Are you really trying to claim that the public has not benefited at all from copyright?
No, and I thought I was upfront about it. I think the public benefited tremendously from the fact that people—even if only the rich, initially—could broadcast their personal opinions. And I said that just above, as clearly as I could.
I do NOT, however, believe that the copyright law of today, in USA, is providing any benefit that the 1st Amendment does not provide. In particular, I am prepared to argue that here and now, there is absolutely no evidence that the copyright law advances the progress of science and useful arts. And there are literally VAULTS full of evidence that it impedes the said progress: the very same vaults where 1920-and-on movie reels rot, never to be seen again by anyone.
There are thousands of incentives for creating arts, useful or not. If I was to pick a major one, I would say: a woman's attention. More than enough art was created just to impress a girl. Some people create because they are paid in advance. Yet more people create art because they just want to be famous. Yet more create without even a hope to be seen, just because they are motivated by more abstract goals like human rights. It is a fact that plenty of art was created before copyright and in spite of copyright. It really is on you to show that significantly more art is created with copyright than without it, because if you cannot show that, then I can start listing actual instances of the copyright impeding creativity and robbing EVERYONE of of the works created in the last 100 years. Go ahead, make an argument for how giving a monopoly for publicizing abstract thought results in creating much (or even any) more art than we would have without doing so. I am all ears.
Which is precisely why we need to redesign the entire copyright system, and rethink all the principles on which it was based. Copyrights were created at a time when only people who possessed specialized industrial equipment could produce copies efficiently
Yes, but there is more. Before the copyright law came into existence, the right to publish was reserved to the state alone. If you managed to publish (really, publicize) whatever the state did not like, you had them knocking on your door the next day. Counterintuitively, copyrights were a definitive step away from censorship. Now rich people could ask and sometimes be granted an exclusive permission by the state to publish. (Of course, poor people could ask too, but as you point out, they could not afford to publish anyway.) Instead of being controlled by the state in a dictatorial manner, publishing became merely regulated by the state. The market of ideas became more free.
The US copyright, even now, is an improvement in this respect, as it took us further away from censorship. It kicks in automatically at the moment of creation, and at the same time allows fair use.
Was the escape from the despotic censor the original intent of the copyright law? I am not a law historian, so I may be very wrong here, but I want to say yes. From what I gathered, it was the result of a power struggle between the state and the rich artisans. The purpose of the original copyright law was to even out the playing field in publishing and to create the system in which (at least) rich and powerful could speak more freely. And in US today we are yet better off, as we are lucky to have a law which works for the poor just as well as it does for the rich.
If we are to keep moving along this path, I say we need to phase out the copyright law altogether, while preserving our right to free expression. The net result will be less censorship (we will never get rid of it completely: the state will always try to infringe on our rights), and a perfectly free market of ideas. IMHO, this is a natural step forward. Once Internet was born in the US, one thing became painfully clear: both our right and our ability to publicize are adequately protected without the copyright law. And there are good reasons to believe that we, the public, are actually huge losers in this deal: there is absolutely no evidence that the monopoly incentive helps us to advance the art, especially when it comes to the "useful" art. Just consider GNU/Linux, probably our best general-purpose OS, definitely better than anything proprietary, which was developed in spite of the copyright, not because of it. The public does not benefit from the copyright, and neither does the state. Factor in the cost of enforcing it, and you get what appears to be pure loss for everyone besides a handful of incredibly lucky artists and a few publishers who are parking their asses on a century worth of public creativity.
Economically speaking, you have profited from the copying.
No, this is a make-belief. Alice buys the internet connection and pays a few cents for torrenting 4 albums. She then spends a few hours listening to them. This is all pure loss for Alice, in economic terms. Somehow this escaped your analysis.
Instead, you reason, if the copyright holder sets the price at $10 per album, then Alice's "gross profit" is $40. And if the copyright holder sets the price at $1000000 per album (which is entirely legit and practical the under current law), then, again, in line with what you are saying, Alice's "gross profit" is $4000000. So you are saying that her "profit" is whatever number the copyright holder says it is. This, of course, is just the kind of unadulterated bullshit that has NOTHING to do with economics or profit, as understood by anyone with a working brain.
This is a general purpose computer we are talking about, so it's not even your hardware in any meaningful sense of the word. What you own is a plastic-silicon brick which can function as a computer whenever Microsoft is feeling generous. You are basically renting a computer without an administrative account. Run afoul of the contract terms, and you are back to owning a brick.
Fuck you Microsoft, and fuck you Apple: if you are marginally better now, it won't last long. The only big players poised to create a completely free phone now are Google and the firms behind MeeGo.
What do you mean, "undoing the health care law"? Wouldn't they need to actually pass something to undo it?
And while it will certainly hurt in the short term, undoing the health care bill would probably be better in the end. The health care cost, now at about 16% GDP, would reach truly astronomical heights, just as millions of people are loosing their insurance because they cannot afford it. There is a nice feedback loop here too: as the pool shrinks, the risk goes up, and so do the premiums. Right now we have about 17% of US residents uninsured (if we figure in people who are insured for a fraction of a year), with the majority cause being insufficient funds. I don't understand US politics very well, so I may be just talking out of my ass. But. If this number climbs up to 25% and starts eating into the middle class, the Republicans may get a real shit tornado on their hands. As a result, a much stronger bill will be passed, and we may yet see the single payer and, gods willing, the breakup of the big pharma.
There is not a congress in the world without loons, fools, and clowns. But the system is designed from ground up to withstand idiots at the wheel, at least for a limited time, so we will probably be governed no better or worse than before.
Just like any piece of proprietary software, Acrobat is not really a document display program, it's a mystery program. We don't know what it does, and people who use it are seeing the consequences.
Very nice post. And you didn't even mention the insta-PK clasterfuck and all the wrong ways they tried to fix it, while the actual solution that all the co-op legit players were asking for (disabling non-consensual PvP) could have been implemented in a few dozen lines.
Re:This is not Diablo, this is B.Netablo
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
·
· Score: 1
Oh, and I'll make a prediction right now. Full-featured D3 will be pay-to-play.
Re:This is not Diablo, this is B.Netablo
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
·
· Score: 1
I bought every WC 1-3, SC 1, and both Diablos; not SC2, but that's because I am not into RTS anymore. And I think I'll skip this one as well. Definitely gonna get the crack and give it a spin, but I am just tired of the bullshit DRM. I want to pay for a game, god damned, not a computer inspector. I don't give a rat's ass if people cheat online, as long as they can't player-kill me on battle.net or my own server. I think I am capable of finding a few people like me, who just want to do some legit co-op dungeon crawl and play with them.
Anyways, Blizzard never really cared much about fighting cheaters. If you played D2, you know what a fiasco that was (the PK part; the game itself was great). I bet they would need to fix, like, 2 lines of code to make non-consensual player-killing go away, but they apparently decided that holding onto the original design principles, no matter how retarded they may be, is more important than facilitating playable co-op on battle.net. What Blizzard really wants and gets now is that you don't own the game, but only rent it from them. Cheaters are just a convenient excuse for monopolizing servers and introducing spyware like Warden in order to prevent users from playing the game on their own terms. We all know, the cheating did NOT go away, so every time they say something had to be done in order to curtail cheating, you know they are knowingly lying.
I am really disappointed in Blizzard. D3 may well turn out to be a great game, especially since Leonard Boyarsky is on the team, but I simply do not trust them anymore. If you want me to pay for your games, Blizzard, open the source code. I will pay for an open-sourced game just like I paid for my copy of Slackware. What I definitely won't pay for is a piece of crud that only works with one server, yours, and runs spyware in the background. In my book, John Carmack is the only person who gets away with this, since I have reasons to believe that he has good will towards his users. I can see it in his dedication to GNU/Linux support and in his willingness to license his old games under GPL. Blizzard could hardly be more backwards in this respect.
A thought-controlled computer would feel just like a part of your mind. It would be nice to have feedback, though: like being able to recall thoughts or images from the computer memory. Then even the biggest doofus will recognize that non-free software is a disease.
The tactile contact will also get bigger, in form of autonomous bots. These will be non-free for a long time, I am afraid, until MLK-bot comes along.
Well, terrorists could possibly take control of the switch and terrorize us by killing our Internet, so we gotta be smart and design the Internet kill switch kill switch, to disable the former if it falls into the wrong hands. Of course, in the event that the latter is also compromised, we need a kill switch kill switch kill switch, and so on.
That's not the computers' fault. These kids are just lazy. If you think we shouldn't fail lazy students who don't do anything, then what's the point of grading? We just need to provide everyone with affordable quality education, we don't need to graduate everyone with honors.
I disagree pretty much completely. A laptop or a smartphone is not a mere calculator, it's a personal mind extension. I feel good about making this prediction: most of these kids with laptops in class will go through the rest of their life with a general-purpose computer in their pocket. Let them use it however they want. If they get distracted by them, they simply won't learn and fail as they should. I would even allow computers during testing, as long as I can isolate them from Internet. We don't need to be oppressive: I think this problem can be mostly solved by redesigning the testing procedures.
You also mention criminal organizations locating themselves on darknets hosted on botnets. Well, that is a price we have to pay.
Oh, no, I understand that. I think may we agree here: I am saying, without a legal public darknet, there will be a sound business sense in herding botnets and selling them to whoever needs privacy, for whatever reason. So instead of a metered, voluntary, secure darknet infrastructure, we will still have one just as robust, but unmetered, involuntary, and by very definition insecure. And it's only available to criminals. This is a worse outcome, no matter how we look at it.
The article actually was created to explain QC in every possible way at the same time, but you particular reading caused the wave function to collapse and that's the crap you got as the result.
Effective darknets—the ones that give you actual privacy—will remain illegal on Internet, and it should not be fixed by technical means, since Internet can be either anonymous or fast, but hardly both. It may be within the law to run something like Tor, but that won't matter for liability purposes when someone is using your node for an illegal activity. At the very best, you will get your node taken in for questioning, and, IMHO, it is supposed to work this way. The only legit way to create anonymity on Internet is by legal means: individual access points have to be given the safe harbor reserved today for big ISPs.
At the same time, it will probably be just like you say: there will be a massive web of darknets based on infectious botnets and it will only be accessible by criminals. Societies that keep fighting free expression and anonymity on Internet will all but assure the viability of the botnet business. This is a tremendous inefficiency, and I hope that states that persist in it will be left behind due to the cost of fighting this omnipresent and highly organized criminal establishment.
Unsurprisingly, app developer interest has been... limited.
And yet I can run things like python out of the box, and things like ssh(d), emacs, LaTeX, mplayer with minimal effort.
As long as they make a phone with hardware capable of running a current GNU/Linux
OS (e.g., armel, just like N900), they don't need to think about developers: not any more than Dell has to think about developers
when it sells us Intels and AMDs. N900 is almost there, but it just lacks
RAM needed to build large projects. Once they cram the development chain (basically, gcc and
the libs) into this form factor, we will have a complete GNU/Linux OS on these devices. The whole
shabang. And literally overnight. That's all I ever want from a computer, mobile or not. I just want it
to run all free software written up to this point, and this is NOT asking for too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. Actually, it explains a lot.
Are you really trying to claim that the public has not benefited at all from copyright?
No, and I thought I was upfront about it. I think the public benefited tremendously from the fact that people—even if only the rich, initially—could broadcast their personal opinions. And I said that just above, as clearly as I could.
I do NOT, however, believe that the copyright law of today, in USA, is providing any benefit that the 1st Amendment does not provide. In particular, I am prepared to argue that here and now, there is absolutely no evidence that the copyright law advances the progress of science and useful arts. And there are literally VAULTS full of evidence that it impedes the said progress: the very same vaults where 1920-and-on movie reels rot, never to be seen again by anyone.
There are thousands of incentives for creating arts, useful or not. If I was to pick a major one, I would say: a woman's attention. More than enough art was created just to impress a girl. Some people create because they are paid in advance. Yet more people create art because they just want to be famous. Yet more create without even a hope to be seen, just because they are motivated by more abstract goals like human rights. It is a fact that plenty of art was created before copyright and in spite of copyright. It really is on you to show that significantly more art is created with copyright than without it, because if you cannot show that, then I can start listing actual instances of the copyright impeding creativity and robbing EVERYONE of of the works created in the last 100 years. Go ahead, make an argument for how giving a monopoly for publicizing abstract thought results in creating much (or even any) more art than we would have without doing so. I am all ears.
OMG this would be beyond ironic: if she makes millions by selling rights to a non-free book.
Which is precisely why we need to redesign the entire copyright system, and rethink all the principles on which it was based. Copyrights were created at a time when only people who possessed specialized industrial equipment could produce copies efficiently
Yes, but there is more. Before the copyright law came into existence, the right to publish was reserved to the state alone. If you managed to publish (really, publicize) whatever the state did not like, you had them knocking on your door the next day. Counterintuitively, copyrights were a definitive step away from censorship. Now rich people could ask and sometimes be granted an exclusive permission by the state to publish. (Of course, poor people could ask too, but as you point out, they could not afford to publish anyway.) Instead of being controlled by the state in a dictatorial manner, publishing became merely regulated by the state. The market of ideas became more free.
The US copyright, even now, is an improvement in this respect, as it took us further away from censorship. It kicks in automatically at the moment of creation, and at the same time allows fair use.
Was the escape from the despotic censor the original intent of the copyright law? I am not a law historian, so I may be very wrong here, but I want to say yes. From what I gathered, it was the result of a power struggle between the state and the rich artisans. The purpose of the original copyright law was to even out the playing field in publishing and to create the system in which (at least) rich and powerful could speak more freely. And in US today we are yet better off, as we are lucky to have a law which works for the poor just as well as it does for the rich.
If we are to keep moving along this path, I say we need to phase out the copyright law altogether, while preserving our right to free expression. The net result will be less censorship (we will never get rid of it completely: the state will always try to infringe on our rights), and a perfectly free market of ideas. IMHO, this is a natural step forward. Once Internet was born in the US, one thing became painfully clear: both our right and our ability to publicize are adequately protected without the copyright law. And there are good reasons to believe that we, the public, are actually huge losers in this deal: there is absolutely no evidence that the monopoly incentive helps us to advance the art, especially when it comes to the "useful" art. Just consider GNU/Linux, probably our best general-purpose OS, definitely better than anything proprietary, which was developed in spite of the copyright, not because of it. The public does not benefit from the copyright, and neither does the state. Factor in the cost of enforcing it, and you get what appears to be pure loss for everyone besides a handful of incredibly lucky artists and a few publishers who are parking their asses on a century worth of public creativity.
Economically speaking, you have profited from the copying.
No, this is a make-belief. Alice buys the internet connection and pays a few cents for torrenting 4 albums. She then spends a few hours listening to them. This is all pure loss for Alice, in economic terms. Somehow this escaped your analysis.
Instead, you reason, if the copyright holder sets the price at $10 per album, then Alice's "gross profit" is $40. And if the copyright holder sets the price at $1000000 per album (which is entirely legit and practical the under current law), then, again, in line with what you are saying, Alice's "gross profit" is $4000000. So you are saying that her "profit" is whatever number the copyright holder says it is. This, of course, is just the kind of unadulterated bullshit that has NOTHING to do with economics or profit, as understood by anyone with a working brain.
Then again, since snakes don't have original sin
According to the book, snakes are the origin of sin.
Yeah, they all still have ways to go, but at least they seem to be making progress.
This is a general purpose computer we are talking about, so it's not even your hardware in any meaningful sense of the word. What you own is a plastic-silicon brick which can function as a computer whenever Microsoft is feeling generous. You are basically renting a computer without an administrative account. Run afoul of the contract terms, and you are back to owning a brick.
Fuck you Microsoft, and fuck you Apple: if you are marginally better now, it won't last long. The only big players poised to create a completely free phone now are Google and the firms behind MeeGo.
What do you mean, "undoing the health care law"? Wouldn't they need to actually pass something to undo it?
And while it will certainly hurt in the short term, undoing the health care bill would probably be better in the end. The health care cost, now at about 16% GDP, would reach truly astronomical heights, just as millions of people are loosing their insurance because they cannot afford it. There is a nice feedback loop here too: as the pool shrinks, the risk goes up, and so do the premiums. Right now we have about 17% of US residents uninsured (if we figure in people who are insured for a fraction of a year), with the majority cause being insufficient funds. I don't understand US politics very well, so I may be just talking out of my ass. But. If this number climbs up to 25% and starts eating into the middle class, the Republicans may get a real shit tornado on their hands. As a result, a much stronger bill will be passed, and we may yet see the single payer and, gods willing, the breakup of the big pharma.
There is not a congress in the world without loons, fools, and clowns. But the system is designed from ground up to withstand idiots at the wheel, at least for a limited time, so we will probably be governed no better or worse than before.
That's nothing. Catholics will be suing single-celled organisms.
Just like any piece of proprietary software, Acrobat is not really a document display program, it's a mystery program. We don't know what it does, and people who use it are seeing the consequences.
Simple! Just uninstall the Reader.
Very nice post. And you didn't even mention the insta-PK clasterfuck and all the wrong ways they tried to fix it, while the actual solution that all the co-op legit players were asking for (disabling non-consensual PvP) could have been implemented in a few dozen lines.
Oh, and I'll make a prediction right now. Full-featured D3 will be pay-to-play.
I bought every WC 1-3, SC 1, and both Diablos; not SC2, but that's because I am not into RTS anymore. And I think I'll skip this one as well. Definitely gonna get the crack and give it a spin, but I am just tired of the bullshit DRM. I want to pay for a game, god damned, not a computer inspector. I don't give a rat's ass if people cheat online, as long as they can't player-kill me on battle.net or my own server. I think I am capable of finding a few people like me, who just want to do some legit co-op dungeon crawl and play with them.
Anyways, Blizzard never really cared much about fighting cheaters. If you played D2, you know what a fiasco that was (the PK part; the game itself was great). I bet they would need to fix, like, 2 lines of code to make non-consensual player-killing go away, but they apparently decided that holding onto the original design principles, no matter how retarded they may be, is more important than facilitating playable co-op on battle.net. What Blizzard really wants and gets now is that you don't own the game, but only rent it from them. Cheaters are just a convenient excuse for monopolizing servers and introducing spyware like Warden in order to prevent users from playing the game on their own terms. We all know, the cheating did NOT go away, so every time they say something had to be done in order to curtail cheating, you know they are knowingly lying.
I am really disappointed in Blizzard. D3 may well turn out to be a great game, especially since Leonard Boyarsky is on the team, but I simply do not trust them anymore. If you want me to pay for your games, Blizzard, open the source code. I will pay for an open-sourced game just like I paid for my copy of Slackware. What I definitely won't pay for is a piece of crud that only works with one server, yours, and runs spyware in the background. In my book, John Carmack is the only person who gets away with this, since I have reasons to believe that he has good will towards his users. I can see it in his dedication to GNU/Linux support and in his willingness to license his old games under GPL. Blizzard could hardly be more backwards in this respect.
A thought-controlled computer would feel just like a part of your mind. It would be nice to have feedback, though: like being able to recall thoughts or images from the computer memory. Then even the biggest doofus will recognize that non-free software is a disease.
The tactile contact will also get bigger, in form of autonomous bots. These will be non-free for a long time, I am afraid, until MLK-bot comes along.
I wonder which magic they are gonna recapture. This one? Or this?
Well, terrorists could possibly take control of the switch and terrorize us by killing our Internet, so we gotta be smart and design the Internet kill switch kill switch, to disable the former if it falls into the wrong hands. Of course, in the event that the latter is also compromised, we need a kill switch kill switch kill switch, and so on.
That's not the computers' fault. These kids are just lazy. If you think we shouldn't fail lazy students who don't do anything, then what's the point of grading? We just need to provide everyone with affordable quality education, we don't need to graduate everyone with honors.
I disagree pretty much completely. A laptop or a smartphone is not a mere calculator, it's a personal mind extension. I feel good about making this prediction: most of these kids with laptops in class will go through the rest of their life with a general-purpose computer in their pocket. Let them use it however they want. If they get distracted by them, they simply won't learn and fail as they should. I would even allow computers during testing, as long as I can isolate them from Internet. We don't need to be oppressive: I think this problem can be mostly solved by redesigning the testing procedures.
You also mention criminal organizations locating themselves on darknets hosted on botnets. Well, that is a price we have to pay.
Oh, no, I understand that. I think may we agree here: I am saying, without a legal public darknet, there will be a sound business sense in herding botnets and selling them to whoever needs privacy, for whatever reason. So instead of a metered, voluntary, secure darknet infrastructure, we will still have one just as robust, but unmetered, involuntary, and by very definition insecure. And it's only available to criminals. This is a worse outcome, no matter how we look at it.
The article actually was created to explain QC in every possible way at the same time, but you particular reading caused the wave function to collapse and that's the crap you got as the result.
Effective darknets—the ones that give you actual privacy—will remain illegal on Internet, and it should not be fixed by technical means, since Internet can be either anonymous or fast, but hardly both. It may be within the law to run something like Tor, but that won't matter for liability purposes when someone is using your node for an illegal activity. At the very best, you will get your node taken in for questioning, and, IMHO, it is supposed to work this way. The only legit way to create anonymity on Internet is by legal means: individual access points have to be given the safe harbor reserved today for big ISPs.
At the same time, it will probably be just like you say: there will be a massive web of darknets based on infectious botnets and it will only be accessible by criminals. Societies that keep fighting free expression and anonymity on Internet will all but assure the viability of the botnet business. This is a tremendous inefficiency, and I hope that states that persist in it will be left behind due to the cost of fighting this omnipresent and highly organized criminal establishment.
Unsurprisingly, app developer interest has been ... limited.
And yet I can run things like python out of the box, and things like ssh(d), emacs, LaTeX, mplayer with minimal effort. As long as they make a phone with hardware capable of running a current GNU/Linux OS (e.g., armel, just like N900), they don't need to think about developers: not any more than Dell has to think about developers when it sells us Intels and AMDs. N900 is almost there, but it just lacks RAM needed to build large projects. Once they cram the development chain (basically, gcc and the libs) into this form factor, we will have a complete GNU/Linux OS on these devices. The whole shabang. And literally overnight. That's all I ever want from a computer, mobile or not. I just want it to run all free software written up to this point, and this is NOT asking for too much.