."
Or at least I would argue it, except that you're too painful to talk to.
The crime is copyright infringement, not "stealing."
If "copyright infringement" is too many syllables for you, use a less loaded term like sharing. But please do not help the RIAA propagate its spin. It's doing fine on its own.
The issue of whether pricing databses are copyrighted is far from settled.
I would love to see credible references for this assertion. Facts, such as telephone numbers or prices, are never ever under any circumstances covered by copyright. The page layout, sure. Even the prose in which the fact is embedded. But never the fact itself.
If vendors are allowed to collect such information in order to better target pricing, shouldn't purchasers be allowed to have access to 'perfect' pricing data to allow a fully informed choice? That is, shouldn't vendors be forced to release their pricing formulas and consumers be allowed to build web sites to compare these prices?
Vendors are allowed to collect information about consumers. Consumers are allowed to collect information about vendors. How is this unbalanced?
Consumers areallowed to build web sites to compare prices. Usually, vendors actively cooperate with such efforts.
It seems that it's become perfectly legitimate -- if not *more* legitimate -- to sell inferior products through manipulative means than it is to simply sell a good product in a straightforward way.
Well, you've sort of filled your postulate with loaded words. Let's clarify: by "manipulative" I assume that you mean "profit-maximizing." That understood, manipulative is a plus. It drives Adam Smith's invisible hand, after all -- arbitrage, rooted in self interest, is what makes our economy run.
As to good products and inferior products: both have a very important place in the market. The market will make sure that inferior goods are sold for less than normal goods -- if they aren't, no one will buy them.
Suppose price gauging is "immoral" according to our common sense but its existence in a particular case is Pareto efficient: that is, it makes everyone in the world better off. Utilitarians would say that, in such a case, we are obligated to discard our moral intuition to make everyone better off. Do you disagree?
No, of course not. I might go so far as to equate the pursuit of pareto efficiency with morality. But in a dichotomy between price discrimination and not, both choices are actually pareto efficient. No matter which choice you start with, you can't switch to the other without making someone worse off. If a merchant is price discriminating and you force him to stop, his revenue drops. If he's charging a flat fee and you order him to start discriminating, the rich guys get jacked. So I guess I don't see how pareto efficiency is relevant.
Think of it as two siblings fighting over a toy. No matter who has it, it can't change hands without one of the siblings losing his toy. Therefore, either sibling having the toy is pareto efficient.
I could understand why a local CD store or even Apple wouldn't offer refunds on purchased music
Actually, Apple will gladly reinstate any downloads that you've been charged for if you call them. Why? Because they realize that the 30 people who will use this to their (unfair) advantage are nothing beside the thousands of relieved users.
If I were a telemarketer, I'd be overjoyed at the prospect of a national do-not-call list
No you wouldn't, since your own statistics -- like their's -- would show that the do-not-call types are exactly as likely to buy as the rest. Funny old world, eh?
Maybe the most effective resistance against the RIAA would be for 10,000,000 people to voluntarily go to the authorities and confess to having downloaded exactly 1 song. "I did it, and I can't sleep cause of the guilt, please punish me."
Yeah right. The authorities would say, "That's great, but with those parameters, it's a civil offense. Go bother the RIAA with your confession."
Maybe the most effective resistance would be if everyone did the equivalent: logged onto Kazaa and started blatantly sharing files. With 10,000,000 users, the RIAA couldn't possibly confront them all, could they?
Oh wait -- they already are. And the number is closer to 80,000,000. And that's not stopping the RIAA. As long as we're assuming that these tens of millions of protesters are organized and willing to make personal sacrifices, perhaps a better course of action would be for every one of them to donate $100 to a presidential candidate like Dean. 80 mil * $100 = $8 billion, which is far more than Pres. Bush could possibly hope for. If that happened, the world would change.
It's not loss of profit that the RIAA is worried about anyway, it's always been about loss of controll. If the RIAA can't force the public to think the artists it hand picks are cool, then they can't be sure of profits from manufactured bands.
I call BS. Advertising makes an artist popular, not availability. Even without P2P, indie artists are completely accessible: they make CDs too, and they let you buy them. But with or without P2P, they cannot compete with the RIAA's advertising machine. No, the RIAA is frightened of filesharing for precisely two reasons:
Loss of profit: someone able to attain a product for free is much less likely to buy the same (or loosely equivalent) product. We can claim that filesharing actually helps the industry, but financially the numbers are not with us.
Systemic obsolescence: the RIAA has grown an industry from distributing music. If filesharing technology becomes sufficiently widespread, accepted, and easy to use, then that industry is no longer useful.
Well, I've got a lot more respect for you having read that response. I'm glad that your argument was more profound in fact than as I interpreted.
That said, I think you misinterpret boomgopher when he says "No, it's human interpretation the makes something poetry... Computers/processes are quite capable of producing works we percieve as art." I believe he considers art more an internal aspect of perception than an objective attribute of a thing. That is, if I look at a mountain range, or a lightning storm, or random data on a floppy, and see in it something profound, then for me, it's art. If I look at the output of an automated authoring algorithm and find meaning or profundity, then that should qualify as well. I understand that you're probably having a fit over that definition, and I respect that, but if that's the extent of your objection, then we're back where we started. Linguists would say that definitions ought be descriptive rather than prescriptive anyhow, and that is certainly one way the word is used.
But even aside from that, I find your definition intriguing. Your "definition of art is simple: a human's expression of itself." What about a human's expression of a vase of flowers? Or of a mountain range? There are a great many museums that would be quite surprised to learn that such is not art. One possible response is that only flowers arranged with the intention of making a metaphorical observation of its author's humanity qualify, yet this does not hold up -- a great many works widely revered as art merely substituted for the portraiture now more efficiently afforded by photography. Another response is that any form of human expression inevitably and ultimately expresses the human behind it -- but if one accepts this, then absolutely any act of expression by a human qualifies as art. When I say hello to a man on the street, the inflection of my voice, the bearing of my posture, my gait, my facial arrangement, and innumerable other features reflect my humanity -- thus, my mere expression of greeting deserves enshrinement in the ivory halls of artistry. I'd question that.
Yet even if we accept your definition as dogma, why doesn't the program's output qualify? It was created by human hands, with a human purpose. Granted, it uses algorithmic automation to achieve its end, but so does the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. It moreover incorporates human response and subjectivity -- human expression in itself -- in crafting its so-called poetry. A poet often quite calculatingly decides between paths his poem-in-progress could take by which word he finds more appealing -- Poe actually chose "Nevermore" and a raven (which was originally a parrot) in precisely this way, according to an interview. Since that's literally what participants on the linked website are instructed to do -- choose between branches of poetry by subjective allure -- why should the result not be considered collaborative art?
I'm personally quite interested in the definition of art. I recall once leafing through an old pad of notes I took in a college math course and being surprised by an intriguing bit of poetry I'd written. It rather skillfully incorporated relevant multivariable calculus terms into a playful rhythm, and I was honestly impressed with myself -- until I realized the poetry was actually just my sadly ineffectual attempt at coherent note-taking on a particularly sleep-deprived day. That opened my eyes a bit.
This was far longer than I intended. I look forward to your observations, though feel free to refrain if you think I'm beating a dead horse.
Okay. I see where you're coming from. My point is that your quibble is not with the parent's CONCEPT (which is essentially that a genetic algorithm can mimic human creation), but with his TERMINOLOGY (in that he called such mimicry "art" rather than "surrogate art" or whatever you'd prefer). As such, I'd call your argument without merit.
Imagine that a poster talked about how genetic algorithms instead of more traditional iterative ones signified "a new paradigm of programming theory." You understand what he's saying, and the concept is the showpiece of his post. Yet what if OrcaParty had jumped in with
NO! You're wrong! As any linguist could tell you, 'Paradigm' refers only to verb and noun tables designed to illustrate proper conjugation and declination for all verbs and nouns in the same linguistic family. It's clear you're not involved with linguistics.
He's rather missing the point, isn't he? He doesn't even remotely address the poster's concept, which is that genetic algorithms open an entirely new field of coding theory and practice. One might claim that such a reply is without merit, since it contributes nothing worthwhile to the discussion.
That was all I meant with my first post. But you responded by first informing me that my own ad-hoc definition would be accepted by "[n]o one involved in the arts," and then accusing ME of an appeal to authority. I am fairly certain that of art is not something defined with consensus by the artsy types, so since my definition was inadequate, I'm curious to hear exactly how you'd define it. I don't just want to hear that it can only be created by humans; I'm looking for a precise defintion that will serve as a test to distinguish between all things that are art and all things that are not.
Ah: a proof by redefinition. Most of us think of art as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing," while you have defined it as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing AND is made by humans." Fine. You're only begging the question. If you insist on your definition, of course it's not art. Regardless whether you're technically right, you've not said anything of merit.
Granted, but there's a huge difference between the neolithic option of physically passing pieces of paper between adjacent people and the modern one of effecting an instantaneous network permeating the lecture and allowing greater than two-party discussions to happen in real-time, at the speed at which its participants can type. This is new, this is exciting, and this makes me disappointed that more students don't bring laptops to class.
4. A democracy is made up of the general will of the populace. MILLIONS of people in the country share files... The RIAA is what, two hundred 50-year-old lawyers with a giant bank account?
I don't think this is by itself very good reasoning -- in 1950 (when Brown v. Board of Ed was decided), millions of Americans, including young people, supported racial segregation in public schools. Yet I think the SCOTUS was correct in striking it.
I think it was Hamilton who said that the role of government is to protect the entitled minority from the whims of the majority. You might argue that the RIAA is not entitled to protection -- that ethically they do not deserve protection, much like we hold that murderers and rapists don't. Personally, I'd tend to agree, but this is a separate line of reasoning -- we're back to a debate of what's legal and what should be legal rather than the circumlocuitous "X million support it."
A strictly majoritarian democracy can itself be quite tyrannical -- I would not want to live in a country where, for example, 49% of the population were enslaved to the other 51%, even if that outcome had been achieved by a democratic vote.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever.
This cannot be enforced. If they could restrict the distribution of data, they'd already have restricted mp3s. Since they can't, they will also fail at restricting P2P applications.
They don't NEED to. They already have some 95% market share. All they need to do is convince current windows users to UPGRADE. When you start thinking of MS's software development strategy as a surrogate subscription model, their decisions make sense.
"Look, world, another version of Office! This one does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except break compatibility with the previous version! Form one line, please!"
Perhaps, but one must make a couple considerations that work against your thesis:
Bloat is the consumption of additional computational resources WITHOUT a commensurate increase in utility.
Those spinny flashy bits of eye candy in OS X make it significantly easier for me to use. Therefore OS X is not bloated. You may disagree, but you have the option to go command-line.
Now, MS Office on the other hand...
Yeah, and the Law of Gravity isn't technically a law either: it's an experimental observation that has held true over time.
So?
As a result, I have no confidence in ATI what-so-ever, and that's why to this day I won't purchase a gamecube.
No confidence is necessary: the gamecube works.
Maybe you meant you have no good will for ATI, and thus by not buying a gamecube you feel you are sticking it to the Man.
Um, okay.
I hope that artists do not become driven to work on "hits" and ignore the practice of making the songs that they themselves enjoy.
One alternate view: With the rise of singles and the fall of the album, I can be completely sure that I enjoy every single track I purchase. I couldn't give two hoots what the artist likes; it's my money.
I'd say this is the more egalitarian, meritocratic method of economic survival of the fittest.
I don't think this quite follows. Samus spends a good deal of time in third-person (morphed) and a good deal of time not shooting enemies (solving puzzles instead). One might also say that because Link spends some time shooting enemies in first-person mode (think bow and arrow), Wind Waker is a first-person shooter. And it's really, really not.
Despite all his conspiratorial talk and financial maneuverings, what Cringely is basically talking about is an online music library, like the one you go to to borrow books. You listen to music by electronically checking it out, and no one else can listen to it while it is checked out. The question is, do the Fair Use provisions and First Sale doctrines that protect physical book libraries also protect online music libraries?
Well, it's up to the judge. Both sides have a strong argument:
In defense of Snapster, ordinary libraries are definitely legal, and the doctrines that protect one could be argued to protect the other.
On the other hand, the mp3.com precedent is not sympathetic to the effort, and the ease of making a copy of a streaming download might suggest to the judge that Snapster is yet another means for facilitating copyright infringement. There's clear precedent for banning programs that do that (napster, morpheus), so once infringement is seen as the primary purpose, it's all over.
On the other hand, physical libraries permit patrons to borrow CDs, and these can easily be ripped. Such does not make infringement the primary purpose of borrowing CDs, as evidenced by the fact that libraries are still legal.
So the million dollar question is whether Snapster is seen as a scheme to facilitate infringement or a legitimate library. It's up to the judge, really.
The upshot is that Cringely ought to drop his conspiratorial muttering and winking, and he REALLY needs to pick a different name for it. Why not something like "Music Library"?
You stop it.
First you assume that I illegally share files. This assumption is irrelevant to the discussion; the only motivation I need to object is commitment to the English language and the integrity of thought, unburdened by the infringement-is-stealing propaganda you would espouse. If you can't argue reasonably, without propping your aguments up with ad hominems, don't post.
What a low opinion you have of "most people." I don't think of the masses as unwashed, I don't consider them hoi polloi, and I can't think of anyone I know who would not understand the phrase "copyright infringement." If your friends can't get their minds around it, you can call it "breaking copyright" without abandoning truth. And you should probably also get new friends, since they're dumb as bricks.
Okay. Copyright infringement is illegally copying a creative work. It's bad because if everyone did it, the creative types wouldn't get paid and then they would have no reason to make more works. Then there would be no more commercial music or films or software. Is that simple enough for the masses?
Yes. That's a really frickin huge difference: a really good reason why copyright infringement is NOT AS BAD as theft. Therefore, perhaps we shouldn't conflate the former with the latter.
Pragmatically, what's the difference? They can't tell the difference, so you are going just as far toward leaving us all with "content boxes" as a regular infringer.
Hmm.
"Look's like as six syllable phrase... must be just too much for someone as stupid as me to discern.... Either that or I'm not deluding myself into thinking that I'm fighting the good fight."
"Copyright infringement" is the accurate phrase. Talk to your lawyer if you don't believe me. He gets paid by the hour to pound similar wisdom into your head; I don't think I'm willing to take on such a mammoth task without similar remuneration.
As to whether "sharing" or "stealing" is a better two-syllable abbreviation for the, ah, less verbally inclined among us, I argue that it's "sharing."
Or at least I would argue it, except that you're too painful to talk to.
You're wrong on one count:
If "copyright infringement" is too many syllables for you, use a less loaded term like sharing. But please do not help the RIAA propagate its spin. It's doing fine on its own.
I would love to see credible references for this assertion. Facts, such as telephone numbers or prices, are never ever under any circumstances covered by copyright. The page layout, sure. Even the prose in which the fact is embedded. But never the fact itself.
If vendors are allowed to collect such information in order to better target pricing, shouldn't purchasers be allowed to have access to 'perfect' pricing data to allow a fully informed choice? That is, shouldn't vendors be forced to release their pricing formulas and consumers be allowed to build web sites to compare these prices?
Vendors are allowed to collect information about consumers. Consumers are allowed to collect information about vendors. How is this unbalanced?
Consumers areallowed to build web sites to compare prices. Usually, vendors actively cooperate with such efforts.
It seems that it's become perfectly legitimate -- if not *more* legitimate -- to sell inferior products through manipulative means than it is to simply sell a good product in a straightforward way.
Well, you've sort of filled your postulate with loaded words. Let's clarify: by "manipulative" I assume that you mean "profit-maximizing." That understood, manipulative is a plus. It drives Adam Smith's invisible hand, after all -- arbitrage, rooted in self interest, is what makes our economy run.
As to good products and inferior products: both have a very important place in the market. The market will make sure that inferior goods are sold for less than normal goods -- if they aren't, no one will buy them.
Suppose price gauging is "immoral" according to our common sense but its existence in a particular case is Pareto efficient: that is, it makes everyone in the world better off. Utilitarians would say that, in such a case, we are obligated to discard our moral intuition to make everyone better off. Do you disagree?
No, of course not. I might go so far as to equate the pursuit of pareto efficiency with morality. But in a dichotomy between price discrimination and not, both choices are actually pareto efficient. No matter which choice you start with, you can't switch to the other without making someone worse off. If a merchant is price discriminating and you force him to stop, his revenue drops. If he's charging a flat fee and you order him to start discriminating, the rich guys get jacked. So I guess I don't see how pareto efficiency is relevant.
Think of it as two siblings fighting over a toy. No matter who has it, it can't change hands without one of the siblings losing his toy. Therefore, either sibling having the toy is pareto efficient.
I could understand why a local CD store or even Apple wouldn't offer refunds on purchased music
Actually, Apple will gladly reinstate any downloads that you've been charged for if you call them. Why? Because they realize that the 30 people who will use this to their (unfair) advantage are nothing beside the thousands of relieved users.
If I were a telemarketer, I'd be overjoyed at the prospect of a national do-not-call list
No you wouldn't, since your own statistics -- like their's -- would show that the do-not-call types are exactly as likely to buy as the rest. Funny old world, eh?
Maybe the most effective resistance against the RIAA would be for 10,000,000 people to voluntarily go to the authorities and confess to having downloaded exactly 1 song. "I did it, and I can't sleep cause of the guilt, please punish me."
Yeah right. The authorities would say, "That's great, but with those parameters, it's a civil offense. Go bother the RIAA with your confession."
Maybe the most effective resistance would be if everyone did the equivalent: logged onto Kazaa and started blatantly sharing files. With 10,000,000 users, the RIAA couldn't possibly confront them all, could they?
Oh wait -- they already are. And the number is closer to 80,000,000. And that's not stopping the RIAA. As long as we're assuming that these tens of millions of protesters are organized and willing to make personal sacrifices, perhaps a better course of action would be for every one of them to donate $100 to a presidential candidate like Dean. 80 mil * $100 = $8 billion, which is far more than Pres. Bush could possibly hope for. If that happened, the world would change.
It's not loss of profit that the RIAA is worried about anyway, it's always been about loss of controll. If the RIAA can't force the public to think the artists it hand picks are cool, then they can't be sure of profits from manufactured bands.
I call BS. Advertising makes an artist popular, not availability. Even without P2P, indie artists are completely accessible: they make CDs too, and they let you buy them. But with or without P2P, they cannot compete with the RIAA's advertising machine. No, the RIAA is frightened of filesharing for precisely two reasons:
Well, I've got a lot more respect for you having read that response. I'm glad that your argument was more profound in fact than as I interpreted.
That said, I think you misinterpret boomgopher when he says "No, it's human interpretation the makes something poetry... Computers/processes are quite capable of producing works we percieve as art." I believe he considers art more an internal aspect of perception than an objective attribute of a thing. That is, if I look at a mountain range, or a lightning storm, or random data on a floppy, and see in it something profound, then for me, it's art. If I look at the output of an automated authoring algorithm and find meaning or profundity, then that should qualify as well. I understand that you're probably having a fit over that definition, and I respect that, but if that's the extent of your objection, then we're back where we started. Linguists would say that definitions ought be descriptive rather than prescriptive anyhow, and that is certainly one way the word is used.
But even aside from that, I find your definition intriguing. Your "definition of art is simple: a human's expression of itself." What about a human's expression of a vase of flowers? Or of a mountain range? There are a great many museums that would be quite surprised to learn that such is not art. One possible response is that only flowers arranged with the intention of making a metaphorical observation of its author's humanity qualify, yet this does not hold up -- a great many works widely revered as art merely substituted for the portraiture now more efficiently afforded by photography. Another response is that any form of human expression inevitably and ultimately expresses the human behind it -- but if one accepts this, then absolutely any act of expression by a human qualifies as art. When I say hello to a man on the street, the inflection of my voice, the bearing of my posture, my gait, my facial arrangement, and innumerable other features reflect my humanity -- thus, my mere expression of greeting deserves enshrinement in the ivory halls of artistry. I'd question that.
Yet even if we accept your definition as dogma, why doesn't the program's output qualify? It was created by human hands, with a human purpose. Granted, it uses algorithmic automation to achieve its end, but so does the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. It moreover incorporates human response and subjectivity -- human expression in itself -- in crafting its so-called poetry. A poet often quite calculatingly decides between paths his poem-in-progress could take by which word he finds more appealing -- Poe actually chose "Nevermore" and a raven (which was originally a parrot) in precisely this way, according to an interview. Since that's literally what participants on the linked website are instructed to do -- choose between branches of poetry by subjective allure -- why should the result not be considered collaborative art?
I'm personally quite interested in the definition of art. I recall once leafing through an old pad of notes I took in a college math course and being surprised by an intriguing bit of poetry I'd written. It rather skillfully incorporated relevant multivariable calculus terms into a playful rhythm, and I was honestly impressed with myself -- until I realized the poetry was actually just my sadly ineffectual attempt at coherent note-taking on a particularly sleep-deprived day. That opened my eyes a bit.
This was far longer than I intended. I look forward to your observations, though feel free to refrain if you think I'm beating a dead horse.
Okay. I see where you're coming from. My point is that your quibble is not with the parent's CONCEPT (which is essentially that a genetic algorithm can mimic human creation), but with his TERMINOLOGY (in that he called such mimicry "art" rather than "surrogate art" or whatever you'd prefer). As such, I'd call your argument without merit.
Imagine that a poster talked about how genetic algorithms instead of more traditional iterative ones signified "a new paradigm of programming theory." You understand what he's saying, and the concept is the showpiece of his post. Yet what if OrcaParty had jumped in with
He's rather missing the point, isn't he? He doesn't even remotely address the poster's concept, which is that genetic algorithms open an entirely new field of coding theory and practice. One might claim that such a reply is without merit, since it contributes nothing worthwhile to the discussion.That was all I meant with my first post. But you responded by first informing me that my own ad-hoc definition would be accepted by "[n]o one involved in the arts," and then accusing ME of an appeal to authority. I am fairly certain that of art is not something defined with consensus by the artsy types, so since my definition was inadequate, I'm curious to hear exactly how you'd define it. I don't just want to hear that it can only be created by humans; I'm looking for a precise defintion that will serve as a test to distinguish between all things that are art and all things that are not.
Ah: a proof by redefinition. Most of us think of art as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing," while you have defined it as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing AND is made by humans." Fine. You're only begging the question. If you insist on your definition, of course it's not art. Regardless whether you're technically right, you've not said anything of merit.
Granted, but there's a huge difference between the neolithic option of physically passing pieces of paper between adjacent people and the modern one of effecting an instantaneous network permeating the lecture and allowing greater than two-party discussions to happen in real-time, at the speed at which its participants can type. This is new, this is exciting, and this makes me disappointed that more students don't bring laptops to class.
4. A democracy is made up of the general will of the populace. MILLIONS of people in the country share files... The RIAA is what, two hundred 50-year-old lawyers with a giant bank account?
I don't think this is by itself very good reasoning -- in 1950 (when Brown v. Board of Ed was decided), millions of Americans, including young people, supported racial segregation in public schools. Yet I think the SCOTUS was correct in striking it.
I think it was Hamilton who said that the role of government is to protect the entitled minority from the whims of the majority. You might argue that the RIAA is not entitled to protection -- that ethically they do not deserve protection, much like we hold that murderers and rapists don't. Personally, I'd tend to agree, but this is a separate line of reasoning -- we're back to a debate of what's legal and what should be legal rather than the circumlocuitous "X million support it."
A strictly majoritarian democracy can itself be quite tyrannical -- I would not want to live in a country where, for example, 49% of the population were enslaved to the other 51%, even if that outcome had been achieved by a democratic vote.