The margin of profit is much higher on the games than it is on the systems. Open hardware makes pirating games much easier, as well as giving away or selling games that people can play without giving the manufacturer any more money. Open hardware can only work if you sell the hardware at a price that's reasonable for the features. The only reason people are saying how cool this is is because the hardware is cheap.
It's a proxy. All your traffic at least goes through Google's program, and most of it will be Google's cached copy. When you request the copy, they get all the information they need.
If you don't patent it, then someone else could do so and restrict the use of it. Instead, videotape yourself kicking Jeff Bezos in the nuts and share it on Kazaa as "BRITNEY SPEARS HAVING SEX WITH DONKEY.avi". If anyone tries to patent it, there'll be prior art all over the Internet.
So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.
Bezos has the money to spend on patents. College students in a garage developing Amazon++ don't. The threat of legal action shuts them down. That's why patents shouldn't be granted like that. A suit for anything else would get thrown out as frivolous. Once you have a patent, you have to spend money to get it invalidated. Uncool, and unconstitutional. Instead of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts," it hinders it.
I'll wait to see how they use the data they get from this before I consider using it (not that I can now anyway, since it's not available on Linux), but I'm pretty sure what they're going to use it for anyway.
Let's look at the information Google currently has to generate search results from.
The content of each webpage (text, images, video, anything really)
The number of pages that link to a page in question
The words that people use to link to a page
The sites that people click on after searching for a term
These by themselves generate pretty good results, but sometimes this information can be deceptive. The more metrics you have to measure relevance by, the better.
So now, Google offers to cache the Internet from everyone. What can they get out of this? Well, everyone here is speculating about the evil things, so I'll leave those as a given. What I haven't seen so far is a very valuable piece of information they get from this: web traffic. They get to see how many people go to web sites, what time, where they got referred from, and anything else that can be deciphered from someone's web traffic. Not only can they rank pages by how many people link to a page, they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly. Web sites won't be able to plant links around the Internet to increase their ranking, because if no one actually clicks the link, then it's not important in the first place. That is awesome.
I find it no small irony that a company that relies on over 10,000 linux servers (actually I think the number may exceed 40,000) essentially making them one of the largest benficiaries of the OSS community they don't yet have a Google Desktop, nor are offering a beta of this accelerator for the linux community.
Uh, it's not ironic at all. As you said, they use Linux servers, not desktops. Those servers don't need Google Desktop or Webaccelerator.
Don't get me wrong, I like Google, think they've done great stuff, but come on -- how about paying back a little to the hand that giveth.
You think they're trying to do Windows users a favor by releasing these products? They're doing it for themselves. They make money off of these products by solidifying their mindshare and marketshare. Releasing Linux versions (or OS X versions, for that matter) obviously isn't worth it to them.
Actually, OSS has a greater chance of being the target of both patent and copyright lawsuits because you can see the source. Any patent or copyright holder can look to see how you're implementing something and sue you if you're infringing. The claims also become much more black and white since the code is out there and it's easy to verify. You can either be SCO or Fraunhofer, whose patents would be infringed upon if the various open source projects out there that implement "their" algorithm were developed in America.
With that said, open source and closed source software have an equal chance of infriging on a patent, which quickly approaches one as the number of lines of code increases. It's just easier to tell if an open source program is or not.
Actually we do. We are not just consumers. We are citizens in a representative democracy. That means the laws that create copyright a particular way can and will change to meet the will of the majority.
Right. All my posts in this thread have been about why we shouldn't change these laws (other than shortening the duration of copyright, getting rid of the DMCA, etc). The laws currently state that you don't get to choose who to pay for a copy of a creative work, the copyright holder chooses. In the music industry, many artists choose to sell albums through a record label, so that's who you pay, or you don't get a lawful copy.
The record companies don't give a crap about the artists (when they say they do, I find it more offensive than kiddy porn), they care about maximizing profits.
Correct. They're venture capitalists. They're supposed to just care about the profit. It's their job.
If the record companies won't respond to market pressure (i.e. "people won't pay us, we'd better lower prices"), then we will decide *IF* we want to pay.
You can decide if you want to pay, but if you don't then you don't get a copy. We've decided as a society to give creators the sole right to make copies of their work. If you disagree with that, then you should try to get the laws changed. Admittedly, that would be pretty difficult, especially since lobbyists bribe legislators. My point is that the notion of intellectual property should exist, because it leads to more works being created.
The record companies have twisted copyright beyond all comprehension. So the consumer has decided who he will pay. Nobody.
Good. Protesting against unjust laws is the way to get them changed. What you don't seem to understand is that protesting involves sacrifice. That means you live without the works put out by the record companies and support artists who agree with you.
You will fall.
I find it odd that many people in this thread are referring to the record companies in the second person. You should probably check out my posting history or Google my email address.
Just how profitable are these "traditional ip-backed models" when everyone is copying the "ip" on the net for nothing, despite it being illegal with draconian punishments to do so?
People take infringe on copyright precisely because they don't see any repercussions for their actions. Furthermore, if people disregard intellectual property laws, of course those business models won't be profitable. My whole point was that society benefits from IP laws existing and people following them, although the laws aren't perfect and need to be changed.
Society cares about the creator immensely, the creator is effectively a brand name.
I think you misunderstand what I was saying here. We made intellectual property laws to ensure that more works would be created, not to ensure the livelihood of creators. That's just a side effect.
A work-for-hire mechanism can be at least as lucrative as the current system.
If that was true, then more people would use that system. Intellectual property law doesn't prevent people from using that model. The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models are more lucrative.
If the creator is good, he will be able to command increasingly higher fees for each new creation - not because people are necessarily willing to pay more, but because the better his stuff, the larger the pool of people who have experienced it and liked it enough to pay for the next work will be.
Works take an initial investment to put out. This initial investment allows for the artist to focus on their work instead of working on the side, resulting in better work. Also, the work itself costs money to put together. Record labels act as venture capitalists in the music industry by funding artists.
Moreover, the model you suggest takes the focus off of the work and onto the creator. This is backwards. Like I said before, I don't care about the creator and neither does society. I want to pay for a creative work, not pay someone to create something. By paying for the work itself after it's created, I can make sure the work is good before I buy it by listening to it in a store, or listening to a preview on iTunes. In the model you suggest, I would have to function as a venture capitalist. I don't want to do that, and neither do most people. We don't get a return on investment other than the work itself, so there is very little incentive for consumers to take that risk.
Work-for-hire models are less profitable than traditional models in most cases. They will not replace traditional models unless we force them to by taking away intellectual property rights. If we do that, we'll be forcing the industry to use a less profitable model, therefore less creative works will be produced. That's the whole reason IP law exists.
For example, with roughly a billion people on the net, if only 0.1% think that Joe Cool's next album is worth $1 to them, that's $1,000,000 direct to Joe Cool. That's the kind of money only the super of the super-stars see on any regular basis.
This occurs very infrequently, if at all. If this model was as profitable as you say, they would choose this model instead. Essentially, this is the model that artists use before they get record deals. They get money for concerts and merchandise they sell to people who want to see them put out another work. However, once they get a record deal, they usually take it. Why? It's more profitable.
Creative works would still be produced without intellectual property rights, but there would be less of them. Instead, let artists choose to reliquish their intellectual property rights, and support the ones who do with your money. That doesn't mean it's okay to ignore the intellectual property rights we've given creators as a society. The "get a new business model" argument is crap unless you want to see less creative works produced. The typical response to this is "Well, most of the stuff out there is crap!" So... don't download it?
I like how I got the moderator smackdown from 5 to 1. If you disagree with what I said, reply to it like others did. Downward moderation is for posts that you don't think are worth people's time. If that was the case, people wouldn't have replied to me.
Call me crazy, but if an artist doesnt want to create because they arent getting paid, how much of an "artist" can they possibly be?
Neither I nor the law care very much about the artist himself. We care about the works they create. It doesn't matter if the person lives up to what your ideals of what an artist should be, it only matters that they're putting good stuff out there. If they are, people will buy it, as long as they can't get it for free.
This isnt about saying "oh we want shit for free" - this about saying, I want to pay the content producers - not the destributors( riaa )..
You don't get to decide who to pay. The artists chose to sign contracts with the record labels that state that you pay them. That's the way things work. Record labels invest in artists, and they expect a return on their investment. There have been various developments that bode ill for the record labels, such as distribution over the internet and cheap digital audio editing. That doesn't mean you illegally take music. I'm fairly sure you don't send artists envelopes with money in them anyway. If you want to support the artists, you buy the products they sell: CDs, t-shirts, etc. The larger return on investment the record label gets from the artist, the better deal they get for their next album.
Read my other posts in this thread if you still don't get why the record labels are important. Even when the record labels meet their eventual demise, intellectual property law will still be important to ensure that artists can make money off of their work.
Re:Good news, even for Sid users.
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
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· Score: 2, Informative
On that note, does anyone know when Debian will adopt X.org?
Short answer: It shouldn't take very long at all since it's already been packaged for Ubuntu. A new X.org release with a different packaging structure is scheduled to be released soon, so that will complicate things a bit. The new release is supposed to be included in the next Ubuntu release if it gets out early enough, so most of the packaging work will be done.
Long answer: Debian X Strike Force
You admittedly pick ONE new model, pick it apart and use that as justification for disregarding all new models.
I never said that all of them should be disregarded, just that all have a major flaw: they're far less lucrative than what we currently have, so less creative works will be produced. It was more of an invitation for people to propose other models, which I'm glad you took up.
How about considering other models that have wider applicability? Such as group contracting - where consumers band together and pool their small sums to contract for the creation and then the end result is released to the public domain?
If this is really that lucrative of a business model, why aren't more people doing it? The reason is that it's not as profitable as traditional, intellectual property-backed models. With this model, a creator only makes a fixed amount of money, whereas a creator can sell their work for the duration of their copyright (which should be shorter) otherwise. This also makes it much harder for new creators to make money off their work, as getting enough people to fund an unknown artist is extremely difficult. Currently, record labels are the venture capitalists of the music industry. They'll take chances because they can get a return on investment. The model you're proposing yields no return on investment.
A common thread between many of these proposals is diverting the focus of interest away from the creative work to the creator. I don't care about the creator, and neither does society. What we care about is the creative work they're producing. Contracting doesn't make sense. I don't want to pay someone to create something for me, I want to buy a creation. The effort it takes to shove things into a creator-centric business model is a sign that something isn't right. These models can still be used by people who it works for, but getting rid of intellectual property on the basis of the success of a few would be foolish.
As I said before, all the proposed alternative business models have one thing in common: less profit for the creator. This means that being a creator is a less lucrative career, so less people do it. Not good. What we want to find is an ideal balance between the rights we reliquish to creators and the benefits society yields from the resulting increase in creative works. I don't think we're there yet either, but the basic notion of intellectual property is a stable foundation on which to build a vibrant creative society.
However, modern technology has called into question the validity of this definition of "property".
Who are you kidding? Technology didn't call into question the validity of intellectual property, human nature did. What happened is that it's so easy to disregard the laws that protect intellectual property that tons of people do it. This makes sense. Intellectual property has no basis in natural law, and as a result, most people don't feel bad about downloading music off the Internet. The notion of intellectual property conflicts with something inside each of us that sees nothing wrong with making a copy of something we already have and giving it to someone else.
What you don't seem to realize is that intellectual property was created for the sole purpose of giving content creation a viable business model. If you're the only one who is allowed to make copies of the work you create, you can sell those copies for money. Otherwise, it's infinitely harder to create content as a career. No one wants that. We want all this content to still be created so we can enjoy it.
If anything, advances in technology have proven that intellectual property is necessary for a vibrant creative industry. Since it's so easy to copy things now, everyone does it. There need to be artificial barriers in place, such as intellectual property law, to make sure people don't do that. It's easy to tell the creative industries to come up with a new business model, but that has two problems. First of all, people are still taking their content without paying for it. This leaves them no incentive to keep on putting out albums. That's bad. Secondly, no one has suggested a viable alternative business model. One model that is frequently suggested is that artists would distribute their albums for free as an advertisement for concerts and merchandise. What this fails to take into account are the artists that already sell out tours with the current model. All you're doing is taking away an avenue for the artist to make money and claiming that it's a better business model. This also ignores other creative works, such as books and visual art. The people who create these works derive most, if not all of thir income from the sale of their works. If their works start being distributed online as widely as music currently is, there won't be an alternative business model to turn to at all.
If people continue to disregard intellectual property law, the business models that the creative industries use will change. However, the industries as a whole will have to change as well, and this will likely result in far lower production of creative works. That's exactly what intellectual property law is there to prevent. Sure, copyright duration is too long, along with various other problems. The solution is to fix the problems, not get rid of it all together. Intellectual property rights are rights that we give to creators as a society, and we can just as easily take them away. I don't think it's wise to do so.
It also looks like they integrated Tor into the client, which should lead to fairly interesting results. When a client as popular as Azureus has anonymity built in, I think some people might be angry.
When the **AA see an IP address downloading from an infringing torrent, they direct their lawsuits towards the account holder for that IP. This puts people running Tor at risk of being sued. Is "It wasn't me, it was another Tor user" a valid defense? Are people going to be held accountable for the traffic that passes through their Tor server?
errmm... no. what happens is you get more people coming up with bright idea's, and then working hard as hell in the global competitive sphere to bring them to market.
That's just not true. Since it's harder to make money off of ideas without patents, less people would actively try to come up with ideas. The people who did come up with ideas would keep the details to themselves, or a competitor would copy the idea and sell it at a lower price. Our current patent system requires the inventor to publish the details of the invention, allowing society as a whole to be able to benefit from it once the twenty years is up. This results in both more ideas created since it's profitable, and not losing ideas once the inventor dies because they wanted to profit off of their trade secrets. Intellectual property law is a good thing when implemented correctly.
whining and crying that 'things arent fair' is so un-american, it makes your argument lose a lot of credibility, in my eyes...
Are you actually trying to have a civilized argument anymore?
Just because they came up with an idea doesn't mean they have the "right" to control how it's used (or to stop anyone who might have come up with the idea by themselves).
Correct. Intellectual property law doesn't have it's basis in natural law. Societies came up with IP law as a way to encourage people to create. The promise of the right of exclusive use of the ideas you come up with is a significant incentive to create things. Not only that, but to get the monopoly over your idea, you have to publish it. This stops people from keeping their ideas secret to protect their business, as they had to do before IP law came around. Instead of people's ideas dying with them, they get published and society gets to benefit from it forever.
From a societal-benefit standpoint, it doesn't matter WHO uses the idea - and, by definition, public policy should be made with the resultant societal-benefit in mind.
Given what I stated above, the original creator having a monopoly over the idea provides a societal benefit.
"Free" markets should be strictly limited to payment for providing desired goods or services. Unnatural definitions such as "intellectual property" have no place in a free market.
That's correct, but I don't think completely free markets are desirable. There would be no anti-trust law if we had a completely free market. When infringing on the freedom of the market, you have to be careful that it actually provides a benefit. I think IP law could do so, if it wasn't as crazy as it is today.
I have no clue. Canonical has to make money somehow, though, and I think commercial software developers would find something like this worthy of spending money on. My feeling is that other projects aren't going to want to use a closed source tool (and rightfully so), and I don't even know if there's an offer for other open source projects to use the Launchpad tools. As project internal to Ubuntu, however, it seems to be working pretty well. The barrier to entry for people to translate free software has been lowered, and the translations can be sent back upstream. It's good stuff.
Eventually, this will be just as usefull as CVS/Subversioni is right now for open source projects on different distributions.
That's because CVS and Subversion are centralized versioning systems. Bazaar and other Arch-like systems aren't. The way things are right now, bug tracking systems and code versioning systems are completely separate. If you can integrate a bug tracking system with something like Arch and retain the distributed nature of it all, then it will definitely be useful for multiple distributions. It's all patches. I think this is the direction they're trying to take things.
you CAN'T make money off ideas!!!!!! you need to produce something.
Sometimes the person who comes up with an idea doesn't have the capital to make it into a product. IP laws allow the person to still make money off of their idea by selling it to someone who can. I think this is a good thing. When other countries disregard our IP laws and sell our inventions to people at a lower price, that hurts the original guy with the idea. The end product is that you end up with less people actively trying to come up with ideas. That is bad. Like I said before, fix IP law, don't get rid of it.
I know bad-mouthing Americans is in these days, but it makes your argument lose credibility in my eyes.
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The margin of profit is much higher on the games than it is on the systems. Open hardware makes pirating games much easier, as well as giving away or selling games that people can play without giving the manufacturer any more money. Open hardware can only work if you sell the hardware at a price that's reasonable for the features. The only reason people are saying how cool this is is because the hardware is cheap.
There already is open hardware out there: PDAs.
It's a proxy. All your traffic at least goes through Google's program, and most of it will be Google's cached copy. When you request the copy, they get all the information they need.
If you don't patent it, then someone else could do so and restrict the use of it. Instead, videotape yourself kicking Jeff Bezos in the nuts and share it on Kazaa as "BRITNEY SPEARS HAVING SEX WITH DONKEY.avi". If anyone tries to patent it, there'll be prior art all over the Internet.
The Google toolbar only sends the URL of the page you're visiting back to Google, with a harmless google.com URL as the referrer. People would scream about privacy complaints otherwise. With this, the only information sent to Google is stuff that's necessary for the service to work. Fortunately for Google, that information happens to be important.
Yahoo and presumably Alexa do send referrer information if WebRank is enabled. I don't know what percentage of people turn off WebRank, but with Web Accelerator, there's no opting out if you use it.
So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.
Bezos has the money to spend on patents. College students in a garage developing Amazon++ don't. The threat of legal action shuts them down. That's why patents shouldn't be granted like that. A suit for anything else would get thrown out as frivolous. Once you have a patent, you have to spend money to get it invalidated. Uncool, and unconstitutional. Instead of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts," it hinders it.
"Don't worry. Their motto is 'do no evil', so we can trust them!", say the geek masses.
The reason I personally trust Google is because they've earned it. Their business ethics are far better than most companies out there, so I trust them with the messages people send me, the locations I drive to, my writing, and my interests in general.
I'll wait to see how they use the data they get from this before I consider using it (not that I can now anyway, since it's not available on Linux), but I'm pretty sure what they're going to use it for anyway.
- The content of each webpage (text, images, video, anything really)
- The number of pages that link to a page in question
- The words that people use to link to a page
- The sites that people click on after searching for a term
These by themselves generate pretty good results, but sometimes this information can be deceptive. The more metrics you have to measure relevance by, the better.So now, Google offers to cache the Internet from everyone. What can they get out of this? Well, everyone here is speculating about the evil things, so I'll leave those as a given. What I haven't seen so far is a very valuable piece of information they get from this: web traffic. They get to see how many people go to web sites, what time, where they got referred from, and anything else that can be deciphered from someone's web traffic. Not only can they rank pages by how many people link to a page, they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly. Web sites won't be able to plant links around the Internet to increase their ranking, because if no one actually clicks the link, then it's not important in the first place. That is awesome.
Why didn't I think of that?
I find it no small irony that a company that relies on over 10,000 linux servers (actually I think the number may exceed 40,000) essentially making them one of the largest benficiaries of the OSS community they don't yet have a Google Desktop, nor are offering a beta of this accelerator for the linux community.
Uh, it's not ironic at all. As you said, they use Linux servers, not desktops. Those servers don't need Google Desktop or Webaccelerator.
Don't get me wrong, I like Google, think they've done great stuff, but come on -- how about paying back a little to the hand that giveth.
You think they're trying to do Windows users a favor by releasing these products? They're doing it for themselves. They make money off of these products by solidifying their mindshare and marketshare. Releasing Linux versions (or OS X versions, for that matter) obviously isn't worth it to them.
Actually, OSS has a greater chance of being the target of both patent and copyright lawsuits because you can see the source. Any patent or copyright holder can look to see how you're implementing something and sue you if you're infringing. The claims also become much more black and white since the code is out there and it's easy to verify. You can either be SCO or Fraunhofer, whose patents would be infringed upon if the various open source projects out there that implement "their" algorithm were developed in America.
With that said, open source and closed source software have an equal chance of infriging on a patent, which quickly approaches one as the number of lines of code increases. It's just easier to tell if an open source program is or not.
Actually we do. We are not just consumers. We are citizens in a representative democracy. That means the laws that create copyright a particular way can and will change to meet the will of the majority.
Right. All my posts in this thread have been about why we shouldn't change these laws (other than shortening the duration of copyright, getting rid of the DMCA, etc). The laws currently state that you don't get to choose who to pay for a copy of a creative work, the copyright holder chooses. In the music industry, many artists choose to sell albums through a record label, so that's who you pay, or you don't get a lawful copy.
The record companies don't give a crap about the artists (when they say they do, I find it more offensive than kiddy porn), they care about maximizing profits.
Correct. They're venture capitalists. They're supposed to just care about the profit. It's their job.
If the record companies won't respond to market pressure (i.e. "people won't pay us, we'd better lower prices"), then we will decide *IF* we want to pay.
You can decide if you want to pay, but if you don't then you don't get a copy. We've decided as a society to give creators the sole right to make copies of their work. If you disagree with that, then you should try to get the laws changed. Admittedly, that would be pretty difficult, especially since lobbyists bribe legislators. My point is that the notion of intellectual property should exist, because it leads to more works being created.
The record companies have twisted copyright beyond all comprehension. So the consumer has decided who he will pay. Nobody.
Good. Protesting against unjust laws is the way to get them changed. What you don't seem to understand is that protesting involves sacrifice. That means you live without the works put out by the record companies and support artists who agree with you.
You will fall.
I find it odd that many people in this thread are referring to the record companies in the second person. You should probably check out my posting history or Google my email address.
Just how profitable are these "traditional ip-backed models" when everyone is copying the "ip" on the net for nothing, despite it being illegal with draconian punishments to do so?
People take infringe on copyright precisely because they don't see any repercussions for their actions. Furthermore, if people disregard intellectual property laws, of course those business models won't be profitable. My whole point was that society benefits from IP laws existing and people following them, although the laws aren't perfect and need to be changed.
Society cares about the creator immensely, the creator is effectively a brand name.
I think you misunderstand what I was saying here. We made intellectual property laws to ensure that more works would be created, not to ensure the livelihood of creators. That's just a side effect.
A work-for-hire mechanism can be at least as lucrative as the current system.
If that was true, then more people would use that system. Intellectual property law doesn't prevent people from using that model. The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models are more lucrative.
If the creator is good, he will be able to command increasingly higher fees for each new creation - not because people are necessarily willing to pay more, but because the better his stuff, the larger the pool of people who have experienced it and liked it enough to pay for the next work will be.
Works take an initial investment to put out. This initial investment allows for the artist to focus on their work instead of working on the side, resulting in better work. Also, the work itself costs money to put together. Record labels act as venture capitalists in the music industry by funding artists.
Moreover, the model you suggest takes the focus off of the work and onto the creator. This is backwards. Like I said before, I don't care about the creator and neither does society. I want to pay for a creative work, not pay someone to create something. By paying for the work itself after it's created, I can make sure the work is good before I buy it by listening to it in a store, or listening to a preview on iTunes. In the model you suggest, I would have to function as a venture capitalist. I don't want to do that, and neither do most people. We don't get a return on investment other than the work itself, so there is very little incentive for consumers to take that risk.
Work-for-hire models are less profitable than traditional models in most cases. They will not replace traditional models unless we force them to by taking away intellectual property rights. If we do that, we'll be forcing the industry to use a less profitable model, therefore less creative works will be produced. That's the whole reason IP law exists.
For example, with roughly a billion people on the net, if only 0.1% think that Joe Cool's next album is worth $1 to them, that's $1,000,000 direct to Joe Cool. That's the kind of money only the super of the super-stars see on any regular basis.
This occurs very infrequently, if at all. If this model was as profitable as you say, they would choose this model instead. Essentially, this is the model that artists use before they get record deals. They get money for concerts and merchandise they sell to people who want to see them put out another work. However, once they get a record deal, they usually take it. Why? It's more profitable.
Creative works would still be produced without intellectual property rights, but there would be less of them. Instead, let artists choose to reliquish their intellectual property rights, and support the ones who do with your money. That doesn't mean it's okay to ignore the intellectual property rights we've given creators as a society. The "get a new business model" argument is crap unless you want to see less creative works produced. The typical response to this is "Well, most of the stuff out there is crap!" So... don't download it?
I like how I got the moderator smackdown from 5 to 1. If you disagree with what I said, reply to it like others did. Downward moderation is for posts that you don't think are worth people's time. If that was the case, people wouldn't have replied to me.
It's all about tradeoffs. Who needs artificial gravity when the spacesuit feet stick to the ground?
Call me crazy, but if an artist doesnt want to create because they arent getting paid, how much of an "artist" can they possibly be?
Neither I nor the law care very much about the artist himself. We care about the works they create. It doesn't matter if the person lives up to what your ideals of what an artist should be, it only matters that they're putting good stuff out there. If they are, people will buy it, as long as they can't get it for free.
This isnt about saying "oh we want shit for free" - this about saying, I want to pay the content producers - not the destributors( riaa )..
You don't get to decide who to pay. The artists chose to sign contracts with the record labels that state that you pay them. That's the way things work. Record labels invest in artists, and they expect a return on their investment. There have been various developments that bode ill for the record labels, such as distribution over the internet and cheap digital audio editing. That doesn't mean you illegally take music. I'm fairly sure you don't send artists envelopes with money in them anyway. If you want to support the artists, you buy the products they sell: CDs, t-shirts, etc. The larger return on investment the record label gets from the artist, the better deal they get for their next album.
Read my other posts in this thread if you still don't get why the record labels are important. Even when the record labels meet their eventual demise, intellectual property law will still be important to ensure that artists can make money off of their work.
I know. We were addressing post-sarge plans.
On that note, does anyone know when Debian will adopt X.org?
Short answer: It shouldn't take very long at all since it's already been packaged for Ubuntu. A new X.org release with a different packaging structure is scheduled to be released soon, so that will complicate things a bit. The new release is supposed to be included in the next Ubuntu release if it gets out early enough, so most of the packaging work will be done.
Long answer: Debian X Strike Force
The open source 2D-only drivers install preconfigured, so most users don't even need to do this.
You admittedly pick ONE new model, pick it apart and use that as justification for disregarding all new models.
I never said that all of them should be disregarded, just that all have a major flaw: they're far less lucrative than what we currently have, so less creative works will be produced. It was more of an invitation for people to propose other models, which I'm glad you took up.
How about considering other models that have wider applicability? Such as group contracting - where consumers band together and pool their small sums to contract for the creation and then the end result is released to the public domain?
If this is really that lucrative of a business model, why aren't more people doing it? The reason is that it's not as profitable as traditional, intellectual property-backed models. With this model, a creator only makes a fixed amount of money, whereas a creator can sell their work for the duration of their copyright (which should be shorter) otherwise. This also makes it much harder for new creators to make money off their work, as getting enough people to fund an unknown artist is extremely difficult. Currently, record labels are the venture capitalists of the music industry. They'll take chances because they can get a return on investment. The model you're proposing yields no return on investment.
A common thread between many of these proposals is diverting the focus of interest away from the creative work to the creator. I don't care about the creator, and neither does society. What we care about is the creative work they're producing. Contracting doesn't make sense. I don't want to pay someone to create something for me, I want to buy a creation. The effort it takes to shove things into a creator-centric business model is a sign that something isn't right. These models can still be used by people who it works for, but getting rid of intellectual property on the basis of the success of a few would be foolish.
As I said before, all the proposed alternative business models have one thing in common: less profit for the creator. This means that being a creator is a less lucrative career, so less people do it. Not good. What we want to find is an ideal balance between the rights we reliquish to creators and the benefits society yields from the resulting increase in creative works. I don't think we're there yet either, but the basic notion of intellectual property is a stable foundation on which to build a vibrant creative society.
However, modern technology has called into question the validity of this definition of "property".
Who are you kidding? Technology didn't call into question the validity of intellectual property, human nature did. What happened is that it's so easy to disregard the laws that protect intellectual property that tons of people do it. This makes sense. Intellectual property has no basis in natural law, and as a result, most people don't feel bad about downloading music off the Internet. The notion of intellectual property conflicts with something inside each of us that sees nothing wrong with making a copy of something we already have and giving it to someone else.
What you don't seem to realize is that intellectual property was created for the sole purpose of giving content creation a viable business model. If you're the only one who is allowed to make copies of the work you create, you can sell those copies for money. Otherwise, it's infinitely harder to create content as a career. No one wants that. We want all this content to still be created so we can enjoy it.
If anything, advances in technology have proven that intellectual property is necessary for a vibrant creative industry. Since it's so easy to copy things now, everyone does it. There need to be artificial barriers in place, such as intellectual property law, to make sure people don't do that. It's easy to tell the creative industries to come up with a new business model, but that has two problems. First of all, people are still taking their content without paying for it. This leaves them no incentive to keep on putting out albums. That's bad. Secondly, no one has suggested a viable alternative business model. One model that is frequently suggested is that artists would distribute their albums for free as an advertisement for concerts and merchandise. What this fails to take into account are the artists that already sell out tours with the current model. All you're doing is taking away an avenue for the artist to make money and claiming that it's a better business model. This also ignores other creative works, such as books and visual art. The people who create these works derive most, if not all of thir income from the sale of their works. If their works start being distributed online as widely as music currently is, there won't be an alternative business model to turn to at all.
If people continue to disregard intellectual property law, the business models that the creative industries use will change. However, the industries as a whole will have to change as well, and this will likely result in far lower production of creative works. That's exactly what intellectual property law is there to prevent. Sure, copyright duration is too long, along with various other problems. The solution is to fix the problems, not get rid of it all together. Intellectual property rights are rights that we give to creators as a society, and we can just as easily take them away. I don't think it's wise to do so.
It also looks like they integrated Tor into the client, which should lead to fairly interesting results. When a client as popular as Azureus has anonymity built in, I think some people might be angry.
When the **AA see an IP address downloading from an infringing torrent, they direct their lawsuits towards the account holder for that IP. This puts people running Tor at risk of being sued. Is "It wasn't me, it was another Tor user" a valid defense? Are people going to be held accountable for the traffic that passes through their Tor server?
errmm... no. what happens is you get more people coming up with bright idea's, and then working hard as hell in the global competitive sphere to bring them to market.
That's just not true. Since it's harder to make money off of ideas without patents, less people would actively try to come up with ideas. The people who did come up with ideas would keep the details to themselves, or a competitor would copy the idea and sell it at a lower price. Our current patent system requires the inventor to publish the details of the invention, allowing society as a whole to be able to benefit from it once the twenty years is up. This results in both more ideas created since it's profitable, and not losing ideas once the inventor dies because they wanted to profit off of their trade secrets. Intellectual property law is a good thing when implemented correctly.
whining and crying that 'things arent fair' is so un-american, it makes your argument lose a lot of credibility, in my eyes...
Are you actually trying to have a civilized argument anymore?
Just because they came up with an idea doesn't mean they have the "right" to control how it's used (or to stop anyone who might have come up with the idea by themselves).
Correct. Intellectual property law doesn't have it's basis in natural law. Societies came up with IP law as a way to encourage people to create. The promise of the right of exclusive use of the ideas you come up with is a significant incentive to create things. Not only that, but to get the monopoly over your idea, you have to publish it. This stops people from keeping their ideas secret to protect their business, as they had to do before IP law came around. Instead of people's ideas dying with them, they get published and society gets to benefit from it forever.
From a societal-benefit standpoint, it doesn't matter WHO uses the idea - and, by definition, public policy should be made with the resultant societal-benefit in mind.
Given what I stated above, the original creator having a monopoly over the idea provides a societal benefit.
"Free" markets should be strictly limited to payment for providing desired goods or services. Unnatural definitions such as "intellectual property" have no place in a free market.
That's correct, but I don't think completely free markets are desirable. There would be no anti-trust law if we had a completely free market. When infringing on the freedom of the market, you have to be careful that it actually provides a benefit. I think IP law could do so, if it wasn't as crazy as it is today.
I have no clue. Canonical has to make money somehow, though, and I think commercial software developers would find something like this worthy of spending money on. My feeling is that other projects aren't going to want to use a closed source tool (and rightfully so), and I don't even know if there's an offer for other open source projects to use the Launchpad tools. As project internal to Ubuntu, however, it seems to be working pretty well. The barrier to entry for people to translate free software has been lowered, and the translations can be sent back upstream. It's good stuff.
Eventually, this will be just as usefull as CVS/Subversioni is right now for open source projects on different distributions.
That's because CVS and Subversion are centralized versioning systems. Bazaar and other Arch-like systems aren't. The way things are right now, bug tracking systems and code versioning systems are completely separate. If you can integrate a bug tracking system with something like Arch and retain the distributed nature of it all, then it will definitely be useful for multiple distributions. It's all patches. I think this is the direction they're trying to take things.
you CAN'T make money off ideas!!!!!! you need to produce something.
Sometimes the person who comes up with an idea doesn't have the capital to make it into a product. IP laws allow the person to still make money off of their idea by selling it to someone who can. I think this is a good thing. When other countries disregard our IP laws and sell our inventions to people at a lower price, that hurts the original guy with the idea. The end product is that you end up with less people actively trying to come up with ideas. That is bad. Like I said before, fix IP law, don't get rid of it.
I know bad-mouthing Americans is in these days, but it makes your argument lose credibility in my eyes.