I have an idea. How about instead of punishing spammers with 5 years in prison, if this new bill passes, the government just sends them a bunch of death threats?
I wonder if this ever happens with telemarketers? I guess not anymore now that its illegal.
What happens when the well runs dry because they were using more than they needed? Or, what happens when competing technologies (wireless maybe?) never come about it the next 50 years because the government artificially priced the market and competitors are forced to take a much greater loss than they could afford?
Just what I want, a government monopoly on the internet. Forget that before I had an option between two broadband isps, both with weakpoints, and a cheaper dial-up. Now I'm on the government's terms of service without zero options.
Don't be misled and believe that the government just builds stuff for free either. The resources are now being misdirected from something consumers didn't demand (voters demanded it, but they themselves didn't have enough money to foot the bill.)
Last I checked no one was dieing because of lack of an ultra-fast internet connection. Educational value? Sure, but the people who are going to get the most out of it are going to go the extra length to get connected. If your really poor, dial-up is more than enough. I lived on dial-up for a decade and I suspect broadband would just have meant I spent more time playing games rather than reading things such as slashdot.
But who decided that? The businesses. Who speaks up for the consumer of water? The government, which they own.
Last I checked, it was businesses and special interest groups that owned the government.
Not exactly. I wouldn't go as far as making a blanket statement like that. Everyone works for any number of personal reasons, whether money or otherwise. What I am saying is that without money the artist is more working for his or herself rather than producing content that others demand. Even this isn't a very clear example as I'm sure the majority of artists work reflects their own enjoyment. It could even be argued that some artists would produce best without having to worry about money, and that an arguement I'm not going to try arguing against.
I think it would be extremely hard to conduct any types of studies and then attempt to apply them to society as a whole. Some things work for some people, other things would be a disaster. Obviously we have laws against murder and rape, but very few people not only in society but history seriously question these. Perhaps simply relaxing existing laws might give everyone a more comfortable future.
What I do know is that we have too many laws reguarding copyright and IP today and those that we do have serve the interests of a few. Over the next decade or so conflicts between the DMCA and fair are going to make life quite hard for certain people. The current legal situation practically makes everyone a criminal, and thats where the real problem with copyright lays. This opens a hole allowing lawyers to engage in legal terrorism against people who are otherwise doing everything right. This is what SCO and certain other companies are doing right now with their so called patents.
I think that the best thing to do might be create several different groups, each trying their own thing. And yes even a group of artists that does accept vouchers. I think on a much smaller scale this could indeed work, but to throw every artist out there into it would be a mistake.
I'm wondering how pro athletes can manage to make so much money and at the same time taxpayers of major cities are more than eager to fork over their own money as well as their neighbors to have a stadium built for a team that quite blunty sucks, and then still have no problem paying $10 for a beer once it opens.
Great, now your trying to make me argue against a completely free market:)
The problem is it disconnects the market value from the person who originally created the intellectual property. Because this person can not value their work because some one else is depraving them of numbers coming in, they can not judge whether or not they should continue doing what they did in the past.
This does not mean, however, that intellectual property rights should be permanant. They should be limited to ensure that after a set period of time, in which an IP owner may abandon that IP, others can then move in and capitalize on that work.
They are making money off whatever they are doing. If they aren't then they aren't going to be doing it for long. Why would I invest say $100k in a company with no return if I could throw it in something as simple as a bank account and actually get a return off of it. Unspectacular or not, they are doing so in hopes that they will at sometime be able to make an above average return some day. Maybe printing public domain books for a few years is all a start-up printer has the capital to do.
With all this talk about the worst jobs in science, how about the best? I'm thinking along the lines of a whale at Sea World! He doesn't even have to think about wacking off, instead some woman commands him that she must now wack him off, and on top of it he gets free food after blowing a load!
Too much money? Maybe, but thats because people went and saw their movies, or bought their albums.
No new ideas? I could argue with you there. Maybe theres not alot, but I wouldn't go as far as saying none. As far as marketing, don't forget who the movie is for. Its not for the hardcore film buff, its for the people who actually go see them. If I do something and people like it, I'm going to do it again. Eventually they'll get bored, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to do something absolutely completely different. When you are talking of hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe risking it all is worth it once and a while. If you had 100 million how much risk would you take to turn it into a billion?
The same way CDs sold when Napster was around. Not everyone has the knowledge, ablity, or resources to obtain things that are free somewhere in the world. Granted it would be hard for Microsoft to sell software. I'd venture to guess there'd be 50 startups trying to copy and box the software as cheap as possbile, and 50,000 websites offering for download.
Laws against plagiarism do not depend on copyright law, so this is statement is nonsense. (The kid cannot turn in work by Leonardo Da Vinci and claim to be the painter even though that work has no copyright.)
I just answered this in another thread, one up I think.
I tend to agree, but this proposal is not that bad compared to most "compensation via government" schemes.
I agree with you there
Perhaps not having any more high budget movies isn't that great a price to pay for not getting stuck in an unsustainable and unfree society.
Pyramids may be cool to us, but at the time they weren't cool to the people who built them. More or less they were built for one person. As far as I can tell movies are pretty cool for the people who make them. They must be cool for most of the people who shell out $7+ to go watch them (I'm not sure why they would otherwise, short of some trailer that didn't quite show the movie in its true light.) Either way people do go see movies time and time again and have been for decades so they can't be all that bad. As for society being unsustainable if technology stops progressing at the rate it has for the last 100 years, yes. Unfree? I'm not sure we are there yet but I would agree with someone who said we were getting close.
Not to mention that there are people out there who buy one painting in their lifetime, and theres others who buy one hundred. Spreading this out through society as a whole like butter on bread creates gross distortions. As you said measuring the value of art is hard to do (I'll take that a step further, measuring the value of anything is *extraordinarily* hard to do without a free market.) If John-who-just-dropped-out-of-art-school gets paid as much as Boris Vallejo, everyone working at McDonalds is suddenly going to want to be John-who-just-dropped-out-of-art-school, and Boris might just consider a new career in teaching art rather than producing work for the enjoyment of his fans. Sure there are people who do work for "the love of it" as many open source programmers here can relate, but when push comes to shove money plays quite an important factor (which isn't a bad thing either because the world may need a million farmers not a million Bill Clintons.)
Let me refine that arguement with a specific example. There was a website that published original articles about sea survival as well as some other general survival topics. Well aparently some other company ripped the content, slapped it together, and put it in some book that ended up in grocery stores. If there was no copyright, whichever company that spent the most on marketing or had the greatest distribution would profit the most from original work.
Just because an item has no copyright and is available for free doesn't mean its not profitable. I can get any number of public domain works from Project Gutenburg but I if I really want to read them I don't. Its those companies that print the public domain material that are getting the profit from it. Even if there are vouchers someone is still going to be selling CDs, books, music, etc. (at a much cheaper price of course)
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean I think public domain is bad. What it means is that I think that there should be a reasonable limit (20 years sounds good to me) were the creator of a copyrighted work is entitled for commercial profits from something he created. Of course the defination of commercial profits opens up another whole can of worms. Copyright reform is by no means an easy subject to tackle.
"In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years)"
Though I am a strong advoate of copyright/patent reform myself, that does not mean copyright is useless. Without copyright Microsoft could take GPL'ed code, slap it in their software and sell it. Without copyright I, as a painter, could post images on a message board and some 15 year old could rip it off and win some art contest with it (ok, so this has happened anyways.) The point is, abolishing copyright altogether is going to solve very few problems. Copyright needs to be a tool for society as a whole.
Vouchers? I'm not sure if I can use any adjectives to describe this without a lot of %&#@! To put it bluntly this idea is just dumb. If I want to be a n artist I shouldn't have to register with the government to get re-imbersed. "Sorry Mr. John Doe, but your song 'Fuck Bush' disqualify's you from recieving vouchers." Hell, forget censorship, perhaps the makers of GTA3 will just be ineligable for vouchers.
$40k a year? Music, ok, but movies? With budgets in the hundreds of millions whose going to be getting all that capital? What a mess.
Lets take a step away rather than a step toward becoming more dependant on government.
Well first off, if you happen to browse your library's collection of Photography books, they might as well carry Playboy.
There is a big difference between a library proactively carrying an item, and allowing public internet access in which the users intentionally seeks out information. Thus your analogy is not a very good one.
None the less, as always happens when great change occurs, there are people who oppose it. Filtering the internet does not fix anything. It blocks out perfectly good content, in Symantec's case essentially acts as a censor of non-explicit *free* speech, and at the same time is imperfect and lets the stuff you really want to block seep through the cracks.
I have found that people who support filters simply don't understand the issue. The issue isn't that kids shouldn't be able to head over to their local library and download hardcore pornography. #1 no they shouldn't be able to and #2 they probably can do it at a friend's house if they really want to. The issue here is censorship and usurping free speech. I don't see the librarians going through books and blacking out text about as liberarly as the DoJ when they declassify documents. Lets not retard technology and serious change for the sake of feeling good.
Thats right, things won't change until companies take a look at the bottom line and say, "hey, were spending x thousands of dollars on Office, we will probably have to continue paying for upgrades just as we have for the last 5 years, and at the same time we could be using comparable software for nothing." It will happen, just give it time. At bare minimum its going to seriously squeeze Microsoft. On the other hand, those of us who aren't paying for microsofts two money makers are getting deals on just about everything else they make and sell unprofitably (unless of course you work(ed) at a company who tried competing.)
It still beats getting all your information about patent law from SCO or Acacia.. It really is sad to say that Broadbandreports is probably a more objective source then our own (gasp) attorney general.
The real point should be that theres no way anyone can prevent someone else from hurting themself. I don't care how many billions or trillions of dollars you want to spend preventing people from doing drugs (which at the same time makes drug running *alot* more profitable), but until everyone is locked up in a padded room wearing a straight jacket, its just not going to happen.
Alot of things that money get spent on have more to do with feeling good about something than actually fixing a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I take offense at the bureaucrat who thinks that I'm a slave to do their bidding. Can we pass a law to ban him/her/it/master/slave?
I have an idea. How about instead of punishing spammers with 5 years in prison, if this new bill passes, the government just sends them a bunch of death threats? I wonder if this ever happens with telemarketers? I guess not anymore now that its illegal.
I think this carries about as much weight as two tablets of ex-lax.
What happens when the well runs dry because they were using more than they needed? Or, what happens when competing technologies (wireless maybe?) never come about it the next 50 years because the government artificially priced the market and competitors are forced to take a much greater loss than they could afford?
Just what I want, a government monopoly on the internet. Forget that before I had an option between two broadband isps, both with weakpoints, and a cheaper dial-up. Now I'm on the government's terms of service without zero options.
Don't be misled and believe that the government just builds stuff for free either. The resources are now being misdirected from something consumers didn't demand (voters demanded it, but they themselves didn't have enough money to foot the bill.)
Last I checked no one was dieing because of lack of an ultra-fast internet connection. Educational value? Sure, but the people who are going to get the most out of it are going to go the extra length to get connected. If your really poor, dial-up is more than enough. I lived on dial-up for a decade and I suspect broadband would just have meant I spent more time playing games rather than reading things such as slashdot.
But who decided that? The businesses. Who speaks up for the consumer of water? The government, which they own.
Last I checked, it was businesses and special interest groups that owned the government.
Not exactly. I wouldn't go as far as making a blanket statement like that. Everyone works for any number of personal reasons, whether money or otherwise. What I am saying is that without money the artist is more working for his or herself rather than producing content that others demand. Even this isn't a very clear example as I'm sure the majority of artists work reflects their own enjoyment. It could even be argued that some artists would produce best without having to worry about money, and that an arguement I'm not going to try arguing against.
I think it would be extremely hard to conduct any types of studies and then attempt to apply them to society as a whole. Some things work for some people, other things would be a disaster. Obviously we have laws against murder and rape, but very few people not only in society but history seriously question these. Perhaps simply relaxing existing laws might give everyone a more comfortable future.
What I do know is that we have too many laws reguarding copyright and IP today and those that we do have serve the interests of a few. Over the next decade or so conflicts between the DMCA and fair are going to make life quite hard for certain people. The current legal situation practically makes everyone a criminal, and thats where the real problem with copyright lays. This opens a hole allowing lawyers to engage in legal terrorism against people who are otherwise doing everything right. This is what SCO and certain other companies are doing right now with their so called patents.
I think that the best thing to do might be create several different groups, each trying their own thing. And yes even a group of artists that does accept vouchers. I think on a much smaller scale this could indeed work, but to throw every artist out there into it would be a mistake.
I'm wondering how pro athletes can manage to make so much money and at the same time taxpayers of major cities are more than eager to fork over their own money as well as their neighbors to have a stadium built for a team that quite blunty sucks, and then still have no problem paying $10 for a beer once it opens.
Great, now your trying to make me argue against a completely free market :)
The problem is it disconnects the market value from the person who originally created the intellectual property. Because this person can not value their work because some one else is depraving them of numbers coming in, they can not judge whether or not they should continue doing what they did in the past.
This does not mean, however, that intellectual property rights should be permanant. They should be limited to ensure that after a set period of time, in which an IP owner may abandon that IP, others can then move in and capitalize on that work.
They are making money off whatever they are doing. If they aren't then they aren't going to be doing it for long. Why would I invest say $100k in a company with no return if I could throw it in something as simple as a bank account and actually get a return off of it. Unspectacular or not, they are doing so in hopes that they will at sometime be able to make an above average return some day. Maybe printing public domain books for a few years is all a start-up printer has the capital to do.
With all this talk about the worst jobs in science, how about the best? I'm thinking along the lines of a whale at Sea World! He doesn't even have to think about wacking off, instead some woman commands him that she must now wack him off, and on top of it he gets free food after blowing a load!
Didn't these guys read Snow Crash? This wasn't what the Metaverse was quite supposed to be like.
Too much money? Maybe, but thats because people went and saw their movies, or bought their albums.
No new ideas? I could argue with you there. Maybe theres not alot, but I wouldn't go as far as saying none.
As far as marketing, don't forget who the movie is for. Its not for the hardcore film buff, its for the people who actually go see them. If I do something and people like it, I'm going to do it again. Eventually they'll get bored, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to do something absolutely completely different. When you are talking of hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe risking it all is worth it once and a while. If you had 100 million how much risk would you take to turn it into a billion?
How can they sell it without any copyright?
The same way CDs sold when Napster was around. Not everyone has the knowledge, ablity, or resources to obtain things that are free somewhere in the world. Granted it would be hard for Microsoft to sell software. I'd venture to guess there'd be 50 startups trying to copy and box the software as cheap as possbile, and 50,000 websites offering for download.
Laws against plagiarism do not depend on copyright law, so this is statement is nonsense. (The kid cannot turn in work by Leonardo Da Vinci and claim to be the painter even though that work has no copyright.)
I just answered this in another thread, one up I think.
I tend to agree, but this proposal is not that bad compared to most "compensation via government" schemes.
I agree with you there
Perhaps not having any more high budget movies isn't that great a price to pay for not getting stuck in an unsustainable and unfree society.
Pyramids may be cool to us, but at the time they weren't cool to the people who built them. More or less they were built for one person. As far as I can tell movies are pretty cool for the people who make them. They must be cool for most of the people who shell out $7+ to go watch them (I'm not sure why they would otherwise, short of some trailer that didn't quite show the movie in its true light.) Either way people do go see movies time and time again and have been for decades so they can't be all that bad. As for society being unsustainable if technology stops progressing at the rate it has for the last 100 years, yes. Unfree? I'm not sure we are there yet but I would agree with someone who said we were getting close.
Not to mention that there are people out there who buy one painting in their lifetime, and theres others who buy one hundred. Spreading this out through society as a whole like butter on bread creates gross distortions. As you said measuring the value of art is hard to do (I'll take that a step further, measuring the value of anything is *extraordinarily* hard to do without a free market.) If John-who-just-dropped-out-of-art-school gets paid as much as Boris Vallejo, everyone working at McDonalds is suddenly going to want to be John-who-just-dropped-out-of-art-school, and Boris might just consider a new career in teaching art rather than producing work for the enjoyment of his fans. Sure there are people who do work for "the love of it" as many open source programmers here can relate, but when push comes to shove money plays quite an important factor (which isn't a bad thing either because the world may need a million farmers not a million Bill Clintons.)
Let me refine that arguement with a specific example. There was a website that published original articles about sea survival as well as some other general survival topics. Well aparently some other company ripped the content, slapped it together, and put it in some book that ended up in grocery stores. If there was no copyright, whichever company that spent the most on marketing or had the greatest distribution would profit the most from original work.
Just because an item has no copyright and is available for free doesn't mean its not profitable. I can get any number of public domain works from Project Gutenburg but I if I really want to read them I don't. Its those companies that print the public domain material that are getting the profit from it. Even if there are vouchers someone is still going to be selling CDs, books, music, etc. (at a much cheaper price of course)
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean I think public domain is bad. What it means is that I think that there should be a reasonable limit (20 years sounds good to me) were the creator of a copyrighted work is entitled for commercial profits from something he created. Of course the defination of commercial profits opens up another whole can of worms. Copyright reform is by no means an easy subject to tackle.
The NSA was making a "secure" version of Linux weren't they?
"In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years)"
Though I am a strong advoate of copyright/patent reform myself, that does not mean copyright is useless. Without copyright Microsoft could take GPL'ed code, slap it in their software and sell it. Without copyright I, as a painter, could post images on a message board and some 15 year old could rip it off and win some art contest with it (ok, so this has happened anyways.) The point is, abolishing copyright altogether is going to solve very few problems. Copyright needs to be a tool for society as a whole.
Vouchers? I'm not sure if I can use any adjectives to describe this without a lot of %&#@! To put it bluntly this idea is just dumb. If I want to be a n artist I shouldn't have to register with the government to get re-imbersed. "Sorry Mr. John Doe, but your song 'Fuck Bush' disqualify's you from recieving vouchers." Hell, forget censorship, perhaps the makers of GTA3 will just be ineligable for vouchers.
$40k a year? Music, ok, but movies? With budgets in the hundreds of millions whose going to be getting all that capital? What a mess.
Lets take a step away rather than a step toward becoming more dependant on government.
Well first off, if you happen to browse your library's collection of Photography books, they might as well carry Playboy.
There is a big difference between a library proactively carrying an item, and allowing public internet access in which the users intentionally seeks out information. Thus your analogy is not a very good one.
None the less, as always happens when great change occurs, there are people who oppose it. Filtering the internet does not fix anything. It blocks out perfectly good content, in Symantec's case essentially acts as a censor of non-explicit *free* speech, and at the same time is imperfect and lets the stuff you really want to block seep through the cracks.
I have found that people who support filters simply don't understand the issue. The issue isn't that kids shouldn't be able to head over to their local library and download hardcore pornography. #1 no they shouldn't be able to and #2 they probably can do it at a friend's house if they really want to. The issue here is censorship and usurping free speech. I don't see the librarians going through books and blacking out text about as liberarly as the DoJ when they declassify documents. Lets not retard technology and serious change for the sake of feeling good.
2 Billion? The U.S. government spends that much *in the red* in less than 2 days. Certainly theres money out there for Google!
Thats right, things won't change until companies take a look at the bottom line and say, "hey, were spending x thousands of dollars on Office, we will probably have to continue paying for upgrades just as we have for the last 5 years, and at the same time we could be using comparable software for nothing." It will happen, just give it time. At bare minimum its going to seriously squeeze Microsoft. On the other hand, those of us who aren't paying for microsofts two money makers are getting deals on just about everything else they make and sell unprofitably (unless of course you work(ed) at a company who tried competing.)
After I took exlax and a suppository and I was still constipated, I never thought twice about taking a shit.
I see they got a few of my favoraites in there. Chiefly Pulp Fiction, Godfather, Bladerunner, and Alien/Aliens. Come on, wheres Terminator?
It still beats getting all your information about patent law from SCO or Acacia.. It really is sad to say that Broadbandreports is probably a more objective source then our own (gasp) attorney general.
Ya, and the judge ordered them that the links couldn't be hyperlinked. They were still there, you just had to copy and paste the url to get there.
The real point should be that theres no way anyone can prevent someone else from hurting themself. I don't care how many billions or trillions of dollars you want to spend preventing people from doing drugs (which at the same time makes drug running *alot* more profitable), but until everyone is locked up in a padded room wearing a straight jacket, its just not going to happen.
Alot of things that money get spent on have more to do with feeling good about something than actually fixing a problem.
Don't you understand that they should just jump to conclusions about technology they don't understand?