Because if it has industrial application, it could be protected by patent.
Patents cover machines, human made products, compositions of matter, and processing methods. Laws of nature cannot be patented. Mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. (Knuth has argued that there is no such thing as a non-mathematical computer algorithm, but lawmakers have just ignored this). I don't believe you can make a coherent argument that something needs protection based on the amount of work that went into it.
Not entirely, the IPR laws actually restrict the work in accordance with how how socially important the work is. This is why patents last for only 20 years, but copyright for 70 years+.
Why restrict them at all? Why not give authors and inventors unlimited inheritable rights? Because society as a whole would be worse off. That indicates to me that copyright should always be seen in light of total benefits to society, rather than natural rights of authors and performers.
Well, if the authors or artists don't have any rights, then simply you are going to make the copies and profit from them, either by enjoyment or monetary worth. Is it fair that you should profit on their hard work?
Why not? You seem to argue that producer surplus should receive larger weight than consumer surplus, a rather curious position. A complete welfare analysis of the music industry may be a little ambitious, but I can attempt something more modest. Consider this.
At the moment, Apple's iTMS stores 700,000 songs, about 2TB of AAC. Ignoring album purchases and bandwith costs, a consumer would now pay $693,000 to Apple and about $1500 in storage to obtain the whole library. At some point in the future, say 20 years from now, it becomes affordable for everyone to buy a computer (or maybe even a portable music player) that stores 2 million tracks for $300. Now, what do you think will provide society as a whole the greater benefit. Giving everybody access to the whole historical library of music at duplication and storage costs. Or keeping the price high though copyright as incentive to new talent? At what point does the costs of stimulating new musical output outweight the benefits? Remember, it's unlikely that new works will completely dissappear, or even fall to pre-copyright levels. When we have a back catalogue of 700,000 tracks? 2 million? 5 million? At the point where nobody will have enough lifetime te listen to his whole collection? If abolishing copyright for music sounds too radical, consider limiting it to 14 years, the argument remains the same.
You can debate the overall "fundamental" reasoning that underscores the whole idea of copyright system and whether works are protected or not, but fundamental it comes down to a simple question of "artist spends time, effort and cost making a creative work", and in return are you going to give the artist some protection for what he is created, or are you going to allow people to take it and use it as they please ?
"social model" includes economics; there's no way in this limited time and space all the issues cna be fleshed out, but quite simply you fundamentally erred on understanding exactly what coypright protects (it protects expressions, not ideas), so therefore it seems to me that you don't have a full grasp of the facts to entertain an enlightened debate.
Copyright law protects expressions, not idea or facts. This is standard in about any text on copyright. But I don't see why this distinction should be made following your justification for copyright. After all, the scientist may spend more time and effort and costs to make a discovery. Of course he has copyright on the expression in a paper (at least until he publishes in a major journal), but the value is in the idea. Why should his algorithm not be protected? After all, most non-trivial algorithms are already named after the discoverer(s). Arguing that these facts and ideas exists "in nature" is as futile as arguing that a work of fiction already exists in a dictionary. By your reasoning, it is the work and costs involved in the expression that justifies protection. Why not the work and costs involved in discovery?
If you follow reasoning, would you not need to give more protection work that was costlier to produce?
The fundamental issue is whether you believe that authors or artists naturally have some rights over a copy that I make with my equipment, or that copyright exists merely as an economic stimulus to creativity. You have not answered this explicitly yet.
it costs time, effort and money to make these musical works: so the creators deserve to own rights in those works.
I'm not convinced that the conclusion follows from the premise.
Your perspective on IP is driven by your view of how societies social model should be.
My perspective on "IP" is driven by economic reasoning. I'm still curious what your perspective on copyright is. As I understand, the Continental European and American traditions differ somewhat with regards to copyright law. I'm interested in your position.
Sure, you can set up a society where there are no property rights and everything is under communal ownership. That's not how current society works, but feel free to convince the world that we should change.
There is a difference between property rights, and copyrights.
> Copyright is not outdated: firstly, it costs time, effort and money to make these musical works:
Agreed.
> so the creators deserve to own rights in those works.
I don't see how this follows from the premise. It also costs time, money and effort to discover an efficient algorithm or to map the human genome. Should the resulting information be "owned" as well? I'm genuinely curious. Do you consider copyright a natural right or merly a government granted monopoly?
That's a ridiculous statement. The firmware IS the router. Without the firmware, the router is a few of off-the-shelf ethernet chips and a processor. The only difference between many different products is the firmware.
Which makes it even more offensive that some companies are putting GPL software like Busybox in their firmware without telling anyone.
Well, if your needs are specialized, any system can be rock solid. I know people with Win2k laptops that only run Visual Studio and LaTeX. I doubt they ever reinstalled Windows.
Wait, let me get this straight. You bough a Powerbook and only run the bundled apps and Launchbar? AFAIK, the Powerbooks don't even include Appleworks (unlike the iBooks).
> The reason for this is that vi was invented and was popular before arrow keys were a standard thing on all keyboards.
Yup. I guess this is the reason why vi does not support arrow keys. Real vi nuts will also have the backtick key on standard PC keyboards remapped to Esc, like on the VT100 and ancient XT keyboards.
Did you even read the link? Testing does not get timely security updates. Gnome and KDE were broken for months in Testing in the past year. This may happen in other development trees like Redhat-Rawhide and Mandrake-Cooker, but not in the release versions. Testing may (or may not) be less broken than the development trees, it is not comparable to the release versions of other distros. Close to release it's of course pretty stable. But at the start and in the middle of the cycle, things may be a lot worse. Which is of course the reason that it is called Testing and not Stable.
If you want stuff up to date, but want to have something that would be considered "stable" by other distros, you run Sarge (or testing).
This is wrong, see the discussions on Debianplanet (post by Chris Metzer) and the
mailing list. To summarize: Testing exists for the development of the next Stable release. It is not intended to provide people with a more recent Stable. Debian does have a problem getting timely Stable releases, but the solution is not to point end-users to Testing.
There is something slightly distressing about the need for companies to be different in ways that inconveniences consumers for no apparent reason than to be unique.
[...]
Why have so many different file formats developed over the years?
As a business major, how can you be surprised by this? Making yourself unique (either real or imagined) is the way to get pricing power. Although the textbook examples of monopoly and perfect competition are the easiest to analyze, almost everything in the consumer market is traded in a market somewhere in between. The right question is not so much whether a company has competitors, but in what degree it can set prices. In perfect competition, a company has no pricing power: if the price is higher than marginal costs, another company will offer the same product for less. A monopolist has it all: it determines the profit maximizing price and customers can take it or leave it. Almost every company is in between and would love to be in a price setting position. Some ways to do this are by branding, offering higher quality or offering something proprietary (file formats). Note that to gain pricing power, it does not matter whether one is truely different or not, only the customer's perception matters (branding).
Microsoft has quite some pricing power, but they do have competition (Linux/Unix, Mac, OpenOffice). Their profit maximizing prices are probably higher than their current prices. Likewise, Apple has some freedom in choosing the prices for the Macs, as they are perceived to be somewhat different from the commodity PC. But the difference is not enough to give them monopoly-like pricing power.
You stated that DVDs state that you need a DVD player. In this case, a piece of hardware.
A DVD player consists of hardware and software. In a standalone player, they're integrated. On a computer, the software part is installed separately. If you buy a DVD-rom drive, the box will state that it works under Windows. If you buy OEM, you're responsible for the software yourself (and pre-DeCSS, there was no Linux player).
The second part, being that the Big Five hate the concept of digital media, and we're playing right into their hands, giving them *exactly* what they want. DVD was already fairly well established as a format, an accepted means of transfer. Digital music is NOT, and we're really fscking up its chances because we don't like the way the games being played. If you don't like how the games being played, go home. Don't ruin it for those of us that are enjoying it.
As long as the courts haven't decided that Jon broke any laws, he can do as he pleases.
> DVDs don't state at the time of purchase that you have to have X or Y, just that you have to have the disc.
DVDs state at the time of purchase that you have to have a DVD player (and usually even a DVD player of region X). All DVD players needed a license from the DVD consortium, until the DeCSS crack. What's the difference with iTMS?
> Isn't VCD a more complex algorithm to decode since most (many?) video cards have hardware MPEG-2 decoding?
A VCD is MPEG-1, which is pretty trivial to decode. (I'm not sure but I think most hardware MPEG-2 decoders will also decode MPEG-1. At least, every DVD player will also play VCDs). MPEG-4 (divx, xvid, wmv9, etc) are much more processor intensive (and there is little hardware accelleration widely available).
> If you don't have a desktop, an external 3.5" disk with USB or Firewire interface [...]
Even better would be an external 2.5" in an enclosure for backups. Make sure you also have windows installed on the backup HD. If your laptop HD dies, you simply use the one in the enclosure, and order a new one for the enclosure. Advantage: almost zero downtime. Disadvantage: the risk that the second HD fails before your replacement drive arrives.
> But IM is dominated by the big three: AOL+ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.
A little off-topic, but I wonder how they compare in the global market shares. I have gathered that AIM is very big in the US, much less so in Europe and Asia. An obvious reason is that AOL has a much bigger presence in the US than elsewhere. Another thing, in Europe what held back IM a lot was that dial-up was metered by the second. Always on access is only starting to take off relatively recently, and XP already has the client integrated. I think in Europe MSN is the biggest. Asia also has some homebrew IM networks, like QQ.
Your comment doesn't really explain why Apple chose to port iTunes to MS Windows. Poeple are not going to switch an OS just to use iTunes. However, given an iTunes clinet for Linux, more Linux users will be persuaded to buy iPods and music from iTunes.
It's pretty simple if you think about it. At the moment MS Windows is the desktop standard, and there is little that Apple can do about it. As you say yourself, people are not going to switch an OS just for iTunes. Hence, keeping iTunes on the Mac will not get them many switchers. Porting to Windows does give them an enormous market for the songs and their iPods, so that's a no-brainer. Linux is growing but still has few desktop users, so porting to Linux will not give them many more customers. But more importantly, not porting iTunes to Linux gives them a competitive advantage for people switching from Windows.
Today, the two most credible alternatives to a Windows-less desktop PC are Linux and Macintosh. For both platforms, the main source of new users are former Windows users. Linux and Mac are competitors in the Windows-switcher market, and one of the advantages of the Mac here is the suit of applications, including iTunes. Apple has little interest in porting desktop apps to Linux.
1.1 General License Grant. Microsoft grants to you as an individual, a personal, nonexclusive license to make and use copies of the Software (i) for your internal use; (ii) for designing, developing, testing and demonstrating your software product(s); and (iii) for evaluation of the Software.
and this
4. RESERVATION OF RIGHTS AND OWNERSHIP. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this EULA.
the question remains: can I use this to develop and distribute commercial software? Or GPL software?
I've always found it interesting that in the US (with the possible exception of major cities) adults are almost always expected to have a car. The are many explanations for this phenomenon, e.g. lower population density, individualism, suburban sprawl, low gas prices, major urban development after the introduction of the car, bad public transportation. But for many explanations, it's not really clear what is the cause and what is the effect.
There are of course positive (freedom, independence of time tables) and negative sides (environment, dependence on oil, health/obesity) to having cars for everyone.. But it's an interesting difference between the US and many (most?) other countries in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment, Apple's iTMS stores 700,000 songs, about 2TB of AAC. Ignoring album purchases and bandwith costs, a consumer would now pay $693,000 to Apple and about $1500 in storage to obtain the whole library. At some point in the future, say 20 years from now, it becomes affordable for everyone to buy a computer (or maybe even a portable music player) that stores 2 million tracks for $300. Now, what do you think will provide society as a whole the greater benefit. Giving everybody access to the whole historical library of music at duplication and storage costs. Or keeping the price high though copyright as incentive to new talent? At what point does the costs of stimulating new musical output outweight the benefits? Remember, it's unlikely that new works will completely dissappear, or even fall to pre-copyright levels. When we have a back catalogue of 700,000 tracks? 2 million? 5 million? At the point where nobody will have enough lifetime te listen to his whole collection? If abolishing copyright for music sounds too radical, consider limiting it to 14 years, the argument remains the same.
The fundamental issue is whether you believe that authors or artists naturally have some rights over a copy that I make with my equipment, or that copyright exists merely as an economic stimulus to creativity. You have not answered this explicitly yet.
> Copyright is not outdated: firstly, it costs time, effort and money to make these musical works:
Agreed.
> so the creators deserve to own rights in those works.
I don't see how this follows from the premise. It also costs time, money and effort to discover an efficient algorithm or to map the human genome. Should the resulting information be "owned" as well? I'm genuinely curious. Do you consider copyright a natural right or merly a government granted monopoly?
Well, if your needs are specialized, any system can be rock solid. I know people with Win2k laptops that only run Visual Studio and LaTeX. I doubt they ever reinstalled Windows.
Wait, let me get this straight. You bough a Powerbook and only run the bundled apps and Launchbar? AFAIK, the Powerbooks don't even include Appleworks (unlike the iBooks).
I wonder if reverse engineering the WP format might be much easier than MS-Word because of that wonderful Reveal Codes thing?
X-Setup beats the pants off TweakUI.
It's pretty amusing that IBM misspelled "kernels" on their web site :-)
> The reason for this is that vi was invented and was popular before arrow keys were a standard thing on all keyboards.
Yup. I guess this is the reason why vi does not support arrow keys. Real vi nuts will also have the backtick key on standard PC keyboards remapped to Esc, like on the VT100 and ancient XT keyboards.
Did you even read the link? Testing does not get timely security updates. Gnome and KDE were broken for months in Testing in the past year. This may happen in other development trees like Redhat-Rawhide and Mandrake-Cooker, but not in the release versions. Testing may (or may not) be less broken than the development trees, it is not comparable to the release versions of other distros. Close to release it's of course pretty stable. But at the start and in the middle of the cycle, things may be a lot worse. Which is of course the reason that it is called Testing and not Stable.
Microsoft has quite some pricing power, but they do have competition (Linux/Unix, Mac, OpenOffice). Their profit maximizing prices are probably higher than their current prices. Likewise, Apple has some freedom in choosing the prices for the Macs, as they are perceived to be somewhat different from the commodity PC. But the difference is not enough to give them monopoly-like pricing power.
I asked about it, and the discount was $0. Better stick with MS, where the discount runs into the hundreds.
> I don't think my Slackware came with Windows Update. Where can I download it?
:-).
http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
Since you you Slack, you have to take care of the dependencies yourself
> DVDs don't state at the time of purchase that you have to have X or Y, just that you have to have the disc.
DVDs state at the time of purchase that you have to have a DVD player (and usually even a DVD player of region X). All DVD players needed a license from the DVD consortium, until the DeCSS crack. What's the difference with iTMS?
> IBM makes more money,
IBM's revenues are much larger (91B vs 36B) but the EBITDA (10.4 vs 11.7B) and net earnings (7.8B vs 7.4B) are pretty close.
> has more employees,
Making the same amount of money with more people is not good.
> and is a bigger company. Go check out the facts at some point...
Depends on your metric. Measured by market cap, MSFT (297B) is much bigger than IBM (155B).
> Isn't VCD a more complex algorithm to decode since most (many?) video cards have hardware MPEG-2 decoding?
A VCD is MPEG-1, which is pretty trivial to decode. (I'm not sure but I think most hardware MPEG-2 decoders will also decode MPEG-1. At least, every DVD player will also play VCDs). MPEG-4 (divx, xvid, wmv9, etc) are much more processor intensive (and there is little hardware accelleration widely available).
> If you don't have a desktop, an external 3.5" disk with USB or Firewire interface [...]
Even better would be an external 2.5" in an enclosure for backups. Make sure you also have windows installed on the backup HD. If your laptop HD dies, you simply use the one in the enclosure, and order a new one for the enclosure. Advantage: almost zero downtime. Disadvantage: the risk that the second HD fails before your replacement drive arrives.
> But IM is dominated by the big three: AOL+ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.
A little off-topic, but I wonder how they compare in the global market shares. I have gathered that AIM is very big in the US, much less so in Europe and Asia. An obvious reason is that AOL has a much bigger presence in the US than elsewhere. Another thing, in Europe what held back IM a lot was that dial-up was metered by the second. Always on access is only starting to take off relatively recently, and XP already has the client integrated. I think in Europe MSN is the biggest. Asia also has some homebrew IM networks, like QQ.
Today, the two most credible alternatives to a Windows-less desktop PC are Linux and Macintosh. For both platforms, the main source of new users are former Windows users. Linux and Mac are competitors in the Windows-switcher market, and one of the advantages of the Mac here is the suit of applications, including iTunes. Apple has little interest in porting desktop apps to Linux.
I've always found it interesting that in the US (with the possible exception of major cities) adults are almost always expected to have a car. The are many explanations for this phenomenon, e.g. lower population density, individualism, suburban sprawl, low gas prices, major urban development after the introduction of the car, bad public transportation. But for many explanations, it's not really clear what is the cause and what is the effect. There are of course positive (freedom, independence of time tables) and negative sides (environment, dependence on oil, health/obesity) to having cars for everyone.. But it's an interesting difference between the US and many (most?) other countries in the world.