A typical data set may contain 10,000 or more elements (e.g. financial analysis, temperature/forcast data, usage stats for a medium size web site, marketing data for a product line). Immediately, this requires a DOM tree with at least that many nodes.
Not really. It requires the client to ask the server for the subset of information it needs to display right now and to insert that information into the tree. Do you think at all of these SVG mapping applications download the map of the entire planet as one big SVG file? Cleopatra is an example of a client-server system that downloads the data it needs at the moment it needs it. So is FOAFnaut. In neither case is there a massive DOM hanging around. Rather a standard relational database holds the data until it needs to be visualized. This is how most Web applications work (SVG-oriented or not). Of course, if you have the luxury of keeping all of the data on the client side then you can reduce your latency but that's a standard performance for memory trade-off.
With no real package support and no built-in way to manage a large code base, JavaScript is not the ideal language for developing reusable vis code.
You might want to look at the component models under development like RCC, XBL and dSVG. Mozilla is a large application built in large part in JavaScript: using XBL. But again, you will usually leave most of your business logic on the server side.
I'm holding out hope that the SVG community will slow down on the feature creep and architecture bloat and focus on developing applications with the currect standard.
That's a classic complaint. Features I don't use are bloat. We need more features that I will use.
Only by stepping back and trying to use the current system will the architects of SVG know what's missing and what needs improvement.
SVGOpen just featured four tracks for a week of people using SVG. Many of them were using it for data visualization. In particular, that's the focus of Corel's
new product. Perhaps you mean something else by data visualization...
This means that PDF is usable even without a plugin (by using an external application -- in this case, Acrobat Reader).
The Acrobat Reader is basically the same as the Acrobat plugin. You have to download it and install it. You do the same thing with a plugin. Yes, a standalone viewer is different technically than a plugin but how does this affect the marketability of the underlying standards.
Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.
Here is info on synching with audio. And on synching with video and there are hundreds of examples of interactivity. Most SVG's on the Web are interactive. For instance: asteroids in SVG. A bunch of demos including a paint program written in SVG.
I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL [w3.org] is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.
SVG includes SMIL! You are quite wrong that SVG is "just" a vector graphics format. SVG Tiny is just a vector graphics format, but full SVG has animation and scripting, just like Flash.
I wish the Mozilla team would prioritize SVG support. If you want the Web designer community to get interested in Mozilla you have to give them some exciting features that they just can't get from Internet Explorer. Not just better standards support but totally new capabilities. That's what SVG is about! Mozilla has done a lot of innovation around the content, things like popup blocking and tabs. But what about making the Web itself a more interesting, interactive, standards-based place? I know native SVG is not ready for inclusion yet but it would get there a lot faster if some Mozilla staffers through some excitement, support and effort in that direction.
First, being able to download the specs does not make the format "open". An open format is defined in an open, relatively transparent process with input from multiple players including vendors and end-users. As long as Macromedia maintains sole control over the direction of the specification, it is not open. You can also download specs for the Word.DOC format.
Second, you cannot download the specs without agreeing to a license agreement. The license agreement is specifically designed to allow you to create SWF files but not to create a viewer. Macromedia has not sued anyone who created a viewer but that's because nobody has done a good enough job to compete with them seriously. Imagine if an open source product competed so well that more people wanted the open source version than the Macromedia version. First, they could sue. Then, they could change the format to make the open source version obsolete. That's why Flash is not an open format.
If Macromedia wants it to be open it should remove the licensing agreement and say that the specification is in the public domain for anybody to do anything with it.
I agree completely that browsers need to support SVG, and until this is more advanced, tools like the one in this article are getting ahead of things
According to this logic, Adobe is getting ahead of themselves making products that generate PDF until the browsers natively support PDF. PDF is handled by a plugin. SVG is handled by a plugin. They plugins come from the same company. So why is native browser support a necessary condition for SVG's success?
That said, there are some advanced features that can be only accomplished if SVG is native in the browser but that is necessary for it to become more important to the Web than PDF or Flash. But merely to be in the same league a plugin is fine.
Ultimately, this needs to be done without plugins -- its really just another image format.
Uhhh...no it isn't. SVG is designed to be much, much more than just another image format. For instance it can be the basis for fonts. It has full multimedia sequencing. It can be used as a page description language in printers. But most important: it is designed to be integrated with XHTML so that you authors can seamlessly move back and forth between XHTML, SVG, SMIL, XLink, XForms etc. It is a key part of the next generation of browser and not just another file format (once we get beyond the plugin stage). More here.
Personally, I would not buy the product no matter what platform it runs on because of the (sad) state of SVG support in the browser market, and the foreseen SVG support in the coming years. With IE not being updated for the next 2 years, only Mozilla, Opera, & KHTML variants will be likely to have any decent SVG support anytime soon, and even that is just a possibility, and hardly a foregone conclusion. Your product may be the greatest thing for SVG that has come along (not that that would be saying much, considering), but SVG support, for all _practical_ considerations, is nearly non-existent in browsers, and as a percentage of the surfing public goes, will remain so for years to come
PDF support is quite literally missing from all browsers and yet PDF is quite successful. This is not just an idle analogy. Adobe is the vendor of the leading SVG viewer and they know better than anybody how to make a plugin work. One way is to bundle the SVG plugin with the Acrobat plugin which most people need to download anyhow. Adobe has done that before and probably will again in the future. If, in the next few years, SVG is "only" as successful as PDF I will be quite happy myself. So all of the doom and gloom is certainly not warranted.
If the latter is the case, then your product may never be useful enough for Corel to continue to support unless Mozilla/Opera/KHTML-based browsers actually start taking significant browser marketshare away from IE.
SmartGraphics Studio is for businesses. They can deploy the SVG viewer to every desktop in their system merely by adding it to their standard install. They don't need Microsoft to bless it any more than they need Microsoft to bless PDF/Acrobat.
If you big companies [RIAA] are going to come to my house and arrest me for "sharing" your IP, then why can't I come to YOUR house and arrest you for stealing (profiting from) MY IP [BSD Code].
First, what does my small software startup that wants to embed some BSD code have to do with the RIAA? Anyhow, the fact that the FSF shares tactics with the RIAA (litigiousness) makes the FSF look worse, not better.
Maybe Bram Cohen has no problem with piracy and yet he did BitTorrent in a manner that was not conducive to piracy because he has more than one interest. I am very interested in human rights also, but when I wrote an XML parser for Python human rights were not foremost in my mind. BitTorrent allows the redistribution of information. That furthers Bram's goals even if the information distributed is always legal. For instance safety activists could use BitTorrent to redistribute videos of a pilot falling asleep at the wheel.
People don't know the difference between Internet Explorer and Mozilla because at this point the differences are minor. If Mozilla adds some radical new functionality people will download it and find that it is a superset of "the Internet."
For instance, if RSS continues to advance, Mozilla could become a news aggegrator and people would download it for that, rather than to browse the Web.
Really, it's worse than this, because the author appears to be trying to incite some kind of revolt in the programming community against all kinds of closed-source development.
No, you misunderstand completely. Tim Bray sells closed source software. But he builds it on open platforms. He advises you to do so also. Find ways to be independent of your platform vendor so that they do not own you and cannot run you out or business by bundling an inferior knock-off with the OS or changing the APIs you depend upon.
New versions of Windows come with large GUI changes and entirely new utilities (e.g. photo management software). You can often tell what version of Windows you are working with just by the look and feel. (at least for the desktop-oriented ones). New versions of Windows also have radically new technologies like COM or.NET. A new version of Red Hat has many more user-visible changes than a new version of the Linux kernel. It isn't that there is anything wrong with the Linux development model, it is just much more modular and incremental so why get so excited about such a relatively small and day-to-day invisible component?
Doesn't it seem strange that of all the open source projects with constant upgrades and lots of user visible changes, the slashdot community gets all excited about a kernel? A kernel! What difference is this going to make to your day to day life, compared to a new version of your mail program or language runtime or desktop environment or editor?
Since both Java and Python support type coercion, it is not the case that for any given Java or Python program, type errors will always be detected -- namely, in programs where coercion is used, the guarantee no longer holds.
In a system with type coercion, errors are caught at runtime. That's why both Java and Python have TypeError/ClassCastExceptions. If you read your own definition you'll see that it specifically allows for catching of errors at runtime.
The definition:...we define a programming language to be strongly typed if type errors are always detected. This requires that the types of all operands can be determined, either at compile time or at run time.
You said: This criterion is met by very few real-world languages
Python and Java are two examples of languages that meet this criteria. They detect type errors either at compile time (in the Java-without-casting case) or at runtime (in the Python or the Java-with-casting case).
To begin with, you will need to be able to read SWF files directly. After that, you need to implement a better renderer than Flash's vector engine. After which you need to mirror ActionScript's functionality in SMIL, probably as an extension. Finally, you need a content creation tool that's very much like Flash's IDE to have a smooth migration tool for Flash developers.
First, SMIL is not intended to be a Flash replacement. The W3C set of standards are very modular so you would put several of them together to do the sort of things Flash does. SMIL alone is not even close. But then I doubt Flash is very close to SMIL. As far as ActionScript: SMIL is a Web technology. Of course you can use ECMAScript/Javascript with it.
SMIL+SVG is the most logical output format and interchange format for Open source presentation programs. It would be terrific if they could get together to turn Mozilla into a standards-based multimedia presentation delivery platform.
SMIL's will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly - and so far, they haven't.
This is a little bit like saying that HTML will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly. SMIL is not for phones. It can be used on phones, as can HTML or MP3 or JPEG, but it can also be used anywhere else. Consider the number of
implementations out there. Only a small subset are for phones.
They can. I'm not arguing that society has no interest in this, just that the person who makes something owns and has exclusive rights to it until he transfers ownership and/or rights elsewhere.
First, what do you mean "rights to it." The rights to a chair are straightforward. The owner of a chair can transport the chair where they wish and use it as they wish. Others can presumably do anything they want with it as long as they do not interfere with the owner's ability to use it and transport it. For instance if you left it on the street and someone else sat on it, I don't imagine there is any law that they could be prosecuted under, until the owner complained that the sitter prevented them from sitting on it themselves (which is theft) or broke it, (which is vandalism). Analogously, one should be able to use a song as long as you do not deny the use to the original creator.
Second, you use the word "rights" but it is not clear that you know what it means. Where do you think rights come from. They don't come from logic, that's for sure. Please describe where rights come from. Do I have a right to smoke on the street? Do I have a right to speak out against George Bush? Why or why not?
I can conceive of no way to refute the notion that the individual who creates something that did not previously exist is the orginal owner.
It isn't something to be refuted. It is something to be discovered by looking at the laws of a particular nation. Actually, there is no nation that I know of that enshrines that right in an adopted constitution.
I said:...what are you basing it upon?
You responded: As I said, simple logic. See above.
You cannot base an argument on pure logic. Logic is a system of coming to conclusions based upon premises. When people disagree on their premises, their logic will lead them totally different places. Rights are either moral or legal and thus must have a basis either in morality or legality. You have not stated whether you believe this right comes from morality or legality so I don't know on what basis to argue.
If we can agree that ownership is a form of usage right then we need to clarify what it means to have a "right" and then we can determine whether intellectual property ownership is a right or not, using logic. But simply asserting a thing over and over again is not logic. It is just assertion.
No, but you misconstrue the public domain. When something moves into the public domain, ownership and rights to it are transferred to the public. I.e., it is now in the domain of the public.
You are incorrect. When a piece of land (e.g. a park) becomes public, it is owned by the government on the behalf of the public. The government can charge a fee for use if that is considered to be in the best interest of the public (or even if it isn't!). But when a book passes into the public domain, the government does not manage it. Quite the opposite, the government gives up the right that it previously had to control the distribution of it. Even if they wished to prevent the distribution of it, that would be against the US constitution because according to the constitution, intellectual creations are not owned.
If they were property then it would be unconstitutional to place them in the public domain without compensating the creator directly.
No, that is not my argument. The creator of a work agrees to legally defined IP limits by virtue of living in that particular society.
So why could a society not decide that the legal limit is 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or 5 nano-seconds? Economically this might be a bad decision, but it is just as valid as any other arbitrary limitation.
In essence, they are legally mandated transfers of rights and ownership.
That is incorrect. To transfer something you need to have a source and a destination. But the public domain is not a legal entity that you can transfer rights to. And it is certainly not the case that the government gets the rights. So the truth is that those rights just evaporate which suggests to me that they were hardly fundamental rights in the first place. Consider also that it is more or less impossible to put a physical object "in the public domain". If you put a chair outside of your house and say it is in the public domain, the first person to claim it will own it. It would not be in the public domain in the sense that it is not owned. The closest thing would be to put it in the care of the government or a non-profit organization.
You keep making reference to morality and moral positions. I'm not basing my argument on morals ot ethics.
Okay, then what are you basing it upon? If it isn't morality, it isn't ethics and it isn't law, then what?
To me, it is very logical to state that I own and have exclusive rights to something I make until I transfer ownership and rights elsewhere.
You yourself acknowledge that you do not control the transfer to the public domain. You seem to have no problem with that. So your logic is already inconsistent. If ideas (or expressions of ideas) can be owned the same way that furniture can be, then the whole notion of public domain is bunk and mandatory transfer to the public domain is theft.
Absent that transfer, I cannot understand how someone else can possibly own what I make.
Then I guess you don't understand the current system because people have their works transferred into the public domain against their will on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical data set may contain 10,000 or more elements (e.g. financial analysis, temperature/forcast data, usage stats for a medium size web site, marketing data for a product line). Immediately, this requires a DOM tree with at least that many nodes.
Not really. It requires the client to ask the server for the subset of information it needs to display right now and to insert that information into the tree. Do you think at all of these SVG mapping applications download the map of the entire planet as one big SVG file? Cleopatra is an example of a client-server system that downloads the data it needs at the moment it needs it. So is FOAFnaut. In neither case is there a massive DOM hanging around. Rather a standard relational database holds the data until it needs to be visualized. This is how most Web applications work (SVG-oriented or not). Of course, if you have the luxury of keeping all of the data on the client side then you can reduce your latency but that's a standard performance for memory trade-off.
With no real package support and no built-in way to manage a large code base, JavaScript is not the ideal language for developing reusable vis code.
You might want to look at the component models under development like RCC, XBL and dSVG. Mozilla is a large application built in large part in JavaScript: using XBL. But again, you will usually leave most of your business logic on the server side.
I'm holding out hope that the SVG community will slow down on the feature creep and architecture bloat and focus on developing applications with the currect standard.
That's a classic complaint. Features I don't use are bloat. We need more features that I will use.
Only by stepping back and trying to use the current system will the architects of SVG know what's missing and what needs improvement.
SVGOpen just featured four tracks for a week of people using SVG. Many of them were using it for data visualization. In particular, that's the focus of Corel's new product. Perhaps you mean something else by data visualization...
Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard.
This is not true. Adobe has an alpha with support for SVG 1.2.
This means that PDF is usable even without a plugin (by using an external application -- in this case, Acrobat Reader).
The Acrobat Reader is basically the same as the Acrobat plugin. You have to download it and install it. You do the same thing with a plugin. Yes, a standalone viewer is different technically than a plugin but how does this affect the marketability of the underlying standards.Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.
Here is info on synching with audio. And on synching with video and there are hundreds of examples of interactivity. Most SVG's on the Web are interactive. For instance: asteroids in SVG. A bunch of demos including a paint program written in SVG.
I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL [w3.org] is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.
SVG includes SMIL! You are quite wrong that SVG is "just" a vector graphics format. SVG Tiny is just a vector graphics format, but full SVG has animation and scripting, just like Flash.
I wish the Mozilla team would prioritize SVG support. If you want the Web designer community to get interested in Mozilla you have to give them some exciting features that they just can't get from Internet Explorer. Not just better standards support but totally new capabilities. That's what SVG is about! Mozilla has done a lot of innovation around the content, things like popup blocking and tabs. But what about making the Web itself a more interesting, interactive, standards-based place? I know native SVG is not ready for inclusion yet but it would get there a lot faster if some Mozilla staffers through some excitement, support and effort in that direction.
First, being able to download the specs does not make the format "open". An open format is defined in an open, relatively transparent process with input from multiple players including vendors and end-users. As long as Macromedia maintains sole control over the direction of the specification, it is not open. You can also download specs for the Word .DOC format.
Second, you cannot download the specs without agreeing to a license agreement. The license agreement is specifically designed to allow you to create SWF files but not to create a viewer. Macromedia has not sued anyone who created a viewer but that's because nobody has done a good enough job to compete with them seriously. Imagine if an open source product competed so well that more people wanted the open source version than the Macromedia version. First, they could sue. Then, they could change the format to make the open source version obsolete. That's why Flash is not an open format.
If Macromedia wants it to be open it should remove the licensing agreement and say that the specification is in the public domain for anybody to do anything with it.
I agree completely that browsers need to support SVG, and until this is more advanced, tools like the one in this article are getting ahead of things
According to this logic, Adobe is getting ahead of themselves making products that generate PDF until the browsers natively support PDF. PDF is handled by a plugin. SVG is handled by a plugin. They plugins come from the same company. So why is native browser support a necessary condition for SVG's success?
That said, there are some advanced features that can be only accomplished if SVG is native in the browser but that is necessary for it to become more important to the Web than PDF or Flash. But merely to be in the same league a plugin is fine.
Ultimately, this needs to be done without plugins -- its really just another image format.
Uhhh...no it isn't. SVG is designed to be much, much more than just another image format. For instance it can be the basis for fonts. It has full multimedia sequencing. It can be used as a page description language in printers. But most important: it is designed to be integrated with XHTML so that you authors can seamlessly move back and forth between XHTML, SVG, SMIL, XLink, XForms etc. It is a key part of the next generation of browser and not just another file format (once we get beyond the plugin stage). More here.
Personally, I would not buy the product no matter what platform it runs on because of the (sad) state of SVG support in the browser market, and the foreseen SVG support in the coming years. With IE not being updated for the next 2 years, only Mozilla, Opera, & KHTML variants will be likely to have any decent SVG support anytime soon, and even that is just a possibility, and hardly a foregone conclusion. Your product may be the greatest thing for SVG that has come along (not that that would be saying much, considering), but SVG support, for all _practical_ considerations, is nearly non-existent in browsers, and as a percentage of the surfing public goes, will remain so for years to come
PDF support is quite literally missing from all browsers and yet PDF is quite successful. This is not just an idle analogy. Adobe is the vendor of the leading SVG viewer and they know better than anybody how to make a plugin work. One way is to bundle the SVG plugin with the Acrobat plugin which most people need to download anyhow. Adobe has done that before and probably will again in the future. If, in the next few years, SVG is "only" as successful as PDF I will be quite happy myself. So all of the doom and gloom is certainly not warranted.
If the latter is the case, then your product may never be useful enough for Corel to continue to support unless Mozilla/Opera/KHTML-based browsers actually start taking significant browser marketshare away from IE.
SmartGraphics Studio is for businesses. They can deploy the SVG viewer to every desktop in their system merely by adding it to their standard install. They don't need Microsoft to bless it any more than they need Microsoft to bless PDF/Acrobat.
First, what does my small software startup that wants to embed some BSD code have to do with the RIAA? Anyhow, the fact that the FSF shares tactics with the RIAA (litigiousness) makes the FSF look worse, not better.
Maybe Bram Cohen has no problem with piracy and yet he did BitTorrent in a manner that was not conducive to piracy because he has more than one interest. I am very interested in human rights also, but when I wrote an XML parser for Python human rights were not foremost in my mind. BitTorrent allows the redistribution of information. That furthers Bram's goals even if the information distributed is always legal. For instance safety activists could use BitTorrent to redistribute videos of a pilot falling asleep at the wheel.
If you are going to call copyright violations "Piracy", then I call taking the BSD code and not releasing changes as theft.
Oh, I see. So you have the same understanding of copyright morality that Microsoft and the RIAA does. Interesting.
People don't know the difference between Internet Explorer and Mozilla because at this point the differences are minor. If Mozilla adds some radical new functionality people will download it and find that it is a superset of "the Internet." For instance, if RSS continues to advance, Mozilla could become a news aggegrator and people would download it for that, rather than to browse the Web.
Really, it's worse than this, because the author appears to be trying to incite some kind of revolt in the programming community against all kinds of closed-source development.
No, you misunderstand completely. Tim Bray sells closed source software. But he builds it on open platforms. He advises you to do so also. Find ways to be independent of your platform vendor so that they do not own you and cannot run you out or business by bundling an inferior knock-off with the OS or changing the APIs you depend upon.
New versions of Windows come with large GUI changes and entirely new utilities (e.g. photo management software). You can often tell what version of Windows you are working with just by the look and feel. (at least for the desktop-oriented ones). New versions of Windows also have radically new technologies like COM or .NET. A new version of Red Hat has many more user-visible changes than a new version of the Linux kernel. It isn't that there is anything wrong with the Linux development model, it is just much more modular and incremental so why get so excited about such a relatively small and day-to-day invisible component?
Doesn't it seem strange that of all the open source projects with constant upgrades and lots of user visible changes, the slashdot community gets all excited about a kernel? A kernel! What difference is this going to make to your day to day life, compared to a new version of your mail program or language runtime or desktop environment or editor?
Since both Java and Python support type coercion, it is not the case that for any given Java or Python program, type errors will always be detected -- namely, in programs where coercion is used, the guarantee no longer holds.
In a system with type coercion, errors are caught at runtime. That's why both Java and Python have TypeError/ClassCastExceptions. If you read your own definition you'll see that it specifically allows for catching of errors at runtime.
The definition: ...we define a programming language to be strongly typed if type errors are always detected. This requires that the types of all operands can be determined, either at compile time or at run time.
You said: This criterion is met by very few real-world languages
Python and Java are two examples of languages that meet this criteria. They detect type errors either at compile time (in the Java-without-casting case) or at runtime (in the Python or the Java-with-casting case).
Actually, this is one place where I think ruby is ahead of your average scripting language currently in the not-yet-supporting-Unicode state.
What scripting language doesn't support Unicode? BASH? Python, Perl and JavaScript all do.
I know of at least three free debuggers. One is PDB. Another is PythonWin. And finally there is IDLE.
To begin with, you will need to be able to read SWF files directly. After that, you need to implement a better renderer than Flash's vector engine. After which you need to mirror ActionScript's functionality in SMIL, probably as an extension. Finally, you need a content creation tool that's very much like Flash's IDE to have a smooth migration tool for Flash developers.
First, SMIL is not intended to be a Flash replacement. The W3C set of standards are very modular so you would put several of them together to do the sort of things Flash does. SMIL alone is not even close. But then I doubt Flash is very close to SMIL. As far as ActionScript: SMIL is a Web technology. Of course you can use ECMAScript/Javascript with it.
SMIL+SVG is the most logical output format and interchange format for Open source presentation programs. It would be terrific if they could get together to turn Mozilla into a standards-based multimedia presentation delivery platform.
SMIL's will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly - and so far, they haven't.
This is a little bit like saying that HTML will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly. SMIL is not for phones. It can be used on phones, as can HTML or MP3 or JPEG, but it can also be used anywhere else. Consider the number of implementations out there. Only a small subset are for phones.
They can. I'm not arguing that society has no interest in this, just that the person who makes something owns and has exclusive rights to it until he transfers ownership and/or rights elsewhere.
First, what do you mean "rights to it." The rights to a chair are straightforward. The owner of a chair can transport the chair where they wish and use it as they wish. Others can presumably do anything they want with it as long as they do not interfere with the owner's ability to use it and transport it. For instance if you left it on the street and someone else sat on it, I don't imagine there is any law that they could be prosecuted under, until the owner complained that the sitter prevented them from sitting on it themselves (which is theft) or broke it, (which is vandalism). Analogously, one should be able to use a song as long as you do not deny the use to the original creator.
Second, you use the word "rights" but it is not clear that you know what it means. Where do you think rights come from. They don't come from logic, that's for sure. Please describe where rights come from. Do I have a right to smoke on the street? Do I have a right to speak out against George Bush? Why or why not?
I can conceive of no way to refute the notion that the individual who creates something that did not previously exist is the orginal owner.
It isn't something to be refuted. It is something to be discovered by looking at the laws of a particular nation. Actually, there is no nation that I know of that enshrines that right in an adopted constitution.
I said: ...what are you basing it upon?
You responded: As I said, simple logic. See above.
You cannot base an argument on pure logic. Logic is a system of coming to conclusions based upon premises. When people disagree on their premises, their logic will lead them totally different places. Rights are either moral or legal and thus must have a basis either in morality or legality. You have not stated whether you believe this right comes from morality or legality so I don't know on what basis to argue.
If we can agree that ownership is a form of usage right then we need to clarify what it means to have a "right" and then we can determine whether intellectual property ownership is a right or not, using logic. But simply asserting a thing over and over again is not logic. It is just assertion.
No, but you misconstrue the public domain. When something moves into the public domain, ownership and rights to it are transferred to the public. I.e., it is now in the domain of the public.
You are incorrect. When a piece of land (e.g. a park) becomes public, it is owned by the government on the behalf of the public. The government can charge a fee for use if that is considered to be in the best interest of the public (or even if it isn't!). But when a book passes into the public domain, the government does not manage it. Quite the opposite, the government gives up the right that it previously had to control the distribution of it. Even if they wished to prevent the distribution of it, that would be against the US constitution because according to the constitution, intellectual creations are not owned. If they were property then it would be unconstitutional to place them in the public domain without compensating the creator directly.
No, that is not my argument. The creator of a work agrees to legally defined IP limits by virtue of living in that particular society.
So why could a society not decide that the legal limit is 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or 5 nano-seconds? Economically this might be a bad decision, but it is just as valid as any other arbitrary limitation.
In essence, they are legally mandated transfers of rights and ownership.
That is incorrect. To transfer something you need to have a source and a destination. But the public domain is not a legal entity that you can transfer rights to. And it is certainly not the case that the government gets the rights. So the truth is that those rights just evaporate which suggests to me that they were hardly fundamental rights in the first place. Consider also that it is more or less impossible to put a physical object "in the public domain". If you put a chair outside of your house and say it is in the public domain, the first person to claim it will own it. It would not be in the public domain in the sense that it is not owned. The closest thing would be to put it in the care of the government or a non-profit organization.
You keep making reference to morality and moral positions. I'm not basing my argument on morals ot ethics.
Okay, then what are you basing it upon? If it isn't morality, it isn't ethics and it isn't law, then what?
To me, it is very logical to state that I own and have exclusive rights to something I make until I transfer ownership and rights elsewhere.
You yourself acknowledge that you do not control the transfer to the public domain. You seem to have no problem with that. So your logic is already inconsistent. If ideas (or expressions of ideas) can be owned the same way that furniture can be, then the whole notion of public domain is bunk and mandatory transfer to the public domain is theft.
Absent that transfer, I cannot understand how someone else can possibly own what I make.
Then I guess you don't understand the current system because people have their works transferred into the public domain against their will on a regular basis.