In a "centralized server with secret sauce" model, you create a paranoid closed source society.
True but I dont beliebe closed source society is something that will survive long. I was merely offerring some viable alternatives for transition from the current model to a service based one. Propriatery software suffers from the same problems music industry does and unless there some radical chanegs in its structure, you will watch its death throws within a decade.
Intellectual property is based on the belief that there is inherent value in an idea.
No. Intellectual property is an attempt to own integer numbers. Silly? Convert "Coke" to ASCII codes and put the resulting digits end to end. That integer number would then be a property of Coca Cola company. Think about it.
(in this case the Coca Cola name is only applicaple in a particular industry etc but similiar tratment for a song for example would be universally accepted as equvalent to the original)
Information and ideas are not something that can be "owned" any more then numbers can be "owned".
What are you talking about? The value of the services one can offer is to be arrived at via regular market forces. The entire distinction is a legal one and has to do with treatment of proprietary software as "service" instead of "property" which causes all these vast problems. Frankly, the proprietary software model is just as toast as the current music industry system and any attempts to rescue it will inevietably (and painfully for us all) backfire. But I know they will be all tried one after another, until every last government official finally grasps that this bird is truly dead. I was merely proposing a viable alternative system where someone hell-bent on doing something of the kind of proprietary software could survive.
but hey, you guys are happy for the pirates to make money, while the artist goes hungry
And beacuse you call yourself an "artist" that grants you automatic priviledges most of other mundane people do not have. Like a right to make money. Because you understand your own value. Right. I have news for you: the value of your "art" is what we the listeners think its value is. Not you. You can call yourself a musician and be tone deaf. Wouldnt be the first and the last one.
Yet it is you who wants to decide how to screw us all up in a thousand ways for centures to come by inane protectionist welfare system for the McMusic industry. Expense of which we, the regular Joes not you are supposed to furnish. If you think this is what you will get by whining about "piracy" and "intellectual property", I think you got another thing coming.
How about YOU go and talk to the bootlegger and get them to "sponsor" the artist and see what they say!
How come he makes money on something you cannot? Are your "official" copies sold at the same price as his with you promoting them yourself on stage worse quality then his? Then you deserve to get ganked by him. He offers superior service of replication! You are supposed to be making money on live performances and if you cannot anymore then your career has come to its conclusion. If people rather listen to some old stuff of yours, its the time to retire. My response to the previous poster about negotiation had to do with the specific case of another live performer. You are lazier yet. You want to play/record once and get paid untill you are in your 80s. And to hell with the consequences for the rest of us.
We're always going to have this problem while there are people in this world who put greed before respect for one's intellectual or artistic property, and the solution isn't to simply "stop performing" - you're obviously not a struggling muso. Sure I can download songs for "free" and have my computer "play me the music".. but by doing that you're killing off the artists without them having a say about it.
That is because in your arrogance you believe that you have a right to make money that way even if the social implications of your "intellectual or artistic property" are grave for vast swathes of the population and carry immense dangers in science, medicine and many other human endavours. You musicians (or more likely your profits) are simply too important not to put ahead of the society as a whole.
I find it maddenning that musicians whine about people wanting "free" stuff while trying to create nothing short of protectionist state welfare for themselves. At a great expense to the progress of technology, freedom of speech and perversion of laws. Some seriously inflated egos there.
The information, and not the service is what holds the value.
No. It is the action of keeping it secret that generates the value. Take your example and subsitude a dude who instead of being an expert, sells fake cancer treatment while the 99% of regular doctors sell the regular one for 1/10th the price. The information of the quack is worthless. His action of convincing people to believe him in their derperation and keeping the truth from them is what counts.
where the hungry can get free food without having to work for it
While technically possible with good energy sources and complete automation, I would put that one down as "far... far... far" into the future. Besides there are completely different issues involved here dealing with property, uncontrolled population growth etc etc far beyond the narrow scope of this "information is not property" discussion.
That is the problem. You see there are two choices before us. Either we accept your line of logic or mine. If we go your way, there are plentiful and devastating side effects. After all if you can charge for the "value" of the software performing a task on a users PC, so can a gene designer charge each time a chemical process driven by his DNA program is performed.
You and him are in the same boat.
Are you comfortable with life-time payments for the priviledge of having turquoise eyes? Or a gouging private tax on your food because some DNA ended up on all of the farmer's fields due to self-replication? That is where all of this will end up.
When weighted as a whole your method while arguably conceptually consistent is falling appart due to its gigiantic social cost. If you were to try to repair it, you will end up with millions of law "patches" trying to correct each and every unforeseen outcome propping up.
So of you accept my model which prevents such abuse, you can be accommodated. If you abandon thinking of your work as making "product" which is "property" and instead think of yourself performing "service" you can get back to the same spot you are now. Your software is free to copy but if you are clever with your business plan (centralized servers containing secret sauce, extensive network of complexity-eliminating, hand-holding support staff etc. etc), you can achieve the same monetary effect but without all the negative and unforeseen consequences of "information as property" approach.
That was the case throughout history. If you published something, you might end up as co-discoverer. How many theorems are there with two or more names in them?
Einstein-Bose condensate for example. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. And so on.
How are you special and entitled to protection from this? Otherwise you get a pile of half-assed people spending 100% of their "reseach" time and funds suing each other over "infringements".
Commercial software seems to fall into the same trap although it would not likely be classified as "art". And I think that in the long run (perheaps decades or more - remember there is a lot of money and power being generated from this farce) we will find OSS as the only surviving type of software.
That is if freedom-loving and enlightened societies prevail and not some murky totalitarians.
Problem is, every time i write a new song this other guy performs it...
That is when you stop performing and revert to composing. You make the dude sponsor you for that work. He can sing better, you can compose better. I dont understand you point. If you were to be somehow protected for your inferior performances we are again facing attempts to put the information genie back into the bottle. No, instead you use your business common sense and cut him off from the source until he pays up.
Please attempt to translate this argument to books
In another message on this thread I explained as follows: Book writers write for the sake of art or education. They are paid by art/education-sponsoring patronages like art/education foundations and wealthy art lovers. The publishers get paid by end-users for the service of copying the works and distributing them. Simple, effective, no need for copyright.
True but music also is information. The very fact that you can encode it into computer data with 100% accuracy is a dead giveway.
Taking this scenario to the extreme, only one single copy of any given book would ever have to be purchased, and that would form a pool from which any trade or swap could be conducted by simply copying the work.
Exactly. The author gets paid by a wealthy patron, art foundation, etc. We all are enriched by his art. Why else write books? Out of greed? You really think all those inane paperback novels are art?!
If you are truly a musician, you compose and perform. You can get huge crowds to your concerts. Lots of money there. And internet downloading is your friend!. It advertises for you! Free! Alternatively you compose only and expect the same art-sponsoring foundations to sponsor your creativity. What is wrong with that? Well except not being able to create some perverted hype and marketing induced monstrous cash cows like Britney...
Have they "stolen" something from me or made my services any less valuable?
If you peak at my reply to the post above, you will see that you are entitled to payment for you labour and nothing more, and that is precisely what is happening in this case.
Same applies to the musicians but when you are downloading the music they are not performing for you, Internet and your PC are. Ergo no money for them.
If you were to pay them, that would in your example be directly equivalent to the dude who took the notes being expected to pay you each time he photocopies his notebook. Ridiculous idea, but that is precisely what the McMusic industry has people brainwashed into believing.
You sir are confused. If music is property then if you download it you are somehow magically stealing it. If it is not, then you are not. Simple as that.
What you are describing is a result of decades of unscrupulous brainwashing by various "information industries".
Let me explain:
The musicians are only entitled to pay for their labour. That, in their case means performances. LIVE performances. You charge at the gate and no issue with "stealing". Why? Simple. Beecause if they are using a recording of a performance they in effect are using someone's elses playback device (fully paid for by the listener) playing data from a media disk (also fully paid for). The performance is done by the machine not the musician. As such the entire industry system is based on a single performance and then a stream of endless payments for not performing it again is totally unrealistic.
Sure you can try and bend and twist laws and technology to stop the obvious results of this insane idea but it will fail sooner or later. Same problem applies to DVDs, Sattellite TV and a myriad of other related "products".
The entire mis-understanding comes from the fact that what you think is "art" is in fact consumer abuse. "Artists" only create art from the need to express themselves and not for money. Sure they need to live on something and so we have concerts, exhibitions, wealthy patrons and government grants. You see none of this copyright-based McMusic industry was around back in the days of Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bethoven, DaVinci and so according to the current set of demagogues these people never produced anything art-like.
You must snap out of this miserable state of being a tool for the "information" industry.
Actually no. You see many people (I think a growing number) are starting to realize that music is not property. To be fair, no information can be "property". The only reason we stick to this flawed paradigm is because all of the legal mechanisms of our societies are geared toward handling physical "private property" and are unable to cope with attempts at using information as "property".
I recommend
this analysis of the fallacies of treating information that way. The RIAA/MPAA and the current USPO maddness are only tips of the iceberg. Think someone else's "ownership" of your DNA and patenting/copyrights on large integer numbers.
Yes, but he is worried about not being able to put actual GPLed code right into his product. How dare those pink FSF commies try to produce and GPL code thats rightfully his! Heathens!
They made it. They made it GPLed. And they dont like your way of thinking! They actually think you want to be a thief. Yes sir. You want to take what they made, add some stuff to it and make money on it and give NOTHING back to those who made the code.
And lo and behold GPL is preventing you from doing just that! How anti-ripoff.. I mean anti-your kind of business.
Hello! Planet earth to Mr. Thieving Capitalist! No can do! Write your own bloody code under any license you find handy and keep it! Hands-off our shared knowledge. You dont know what "shared" means.
The only thing everyone is getting tired of is would-be thieves whining that the good denizens of OSS community were bold enough to keep the goodies locked away from them. How attrocious! How anti-business! How anti-american! Those pink FSF commies!
Get a grip man, and you wonder why people rate your ranting as "-1, Troll".
Haven't you noticed that you basically can't use GPL'd code in a business environment?
That is quite curious sir, given that myself and thousands of others are using GNU/Linux in business. Some of the users are companies like Google and IBM.
Your problem with the GPL simply stems from the impotent frustration of someone who wishes for all the open code to be licensed under a BSD or Public Domain type of license so it can be "borrowed" into some closed-source project with which you are planning to make such a killing as to make Bill Gates look like a lemon-stand owner. You are quite transparent and quite amusing, you know.
I can remove GNU applications (I rarely use them anyway) and keep using Linux. It's the one running my hardware and booting my laptop and letting me use it.
I am afraid that your system would cease to function all together given as libc (as in/lib/libc.so.6), the core library that 90% of all applications link to is part of GNU. I am no nazi when it comes to insisting that you call the thing GNU/Linux but I can see how RMS can be seriously peeved when such critical elements that existed long before Linux proper (not to mention the C compiler the kernel is made with) are completely ignored and most people believe Linus wrote the whole thing. This is compounded by the fact that GNU people now have a semi-working kernel called Hurd and when plugged into the same libraries and tools that the Linux kernel is surrounded in it creates a functioning OS.
So for practical every-day use I tend to just say Linux but I also mention GNU/Linux at least once at the beginning of the conversation.
As to Chirac, he is in a no-win situation. Huge and increasingly militant islamic minority demanding all sorts of rights and starting to openly intimidate the general populace. So they try to curb the influence of the radical islamists but will only end up inflaming them.
Personally I think there is a world-wide confrontation coming of the followers of radical islam and the rest of the planet. And I don't mean terrorists but head-on warfare with religious zealots screaming "Allah Akbar!" at the top of their lungs as they charge with their RPGs. They will inevietably lose but a lot of blood will flow, most of it in the Middle East but a lot in places like France with 3 million of potential internal enemies.
For North America, the wise thing to do would be to minimise our exposure to the maniacs and instead of sticking our heads into the very center of their lair, focus on defending our own borders. Religious zealotry is basically indestructible and can only be terminated by killing the entire populations that foister it. Isolation and waiting them out and allowing them to burn themselves up in their inevietable internal destruction and not offerring a viable target is the only way to get out of this, IMHO.
What should be mildly amusing to an American is that this islamic time-bomb the French have is the result of their past imperial adventures in places like Algier. Same very problem the US has created for itself today.
Oh, when it comes to teh French insulting the US, I seem to recall some incident with "freedom fries" after the "old europe" basically nailed the problem on the head and refused to get involved in the Iraq insanity for all those valid reasons like the lack of any WMDs, creating a new center of terrorist activity and total poltical wreckage that Iraq has become. Sure they had other selfish reasons but these were just icing on the cake. It didnt serve them to be right when being right was less important to "being with us or being against us". And my personal opinon again is that Iraq as a country is finished and the US invasion will be marked in history books as the time of the destruction of the country and Saddam as its last leader. Saddam with all his stupididy and viciousness was the rubber band that held that thing together, very much like Tito did in Yugoslavia. Just as Yugoslavia is history, you will see Kurdistan, Shia-stan some Sunni-stan not so long into the future. After a bloody civil war over the extent of their borders of course.
Then we end up with a "wild-west, dog-eats-dog, winner takes all" capitalism which inevietably will result in a handful of ruthless strong men being owners of everything under the sun. An all-powerful oligarchy of mutually-reinforcing monopolies is the natural stable state into which all unregulated capitalist societies would morph given enough time.
You see everything as exploitation. You see everything as winner vs. loser.
No, I am just a realist. Its a hard-earned thing you get beaten into you by life. As opposed to ideologues who would believe wackiest theories as long as they somehow justify their pre-conceived notions. That includes followers of Adam Smith, Marx and many others.
As to your actual point, it is all in definitions of words like "stealing" or "creating". If by stealing you mean appropriation of some resource without compensation, then unless you can show that whomever you see having some resource is the original person that acquired the resource by discovering it, he has something that he stole (or bought stolen) or inhereited or married into. That was the whole point of the very observant and wise italian phrase the original post mentioned.
Almost everything in our sights is at least in part derived from some long-ago original thievery. The fact remains that virtually all finite natural resources of this planet are stolen from someone by some king's/pharaoh's army and all of the modern "owners" are merely inhereitors of the stuff. And thats if you forego modern thieving by individuals, states, dictators etc. Like oil for example and the Saudi royal familiy who were "given" the country and its oil by the British.
All our "creations" in material form are built from these materials and thus derrived from the proceeds of thievery.
"Creating" wealth could only apply to ideas, unfortunately ideas, like the products manufacured from natural resources are derrived from existing ideas which whole or in part were "borrowed" in the same fashion natural resources where. There are marked differences though, ideas are information and information is not property no matter how hard the capitalist ideologies try to make it so. So ideas can are copied effortlessly instad of being yanked from underneath someones butt and the "stealing" applies mostly to the theft of the credit for the idea. Therefore ideas are not even a part of the capitalist equation. Capitalist system in its standard form is applicaple exclusively to material posessions and we already covered that.
So unless you launch into space (in a rocket made from stolen materials) and go and claim some new and never before owned piece of property, all what you have is a result of either "marrying into, inhereiting or stealing". On second thought make it just "stealing", the other two are just deferred forms of it. You see, unless you constantly expand the sphere of influence of a capitalist system to cover more and more natural resources there is no way to "create" any new wealth. Just printing paper notes with ever increasing denominations and continuously reprocessing the stolen goods from one shape to another does not constitute "creating".
Nationalizing vast swarthes of industry and implementing a program of full-employment...
Yes if you happened to be in the favoured group of the "approved" capitalists like Krupp, Messershmidt, BMW etc. Full employment is a killer profit maker if you got the state as your guaranteed customer at whatever price you can get away with. My understanding of the definition of "capitalism" is a system where the objective of each player is to accumulate maximum possible capital in any way imaginable and not get murdered in the process. This particular method seems a very effective one and came with little perks like free, although somewhat worse for wear workers, wearing striped uniforms and handilly identified by their tatooed numbers.
No kidding; but what exactly are you referring to with the 96% number?... Not without massive government **cough**anti-market**cough** intervention.
My point was that in a sane system it should never have been possible for any company to attain 96% market share of anything. The very fact that MS did that is a failure of the system as there was no counter-measure to prevent such extreme condition. A counter-measure could have only been a regulatory one since obviously capitalism has no build-in effective balancing mechanism and is prone to wild and dangerous situations like near-total monopolies.
It's pretty disingenuous to try to hold up a one-word Darl McBride quote as..
If only Darl was saying that it would be, I have seen/heard this used derisively many times now not only on the net but mostly from middle and upper managers in some firms I deal with. I am not sure you realize but there are a lot of people who despise OSS because it does not fit their notion of what "an honest business" should look like. "It's some hippie commune thing you know...". There are more Darl sympathisers out there then many of us are comfortable thinking about.
If you don't feel like being patient, then just keep promoting with increased zeal...
I am not sure you understood. By "making" people use OSS I meant making them use it against their will as in a decree from the managment. Promoting and encouraging its use is an entirely different issue.
Canadian. Hurts more because I get to see first-hand (we have all the US channels) the brainwashing, spin-doctoring and "patriotic" rallying each time somebody, somewhere in the world is going to be "liberated" or some brain-dead CIA plan blew up.
I seriously think that the US is its own worst enemy and would do itself a great favour were it to get out of the business of trying to run the planet. Alternative sources of energy and fuels should be the top priority and complete neutrality in some religion-gone-mad places like Israel or Iran would go a loooong way towards subsiding the world-wide anthipathy George has managed to drum up.
Yes even up here in Canada. A lot of people are pissed. And this is in a country that sent almost all of our meager troops to Afganistan and for us it was a great monumental decision because Canada was always fiercely neutral. Now we are on Osama's list. We werent before that even after 9/11, despite what George says. We simply werent present anywhere in Osama's neighbourhood. No dictators propped up, no bloody revolutions started. Americans used to buy Maple Leaf embroided jackets to try to pretend to be Canadian when travelling abroad. No more of that.
So you should think about the depths other countries went to in order to try to stick with the US after 9/11.
Because then (even though not entirely unprovoked) you were the victim of extra-territorial agression. That was all the difference.
I gurantee you that the Iraq thing blew the whole thing sky high. Noone is going to lift a finger again no matter what happens unless there is some serious rethinking of the US foreign policy.
I am not sure what do you refer to in your post. Perheaps it is addressed to the wrong thread or something. My post was in reply to someone who ridiculed the idea that the object of capitalism is to "amass capital". He used a hillarious example of consumer naivette to try to discredit that quite valid observation. Then someone sounding totally different alas with the same Slashdot id goes and tries to explain the value of freedom of choice. One has nothing to do with the other. Capitalism and freedom are two totally separate and mutually independent concepts. Nazi Germany was a fiercely capitalist society (despide the National Socialism moniker). But I will do my best to respond to this.
I think people just hate Microsoft and can't come to grips with the reasons why.
I cant speak for others but for me the point of dislike is that Microsoft is the blatantly obvious result of 100% pure unbashed and uncontrolled capitalist behaviour. 96% market share is just unhealthy for anything in any industry. Period. And that this is dismissed by people as some sort of aberration. And then the same people go on about evils of government controls and how do we need more freedom for formation of companies like microsoft.
And then the same very people tend to moan about evils of competition from the "communist" upstart OSS and how we must regulate against it instead of giving it level playing field and in the case of obvious situations like 3rd world countries, prefer it. To "protect" the "american values" etc. Making sure that the market share of Microsoft doesnt shrink. Then usually the same people go onto talking about "thievery" of large numbers a.k.a "Intellectual Properties". It just makes me mad. I admit it. It has nothing to do with trying to destroy Microsoft. It has everything to do with Microsoft being the most visible and "in-your-face" example of excess and monumental greed. The fact that OSS (which I happen to use a lot) is considered by Microsoft "the enemy" to be destroyed (by making it illegal preferrably) compounds my feelings. But its not the company itself or Bill or its (in my view questionable in some respects but quite fine in others) products. Should Apple be at 96% share and were prone to the same behaviour, they would be in most people target sights instead of MS. There are a lot of other reasons having to do with the way Microsoft steals ideas and calls them their property etc, but the above its the gist of it.
Telling people what to buy or what not to buy is futile because they are for better or worse equipped with their own brains and those who are prone to buying PetRocks and "Loose Fat by watching TV!" books and keep sending money to that nice Nigerian general who has so much trouble moving his millions out of the country would go on getting fleeced no matter what I say so that has really nothing to do with the issue. I do tend to extroll virtues of OSS because I use it and like using it myself. But I will be the first to admit that its not for everyone and every situation and in many areas OSS is just plain not ready to compete. "Making" people use OSS is futile and counterproductive in general, only feasible in tightly controlled business environments where corporate policy enforces some company-wide rules. Thats no different than any other type of software.
Trying to play politics at the UN and reduce endorsement of OSS in places that it is most applicapple/needed i.e. the 3rd world, is just pure assholery.
Slashdot Mirror
True but I dont beliebe closed source society is something that will survive long. I was merely offerring some viable alternatives for transition from the current model to a service based one. Propriatery software suffers from the same problems music industry does and unless there some radical chanegs in its structure, you will watch its death throws within a decade.
Intellectual property is based on the belief that there is inherent value in an idea.
No. Intellectual property is an attempt to own integer numbers. Silly? Convert "Coke" to ASCII codes and put the resulting digits end to end. That integer number would then be a property of Coca Cola company. Think about it.
(in this case the Coca Cola name is only applicaple in a particular industry etc but similiar tratment for a song for example would be universally accepted as equvalent to the original)
Information and ideas are not something that can be "owned" any more then numbers can be "owned".
What are you talking about? The value of the services one can offer is to be arrived at via regular market forces. The entire distinction is a legal one and has to do with treatment of proprietary software as "service" instead of "property" which causes all these vast problems. Frankly, the proprietary software model is just as toast as the current music industry system and any attempts to rescue it will inevietably (and painfully for us all) backfire. But I know they will be all tried one after another, until every last government official finally grasps that this bird is truly dead. I was merely proposing a viable alternative system where someone hell-bent on doing something of the kind of proprietary software could survive.
And beacuse you call yourself an "artist" that grants you automatic priviledges most of other mundane people do not have. Like a right to make money. Because you understand your own value. Right. I have news for you: the value of your "art" is what we the listeners think its value is. Not you. You can call yourself a musician and be tone deaf. Wouldnt be the first and the last one.
Yet it is you who wants to decide how to screw us all up in a thousand ways for centures to come by inane protectionist welfare system for the McMusic industry. Expense of which we, the regular Joes not you are supposed to furnish. If you think this is what you will get by whining about "piracy" and "intellectual property", I think you got another thing coming.
How come he makes money on something you cannot? Are your "official" copies sold at the same price as his with you promoting them yourself on stage worse quality then his? Then you deserve to get ganked by him. He offers superior service of replication! You are supposed to be making money on live performances and if you cannot anymore then your career has come to its conclusion. If people rather listen to some old stuff of yours, its the time to retire. My response to the previous poster about negotiation had to do with the specific case of another live performer. You are lazier yet. You want to play/record once and get paid untill you are in your 80s. And to hell with the consequences for the rest of us.
We're always going to have this problem while there are people in this world who put greed before respect for one's intellectual or artistic property, and the solution isn't to simply "stop performing" - you're obviously not a struggling muso. Sure I can download songs for "free" and have my computer "play me the music".. but by doing that you're killing off the artists without them having a say about it.
That is because in your arrogance you believe that you have a right to make money that way even if the social implications of your "intellectual or artistic property" are grave for vast swathes of the population and carry immense dangers in science, medicine and many other human endavours. You musicians (or more likely your profits) are simply too important not to put ahead of the society as a whole.
I find it maddenning that musicians whine about people wanting "free" stuff while trying to create nothing short of protectionist state welfare for themselves. At a great expense to the progress of technology, freedom of speech and perversion of laws. Some seriously inflated egos there.
No. It is the action of keeping it secret that generates the value. Take your example and subsitude a dude who instead of being an expert, sells fake cancer treatment while the 99% of regular doctors sell the regular one for 1/10th the price. The information of the quack is worthless. His action of convincing people to believe him in their derperation and keeping the truth from them is what counts.
While technically possible with good energy sources and complete automation, I would put that one down as "far ... far... far" into the future. Besides there are completely different issues involved here dealing with property, uncontrolled population growth etc etc far beyond the narrow scope of this "information is not property" discussion.
That is the problem. You see there are two choices before us. Either we accept your line of logic or mine. If we go your way, there are plentiful and devastating side effects. After all if you can charge for the "value" of the software performing a task on a users PC, so can a gene designer charge each time a chemical process driven by his DNA program is performed.
You and him are in the same boat.
Are you comfortable with life-time payments for the priviledge of having turquoise eyes? Or a gouging private tax on your food because some DNA ended up on all of the farmer's fields due to self-replication? That is where all of this will end up.
When weighted as a whole your method while arguably conceptually consistent is falling appart due to its gigiantic social cost. If you were to try to repair it, you will end up with millions of law "patches" trying to correct each and every unforeseen outcome propping up.
So of you accept my model which prevents such abuse, you can be accommodated. If you abandon thinking of your work as making "product" which is "property" and instead think of yourself performing "service" you can get back to the same spot you are now. Your software is free to copy but if you are clever with your business plan (centralized servers containing secret sauce, extensive network of complexity-eliminating, hand-holding support staff etc. etc), you can achieve the same monetary effect but without all the negative and unforeseen consequences of "information as property" approach.
Einstein-Bose condensate for example. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. And so on.
How are you special and entitled to protection from this? Otherwise you get a pile of half-assed people spending 100% of their "reseach" time and funds suing each other over "infringements".
Commercial software seems to fall into the same trap although it would not likely be classified as "art". And I think that in the long run (perheaps decades or more - remember there is a lot of money and power being generated from this farce) we will find OSS as the only surviving type of software.
That is if freedom-loving and enlightened societies prevail and not some murky totalitarians.
That is when you stop performing and revert to composing. You make the dude sponsor you for that work. He can sing better, you can compose better. I dont understand you point. If you were to be somehow protected for your inferior performances we are again facing attempts to put the information genie back into the bottle. No, instead you use your business common sense and cut him off from the source until he pays up.
In another message on this thread I explained as follows: Book writers write for the sake of art or education. They are paid by art/education-sponsoring patronages like art/education foundations and wealthy art lovers. The publishers get paid by end-users for the service of copying the works and distributing them. Simple, effective, no need for copyright.
True but music also is information. The very fact that you can encode it into computer data with 100% accuracy is a dead giveway.
Taking this scenario to the extreme, only one single copy of any given book would ever have to be purchased, and that would form a pool from which any trade or swap could be conducted by simply copying the work.
Exactly. The author gets paid by a wealthy patron, art foundation, etc. We all are enriched by his art. Why else write books? Out of greed? You really think all those inane paperback novels are art?!
If you are truly a musician, you compose and perform. You can get huge crowds to your concerts. Lots of money there. And internet downloading is your friend!. It advertises for you! Free! Alternatively you compose only and expect the same art-sponsoring foundations to sponsor your creativity. What is wrong with that? Well except not being able to create some perverted hype and marketing induced monstrous cash cows like Britney...
If you peak at my reply to the post above, you will see that you are entitled to payment for you labour and nothing more, and that is precisely what is happening in this case.
Same applies to the musicians but when you are downloading the music they are not performing for you, Internet and your PC are. Ergo no money for them.
If you were to pay them, that would in your example be directly equivalent to the dude who took the notes being expected to pay you each time he photocopies his notebook. Ridiculous idea, but that is precisely what the McMusic industry has people brainwashed into believing.
What you are describing is a result of decades of unscrupulous brainwashing by various "information industries".
Let me explain:
The musicians are only entitled to pay for their labour. That, in their case means performances. LIVE performances. You charge at the gate and no issue with "stealing". Why? Simple. Beecause if they are using a recording of a performance they in effect are using someone's elses playback device (fully paid for by the listener) playing data from a media disk (also fully paid for). The performance is done by the machine not the musician. As such the entire industry system is based on a single performance and then a stream of endless payments for not performing it again is totally unrealistic.
Sure you can try and bend and twist laws and technology to stop the obvious results of this insane idea but it will fail sooner or later. Same problem applies to DVDs, Sattellite TV and a myriad of other related "products".
The entire mis-understanding comes from the fact that what you think is "art" is in fact consumer abuse. "Artists" only create art from the need to express themselves and not for money. Sure they need to live on something and so we have concerts, exhibitions, wealthy patrons and government grants. You see none of this copyright-based McMusic industry was around back in the days of Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bethoven, DaVinci and so according to the current set of demagogues these people never produced anything art-like.
You must snap out of this miserable state of being a tool for the "information" industry.
I recommend this analysis of the fallacies of treating information that way. The RIAA/MPAA and the current USPO maddness are only tips of the iceberg. Think someone else's "ownership" of your DNA and patenting/copyrights on large integer numbers.
Yes, but he is worried about not being able to put actual GPLed code right into his product. How dare those pink FSF commies try to produce and GPL code thats rightfully his! Heathens!
They made it. They made it GPLed. And they dont like your way of thinking! They actually think you want to be a thief. Yes sir. You want to take what they made, add some stuff to it and make money on it and give NOTHING back to those who made the code.
And lo and behold GPL is preventing you from doing just that! How anti-ripoff.. I mean anti-your kind of business.
Hello! Planet earth to Mr. Thieving Capitalist! No can do! Write your own bloody code under any license you find handy and keep it! Hands-off our shared knowledge. You dont know what "shared" means.
The only thing everyone is getting tired of is would-be thieves whining that the good denizens of OSS community were bold enough to keep the goodies locked away from them. How attrocious! How anti-business! How anti-american! Those pink FSF commies!
Get a grip man, and you wonder why people rate your ranting as "-1, Troll".
That is quite curious sir, given that myself and thousands of others are using GNU/Linux in business. Some of the users are companies like Google and IBM.
Your problem with the GPL simply stems from the impotent frustration of someone who wishes for all the open code to be licensed under a BSD or Public Domain type of license so it can be "borrowed" into some closed-source project with which you are planning to make such a killing as to make Bill Gates look like a lemon-stand owner. You are quite transparent and quite amusing, you know.
I am afraid that your system would cease to function all together given as libc (as in /lib/libc.so.6), the core library that 90% of all applications link to is part of GNU. I am no nazi when it comes to insisting that you call the thing GNU/Linux but I can see how RMS can be seriously peeved when such critical elements that existed long before Linux proper (not to mention the C compiler the kernel is made with) are completely ignored and most people believe Linus wrote the whole thing. This is compounded by the fact that GNU people now have a semi-working kernel called Hurd and when plugged into the same libraries and tools that the Linux kernel is surrounded in it creates a functioning OS.
So for practical every-day use I tend to just say Linux but I also mention GNU/Linux at least once at the beginning of the conversation.
As to Chirac, he is in a no-win situation. Huge and increasingly militant islamic minority demanding all sorts of rights and starting to openly intimidate the general populace. So they try to curb the influence of the radical islamists but will only end up inflaming them.
Personally I think there is a world-wide confrontation coming of the followers of radical islam and the rest of the planet. And I don't mean terrorists but head-on warfare with religious zealots screaming "Allah Akbar!" at the top of their lungs as they charge with their RPGs. They will inevietably lose but a lot of blood will flow, most of it in the Middle East but a lot in places like France with 3 million of potential internal enemies.
For North America, the wise thing to do would be to minimise our exposure to the maniacs and instead of sticking our heads into the very center of their lair, focus on defending our own borders. Religious zealotry is basically indestructible and can only be terminated by killing the entire populations that foister it. Isolation and waiting them out and allowing them to burn themselves up in their inevietable internal destruction and not offerring a viable target is the only way to get out of this, IMHO.
What should be mildly amusing to an American is that this islamic time-bomb the French have is the result of their past imperial adventures in places like Algier. Same very problem the US has created for itself today.
Oh, when it comes to teh French insulting the US, I seem to recall some incident with "freedom fries" after the "old europe" basically nailed the problem on the head and refused to get involved in the Iraq insanity for all those valid reasons like the lack of any WMDs, creating a new center of terrorist activity and total poltical wreckage that Iraq has become. Sure they had other selfish reasons but these were just icing on the cake. It didnt serve them to be right when being right was less important to "being with us or being against us". And my personal opinon again is that Iraq as a country is finished and the US invasion will be marked in history books as the time of the destruction of the country and Saddam as its last leader. Saddam with all his stupididy and viciousness was the rubber band that held that thing together, very much like Tito did in Yugoslavia. Just as Yugoslavia is history, you will see Kurdistan, Shia-stan some Sunni-stan not so long into the future. After a bloody civil war over the extent of their borders of course.
Then we end up with a "wild-west, dog-eats-dog, winner takes all" capitalism which inevietably will result in a handful of ruthless strong men being owners of everything under the sun. An all-powerful oligarchy of mutually-reinforcing monopolies is the natural stable state into which all unregulated capitalist societies would morph given enough time.
No, I am just a realist. Its a hard-earned thing you get beaten into you by life. As opposed to ideologues who would believe wackiest theories as long as they somehow justify their pre-conceived notions. That includes followers of Adam Smith, Marx and many others.
As to your actual point, it is all in definitions of words like "stealing" or "creating". If by stealing you mean appropriation of some resource without compensation, then unless you can show that whomever you see having some resource is the original person that acquired the resource by discovering it, he has something that he stole (or bought stolen) or inhereited or married into. That was the whole point of the very observant and wise italian phrase the original post mentioned.
Almost everything in our sights is at least in part derived from some long-ago original thievery. The fact remains that virtually all finite natural resources of this planet are stolen from someone by some king's/pharaoh's army and all of the modern "owners" are merely inhereitors of the stuff. And thats if you forego modern thieving by individuals, states, dictators etc. Like oil for example and the Saudi royal familiy who were "given" the country and its oil by the British.
All our "creations" in material form are built from these materials and thus derrived from the proceeds of thievery.
"Creating" wealth could only apply to ideas, unfortunately ideas, like the products manufacured from natural resources are derrived from existing ideas which whole or in part were "borrowed" in the same fashion natural resources where. There are marked differences though, ideas are information and information is not property no matter how hard the capitalist ideologies try to make it so. So ideas can are copied effortlessly instad of being yanked from underneath someones butt and the "stealing" applies mostly to the theft of the credit for the idea. Therefore ideas are not even a part of the capitalist equation. Capitalist system in its standard form is applicaple exclusively to material posessions and we already covered that.
So unless you launch into space (in a rocket made from stolen materials) and go and claim some new and never before owned piece of property, all what you have is a result of either "marrying into, inhereiting or stealing". On second thought make it just "stealing", the other two are just deferred forms of it. You see, unless you constantly expand the sphere of influence of a capitalist system to cover more and more natural resources there is no way to "create" any new wealth. Just printing paper notes with ever increasing denominations and continuously reprocessing the stolen goods from one shape to another does not constitute "creating".
Yes if you happened to be in the favoured group of the "approved" capitalists like Krupp, Messershmidt, BMW etc. Full employment is a killer profit maker if you got the state as your guaranteed customer at whatever price you can get away with. My understanding of the definition of "capitalism" is a system where the objective of each player is to accumulate maximum possible capital in any way imaginable and not get murdered in the process. This particular method seems a very effective one and came with little perks like free, although somewhat worse for wear workers, wearing striped uniforms and handilly identified by their tatooed numbers.
No kidding; but what exactly are you referring to with the 96% number? ... Not without massive government **cough**anti-market**cough** intervention.
My point was that in a sane system it should never have been possible for any company to attain 96% market share of anything. The very fact that MS did that is a failure of the system as there was no counter-measure to prevent such extreme condition. A counter-measure could have only been a regulatory one since obviously capitalism has no build-in effective balancing mechanism and is prone to wild and dangerous situations like near-total monopolies.
It's pretty disingenuous to try to hold up a one-word Darl McBride quote as..
If only Darl was saying that it would be, I have seen/heard this used derisively many times now not only on the net but mostly from middle and upper managers in some firms I deal with. I am not sure you realize but there are a lot of people who despise OSS because it does not fit their notion of what "an honest business" should look like. "It's some hippie commune thing you know...". There are more Darl sympathisers out there then many of us are comfortable thinking about.
If you don't feel like being patient, then just keep promoting with increased zeal ...
I am not sure you understood. By "making" people use OSS I meant making them use it against their will as in a decree from the managment. Promoting and encouraging its use is an entirely different issue.
I seriously think that the US is its own worst enemy and would do itself a great favour were it to get out of the business of trying to run the planet. Alternative sources of energy and fuels should be the top priority and complete neutrality in some religion-gone-mad places like Israel or Iran would go a loooong way towards subsiding the world-wide anthipathy George has managed to drum up.
Yes even up here in Canada. A lot of people are pissed. And this is in a country that sent almost all of our meager troops to Afganistan and for us it was a great monumental decision because Canada was always fiercely neutral. Now we are on Osama's list. We werent before that even after 9/11, despite what George says. We simply werent present anywhere in Osama's neighbourhood. No dictators propped up, no bloody revolutions started. Americans used to buy Maple Leaf embroided jackets to try to pretend to be Canadian when travelling abroad. No more of that.
So you should think about the depths other countries went to in order to try to stick with the US after 9/11.
Because then (even though not entirely unprovoked) you were the victim of extra-territorial agression. That was all the difference.
I gurantee you that the Iraq thing blew the whole thing sky high. Noone is going to lift a finger again no matter what happens unless there is some serious rethinking of the US foreign policy.
I think people just hate Microsoft and can't come to grips with the reasons why.
I cant speak for others but for me the point of dislike is that Microsoft is the blatantly obvious result of 100% pure unbashed and uncontrolled capitalist behaviour. 96% market share is just unhealthy for anything in any industry. Period. And that this is dismissed by people as some sort of aberration. And then the same people go on about evils of government controls and how do we need more freedom for formation of companies like microsoft. And then the same very people tend to moan about evils of competition from the "communist" upstart OSS and how we must regulate against it instead of giving it level playing field and in the case of obvious situations like 3rd world countries, prefer it. To "protect" the "american values" etc. Making sure that the market share of Microsoft doesnt shrink. Then usually the same people go onto talking about "thievery" of large numbers a.k.a "Intellectual Properties". It just makes me mad. I admit it. It has nothing to do with trying to destroy Microsoft. It has everything to do with Microsoft being the most visible and "in-your-face" example of excess and monumental greed. The fact that OSS (which I happen to use a lot) is considered by Microsoft "the enemy" to be destroyed (by making it illegal preferrably) compounds my feelings. But its not the company itself or Bill or its (in my view questionable in some respects but quite fine in others) products. Should Apple be at 96% share and were prone to the same behaviour, they would be in most people target sights instead of MS. There are a lot of other reasons having to do with the way Microsoft steals ideas and calls them their property etc, but the above its the gist of it.
Telling people what to buy or what not to buy is futile because they are for better or worse equipped with their own brains and those who are prone to buying PetRocks and "Loose Fat by watching TV!" books and keep sending money to that nice Nigerian general who has so much trouble moving his millions out of the country would go on getting fleeced no matter what I say so that has really nothing to do with the issue. I do tend to extroll virtues of OSS because I use it and like using it myself. But I will be the first to admit that its not for everyone and every situation and in many areas OSS is just plain not ready to compete. "Making" people use OSS is futile and counterproductive in general, only feasible in tightly controlled business environments where corporate policy enforces some company-wide rules. Thats no different than any other type of software.
Trying to play politics at the UN and reduce endorsement of OSS in places that it is most applicapple/needed i.e. the 3rd world, is just pure assholery.
I hope this clears things up.