And require the site's visitors to fill out a captcha on every single web page for the privilege of viewing the ads contained therein?
What are you on about? Making ads indistinguishable from content programmatically is a means to defeat ad blockers. Nobody's talking about adding captchas to sites to defeat ad blockers.
If people pay for usage, then ad blocking becomes very similar to P2P. One is avoiding paying for unwanted services, the other is avoiding paying for wanted services.
Still shoddy reasoning. Advertising takes up a trivial amount of bandwidth that is inconsequential to most users, even in a metered bandwidth situation. This is like arguing that ad blocking will take over because of the extra electricity being used. Anyone that concerned about bandwidth usage browses the web in text-only mode anyway and thus filters a lot more than ads. Also keep in mind that ads can be text-only.
And just like p2p filesharing (which was originally only big in the tech crowd), ad blocking will continue to grow into the maintstream.
Shoddy reasoning. Things big in the tech crowd do not necessarily become mainstream. P2P became big because free content is universally appealing. Most ordinary consumers don't have the anti-consumerism streak that seems to infect the tech crowd which causes them to revolt against ads. In short, the utility of P2P and ad blocking are not equivalent.
Especially if usage caps by ISPs get more draconian (and even more so if we see metered usage popping up again).
If that occurs, we've got bigger problems. Technology generally progresses forward, not backward. Unless there's something seriously wrong with the system, this capping and metering situation will get better, not worse for consumers.
If AdBlock countermeasures become popular then it would be easy to make AdBlock download the ads but not display them.
Not necessarily. The owners of the website could randomize things enough to make it so that distinguishing between ads and content is not programmatically detectable. At least not with 100% accuracy.
I fail to see how the cable companies are double dipping but this seems to be a very common misconception around here.
This is how it works. Cable companies charge consumers a monthly fee for their subscription to a set of stations provided by differnt networks. The networks run advertisements on their stations to cover the cost of making the shows they run on their station. Cable companies do not see any revenue directly from advertisements.
I am familiar with the subtleties of the business relationships, but that's not what's relevant here. What's relevant is how the consumer perceives it. The consumer either wants to pay nothing and see ads or pay a subscription service and see no ads. When consumers are forced to both see ads and pay a subscription fee, they're going to consider it double dipping on the part of the provider, regardless of who is seeing what revenues. As such, this (perceived) double dipping will ruin the cable business sooner or later as more and more consumers turn toward services which don't do it.
Yeah, because piracy is never an issue for companies that offer their product via the subscription model.
You're ignoring the part of my post where I mentioned that they should also offer the product in a free, ad supported way as well. Why pirate The Simpsons when I can watch it on Hulu for free? Both Hulu and Pirate Bay show ads, so there's little difference except the fact that Hulu is the legal option.
Sure advertising works, nobody would ever install Add-Block or use the pop-up blockers that are popular in many web browsers.
Uh oh, somebody call Google and tell them that the several billion dollars in revenues they're making in advertising is an unsustainable business model because some people block ads! Seriously, if you seriously think ad blocking has any significant effect on the advertising industry's bottom line, you need to get some perspective.
Most consumers won't bother blocking ads and even if they did it's trivially easy for a content provider to make blocking those ads more trouble than it's worth. You know why they don't? Because so few of their consumers block ads it isn't even worth the effort.
Hardy har, so funny. Or maybe instead they could make their money the way broadcast television has successfully done so for longer than most of us have been alive? Hint: advertising does actually work. Then just offer a subscription service to folks who don't want to see ads. Easy as pie. Shame the cable companies are too busy double dipping (subscription AND ads) to realize consumers hate it.
You're certainly correct of course that should I break countermeasures to produce a copy that I'd be violating your property rights, but the violation is breaking and entering, not the act of producing the copy. This is a perfect demonstration of my original point, which is that intellectual property and physical property are not equivalent.
Should we extend copyright to physical objects, my copying of your basketball (presupposing no breaking and entering) is a violation of the copyright's holder's exclusive rights, as your copy is merely an authorized copy from the copyright holder. I would be violating his or her rights, not yours. However, if I deprive you of your copy, then I am violating your property rights. Thus the difference.
The analogous situation in the real world is if I am given authorized access to your Star Wars DVD or iPod full of Pink Floyd and then copy all the data and return the objects to you, I've committed no violations against you; what I've violated is the copyrights on the Star Wars film and the Pink Floyd music, which you do not possess.
You aren't going far enough. Any kind of private property is a form of government regulation. The only truly "free market" is the one where your property is that which you have the power to take and keep. The only "natural tendency" is to coerce others to surrender as much of their property as possible to yourself, by any means available (including brute force).
You're mistaken. The term free market is defined as a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. It also presupposes the right to private property.
I suspect the OP was referring to the laissez faire kind, which is what I was responding to. The degree to which a market is a free market and the degree to which its corresponding economy is capitalist is often considered synonymous, largely because more regulated capitalist economies are considered to be less capitalist and more mixed. Mixed economies also have fewer free markets. This justifies the shorthand. I think this is the same reason people say Linux rather than GNU/Linux: sometimes, a certain degree of precision is uselessly verbose.;)
Because the concepts are closely associated and are often considered synonymous in the contexts of certain discussions. I am aware of the nuances conveyed by the two different terms, but I don't generally consider those nuances relevant here. I'm using the terms in the context of capitalism generally favoring free markets which is opposite from socialism which favors highly regulated markets. Based on this reasoning, since copyright law is regulation which interferes with the natural tendency of the free market, I can conclude that it would be more capitalist to abolish copyright law. Call it an oversimplification if you like, maybe it is. I will certainly concede that it is more accurate to say that it would be more pro-free market to abolish copyright law. But I am riding on the assumption that the OP was referring to the laissez faire form of capitalism.
And since we classify IP as part of capital(see definition for reference), it would not be, in any way, capitalistic to abolish copyright.
Abolishing copyright would not magically render works covered by it no longer capital, it would just radically alter the pricing by eliminating the legal monopoly associated with it. Based on the reasoning stated above, this would be more capitalist because it would allow the free market to determine prices rather than a government regulation which leans in a more socialist direction.
Wrong the whole justification for coypright is private property (i.e. intellectual property), which is capitalisms raison d'être.
Copyright is just another form of intellectual proeprty rights, which is just another form of private property. Capitalism all the way through there.
You're mistaken. The justification of copyright (at least in the US) is to promote the progress of useful science and art. That reasoning was used to create government regulation which takes the means of production out of the hands of the people who without such regulation could (re)produce freely and places it (legally) into the hands of a single rights holder.
Sorry, but you are mistaken. My car analogy does hold water, however I will concede that a car analogy is trite.:)
Let's try this instead. Suppose you are in a public park and have a basketball. If I could aim a device at your basketball and magically produce a copy of it in my very hands in a split second, that would not be a violation of your property rights. Your basketball never left your possession and you do not have a copyright on your basketball because no such law exists.
Now we could argue that if you had private, personal data somehow contained within your basketball that it could be in violation of some kind of privacy law, if any such thing exists on the books. But even if so, if it's just an ordinary household object already in wide public consumption, such as a basketball, a car, or a popular song, then there is no hypothetical privacy law violated.
Pray tell, so what are the natural tendencies of the free market, and, more importantly, how do you know that it's indeed what they are?
The definition of a free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. A government backed monopoly is the precise opposite of this.
Yes, I'm simplifying it a bit. But as I wrote to another poster above, the concepts are strongly associated. We generally call economies with capitalist features but not entirely free markets mixed economies. The OP distinctly singled out capitalism, so it is logically sound for me to assume s/he meant the free markets, laissez faire kind of capitalism.
While what you are saying might be true in theory, in the real world it works exactly the opposite. If anything, companies would prefer stronger copyrights (and patents). And I don't think you will find too many companies saying they are both anti-free market or anti-capitalist and want to abolish copyright or patents.
To say that stronger copyrights isn't anti-free market is to be ignorant of what a free market actually is. So while you may be right that there are those out there who make such statements, their ignorance does not change the definition of the term.
Capitalism simply means that the means of production (capital) are privately owned. The issue of copyright is completely orthogonal.
In this case, one could say that the means of production are the rights to produce a copy of a work and that they are not entirely privately owned since they are highly regulated by copyright.
That doesn't really address my argument though. I wasn't arguing that markets are natural, but instead that free markets have natural tendencies. In other words, if we have a market that is a free market, we can expect it to behave in a certain way until it is interfered with by regulation rendering it no longer a free market. The artificiality of markets and laws is not at issue.
He's saying Copyright is not a feature of Free Markets. He's just [equating] Capitalism with Free Markets, and they don't require each other.
That's true, but the concepts are strongly associated. We generally call economies with capitalist features but not entirely free markets mixed economies. The OP distinctly singled out capitalism, so it is logically sound for me to assume s/he meant the free markets, laissez faire kind of capitalism.
Courts are also a form of government regulation. Without them, you couldn't have contracts. Sounds like fun capitalism to me, not having contracts...
Not all regulation is created equal. Copyright law and court enforcement of contracts are not equivalent regulations. The former regulation (copyright law) interferes with the natural tendencies of the free market, rendering it less capitalist, while the latter regulation (court enforcement of contracts) does no such interfering.
Intellectual property rights are just an extension of [physical property rights, which is a requirement of capitalism].
Intellectual property and physical property are not equivalent and considering the former an extension of the latter confuses the issue. Your physical property rights do not legally bar me from making a copy of your car, should I have the means, only from depriving you of yours.
In such a fantasy scenario, should we extend copyright law to cover the copying of physical objects in that manner, it would be just as much an interference with the natural tendencies of the free market, and thus less capitalist.
There's no reason to assume there isn't something in the Stargate that prepares you for air pressure changes. Same can be said for filtering certain parts of the light spectrum (visible light) but not others (radio). They could have designed the gates this way on purpose.
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What are you on about? Making ads indistinguishable from content programmatically is a means to defeat ad blockers. Nobody's talking about adding captchas to sites to defeat ad blockers.
Still shoddy reasoning. Advertising takes up a trivial amount of bandwidth that is inconsequential to most users, even in a metered bandwidth situation. This is like arguing that ad blocking will take over because of the extra electricity being used. Anyone that concerned about bandwidth usage browses the web in text-only mode anyway and thus filters a lot more than ads. Also keep in mind that ads can be text-only.
Shoddy reasoning. Things big in the tech crowd do not necessarily become mainstream. P2P became big because free content is universally appealing. Most ordinary consumers don't have the anti-consumerism streak that seems to infect the tech crowd which causes them to revolt against ads. In short, the utility of P2P and ad blocking are not equivalent.
If that occurs, we've got bigger problems. Technology generally progresses forward, not backward. Unless there's something seriously wrong with the system, this capping and metering situation will get better, not worse for consumers.
Not necessarily. The owners of the website could randomize things enough to make it so that distinguishing between ads and content is not programmatically detectable. At least not with 100% accuracy.
I am familiar with the subtleties of the business relationships, but that's not what's relevant here. What's relevant is how the consumer perceives it. The consumer either wants to pay nothing and see ads or pay a subscription service and see no ads. When consumers are forced to both see ads and pay a subscription fee, they're going to consider it double dipping on the part of the provider, regardless of who is seeing what revenues. As such, this (perceived) double dipping will ruin the cable business sooner or later as more and more consumers turn toward services which don't do it.
You're ignoring the part of my post where I mentioned that they should also offer the product in a free, ad supported way as well. Why pirate The Simpsons when I can watch it on Hulu for free? Both Hulu and Pirate Bay show ads, so there's little difference except the fact that Hulu is the legal option.
Uh oh, somebody call Google and tell them that the several billion dollars in revenues they're making in advertising is an unsustainable business model because some people block ads! Seriously, if you seriously think ad blocking has any significant effect on the advertising industry's bottom line, you need to get some perspective.
Most consumers won't bother blocking ads and even if they did it's trivially easy for a content provider to make blocking those ads more trouble than it's worth. You know why they don't? Because so few of their consumers block ads it isn't even worth the effort.
Hardy har, so funny. Or maybe instead they could make their money the way broadcast television has successfully done so for longer than most of us have been alive? Hint: advertising does actually work. Then just offer a subscription service to folks who don't want to see ads. Easy as pie. Shame the cable companies are too busy double dipping (subscription AND ads) to realize consumers hate it.
You're certainly correct of course that should I break countermeasures to produce a copy that I'd be violating your property rights, but the violation is breaking and entering, not the act of producing the copy. This is a perfect demonstration of my original point, which is that intellectual property and physical property are not equivalent.
Should we extend copyright to physical objects, my copying of your basketball (presupposing no breaking and entering) is a violation of the copyright's holder's exclusive rights, as your copy is merely an authorized copy from the copyright holder. I would be violating his or her rights, not yours. However, if I deprive you of your copy, then I am violating your property rights. Thus the difference.
The analogous situation in the real world is if I am given authorized access to your Star Wars DVD or iPod full of Pink Floyd and then copy all the data and return the objects to you, I've committed no violations against you; what I've violated is the copyrights on the Star Wars film and the Pink Floyd music, which you do not possess.
You're mistaken. The term free market is defined as a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. It also presupposes the right to private property.
I suspect the OP was referring to the laissez faire kind, which is what I was responding to. The degree to which a market is a free market and the degree to which its corresponding economy is capitalist is often considered synonymous, largely because more regulated capitalist economies are considered to be less capitalist and more mixed. Mixed economies also have fewer free markets. This justifies the shorthand. I think this is the same reason people say Linux rather than GNU/Linux: sometimes, a certain degree of precision is uselessly verbose. ;)
Because the concepts are closely associated and are often considered synonymous in the contexts of certain discussions. I am aware of the nuances conveyed by the two different terms, but I don't generally consider those nuances relevant here. I'm using the terms in the context of capitalism generally favoring free markets which is opposite from socialism which favors highly regulated markets. Based on this reasoning, since copyright law is regulation which interferes with the natural tendency of the free market, I can conclude that it would be more capitalist to abolish copyright law. Call it an oversimplification if you like, maybe it is. I will certainly concede that it is more accurate to say that it would be more pro-free market to abolish copyright law. But I am riding on the assumption that the OP was referring to the laissez faire form of capitalism.
Abolishing copyright would not magically render works covered by it no longer capital, it would just radically alter the pricing by eliminating the legal monopoly associated with it. Based on the reasoning stated above, this would be more capitalist because it would allow the free market to determine prices rather than a government regulation which leans in a more socialist direction.
You're mistaken. The justification of copyright (at least in the US) is to promote the progress of useful science and art. That reasoning was used to create government regulation which takes the means of production out of the hands of the people who without such regulation could (re)produce freely and places it (legally) into the hands of a single rights holder.
Sorry, but you are mistaken. My car analogy does hold water, however I will concede that a car analogy is trite. :)
Let's try this instead. Suppose you are in a public park and have a basketball. If I could aim a device at your basketball and magically produce a copy of it in my very hands in a split second, that would not be a violation of your property rights. Your basketball never left your possession and you do not have a copyright on your basketball because no such law exists.
Now we could argue that if you had private, personal data somehow contained within your basketball that it could be in violation of some kind of privacy law, if any such thing exists on the books. But even if so, if it's just an ordinary household object already in wide public consumption, such as a basketball, a car, or a popular song, then there is no hypothetical privacy law violated.
The definition of a free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. A government backed monopoly is the precise opposite of this.
Yes, I'm simplifying it a bit. But as I wrote to another poster above, the concepts are strongly associated. We generally call economies with capitalist features but not entirely free markets mixed economies. The OP distinctly singled out capitalism, so it is logically sound for me to assume s/he meant the free markets, laissez faire kind of capitalism.
To say that stronger copyrights isn't anti-free market is to be ignorant of what a free market actually is. So while you may be right that there are those out there who make such statements, their ignorance does not change the definition of the term.
In this case, one could say that the means of production are the rights to produce a copy of a work and that they are not entirely privately owned since they are highly regulated by copyright.
That doesn't really address my argument though. I wasn't arguing that markets are natural, but instead that free markets have natural tendencies. In other words, if we have a market that is a free market, we can expect it to behave in a certain way until it is interfered with by regulation rendering it no longer a free market. The artificiality of markets and laws is not at issue.
That's true, but the concepts are strongly associated. We generally call economies with capitalist features but not entirely free markets mixed economies. The OP distinctly singled out capitalism, so it is logically sound for me to assume s/he meant the free markets, laissez faire kind of capitalism.
Not all regulation is created equal. Copyright law and court enforcement of contracts are not equivalent regulations. The former regulation (copyright law) interferes with the natural tendencies of the free market, rendering it less capitalist, while the latter regulation (court enforcement of contracts) does no such interfering.
Intellectual property and physical property are not equivalent and considering the former an extension of the latter confuses the issue. Your physical property rights do not legally bar me from making a copy of your car, should I have the means, only from depriving you of yours.
In such a fantasy scenario, should we extend copyright law to cover the copying of physical objects in that manner, it would be just as much an interference with the natural tendencies of the free market, and thus less capitalist.
Capitalist markets are free markets. Copyright law interferes with the natural tendencies of the free market, which makes it less capitalist.
Capitalism? Copyright is a form of government regulation on what would otherwise be a free market. It would be more capitalist to abolish copyright.
(Disclaimer: I do not want to abolish copyright.)
There's no reason to assume there isn't something in the Stargate that prepares you for air pressure changes. Same can be said for filtering certain parts of the light spectrum (visible light) but not others (radio). They could have designed the gates this way on purpose.