I wonder how many sales are being lost because of the negative PR all these lawsuits must bring.
Personally, I've been boycotting the RIAA member companies for years now, and I have no intention of dropping it any time soon. Music is one of those things that if you don't know the band, you don't desire it. When you get exposed to it, you want more and more of it.
Just like free-market capitalism is a fantasy, promulgated by some of the greediest pigs to walk the earth.
The textbook definition of a free-market is one where many sellers compete to sell readily interchangeable goods to many buyers and where both sellers and buyers have complete access to market information and act in their own self interest. Each buyer or seller is too small to appriciably change the price of the good through her or his own actions. All buyers and sellers must act independantly.
This is extremely rare, and in many industries is impossible because of the scale needed (oil, electricity, CPUs) or because there is a natural monopoly (utilities, roads, cable, etc.).
In it's ideal state, capitalism would be extremely unstable. To maintain free markets, all players must remain small, but that means that there is no incentive for profit, because there must be some means (most likely government seizure) to bring back into line any capitalists who get too powerful. If you remove the profit incentive, you no longer have capitalism. If you leave the profit incentive, the economy will soon be dominated by trusts, oligopolies, and monopolies, like the US is today.
Ideal capitalism also requires very educated consumers and a ban on advertising (oddly enough, advertising, which distorts market perception, works against a free market).
Ideal capitalism would require all patent and copyright laws to be repealed, as they restrict free-trade. (coincidentially, communism would require the same, as people would create art because it benefits the world, not for personal gain)
I do have one extra condition that I'd like to add though:
10 - Trademarks that are incorporated into a work, even if it has not been copyrighted, cannot be used to restrict said work. Any derivatives made from said work will enjoy the same exemption, so long as the trademark in question is used for something beyond linking the original work to the mark holder or it is made clear that the trademark holder is not affiliated with the derivative.
This addresses the problem of corporations using trademark law to stop otherwise legal copying and derivatives of works, even once they have entered the public domain.
This means that trademarks over characters and titles cannot be used to lock up a public domain work or prevent non-commercial use of a copyrighted work.
I'd like to add that the current system of copyright actually encourages this kind of 'theft', which is better known as plagarism.
If I commercially copy or make a derivative work off of some obscure work and leave the part that says "Copyright 1908 John Doe, All Right Reserved", there's a good chance of legal trouble. If I strip out all authorship and copyright notices, the odds of any legal trouble drop enourmously because it's unlikely that the artist's grandchildren (or the corporation's IP department) have any records of it, no less be able to match it.
Maybe the words wouldn't have so much power if they weren't so taboo. Maybe they'd become just like any other word, nasty when used as an insult and benign when not.
Benign statement with swear words: A man should only fuck the woman he's married to. -or- What a fuckingly beautiful day it is today.
Nasty but swear-word free statement: I hate you. If I could only get my bloody mitts on you, I'd tie you to a plank and take a rusty knife and slowly start peeling off your skin.
The whining is because slashdot keeps linking to NYT articles when there usually is a no-registration equivalent elsewhere.
Also, there are obvious reasons for slashdot registration (such as linking posts to users), and much less info is required. Also, you can post or browse anonymously when you want to, even if you register, on slashdot.
Thirdly, slashdot advertisements are not very intrusive and don't take 15 or 30 seconds of my time. I'd rather they not be there, but they're tolerable, especially with slashdot's format which doesn't require you to load pages often.
Sunlight is about 1.4 kW / square metre, with about half of it in the visible spectrum. 120 100W flourescents would put out 12kW if they were 100% efficient, which they are not. At 30% efficiency, they put out around 3.5kW of light.
It'll still be an order of magnitude dimmer than the sun in the Sahara Desert and since it will be coming from all directions, it won't make you blind.
That or upgrade to a better browser like Konqueror that lets you treat all cookies as session cookies and lets you accept and decline cookies on a site-by-site basis. That way I can block cookies from any site that doesn't absolutely require them and the sites that do require them only get a cookie for a few hours, so it's quite useless for tracking purposes.
Even with these changes, you still have the problem of extortion. If I buy software from the store, open it, read the EULA, and don't like it, it is very hard to get my money back. Also, there is the lost time and potential lost business and missed deadlines from having to find another program. Store bought software can also have malware.
And then you have the unequal position of the two parties (unless you're a very big business).
My beef is that copyright is both unfair and economically bad.
It's unfair because it widens the gap between rich and poor, as money is taken from working class people, particularly the poor, and given to rich people (artists, programmers, authors, etc get a rather small piece of the pie, about 1% in the case of music, and even this money is quite inequally distributed).
Even assuming that people require an incentive other than fame to create (false for music, but probably true for a big-budget film), the current system is horribly inefficient.
A simple free market supply-demand curve will give an ideal price of $0 for anything that can be made for free and in infinite quantity. Any other price will lead to a less efficient economy, particularly if the good is elastic (as most copyright-related industries are).
In certain industries (movies, TV, music, video games), 3:1 advertisement to productions budget ratios are not unheard of. Advertisement is a form of superwaste, where the loss to society is greater than just the dollar cost, as it not only ties up resources making the ads, but also ties up people's time watching them and distorts their spending, among other effects.
For profit production requires much 'wasted' overhead expenses such as lawyers and executives. For profit production also requires that money changes hands and that a controlled distribution system be used, which both incur costs which range from a few percent (large site licenses for software) to 30%+ (consumer items bought in a store).
Litigation and the fear of litigation over copyrights heavily limits certain art (particularly software), and imposes yet another expense to production (the risk of being sued).
The overall efficiency of our copyright industries can be under 1% in extreme cases (recorded music), and is rarely above 20%.
What is really needed is a more efficient way of getting art produced. While 100% efficiency is ideal and in some cases (music, much software) it is possible, anything halfway efficient is better than the current system.
In the cases where people are willing to do it for free or because they need it for their business, copyright or no copyright, the government and the public should say a big 'thank you' and stop at that. It is extremely efficient and expedient, and the authors must have been motivated by something, since they weren't forced to produce. With broadcasting and P2P, efficiencies are often 95%+.
In the cases where works are not made without copyright incentives (big-budget movies), money can be provided by taxation. One way could be to have a 'moving picture [TV and movie] development fund', and to have people vote on what they want to see produced. The system could be only 25% efficient (distribution, waste, and politicians take 75% of the money) and still beat Hollywood by a wide margin.
As an example of efficiency, PBS has an annual budget of around $2B. This pays for the production and broadcasting of hundreds of programs of many genres. The Pokemon craze cost the US public over $5B (whereas in a copyright-free world, the cost would have been much lower since all the merchandise would have been reasonably priced, the way scooters and yo-yos are).
You would be defaulting on your bill, which would be a civil case. If the mechanic was dumb enough not to get a written (or oral if (s)he can prove it) contract or work authorization before starting work, you don't even have to pay her/him.
Taking this a huge step further, how would you feel if someone picked up some of your DNA (perhaps you left a hair follicle behind) and cloned you without your permission?
First off, DNA is not under the scope of copyright. It was made by nature, so it is public domain with regards to copyright law (though it can be patented). Copying or just reading someone's DNA without permission would fall under invasion of privacy, much like taking unauthorized photos of someone in a private space.
It effects everyone. 30 seconds each time your start a car comes out to a lot of lost time. If there are 100,000,000 regular drivers in the US who start their car 1,000 times a year would cost about a billion hours or $10B/year if you value time at $10/hour.
A hard to defeat breathalizer isn't going to come cheap. If they cost $200/unit for parts and labor, than installing them on the 16M new cars sold a year would cost about $3.2B/year.
Distracting the driver to take a re-test while navigating heavy traffic or driving on city streets is going to lead to more accidents. No idea on the cost, either in lives or dollars, that it would cause.
Most of these costs will be incurred by people who don't drive drunk. Laws against driving drunk are punitive enough as it is (In NYC, you get caught DWI and they seize the car), but at least they mostly only effect drunks.
Re:Cell phone jamming on private property
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 1
While cell phone jamming in public spaces is illegal, my research suggests that jamming on private property is not illegal.
I wouldn't be so sure. The electromagnetic spectrum is regulated by the FCC, and is generally considered public property. I can't start my own TV or radio station, even if I only broadcast within my own property.
Generally, consumer devices must not cause any harmful interference. Jammers do cause harmful interference. They also must be licensed to transmit on controlled frequencies like cell phone frequencies.
Cable theft can be serious business, but I thought it was quite rare in the USA. If you bring down the phone or electricity for a down because you stole some cables, I think it should be a felony, at least for a second or third offense.
A lot of cables were stolen in Iraq after Saddam's regime fell, and it complicated the rebuilding process quite a bit. Cables have a decent resale value as they contain quite a bit of valuable copper.
Then again, I never knew that there was a specific law against swiping cables. I figured that it would be covered under some more general theft laws.
Subdivided housing means that landlords or owners are allowed to split a large home into smaller apartments. It generally is profitable for the landlord to do it, but the town generally opposes this because it increases the town's population without increasing the tax base and it will put a strain on town services like schools. No owner is forced to subdivide a house.
As far as drug companies and research go, the cost of research is a small fraction of drug spending. If companies stop researching after applying price controls, the government could fund the research directly and recoup the spent money by lower medicare and medicaid spending which will result from keeping drug prices in check.
Affordable housing means small and cheap housing built on small lots and multifamily housing. It can be built without subsidies, but most towns have zoning laws prohibiting such construction as a way of keeping low income people out and to keep density down.
Food, clothing, and appliances are a small part of poor and middle class people's expenses, and outsourcing and mechanization is primarily reducing the cost of these goods.
The biggest expenses tend to be housing, medical, and auto. For the heavily in debt, you can add in credit cards. Housing and medical are skyrocketing while auto is rising more modestly. Funny enough, to take advantage of low prices in large stores like Walmart, you need a motorcar, which will, in all likelyhood, cost you more than all of your spending at said stores.
If you really want to help the working class, break up the pharmaceutical and medical cartels and push for subdividing our oversized houses and building affordable housing to get rents and property prices under control. Reducing auto expenses would require a massive overhaul of our cities and infrastructure, but the benefits would be massive.
Walmart could push the cost of food, clothing, and appliances to $0 and in several years rising health, housing, and auto costs will eat that all up.
Unfortunately, because of copyright law, it (arguably) does more good to society to put a work under GPL than under the public domain.
Here's a quite possible scenario: An author write a book or draws a cartoon or writes a software program and puts it into the public domain. A distributor takes the work, does a trivial change, and files a copyright. The distributor now puts a bit (or a lot) of effort into marketing the copyrighted version. The author gets upset and complains publicly. The distributor now sues the author (or just threatens to do so) claiming the (s)he infringed on their copyright.
With a GPL license + registering your copyright, you can prevent crap like this from happening while allowing a lot of freedom to the users/viewers/readers.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering how many CDs have been used for burning GNU/Linux ISOs, GNU should be getting a hefty share of the money.
I don't know for a fact, but somehow I wager that the amount is close to $0.
I wonder how many sales are being lost because of the negative PR all these lawsuits must bring.
Personally, I've been boycotting the RIAA member companies for years now, and I have no intention of dropping it any time soon. Music is one of those things that if you don't know the band, you don't desire it. When you get exposed to it, you want more and more of it.
Just like free-market capitalism is a fantasy, promulgated by some of the greediest pigs to walk the earth.
The textbook definition of a free-market is one where many sellers compete to sell readily interchangeable goods to many buyers and where both sellers and buyers have complete access to market information and act in their own self interest. Each buyer or seller is too small to appriciably change the price of the good through her or his own actions. All buyers and sellers must act independantly.
This is extremely rare, and in many industries is impossible because of the scale needed (oil, electricity, CPUs) or because there is a natural monopoly (utilities, roads, cable, etc.).
In it's ideal state, capitalism would be extremely unstable. To maintain free markets, all players must remain small, but that means that there is no incentive for profit, because there must be some means (most likely government seizure) to bring back into line any capitalists who get too powerful. If you remove the profit incentive, you no longer have capitalism. If you leave the profit incentive, the economy will soon be dominated by trusts, oligopolies, and monopolies, like the US is today.
Ideal capitalism also requires very educated consumers and a ban on advertising (oddly enough, advertising, which distorts market perception, works against a free market).
Ideal capitalism would require all patent and copyright laws to be repealed, as they restrict free-trade. (coincidentially, communism would require the same, as people would create art because it benefits the world, not for personal gain)
Sounds very good.
I do have one extra condition that I'd like to add though:
10 - Trademarks that are incorporated into a work, even if it has not been copyrighted, cannot be used to restrict said work. Any derivatives made from said work will enjoy the same exemption, so long as the trademark in question is used for something beyond linking the original work to the mark holder or it is made clear that the trademark holder is not affiliated with the derivative.
This addresses the problem of corporations using trademark law to stop otherwise legal copying and derivatives of works, even once they have entered the public domain.
This means that trademarks over characters and titles cannot be used to lock up a public domain work or prevent non-commercial use of a copyrighted work.
Good idea.
I'd like to add that the current system of copyright actually encourages this kind of 'theft', which is better known as plagarism.
If I commercially copy or make a derivative work off of some obscure work and leave the part that says "Copyright 1908 John Doe, All Right Reserved", there's a good chance of legal trouble. If I strip out all authorship and copyright notices, the odds of any legal trouble drop enourmously because it's unlikely that the artist's grandchildren (or the corporation's IP department) have any records of it, no less be able to match it.
But it does fill up their databases with near-useless data if you use cash with those throw away cards.
The 10th amendment of the constitution says that anything not permitted to the government is reserved for the states or the people.
Maybe the words wouldn't have so much power if they weren't so taboo. Maybe they'd become just like any other word, nasty when used as an insult and benign when not.
Benign statement with swear words:
A man should only fuck the woman he's married to.
-or-
What a fuckingly beautiful day it is today.
Nasty but swear-word free statement:
I hate you. If I could only get my bloody mitts on you, I'd tie you to a plank and take a rusty knife and slowly start peeling off your skin.
The whining is because slashdot keeps linking to NYT articles when there usually is a no-registration equivalent elsewhere.
Also, there are obvious reasons for slashdot registration (such as linking posts to users), and much less info is required. Also, you can post or browse anonymously when you want to, even if you register, on slashdot.
Thirdly, slashdot advertisements are not very intrusive and don't take 15 or 30 seconds of my time. I'd rather they not be there, but they're tolerable, especially with slashdot's format which doesn't require you to load pages often.
Sunlight is about 1.4 kW / square metre, with about half of it in the visible spectrum. 120 100W flourescents would put out 12kW if they were 100% efficient, which they are not. At 30% efficiency, they put out around 3.5kW of light.
It'll still be an order of magnitude dimmer than the sun in the Sahara Desert and since it will be coming from all directions, it won't make you blind.
My computer, which is running GNU/Linux Mandrake 9.1, takes 40MB of RAM idling out of my 128 MB. I'm running KDE with plenty of eye-candy enabled.
It's rare that I use up the full amount of RAM.
That or upgrade to a better browser like Konqueror that lets you treat all cookies as session cookies and lets you accept and decline cookies on a site-by-site basis. That way I can block cookies from any site that doesn't absolutely require them and the sites that do require them only get a cookie for a few hours, so it's quite useless for tracking purposes.
Even with these changes, you still have the problem of extortion. If I buy software from the store, open it, read the EULA, and don't like it, it is very hard to get my money back. Also, there is the lost time and potential lost business and missed deadlines from having to find another program. Store bought software can also have malware.
And then you have the unequal position of the two parties (unless you're a very big business).
My beef is that copyright is both unfair and economically bad.
It's unfair because it widens the gap between rich and poor, as money is taken from working class people, particularly the poor, and given to rich people (artists, programmers, authors, etc get a rather small piece of the pie, about 1% in the case of music, and even this money is quite inequally distributed).
Even assuming that people require an incentive other than fame to create (false for music, but probably true for a big-budget film), the current system is horribly inefficient.
A simple free market supply-demand curve will give an ideal price of $0 for anything that can be made for free and in infinite quantity. Any other price will lead to a less efficient economy, particularly if the good is elastic (as most copyright-related industries are).
In certain industries (movies, TV, music, video games), 3:1 advertisement to productions budget ratios are not unheard of. Advertisement is a form of superwaste, where the loss to society is greater than just the dollar cost, as it not only ties up resources making the ads, but also ties up people's time watching them and distorts their spending, among other effects.
For profit production requires much 'wasted' overhead expenses such as lawyers and executives. For profit production also requires that money changes hands and that a controlled distribution system be used, which both incur costs which range from a few percent (large site licenses for software) to 30%+ (consumer items bought in a store).
Litigation and the fear of litigation over copyrights heavily limits certain art (particularly software), and imposes yet another expense to production (the risk of being sued).
The overall efficiency of our copyright industries can be under 1% in extreme cases (recorded music), and is rarely above 20%.
What is really needed is a more efficient way of getting art produced. While 100% efficiency is ideal and in some cases (music, much software) it is possible, anything halfway efficient is better than the current system.
In the cases where people are willing to do it for free or because they need it for their business, copyright or no copyright, the government and the public should say a big 'thank you' and stop at that. It is extremely efficient and expedient, and the authors must have been motivated by something, since they weren't forced to produce. With broadcasting and P2P, efficiencies are often 95%+.
In the cases where works are not made without copyright incentives (big-budget movies), money can be provided by taxation. One way could be to have a 'moving picture [TV and movie] development fund', and to have people vote on what they want to see produced. The system could be only 25% efficient (distribution, waste, and politicians take 75% of the money) and still beat Hollywood by a wide margin.
As an example of efficiency, PBS has an annual budget of around $2B. This pays for the production and broadcasting of hundreds of programs of many genres. The Pokemon craze cost the US public over $5B (whereas in a copyright-free world, the cost would have been much lower since all the merchandise would have been reasonably priced, the way scooters and yo-yos are).
At least in the US, you can be pro-genocide (such as KKK and neo-Nazis) and the police will keep the angry mob of counter-protesters off of your back.
So if the KKK is considered protected speech, how much harm can a bit of talk about cannibalism cause?
You would be defaulting on your bill, which would be a civil case. If the mechanic was dumb enough not to get a written (or oral if (s)he can prove it) contract or work authorization before starting work, you don't even have to pay her/him.
Taking this a huge step further, how would you feel if someone picked up some of your DNA (perhaps you left a hair follicle behind) and cloned you without your permission?
First off, DNA is not under the scope of copyright. It was made by nature, so it is public domain with regards to copyright law (though it can be patented). Copying or just reading someone's DNA without permission would fall under invasion of privacy, much like taking unauthorized photos of someone in a private space.
It effects everyone. 30 seconds each time your start a car comes out to a lot of lost time. If there are 100,000,000 regular drivers in the US who start their car 1,000 times a year would cost about a billion hours or $10B/year if you value time at $10/hour.
A hard to defeat breathalizer isn't going to come cheap. If they cost $200/unit for parts and labor, than installing them on the 16M new cars sold a year would cost about $3.2B/year.
Distracting the driver to take a re-test while navigating heavy traffic or driving on city streets is going to lead to more accidents. No idea on the cost, either in lives or dollars, that it would cause.
Most of these costs will be incurred by people who don't drive drunk. Laws against driving drunk are punitive enough as it is (In NYC, you get caught DWI and they seize the car), but at least they mostly only effect drunks.
While cell phone jamming in public spaces is illegal, my research suggests that jamming on private property is not illegal.
I wouldn't be so sure. The electromagnetic spectrum is regulated by the FCC, and is generally considered public property. I can't start my own TV or radio station, even if I only broadcast within my own property.
Generally, consumer devices must not cause any harmful interference. Jammers do cause harmful interference. They also must be licensed to transmit on controlled frequencies like cell phone frequencies.
Cable theft can be serious business, but I thought it was quite rare in the USA. If you bring down the phone or electricity for a down because you stole some cables, I think it should be a felony, at least for a second or third offense.
A lot of cables were stolen in Iraq after Saddam's regime fell, and it complicated the rebuilding process quite a bit. Cables have a decent resale value as they contain quite a bit of valuable copper.
Then again, I never knew that there was a specific law against swiping cables. I figured that it would be covered under some more general theft laws.
Subdivided housing means that landlords or owners are allowed to split a large home into smaller apartments. It generally is profitable for the landlord to do it, but the town generally opposes this because it increases the town's population without increasing the tax base and it will put a strain on town services like schools. No owner is forced to subdivide a house.
As far as drug companies and research go, the cost of research is a small fraction of drug spending. If companies stop researching after applying price controls, the government could fund the research directly and recoup the spent money by lower medicare and medicaid spending which will result from keeping drug prices in check.
Affordable housing means small and cheap housing built on small lots and multifamily housing. It can be built without subsidies, but most towns have zoning laws prohibiting such construction as a way of keeping low income people out and to keep density down.
Companies that can't sell their products in a free market go lobby the government for some welfare checks or some government granted monopolies.
Now, if companies can get their welfare and monopolies, why can't I get my welfare and lifetime employment?
Food, clothing, and appliances are a small part of poor and middle class people's expenses, and outsourcing and mechanization is primarily reducing the cost of these goods.
The biggest expenses tend to be housing, medical, and auto. For the heavily in debt, you can add in credit cards. Housing and medical are skyrocketing while auto is rising more modestly. Funny enough, to take advantage of low prices in large stores like Walmart, you need a motorcar, which will, in all likelyhood, cost you more than all of your spending at said stores.
If you really want to help the working class, break up the pharmaceutical and medical cartels and push for subdividing our oversized houses and building affordable housing to get rents and property prices under control. Reducing auto expenses would require a massive overhaul of our cities and infrastructure, but the benefits would be massive.
Walmart could push the cost of food, clothing, and appliances to $0 and in several years rising health, housing, and auto costs will eat that all up.
Unfortunately, because of copyright law, it (arguably) does more good to society to put a work under GPL than under the public domain.
Here's a quite possible scenario: An author write a book or draws a cartoon or writes a software program and puts it into the public domain. A distributor takes the work, does a trivial change, and files a copyright. The distributor now puts a bit (or a lot) of effort into marketing the copyrighted version. The author gets upset and complains publicly. The distributor now sues the author (or just threatens to do so) claiming the (s)he infringed on their copyright.
With a GPL license + registering your copyright, you can prevent crap like this from happening while allowing a lot of freedom to the users/viewers/readers.
It's not easably recyclable. It has a metal layer in the middle. It's also polycarbonate plastic, which most places don't recycle.