No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
50? I'm envious. The last 7 years of interviewing hundreds of candidates uncovers about 1 in 50 that actually understand data structures and algorithms, much less know anything deeper about how computers and memory work or how the language chosen can affect your performance and choice of algorithms/data structures to use.
Sure it can, add or replace it with "or must put up a $100 fee to be forfeited to the accused party should your notice be found to be incorrect" Now you have to put money into each request, nuisance mass automated takedown notices instantly solved since they now can be a source of income
They could potentially fix it, but I'm not sure what the cost of "flush the caches after every context switch" would do to the performance? Knock it down to 50%? Worse? I just can't imagine what a multi-core server with multiple threads would have occur. A CPU on its figurative knees being outpaced by a single core/threaded chip from the 2000s is floating into focus...
I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either.NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.
Well, your first problem is you're running Spring and Angular/React. Both of the latter are highly volatile toys of the moment (or at least were two years ago, I know, I know, ancient in web time but my current projects were all started prior to that) and Spring is COBOL for java apps. There are 1 or 2 useful things in Spring, but you need to be careful how you use it and quarantine it in your development.
* The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.
I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.
You know why Rails sucks and you can't find anyone in the corporate environment to run it? You can start with performance, security and maintainability over time. Corporate environments, at least the ones I work for, run upwards of thousands of transactions a second with millions upon millions of rows of data, hence the long project timelines, you don't turn the titanic in a couple of minutes. Those kinds of project timelines also attracts the interests of coders because of the relative job security. So you get lots of people interested in Java, and very few interested in the gee-whiz Rails thrown together in a week by 1 or 2 people project. Don't get me wrong, Rails has a place in the world - primarily quick POCs for basic workflows. But anything large-scale with reasonable throughput? Not a chance, and I'd double down on that since security will be a concern in any system I work with.
I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia.
How about idiocracy? The same effects make PHP popular, and keeps Perl around long past its expiry date. Not to mention Visual Basic, thankfully nearly dead now, but after causing how much damage?
Well, you can look at it as all those PHP, Perl, and VB projects as being potential clients for you to upgrade at some point in the future when they creak and fail or become unmaintainable for various reasons such as cost, stability issues, or merely time to get new features out to market.
I feel that we're going in cycles due to you ignoring some points I made. I merely object to paying money for lifting restrictions which take no effort by itself and their market value is thus 0$. I object to inheritable rents which merely serve to make another worthless social stratum of aristocrats. I do not object for artists being paid for work they actually do. Nothing less and nothing more.
Granted on the cycles, the cause is a different issue that would generate another cycle. I hold that without copyright artists can easily be ripped off by others and lose control of their works. I believe we largely agree that the length of term of the current law is objectionable as are the terms for transfer, inheritable or otherwise. We disagree on the solution.
You absolutely failed to establish that there is any connection between inheritable rents and state censorship copyright requires and letting authors getting paid. You didn't even try to.
I'm guessing because that wasn't my position nor intent? To be clear, my intent was to show the holes in your position of "no copyright".
Copyright lobbies never were hiding that they actually want infinite copyright, which is in stark contrast to original deal: they get temporary monopoly in exchange for strong public domain. So pretty much everyone is in breach: publishers made it defacto infinite while rest of people don't consider infringing copyrights to be something unusual. The only solution is to legalize status quo: people pay on strictly donation basis, you don't even pretend that people buy something because it just leads to more conflicts and societal tension because both sides have violated their part of this deal for almost a century.
While we agree on the current state and what the industry wants, we disagree on the solution. Since in the US current law exceeds the intent of the clause in the Constitution, it might be time to bring current law back into line with what that intent was. Note that anything with "life of the author" as a limit can be argued to be effectively non-limited violating the "for a limited time" portion of the clause (it's automatically unlimited for the author). Also, the infinite copyrights wanted by industry won't happen because that prevents the movement to the public domain, which is also required by said clause. If we go back to the intent and letter of the Constitution regarding this very specified enumerated ability of Congress and hold the law to be bound by the enabling clause, we would go a long way to addressing a host of complaints regarding copyright. Now if abuse of copyright was also legislated (Happy Birthday and Marvin Gaye's family come to mind as exhibits 1 and 2) for where someone should be held accountable for wrongly trying to profit off of copyrights. Then again, fixing the term length would have addressed both cases negating even the possibility of such nonsensical action.
Publishers don't value work at all. They value only rent. This results in cardinally different business strategy than if advancement of art was actually a goal.
Now your on a "what is art" tear. Let's stick with the issue. Publishers do value work, based off of profit they can earn. There are artists that value their work based off of the profit they can earn. Others value their art purely for itself. Many artists are somewhere in between, creating more art because they can earn something in return. Are you going to argue that only those that value art purely for itself are "true" artists?
And all girls are princesses and all boys are prince charmings, just waiting for twain to meet.
What a silly irrelevant non-sequitur.
Which is what I thought of your statement about people willing to pay for something they'd get for free. I suppose restaurants should hand out free food too, because people will pay them?
It dampens your argument even more. If it's free on airwaves then why not let people do whatever they wish with it as long as they use only own resources, such as peer-to-peer networks?
It does not. The creators or current copyright holders get paid for broadcast rights.
Wow, just wow. Tell me, in your world, what's the difference in taking work from someone and freely distributing it and slavery? Or just down-right forcing them to create? Because your world view is a lot closer to what you're attempting to malign the current system with.
Comparing copyright to slavery doesn't serve to malign it. But merely to show that both involve over broad generalization of notion of property. Slavery is not inherently malign. In fact ancient Greeks would vehemently disagree that it's bad institution. But later it was shown to be counter-productive due to above needless overgeneralization leading to abuses and was abolished. Copyright is on same path.
There is a simple test to prove you wrong: would the ancient Greeks trade places with their slaves?
I'd still say you lack rational thought regarding copyright. In fact, your arguments support copyright more than you realize. Take Kickstarter and Patreon for example. The most successful creative projects there are largely based on copyright's protections.
How come they're based? People who actually care about this stuff only "buy" it to explicitly support creators, the rest pirate it. Exactly same situation would result if copyright were abolished.
They're based on copyright due to how those projects/creators became known/supported in the first place. That you lack the ability to see a plainly stated truth is pretty exceptional.
None of those proposals have a remote chance of being accepted unless abolition is a seriously considered alternative. Copyright lobby is on strictly pro-rent position and they have no reason to budge otherwise. In fact I even made my own proposal, just for the lulz: Work automatically goes public domain after tax filings show that it paid off its creation + 30% profit. This ensures that work that paid for itself already goes into public domain and thus there exists less onerous restrictions on important works and less overpaying for work that has already been done decades ago.
And you thought mine wouldn't work? Why don't you add in that no project would lose more than 1% while you're at it? If you're living in a dream world, you might as well reach for your idealistic stars. At least what I proposed has a basis in law and history being that just about everything has been in law in the past, at least before Disney et al got their fingers into the pie. The only thing I'm sure of is that copyright will be changed.
So you're fine with producing work and others copying it and selling it? So you're ok working for free? Those are the questions you must answer in the affirmative, or you're actually for copyright.
Abolishing copyright doesn't lead to work for free. Nonetheless much of creative work is already done based on non-monetary incentives. And most authors already work on strictly work-for-hire basis, with publishers serving as patrons.
Let's assume that's true for the moment. Why do you suppose that is? Because publishers value the work themselves and wish to spend their money supporting the arts? Or, is it because publishers have a business model wherein they support n creative sources hoping to have a net positive cash flow? And they're successful enough that they wish to grow? And no, I don't like the situation that puts authors in, but facts are facts, and many creators can't afford to do what they do full time on their own.
People are willing to pay for works of art even if access isn't restricted, either as pure donation or to services making access more convenient.
And all girls are princesses and all boys are prince charmings, just waiting for twain to meet.
And so called "piracy" is the only way of bringing some art stuff to people who can't afford it.
Since most music and movies (the 2 most commonly pirated things) make it to airwaves or broadcast/cable TV, your argument falls flat on its face. Piracy is not needed to receive art stuff, only patience is. What piracy accomplishes is that people see/hear what they want when they want, which are what you get when you pay for something. Some will equate piracy with borrowing from the library or renting from a service. It's not.
Copyright was actually a step away from medieval/religious controls.
In "one step forward two steps backwards" sort of way. Copyright is as wrongheaded as slavery. Tracking ownership of intellectual monopolies is about as useless as tracking ownership of people. It shouldn't exist, justification is irrelevant. Whether it's religious control or maintaining monopolies.
Wow, just wow. Tell me, in your world, what's the difference in taking work from someone and freely distributing it and slavery? Or just down-right forcing them to create? Because your world view is a lot closer to what you're attempting to malign the current system with.
I'd claim that what you're saying lacks rational thought.
In making a work of art the only incentive that works is the process of making it. There must be some logistical allowances in people to cooperate for large scale projects, but they don't require handing out inheritable rents. In fact it only hinders art. If decisions are made by rentier and VCs then only risk-reduced remakes of existing works will be made, no new grounds conquered. Kickstarter and patreon do work for amassing funding, and there you actually pay for the work to be made, not for easing of some restriction. Also, remember, you don't need works of arts for survival or production. So basically involving the state here with heavy handed institution of copyright contradicts Government's raison d'etre. Especially considering that in practice copyright only benefits only the most powerful and vocal artists and companies, and they are the only ones who don't need any help to succeed. They only need copyright to control new entrants so they could safely become lazy without risk of losing their power. This contradicts interests of society.
I'd still say you lack rational thought regarding copyright. In fact, your arguments support copyright more than you realize. Take Kickstarter and Patreon for example. The most successful creative projects there are largely based on copyright's protections. People that have succeeded before and have copyrighted material
It's even worse: indoor plumbing and electricity are both relatively recent additions and relatives I knew well added one or both to their houses when they became available, in first world countries no less. I shudder to think what things smelled like at the beginning of the 20th century.
And I still maintain it's insanely stupid for these "young" people to have their heads that far up their own arses that they are completely ignorant of how even their own parents lived a mere 30 years ago. Perhaps a year in a rustic Appalachian "resort" would reset their world view a touch.
My base assumptions are that there is no logical justification for existence of copyright.
So you're fine with producing work and others copying it and selling it? So you're ok working for free? Those are the questions you must answer in the affirmative, or you're actually for copyright. And if you do, since you value your work so little, I have some that needs doing.
The only way such situation can exists is because it was actually rebranding of medieval institution of religious control.
Copyright was actually a step away from medieval/religious controls.
I simply don't believe that there is a reason for copyright to exist and to have a reasonable discussion we need to come from this point....If you want to build things in rational way you can't have hidden base assumptions like "copyright exists to protect authors" or "restrictions on distribution are connected to author's rights" or that "infinite rent from owning copyrights should exist". Those things need to be proven and they weren't. In fact the way things are going are showing those things are not true.
I'd claim that what you're saying lacks rational thought. What incentive is there for someone to pour a year's worth of thought into a work? Or how about several hundred or thousand people, such as occurs with movies? Or are you claiming that youtube videos are where we should head? How I hope not. I prefer well-written books that come out more than once a decade (pre 1900 novels were slow and few between) or a few movies a year. And no, I won't switch to youtube, twitch, nor anything similar. What you're advocating for is unrestricted copying and distribution meaning that the value of anything that can be digitized would effectively be 0. Of course you could be preferring live theater and performances, which would still be recorded and streamed, since in your world there's no restrictions on such actions.
This is incorrect. If interests of authors mattered then it would be impossible to transfer copyright, or at least it would be limited.
Why do you think so? So I'm going to give you a right, but you can't use it nor profit from it?
Protecting interests of authors don't imply restrictions on redistribution, as well as ability to transfer it.
You'll have to provide some reasoning backing that one. If, once a single copy is distributed, anyone can redistribute at will....
In practice you are forced to transfer rights and it becomes strictly work for hire, so only publishers actually get to enjoy rent.
I guess that's why the Prince catalogue isn't worth anything, Paul doesn't have a hope of regaining control of the Beatles catalog that he sold back in the 60s. Marvin Gaye's family apparently can't (unjustly) profit from his work.
Even royalties are eliminated by accounting practices known as "hollywood accounting". Basically it strictly creates rent, and even author himself will get sued for distributing it in some way someone doesn't like. I don't think people who originally drafted copyright laws were unaware of such consequences. To them it was not a bug but a feature, because it made access to culture and knowledge restricted to chosen few and allowed very few most popular authors to work less while earning more.
You have some other issues to answer before we even go down to this level, IMHO your base assumptions are incorrect and/or unsupported. Until that's addressed, everything else is a useless diversion.
What it means is that your understanding of copyright is sorely lacking. Copyright was a concept really first enumerated in the Statute of Anne in 1710. Everything prior to that you are referring to was nothing more than government censoring and control of business, no more and no less than governmental control of who made castles or tended to the royal horses or who got to "control" various parcels of "royal" lands (everything belonged to the monarchy in many countries)
Copyright as formed by the Statute of Anne took the rights to a work away from publishers and placed it in the hands of creators (solely books in England in 1710, the US copyright clause in 1789 copied the Statute of Anne almost verbatim and incorporated maps and charts in addition to books) You can argue the "evil" of this however you'd like, but unless you are for forced labor your arguments will fail by simple rational logic. Just remember that just about anything created and viewed once can easily and very cheaply be copied these days.
Good grief what an insanely stupid question. PC or Mac? Try going further back a little like Atari/Commodores. Phones (with neighbors) 1 TV in the house (shocking, I know!!!) hell, even just 1 radio!!! (You know, the thing you have to listen to?) There's a whole host of other things that were shared in the past that aren't as often now (bathrooms, bedrooms, even beds)
Copyright is first and foremost monopoly and censorship institution. Calling it anything else would be misrepresentation. Promoting arts and sciences doesn't logically lead to restrictions on exchange of information while censorship and rent-seeking does.
Great - I still need you to write some things for me. Since you value it at $0 after you write it, why would you value it higher before you write it? After all, information wants to be free, and you have it and I want it and according to you, I should have it. Thanks!
Once again making a book is totally different kind of labor than writing prose for it. There was no connection there until that idea that some publishers should have monopoly to make books with particular content. Monopoly remains a monopoly, no matter the justification. And effort to write a book isn't proportional to number of readers either. Publishers acknowledge it by paying peanuts to most authors.
And once again, you misrepresent what copyright is. The publisher doesn't have any rights unless the author (creator) grants them some. Self-publishing is a thing, and more authors should maybe go that route.
There is no economic mechanism to ensure that compensation is adequate to effort. The app that is used by tens of people isn't necessarily takes 10000 more effort than app used by 100000 of people. As long as this disconnect exists people will always be leery to "buy" apps. From economic perspective sales of "wares" that take no effort or materials, like restriction removals, is almost as bad as unlicensed money printing machines.
So, it takes little effort to print 10,000 copies of Harry Potter as compared to 1000 copies. So should the next 9000 copies cost nothing? Or, as is more likely, will it merely continue to make more money as they print 100,000 copies? 10,000,000? Are you going to whine and bitch about that as well?
You simply don't get that you have no inherent right to another's labor. Someone wrote it. They own it. They're willing to give you a copy for $10, or allow you to use a copy for $8. The issue I have with subscriptions is that the difference is never great enough to make me want to pay for a subscription instead of buying outright. Even Photoshop - purchasing outright is the better option. It's why I no longer use any Adobe products and have found alternatives.
And to your last point - all redistribution requires effort no matter how minimal. That you value your effort at $0 is your business. In fact, I require some services written, I like your price. You have the job.
Interestingly enough, WordPerfect 5.1 still runs perfectly fine and is usable today. So is Word 95. On their respective OSes, and even some later ones. They still allow one to create a letter or other document and print them out. So I'd say they're still perfectly usable, as well as a host of other software. Now, their integration with other, especially newer software might be questionable or non-existent, but that doesn't make the software less suited for purpose than it was when it was created.
Sounds like you were supporting the clients. LN client sucked ass all day long. The server side of things was infinitely easier and more powerful than the MS crap. Yes, I did both way back in the day. I could tell you things about Exchange that would truly shock you. I actually wonder if they fixed some of those underlying security holes.
I'll third this. I looked at what it would take for a client to replicate a $200K project onto Sharepoint, because they had Sharepoint in house. Well, a quick synopsis of just the yearly CAL costs was enough to kill that thought process, not to mention the 7 figures in development costs because everything would require customization to fit into the Sharepoint way of doing things.
Slashdot Mirror
No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
50? I'm envious. The last 7 years of interviewing hundreds of candidates uncovers about 1 in 50 that actually understand data structures and algorithms, much less know anything deeper about how computers and memory work or how the language chosen can affect your performance and choice of algorithms/data structures to use.
I prefer it over IM, as that it leaves more of a "paper trail" than I find that IM can do as readily.....and this comes in handy for CYA in a BIG way.
This, and only this, is why email is preferred over every other communication method.
Maybe 3 min - this posting took 10s.
The words are there, but the enforcement is unequal.
Step 1 cannot work.
Sure it can, add or replace it with "or must put up a $100 fee to be forfeited to the accused party should your notice be found to be incorrect" Now you have to put money into each request, nuisance mass automated takedown notices instantly solved since they now can be a source of income
It depends, was it a smart cheater that knew the trade-offs, or were they just very lucky that they avoided being caught on day 1?
They could potentially fix it, but I'm not sure what the cost of "flush the caches after every context switch" would do to the performance? Knock it down to 50%? Worse? I just can't imagine what a multi-core server with multiple threads would have occur. A CPU on its figurative knees being outpaced by a single core/threaded chip from the 2000s is floating into focus...
I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either .NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.
Well, your first problem is you're running Spring and Angular/React. Both of the latter are highly volatile toys of the moment (or at least were two years ago, I know, I know, ancient in web time but my current projects were all started prior to that) and Spring is COBOL for java apps. There are 1 or 2 useful things in Spring, but you need to be careful how you use it and quarantine it in your development.
* The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.
I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.
You know why Rails sucks and you can't find anyone in the corporate environment to run it? You can start with performance, security and maintainability over time. Corporate environments, at least the ones I work for, run upwards of thousands of transactions a second with millions upon millions of rows of data, hence the long project timelines, you don't turn the titanic in a couple of minutes. Those kinds of project timelines also attracts the interests of coders because of the relative job security. So you get lots of people interested in Java, and very few interested in the gee-whiz Rails thrown together in a week by 1 or 2 people project. Don't get me wrong, Rails has a place in the world - primarily quick POCs for basic workflows. But anything large-scale with reasonable throughput? Not a chance, and I'd double down on that since security will be a concern in any system I work with.
I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia.
How about idiocracy? The same effects make PHP popular, and keeps Perl around long past its expiry date. Not to mention Visual Basic, thankfully nearly dead now, but after causing how much damage?
Well, you can look at it as all those PHP, Perl, and VB projects as being potential clients for you to upgrade at some point in the future when they creak and fail or become unmaintainable for various reasons such as cost, stability issues, or merely time to get new features out to market.
So, you admit you don't use or understand JavaScript.
My guess is he's using TypeScript or a similar bastardized mauling of JS.
I feel that we're going in cycles due to you ignoring some points I made. I merely object to paying money for lifting restrictions which take no effort by itself and their market value is thus 0$. I object to inheritable rents which merely serve to make another worthless social stratum of aristocrats. I do not object for artists being paid for work they actually do. Nothing less and nothing more.
Granted on the cycles, the cause is a different issue that would generate another cycle. I hold that without copyright artists can easily be ripped off by others and lose control of their works. I believe we largely agree that the length of term of the current law is objectionable as are the terms for transfer, inheritable or otherwise. We disagree on the solution.
You absolutely failed to establish that there is any connection between inheritable rents and state censorship copyright requires and letting authors getting paid. You didn't even try to.
I'm guessing because that wasn't my position nor intent? To be clear, my intent was to show the holes in your position of "no copyright".
Copyright lobbies never were hiding that they actually want infinite copyright, which is in stark contrast to original deal: they get temporary monopoly in exchange for strong public domain. So pretty much everyone is in breach: publishers made it defacto infinite while rest of people don't consider infringing copyrights to be something unusual. The only solution is to legalize status quo: people pay on strictly donation basis, you don't even pretend that people buy something because it just leads to more conflicts and societal tension because both sides have violated their part of this deal for almost a century.
While we agree on the current state and what the industry wants, we disagree on the solution. Since in the US current law exceeds the intent of the clause in the Constitution, it might be time to bring current law back into line with what that intent was. Note that anything with "life of the author" as a limit can be argued to be effectively non-limited violating the "for a limited time" portion of the clause (it's automatically unlimited for the author). Also, the infinite copyrights wanted by industry won't happen because that prevents the movement to the public domain, which is also required by said clause. If we go back to the intent and letter of the Constitution regarding this very specified enumerated ability of Congress and hold the law to be bound by the enabling clause, we would go a long way to addressing a host of complaints regarding copyright. Now if abuse of copyright was also legislated (Happy Birthday and Marvin Gaye's family come to mind as exhibits 1 and 2) for where someone should be held accountable for wrongly trying to profit off of copyrights. Then again, fixing the term length would have addressed both cases negating even the possibility of such nonsensical action.
Publishers don't value work at all. They value only rent. This results in cardinally different business strategy than if advancement of art was actually a goal.
Now your on a "what is art" tear. Let's stick with the issue. Publishers do value work, based off of profit they can earn. There are artists that value their work based off of the profit they can earn. Others value their art purely for itself. Many artists are somewhere in between, creating more art because they can earn something in return. Are you going to argue that only those that value art purely for itself are "true" artists?
And all girls are princesses and all boys are prince charmings, just waiting for twain to meet.
What a silly irrelevant non-sequitur.
Which is what I thought of your statement about people willing to pay for something they'd get for free. I suppose restaurants should hand out free food too, because people will pay them?
It dampens your argument even more. If it's free on airwaves then why not let people do whatever they wish with it as long as they use only own resources, such as peer-to-peer networks?
It does not. The creators or current copyright holders get paid for broadcast rights.
Wow, just wow. Tell me, in your world, what's the difference in taking work from someone and freely distributing it and slavery? Or just down-right forcing them to create? Because your world view is a lot closer to what you're attempting to malign the current system with.
Comparing copyright to slavery doesn't serve to malign it. But merely to show that both involve over broad generalization of notion of property. Slavery is not inherently malign. In fact ancient Greeks would vehemently disagree that it's bad institution. But later it was shown to be counter-productive due to above needless overgeneralization leading to abuses and was abolished. Copyright is on same path.
There is a simple test to prove you wrong: would the ancient Greeks trade places with their slaves?
I'd still say you lack rational thought regarding copyright. In fact, your arguments support copyright more than you realize. Take Kickstarter and Patreon for example. The most successful creative projects there are largely based on copyright's protections.
How come they're based? People who actually care about this stuff only "buy" it to explicitly support creators, the rest pirate it. Exactly same situation would result if copyright were abolished.
They're based on copyright due to how those projects/creators became known/supported in the first place. That you lack the ability to see a plainly stated truth is pretty exceptional.
None of those proposals have a remote chance of being accepted unless abolition is a seriously considered alternative. Copyright lobby is on strictly pro-rent position and they have no reason to budge otherwise. In fact I even made my own proposal, just for the lulz: Work automatically goes public domain after tax filings show that it paid off its creation + 30% profit. This ensures that work that paid for itself already goes into public domain and thus there exists less onerous restrictions on important works and less overpaying for work that has already been done decades ago.
And you thought mine wouldn't work? Why don't you add in that no project would lose more than 1% while you're at it? If you're living in a dream world, you might as well reach for your idealistic stars. At least what I proposed has a basis in law and history being that just about everything has been in law in the past, at least before Disney et al got their fingers into the pie. The only thing I'm sure of is that copyright will be changed.
So you're fine with producing work and others copying it and selling it? So you're ok working for free? Those are the questions you must answer in the affirmative, or you're actually for copyright.
Abolishing copyright doesn't lead to work for free. Nonetheless much of creative work is already done based on non-monetary incentives. And most authors already work on strictly work-for-hire basis, with publishers serving as patrons.
Let's assume that's true for the moment. Why do you suppose that is? Because publishers value the work themselves and wish to spend their money supporting the arts? Or, is it because publishers have a business model wherein they support n creative sources hoping to have a net positive cash flow? And they're successful enough that they wish to grow? And no, I don't like the situation that puts authors in, but facts are facts, and many creators can't afford to do what they do full time on their own.
People are willing to pay for works of art even if access isn't restricted, either as pure donation or to services making access more convenient.
And all girls are princesses and all boys are prince charmings, just waiting for twain to meet.
And so called "piracy" is the only way of bringing some art stuff to people who can't afford it.
Since most music and movies (the 2 most commonly pirated things) make it to airwaves or broadcast/cable TV, your argument falls flat on its face. Piracy is not needed to receive art stuff, only patience is. What piracy accomplishes is that people see/hear what they want when they want, which are what you get when you pay for something. Some will equate piracy with borrowing from the library or renting from a service. It's not.
Copyright was actually a step away from medieval/religious controls.
In "one step forward two steps backwards" sort of way. Copyright is as wrongheaded as slavery. Tracking ownership of intellectual monopolies is about as useless as tracking ownership of people. It shouldn't exist, justification is irrelevant. Whether it's religious control or maintaining monopolies.
Wow, just wow. Tell me, in your world, what's the difference in taking work from someone and freely distributing it and slavery? Or just down-right forcing them to create? Because your world view is a lot closer to what you're attempting to malign the current system with.
I'd claim that what you're saying lacks rational thought.
In making a work of art the only incentive that works is the process of making it. There must be some logistical allowances in people to cooperate for large scale projects, but they don't require handing out inheritable rents. In fact it only hinders art. If decisions are made by rentier and VCs then only risk-reduced remakes of existing works will be made, no new grounds conquered. Kickstarter and patreon do work for amassing funding, and there you actually pay for the work to be made, not for easing of some restriction. Also, remember, you don't need works of arts for survival or production. So basically involving the state here with heavy handed institution of copyright contradicts Government's raison d'etre. Especially considering that in practice copyright only benefits only the most powerful and vocal artists and companies, and they are the only ones who don't need any help to succeed. They only need copyright to control new entrants so they could safely become lazy without risk of losing their power. This contradicts interests of society.
I'd still say you lack rational thought regarding copyright. In fact, your arguments support copyright more than you realize. Take Kickstarter and Patreon for example. The most successful creative projects there are largely based on copyright's protections. People that have succeeded before and have copyrighted material
It's even worse: indoor plumbing and electricity are both relatively recent additions and relatives I knew well added one or both to their houses when they became available, in first world countries no less. I shudder to think what things smelled like at the beginning of the 20th century.
And I still maintain it's insanely stupid for these "young" people to have their heads that far up their own arses that they are completely ignorant of how even their own parents lived a mere 30 years ago. Perhaps a year in a rustic Appalachian "resort" would reset their world view a touch.
My base assumptions are that there is no logical justification for existence of copyright.
So you're fine with producing work and others copying it and selling it? So you're ok working for free? Those are the questions you must answer in the affirmative, or you're actually for copyright. And if you do, since you value your work so little, I have some that needs doing.
The only way such situation can exists is because it was actually rebranding of medieval institution of religious control.
Copyright was actually a step away from medieval/religious controls.
I simply don't believe that there is a reason for copyright to exist and to have a reasonable discussion we need to come from this point. ...If you want to build things in rational way you can't have hidden base assumptions like "copyright exists to protect authors" or "restrictions on distribution are connected to author's rights" or that "infinite rent from owning copyrights should exist". Those things need to be proven and they weren't. In fact the way things are going are showing those things are not true.
I'd claim that what you're saying lacks rational thought. What incentive is there for someone to pour a year's worth of thought into a work? Or how about several hundred or thousand people, such as occurs with movies? Or are you claiming that youtube videos are where we should head? How I hope not. I prefer well-written books that come out more than once a decade (pre 1900 novels were slow and few between) or a few movies a year. And no, I won't switch to youtube, twitch, nor anything similar. What you're advocating for is unrestricted copying and distribution meaning that the value of anything that can be digitized would effectively be 0. Of course you could be preferring live theater and performances, which would still be recorded and streamed, since in your world there's no restrictions on such actions.
This is incorrect. If interests of authors mattered then it would be impossible to transfer copyright, or at least it would be limited.
Why do you think so? So I'm going to give you a right, but you can't use it nor profit from it?
Protecting interests of authors don't imply restrictions on redistribution, as well as ability to transfer it.
You'll have to provide some reasoning backing that one. If, once a single copy is distributed, anyone can redistribute at will....
In practice you are forced to transfer rights and it becomes strictly work for hire, so only publishers actually get to enjoy rent.
I guess that's why the Prince catalogue isn't worth anything, Paul doesn't have a hope of regaining control of the Beatles catalog that he sold back in the 60s. Marvin Gaye's family apparently can't (unjustly) profit from his work.
Even royalties are eliminated by accounting practices known as "hollywood accounting". Basically it strictly creates rent, and even author himself will get sued for distributing it in some way someone doesn't like. I don't think people who originally drafted copyright laws were unaware of such consequences. To them it was not a bug but a feature, because it made access to culture and knowledge restricted to chosen few and allowed very few most popular authors to work less while earning more.
You have some other issues to answer before we even go down to this level, IMHO your base assumptions are incorrect and/or unsupported. Until that's addressed, everything else is a useless diversion.
What it means is that your understanding of copyright is sorely lacking. Copyright was a concept really first enumerated in the Statute of Anne in 1710. Everything prior to that you are referring to was nothing more than government censoring and control of business, no more and no less than governmental control of who made castles or tended to the royal horses or who got to "control" various parcels of "royal" lands (everything belonged to the monarchy in many countries)
Copyright as formed by the Statute of Anne took the rights to a work away from publishers and placed it in the hands of creators (solely books in England in 1710, the US copyright clause in 1789 copied the Statute of Anne almost verbatim and incorporated maps and charts in addition to books) You can argue the "evil" of this however you'd like, but unless you are for forced labor your arguments will fail by simple rational logic. Just remember that just about anything created and viewed once can easily and very cheaply be copied these days.
Good grief what an insanely stupid question. PC or Mac? Try going further back a little like Atari/Commodores. Phones (with neighbors) 1 TV in the house (shocking, I know!!!) hell, even just 1 radio!!! (You know, the thing you have to listen to?) There's a whole host of other things that were shared in the past that aren't as often now (bathrooms, bedrooms, even beds)
Copyright is first and foremost monopoly and censorship institution. Calling it anything else would be misrepresentation. Promoting arts and sciences doesn't logically lead to restrictions on exchange of information while censorship and rent-seeking does.
Great - I still need you to write some things for me. Since you value it at $0 after you write it, why would you value it higher before you write it? After all, information wants to be free, and you have it and I want it and according to you, I should have it. Thanks!
Once again making a book is totally different kind of labor than writing prose for it. There was no connection there until that idea that some publishers should have monopoly to make books with particular content. Monopoly remains a monopoly, no matter the justification. And effort to write a book isn't proportional to number of readers either. Publishers acknowledge it by paying peanuts to most authors.
And once again, you misrepresent what copyright is. The publisher doesn't have any rights unless the author (creator) grants them some. Self-publishing is a thing, and more authors should maybe go that route.
Oh wait, no it seems that they want their 30% cut of that too.
IIRC, recurring subscriptions are facilitated at a much lower rate.
There is no economic mechanism to ensure that compensation is adequate to effort. The app that is used by tens of people isn't necessarily takes 10000 more effort than app used by 100000 of people. As long as this disconnect exists people will always be leery to "buy" apps. From economic perspective sales of "wares" that take no effort or materials, like restriction removals, is almost as bad as unlicensed money printing machines.
So, it takes little effort to print 10,000 copies of Harry Potter as compared to 1000 copies. So should the next 9000 copies cost nothing? Or, as is more likely, will it merely continue to make more money as they print 100,000 copies? 10,000,000? Are you going to whine and bitch about that as well?
You simply don't get that you have no inherent right to another's labor. Someone wrote it. They own it. They're willing to give you a copy for $10, or allow you to use a copy for $8. The issue I have with subscriptions is that the difference is never great enough to make me want to pay for a subscription instead of buying outright. Even Photoshop - purchasing outright is the better option. It's why I no longer use any Adobe products and have found alternatives.
And to your last point - all redistribution requires effort no matter how minimal. That you value your effort at $0 is your business. In fact, I require some services written, I like your price. You have the job.
Interestingly enough, WordPerfect 5.1 still runs perfectly fine and is usable today. So is Word 95. On their respective OSes, and even some later ones. They still allow one to create a letter or other document and print them out. So I'd say they're still perfectly usable, as well as a host of other software. Now, their integration with other, especially newer software might be questionable or non-existent, but that doesn't make the software less suited for purpose than it was when it was created.
Sounds like you were supporting the clients. LN client sucked ass all day long. The server side of things was infinitely easier and more powerful than the MS crap. Yes, I did both way back in the day. I could tell you things about Exchange that would truly shock you. I actually wonder if they fixed some of those underlying security holes.
I'll third this. I looked at what it would take for a client to replicate a $200K project onto Sharepoint, because they had Sharepoint in house. Well, a quick synopsis of just the yearly CAL costs was enough to kill that thought process, not to mention the 7 figures in development costs because everything would require customization to fit into the Sharepoint way of doing things.