You might be right about it being too sharp a transition.
However, those of us who support the abolishment of copyrights think that incentives to create new works are strong enough without copyrights, as with the incentive to create anything that is useful in a free market.
Furthermore, it's really easy to create phishing pages that will only show their contents to humans, and not spiders. Isn't it equally easy to create spiders that look like humans?
Does there phishing information originate from a spider, anyhow?
While I do agree with your conclusion, I think there is a flaw in your reasoning, or lack of recognition that this is a trade-off. If copyrights are abolished, maybe the world will be a much better place. However, all of us copyright-abolishment supporters must recognize that until you try it, you cannot tell whether the net effect will be positive. Maybe movies and games will all be at the level of current independent movies and games, or even worse than that. Maybe the needs of some expensive software niches will not be answered. Lots of negative possibilities arise from the abolishment of copyright. I agree that they are unlikely, but you must be honest and recognize the possibility.
I believe that the only way to know is to test it out. Declare all works as of 2010 to be public domain, and no new copyrights will be granted on anything. Give it a couple of decades and see how the market adapts to handle it. Then solve any problems that arise, and the market cannot handle.
Maybe we need some middle-ground, where copyright only applies to for-profit entities. Maybe some other, non-copyright creative solution should be used.
Moderators: Even if you don't agree, this guy makes good points, and represents a legitimate viewpoint that a lot of people hold. So why -1?
The Simpsons still has its moments, but South Park hasn't been funny ever since they degenerated into making every single episode a tediously drawn out morality play. All three of these shows have been going downhill for years, but I have to say South Park went the fastest.
I'm not sure why you think that either of those shows is more sophisticated than Family Guy. They all rely on the same sorts of humor, just in slightly different proportions. I personally think South Park was crappy until they became moral plays. Season 5 is about when they started becoming funny.
South Park might do shallow depictions of situations and events, compared with WikiPedia, for example. But it goes way deeper than most other shows, and hell, deeper than most discussions you see on the news, or by politicians on the same topics.
I love seasons 9-11 (and the season about 9/11:-), and some episodes from season 5-8 are also awesome.
Thank you. I had not thought about this scenario. However, if my memory serves me right, a lot of the companies that has been caught using modified GPLed software without honouring the license has been hardware companies, that use linux in order to get a free ride, but add support for their proprietary hardware. These would still have a lot of resources because they don't base their business on copyright. I agree, there would still be companies that can gain by closing the source.
However, reverse engineering will be possible. Having dealt with a bit of reverse engineering in the past as an educational hobby, I believe that the field of reverse engineering is highly underdeveloped. I believe this can be explained by the fact that reverse engineering for the purpose of generating usable source code is not very useful, in a world where it is illegal to distribute that source code.
If secret changes become a problem (as in the case of hardware makers), reverse engineering might solve it.
While I am generally in favor of abolishing software copyrights altogether, I acknowledge that I cannot be sure that the results of that would be a net positive. There are many unpredictable results of any large-scale change and indeed, abolishing software copyrights might have some negative consequences (as the one you mention).
I don't believe that the problems introduced by abolishing software copyrights would be serious, but if they turn out to be, there are many possible solutions. To solve the problem you mentioned:
Disallow distribution of source-less binaries unless the source was truly lost (in effect, enforce the GPL as law, when applicable).
If some software still requires copyright-based profit incentive (I believe this is unlikely):
Copyrights can be granted to source-code, not binaries. Copyrights given to encourage secrecy is an absurdity.
Copyrights don't have terms, but have to be "bought" from society (possibly ahead of time), at an exponential price (exponent can be either time, number of copies sold or both). The formula should be tuned to encourage copyrights to last a few years only.
Copyrights only apply to commercial/for-profit purposes.
Patches to source code are not considered derivative works, allowing anyone to build upon the work of others, and in effect fork it, without diminishing the returns of the original copyright owner.
I agree it is possible that the only way to fund some inventions is with some kind of patent system.
Maybe developing a flying car is so expensive that it will be impossible to make a profit by being the first to have one.
My personal opinion is that patents are indeed not necessary in the general case, and that the you-get-to-sell-it-first is enough of a financial incentive.
Also, I think that if something is necessary, its probably not fully fledged patents but:
Instead of disallowing use, production, etc as patents do, give some other exclusive right. For example, anything covered by the patent has to bear a trademark/ad or such as demanded by the original creator.
A maximum price on patent licensing can be imposed as to allow everyone to reasonably use the patents (Tricky to define a reasonable maximum, but probably possible).
Force patent creator to actually implement and reasonably sell/distribute every claim of the patent (again, set a maximum price here), or it becomes invalidated.
The only thing that stops $BIG_EVIL_COMPANY to take any GPLed open source project, add random proprietary changes to it, and release it without the new source code, is because if they do, they will break the GPL, and the GPL is only enforcible because of the copyright laws. Without the GPL, and in extension: the copyright law, they wouldn't have any obligation to release the source except for goodwill, and of course the other good things that comes with open source and free software. Some companies or individuals doesn't want or need those good things, and thus they oppose open source. Without copyrights, businesses that use dubious tactics like forking a piece of software into secrecy would financially fail, and all of their "secret modifications" would be reverse engineered and distributed freely. No, there's another thing that stops $BIG_EVIL_COMPANY from taking a GPLed open source project and modifying it -- lack of resources to do so.
Their financial overhead of developing using the closed-source model is currently offset by the financial gain based on copyright. When there is no longer financial gain due to copyright, this overhead will become unsustainable.
Those who try to close the source will simply be outdone by those that use the more efficient open source process. Don't tell me that this could happen already, because the difference is that now, closed-source companies have huge financial backing based on copyright which will simply disappear. Without billions of dollars Microsoft spend on their products, they would be completely unable to compete with their opensource competitors, which have spent a tiny fraction of that amount.
Additionally, in a copyright-free world, the problem will be a minor one. Instead of not having the source at all, you are merely forced to reverse engineer the software, after which you can distribute the changes freely.
How would they sell it as their own? Recursively applying the same idea, the next guy will improve it by another 1% and sell it as his own and so forth. Before you know it, hundreds of people are creating improvements for the benefit of society!
And all this, without using restrictions on society as an incentive? Sounds great to me.
You have a leap in your logic. As one who opposes software copyrights, I use the GPL and not the BSD license.
As long as copyright exists, we use it, via the GPL, to prevent others from using it. When copyright does not exist, the GPL is not necessary, and then the "BSD license"-style freedom takes place.
Choosing the BSD, rather than the GPL is the choice that reflects support of copyright -- it lets others use copyrights on derivatives of your work! If you do not support copyrights, disallow others from using copyright to restrict your software.
Those of us who oppose software copyrights are also pro-GPL, and I do believe Stallman is also in this crowd.
A good project manager does not necessarily know much about good programming.
A good programmer is _far_ better and more knowledgable at programming than his project manager, and no amount of pure hard work will make a bad programmer into a good one.
NP-completeness relates to the scalability of the algorithm with the size of the input. As far as I know, Quantum computers "solve" NP-complete questions in "Polynomial time" (actually constant time?), but they also limit the size of the input significantly.
Since Quantum Computers seem to run on inputs of a specific size, O() notation does not seem to apply at all. The input has a constant size, and the computation is bound by some constant time.
So "solving" NP-complete problems cannot really violate laws of physics in this sense.
Additionally, in the EU, the majority of income of patented drugs comes from EU governments, who buy these for their citizens as part of national health-care.
Its essentially the government paying for these drugs, why can't it pay for R&D more directly, and cut the inefficient patent process out of the loop?
I am not sure if its a good idea, but it could be an interesting idea, with a small refinement.
Just as you say, you can "blow up" the code to 50,000 lines, but you can also blow up machine code and surround it with NOPs, or just make it extremely inefficient.
If, however, you move the burden of proof to the challenger, and he can implement the essence of the patented idea in any general purpose language as a program smaller than some constant, the patent is invalidated.
The problem is, defining "implementation of a patented idea" is quite fuzzy. Should it include the interface components required to actually put it in use? Should it be on a claim-by-claim basis?
I personally think that all software patents should be abolished, but I do think that if they aren't - they should at least be invalidated when someone can come up with a really short program that implements them.
The connection between copyrights and Microsoft's position is:
Copyrights give Microsoft an incentive to sell as many copies as possible, at the highest possible price, while spending the minimum they can on the implementation of new features. In a non-copyright world, the incentives are different - you want to sell not copies, but code work that is then made public.
In order to sell more copies at a higher price, Microsoft's options are:
Marketing: Indeed they use marketing to expand their market.
Innovation: This is expensive, and if you do too much of it, then you won't be able to later sell upgrades. The upgrades do not only serve as income, but they also allow you to control the software that's running on many users which is an extremely valuable asset as it allows you stifle competition. So you want innovation, but as little of it as possible.
Price reduction: This option is not really necessary, until they start losing the Office war.
Increasing the costs of switching to the competition: To do this, all Microsoft needs to do, is develop highly over-complicated and secret file formats, and generally make it difficult.
I don't think Microsoft or anyone should be forced to implement open standards, but that everyone should be forced to publish a specification of whatever standard they chose. If Microsoft did this, we would actually have compatibility with Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.
As for your claim that the reverse engineering effort of Microsoft's secret file formats is not so significant, I think the evidence speaks otherwise: 10 years later - not a single competing Office Suite can reliably open Microsoft Office documents.
Everybody I know who is not switching to OpenOffice, does so first and foremost because some documents still don't open correctly.
Even in a world of copyrights, Microsoft should have been forced to publish the specification of the.doc format (source code that implements it will do, as well). This would save society from investing many man years in reverse engineering the file format, with only partial success. Instead, Microsoft uses each new Office version (as it does with any other product) to create a new secret file format to replace the old one, and the reverse engineering race starts all over again.
Without copyrights, Microsoft could not exist. Software companies would develop software for clients under contracts. This model results in open source code, so secret file formats are out of the question. The "barrier of entry" to the Office market would not be about 20 man-years or so of re-engineering existing secrets, but instead the ordinary barrier of programming skills. In this model, software companies compete for money, not software packages. They do so on the grounds of which is the most effective at implementing new features. Software packages compete for popularity/fame, and can thus reuse code from each other. This encourages these companies to write good software, that is easy to extend and be compatible with, rather than encouraging secrecy and complications to stifle reverse engineering efforts.
When removing copyrights, you free society from most man-years wasted on these efforts:
Reverse engineering for compatibility
Engineering secret and complicated formats and API's in order to stifle the competition
Reimplementing basic software components as the existing ones are covered by the wrong license, or are closed.
In a world without copyright, these freed man-years will go to:
Less money in the field of software due to lack of copyrights will simply mean some of these man years will go elsewhere, and not to software. This means extra efficiency generating resources for society.
Improving the state of the art, instead of re-engineering it.
The GrandGrandParent was claiming that he does not understand the difficulty of threading with C/C++ with traditional methods.
I suspect that this claim of his is a result of ignorance of the problems at hand, and therefore wanted to analyze one of his programs to explain the difficulties with his program as an example. Or alternatively, he could fail to find any example of such a program he wrote (which seems to be the case) and that means he's criticizing that which he has no experience with:-)
You have completely ignored my argument, and instead went to explain why MS Office is good, in your opinion.
Can you please instead reply point-by-point?
Its not that I expect MS to be compatible with any existing standard, but I do expect everyone to use open standards, and even force them to (unnecessary in a world without copyrights, though), because that's much better for society.
Also, my point was that the way profit is made with copyright system gives companies the wrong incentive: Make it as hard as possible to be compatible with your software. In the case of software, this leads to bad and over-complicated formats and software designs.
My point is not that Microsoft Office sucks to the end user. It may very well be relatively good - but that its bad for society. It means that instead of encouraging efforts to create better office suites, the system encourages efforts just to win the format arms race, and be compatible with Microsoft's new format before they come out with a new incompatible one. Given that Microsoft do not have to reverse engineer their own formats, they can spend more time working on new features, and create a better Office, and at the same time they enjoy a huge advantage of compatibility.
I personally find Microsoft Office pretty horrible, and yet I agree the rest of the Office suites are even worse. I think the main difficulty, though, of creating an office suite in this millenium, is overcoming the obstacles placed by Microsoft.
These obstacles waste many man years (I would guess that most man years that went into all competing office suites went into overcoming compatibility difficulties with MS Office), thereby nullifying all competition, ending up with worse Office Suites for the user.
The little incentive Microsoft has to create features is not even to make it more difficult for the user without those features in another office suite, but to give users a reason to switch to its new, incompatible and secret format.
Microsoft makes it as expensive as it can to switch to alternatives, in order to strengthen its copyright-powered monopoly. It invests many man years in creating incompatibilities, and secret file formats. It uses dubious and illegal deals with OEM's. Some switch to Linux, but Microsoft do succeed in hindering the competition. You cannot reliably use the.DOC format with non-Microsoft products, which is the success of Microsoft's huge effort to create secret and incompatible standards.
The value of a software company, under the copyright model of money-per-copy, is bounded by the amount of money all of its customers would have to pay in order to switch to the competition. Once the company is a de-facto monopoly, its not only bounded by that, it also becomes that.
Indeed, the value of Microsoft, is the aggregated cost of all of its customers switching to a competing product. Increasing the quality of its own products to make it expensive to switch is hard, while creating incompatibilities is easy.
This is another reason that copyrights are bad, specifically for software, they create an incentive to create software that is technically poor, not in a way the customer directly feels, but being technically poor is the only way to make software which is hard to be compatible with. This is why Win32 was so successful (at its goal, of hindering competition) - by being extremely over-complicated and technically poor, it was virtually impossible for other systems, especially open-source ones, to have compatibility.
This post of yours does not really deserve reading, let alone a response.. At about "whine whine whine" instead of a real counter-argument, I stopped reading.
Maybe if you brought real arguments, you'd be writing anything worth reading. Feel free to try again, though.
The problem is that many people are susceptible to propaganda. You either ban it, or you counter it with your own propaganda. You can't just publish it, the result will be worse.
I personally think it should be allowed for sale as long as it comes with the necessary explanations and counter-propaganda attached.
I'm at a friend's house, and since he did not have Firefox, but instead the one that was motived by a copyright-company, and clicking "Back" loses everything you write in a form (even in IE 7!), so I am unable to post my long reply:-( I can't believe people use this piece of crap (Which the majority does, as a counter-claim to yours above about "people parting with their money")
Generally my points were: A. IP lumps together copyrights and trademark laws. I am very much in favor of trademark law, but against copyrights. So please do not misrepresent my position as anti-IP. This is a discussion about copyrights, not IP. B. Copyrights were created, as said so by its creators themselves, as a necessary evil. My argument is that they are no longer (if ever were) necessary, and now are just evil. C. You agree that copyrights discourage people from creating free works, but do not agree to the logical conclusion: That copyrights deprive society of free works, which are much more worthy to society than a copyrighted work (And form a basis for derivative works further enriching society). D. Physical property is different to copyrights, and even different kinds of physical property differ. Ownership of weapons might need differing laws than ownership of cattle, or ownership of money. Ownership of "copyrights" should not exist, as copyrights shouldn't exist. People disclaiming their copyrights proves that copyright is an unnecessary evil for them (and the entire market that their software covers), but people disclaiming some or all of their physical property does not prove anything, and its not a necessary evil to begin with.
The other arguments I have mentioned (the availability of many programmers, etc) make these specific fixes that companies may want to implement very cheap.
Would a garage not pay a few thousand dollars to make its multi-million dollar operation a few percentages more efficient? Would a law firm not pay 10000$ to fix a bug in OpenOffice that is making their lives difficult?
They have no interest vested in software, and those issues are unlikely to be "competative advantages" that they want to lose. There is no reason for them to avoid "leaking" this, or to fear such leaks.
Also, companies may pool up to fund the software development required for an entire field. The RIAA (which now serves a completely negative function in society), could be a positive body and fund open software development that aids the entire industry. A geological industry association can fund geologic developments, and so on.
Well, Anonymous Brave Guy already said a lot of what I was going to say, but I'll still add on:
I wish people would stop putting this in such black-and-white terms. Yes, people create free content. People create kinds of content for which they don't expect or intend to assert IP right. They also give away free muffins and babysitting. Does that mean property rights in physical goods or civil liberties are irrelevant? No.
You misunderstand completely. My right to property is a protection from the government - that physical things that have passed a certain process and are therefore declared "mine" cannot be deprived from me. The right to property is not used as an incentive - but as a protection meant to make people's lives better. The "right" to "intellectual property" (its not a right, and its not property), are a power to deprive others of copies in order to make it possible for me to sell them copies as a means to create incentive for works. Free Software shows that this incentive is not necessary and thus depriving people of copies of information is not a necessary evil as was deemed by the framers of the constitution, but just an evil.
The question is, how do you get those precious creative works that do require a huge investment that no one will charitably fund in advance?
"Uh..."?
Do you want my answer, or the straw man's?
Seriously: The precious creative work of the Linux kernel, or OpenOffice, required a huge investment, and yet without copyrights, it received the "magical funding" it needed. Amazing and miraculous? Or does large software not need these artificial incentives?
Software has various incentives already working for it, without copyrights thank you very much:
Need. The free market works to fulfill the needs of those that have the resources to pay for them. Programmers have the direct resource - they can program what they need. Others have money and can hire programmers directly or indirectly to fulfill their software needs. Without copyrights, others can benefit!
Fun! Creating software is great fun for a vast many people, and they will do so in their spare time. Linux is quite a huge project, and at least until recent years, was primarily motivated by fun.
Low barrier of entry: Creating software is not creating cars. You don't need to pay millions of dollars upfront just to get into the business. Anyone can program from home, and this means that many programmers will always exist.
Remember, free ("Free") content can exist whether or not we have IP laws. The existence of the "rich culture" proves precisely nothing, yet people bring it up as if it's some ingenious point.
The fact that you missed its meaning (that the extra incentive is not required) does not mean its not there.
The argument that Copyrights do not prevent free software from being created is simply false. Copyrights are a huge disincentive to make free software. People will pay for Microsoft Office if that's an option, whereas without copyrighted software, they would pay someone to improve OpenOffice, which would benefit society as a whole.
Copyrights also lure away programmers from creating Free Software (as the only software creation option) to create Non-free copyrighted software, as that pays more.
Copyrights, by creating this disincentive and luring away programmers, thus diminish the size of the Free Software pool, thereby harming society.
I don't know, chasing down a criminal who stabbed me will cost more than my medical bill, is it worth the cost?
Like most analogies, this is a bad one. If the true costs of you being stabbed were only the medical bill, then yes, I would fully agree. However, people being stabbed cost society much more than their medical bills, and therefore whatever costs necessary to chase down stabbers are probably worthwhile for society.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be right about it being too sharp a transition.
However, those of us who support the abolishment of copyrights think that incentives to create new works are strong enough without copyrights, as with the incentive to create anything that is useful in a free market.
Does there phishing information originate from a spider, anyhow?
While I do agree with your conclusion, I think there is a flaw in your reasoning, or lack of recognition that this is a trade-off. If copyrights are abolished, maybe the world will be a much better place. However, all of us copyright-abolishment supporters must recognize that until you try it, you cannot tell whether the net effect will be positive. Maybe movies and games will all be at the level of current independent movies and games, or even worse than that. Maybe the needs of some expensive software niches will not be answered. Lots of negative possibilities arise from the abolishment of copyright. I agree that they are unlikely, but you must be honest and recognize the possibility.
I believe that the only way to know is to test it out. Declare all works as of 2010 to be public domain, and no new copyrights will be granted on anything. Give it a couple of decades and see how the market adapts to handle it. Then solve any problems that arise, and the market cannot handle.
Maybe we need some middle-ground, where copyright only applies to for-profit entities. Maybe some other, non-copyright creative solution should be used.
Moderators: Even if you don't agree, this guy makes good points, and represents a legitimate viewpoint that a lot of people hold. So why -1?
I'm not sure why you think that either of those shows is more sophisticated than Family Guy. They all rely on the same sorts of humor, just in slightly different proportions. I personally think South Park was crappy until they became moral plays. Season 5 is about when they started becoming funny.
South Park might do shallow depictions of situations and events, compared with WikiPedia, for example. But it goes way deeper than most other shows, and hell, deeper than most discussions you see on the news, or by politicians on the same topics.
I love seasons 9-11 (and the season about 9/11
However, reverse engineering will be possible. Having dealt with a bit of reverse engineering in the past as an educational hobby, I believe that the field of reverse engineering is highly underdeveloped. I believe this can be explained by the fact that reverse engineering for the purpose of generating usable source code is not very useful, in a world where it is illegal to distribute that source code.
If secret changes become a problem (as in the case of hardware makers), reverse engineering might solve it.
While I am generally in favor of abolishing software copyrights altogether, I acknowledge that I cannot be sure that the results of that would be a net positive. There are many unpredictable results of any large-scale change and indeed, abolishing software copyrights might have some negative consequences (as the one you mention).
I don't believe that the problems introduced by abolishing software copyrights would be serious, but if they turn out to be, there are many possible solutions. To solve the problem you mentioned:
- Disallow distribution of source-less binaries unless the source was truly lost (in effect, enforce the GPL as law, when applicable).
If some software still requires copyright-based profit incentive (I believe this is unlikely):Maybe developing a flying car is so expensive that it will be impossible to make a profit by being the first to have one.
My personal opinion is that patents are indeed not necessary in the general case, and that the you-get-to-sell-it-first is enough of a financial incentive.
Also, I think that if something is necessary, its probably not fully fledged patents but:
Without copyrights, businesses that use dubious tactics like forking a piece of software into secrecy would financially fail, and all of their "secret modifications" would be reverse engineered and distributed freely. No, there's another thing that stops $BIG_EVIL_COMPANY from taking a GPLed open source project and modifying it -- lack of resources to do so.
Their financial overhead of developing using the closed-source model is currently offset by the financial gain based on copyright. When there is no longer financial gain due to copyright, this overhead will become unsustainable.
Those who try to close the source will simply be outdone by those that use the more efficient open source process. Don't tell me that this could happen already, because the difference is that now, closed-source companies have huge financial backing based on copyright which will simply disappear. Without billions of dollars Microsoft spend on their products, they would be completely unable to compete with their opensource competitors, which have spent a tiny fraction of that amount.
Additionally, in a copyright-free world, the problem will be a minor one. Instead of not having the source at all, you are merely forced to reverse engineer the software, after which you can distribute the changes freely.
I think nobody should make anything digitally anymore based solely on the assumption that noone will be able to copy it.
Copying is NOT like taking away a man's television (while also depriving him from his window).
Copyrights are more harm than good.
How would they sell it as their own?
Recursively applying the same idea, the next guy will improve it by another 1% and sell it as his own and so forth.
Before you know it, hundreds of people are creating improvements for the benefit of society!
And all this, without using restrictions on society as an incentive? Sounds great to me.
You have a leap in your logic.
As one who opposes software copyrights, I use the GPL and not the BSD license.
As long as copyright exists, we use it, via the GPL, to prevent others from using it.
When copyright does not exist, the GPL is not necessary, and then the "BSD license"-style freedom takes place.
Choosing the BSD, rather than the GPL is the choice that reflects support of copyright -- it lets others use copyrights on derivatives of your work! If you do not support copyrights, disallow others from using copyright to restrict your software.
Those of us who oppose software copyrights are also pro-GPL, and I do believe Stallman is also in this crowd.
A good project manager does not necessarily know much about good programming.
A good programmer is _far_ better and more knowledgable at programming than his project manager, and no amount of pure hard work will make a bad programmer into a good one.
NP-completeness relates to the scalability of the algorithm with the size of the input.
As far as I know, Quantum computers "solve" NP-complete questions in "Polynomial time" (actually constant time?), but they also limit the size of the input significantly.
Since Quantum Computers seem to run on inputs of a specific size, O() notation does not seem to apply at all. The input has a constant size, and the computation is bound by some constant time.
So "solving" NP-complete problems cannot really violate laws of physics in this sense.
Additionally, in the EU, the majority of income of patented drugs comes from EU governments, who buy these for their citizens as part of national health-care.
Its essentially the government paying for these drugs, why can't it pay for R&D more directly, and cut the inefficient patent process out of the loop?
I am not sure if its a good idea, but it could be an interesting idea, with a small refinement.
Just as you say, you can "blow up" the code to 50,000 lines, but you can also blow up machine code and surround it with NOPs, or just make it extremely inefficient.
If, however, you move the burden of proof to the challenger, and he can implement the essence of the patented idea in any general purpose language as a program smaller than some constant, the patent is invalidated.
The problem is, defining "implementation of a patented idea" is quite fuzzy. Should it include the interface components required to actually put it in use? Should it be on a claim-by-claim basis?
I personally think that all software patents should be abolished, but I do think that if they aren't - they should at least be invalidated when someone can come up with a really short program that implements them.
The internet also includes the nodes between these tubes, but why do people keep quoting that, as if it points to idiocy?
It is an acceptable description of the essence of the internet, in layman's terms, which is what it was meant to be.
A car is also a seat-box that moves.
The connection between copyrights and Microsoft's position is:
I don't think Microsoft or anyone should be forced to implement open standards, but that everyone should be forced to publish a specification of whatever standard they chose. If Microsoft did this, we would actually have compatibility with Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.
.doc format (source code that implements it will do, as well). This would save society from investing many man years in reverse engineering the file format, with only partial success.
As for your claim that the reverse engineering effort of Microsoft's secret file formats is not so significant, I think the evidence speaks otherwise:
10 years later - not a single competing Office Suite can reliably open Microsoft Office documents.
Everybody I know who is not switching to OpenOffice, does so first and foremost because some documents still don't open correctly.
Even in a world of copyrights, Microsoft should have been forced to publish the specification of the
Instead, Microsoft uses each new Office version (as it does with any other product) to create a new secret file format to replace the old one, and the reverse engineering race starts all over again.
Without copyrights, Microsoft could not exist. Software companies would develop software for clients under contracts. This model results in open source code, so secret file formats are out of the question. The "barrier of entry" to the Office market would not be about 20 man-years or so of re-engineering existing secrets, but instead the ordinary barrier of programming skills.
In this model, software companies compete for money, not software packages. They do so on the grounds of which is the most effective at implementing new features. Software packages compete for popularity/fame, and can thus reuse code from each other. This encourages these companies to write good software, that is easy to extend and be compatible with, rather than encouraging secrecy and complications to stifle reverse engineering efforts.
When removing copyrights, you free society from most man-years wasted on these efforts:
In a world without copyright, these freed man-years will go to:
Even software monop
Yeah, I have.
:-)
The issue was C/C++ threading, though.
The GrandGrandParent was claiming that he does not understand the difficulty of threading with C/C++ with traditional methods.
I suspect that this claim of his is a result of ignorance of the problems at hand, and therefore wanted to analyze one of his programs to explain the difficulties with his program as an example.
Or alternatively, he could fail to find any example of such a program he wrote (which seems to be the case) and that means he's criticizing that which he has no experience with
You have completely ignored my argument, and instead went to explain why MS Office is good, in your opinion.
Can you please instead reply point-by-point?
Its not that I expect MS to be compatible with any existing standard, but I do expect everyone to use open standards, and even force them to (unnecessary in a world without copyrights, though), because that's much better for society.
Also, my point was that the way profit is made with copyright system gives companies the wrong incentive: Make it as hard as possible to be compatible with your software. In the case of software, this leads to bad and over-complicated formats and software designs.
My point is not that Microsoft Office sucks to the end user. It may very well be relatively good - but that its bad for society. It means that instead of encouraging efforts to create better office suites, the system encourages efforts just to win the format arms race, and be compatible with Microsoft's new format before they come out with a new incompatible one.
Given that Microsoft do not have to reverse engineer their own formats, they can spend more time working on new features, and create a better Office, and at the same time they enjoy a huge advantage of compatibility.
I personally find Microsoft Office pretty horrible, and yet I agree the rest of the Office suites are even worse. I think the main difficulty, though, of creating an office suite in this millenium, is overcoming the obstacles placed by Microsoft.
These obstacles waste many man years (I would guess that most man years that went into all competing office suites went into overcoming compatibility difficulties with MS Office), thereby nullifying all competition, ending up with worse Office Suites for the user.
The little incentive Microsoft has to create features is not even to make it more difficult for the user without those features in another office suite, but to give users a reason to switch to its new, incompatible and secret format.
Microsoft makes it as expensive as it can to switch to alternatives, in order to strengthen its copyright-powered monopoly. It invests many man years in creating incompatibilities, and secret file formats. It uses dubious and illegal deals with OEM's. .DOC format with non-Microsoft products, which is the success of Microsoft's huge effort to create secret and incompatible standards.
Some switch to Linux, but Microsoft do succeed in hindering the competition. You cannot reliably use the
The value of a software company, under the copyright model of money-per-copy, is bounded by the amount of money all of its customers would have to pay in order to switch to the competition. Once the company is a de-facto monopoly, its not only bounded by that, it also becomes that.
Indeed, the value of Microsoft, is the aggregated cost of all of its customers switching to a competing product. Increasing the quality of its own products to make it expensive to switch is hard, while creating incompatibilities is easy.
This is another reason that copyrights are bad, specifically for software, they create an incentive to create software that is technically poor, not in a way the customer directly feels, but being technically poor is the only way to make software which is hard to be compatible with.
This is why Win32 was so successful (at its goal, of hindering competition) - by being extremely over-complicated and technically poor, it was virtually impossible for other systems, especially open-source ones, to have compatibility.
This post of yours does not really deserve reading, let alone a response..
At about "whine whine whine" instead of a real counter-argument, I stopped reading.
Maybe if you brought real arguments, you'd be writing anything worth reading. Feel free to try again, though.
The problem is that many people are susceptible to propaganda.
You either ban it, or you counter it with your own propaganda. You can't just publish it, the result will be worse.
I personally think it should be allowed for sale as long as it comes with the necessary explanations and counter-propaganda attached.
I'm at a friend's house, and since he did not have Firefox, but instead the one that was motived by a copyright-company, and clicking "Back" loses everything you write in a form (even in IE 7!), so I am unable to post my long reply :-( I can't believe people use this piece of crap (Which the majority does, as a counter-claim to yours above about "people parting with their money")
Generally my points were:
A. IP lumps together copyrights and trademark laws. I am very much in favor of trademark law, but against copyrights. So please do not misrepresent my position as anti-IP. This is a discussion about copyrights, not IP.
B. Copyrights were created, as said so by its creators themselves, as a necessary evil. My argument is that they are no longer (if ever were) necessary, and now are just evil.
C. You agree that copyrights discourage people from creating free works, but do not agree to the logical conclusion: That copyrights deprive society of free works, which are much more worthy to society than a copyrighted work (And form a basis for derivative works further enriching society).
D. Physical property is different to copyrights, and even different kinds of physical property differ. Ownership of weapons might need differing laws than ownership of cattle, or ownership of money. Ownership of "copyrights" should not exist, as copyrights shouldn't exist. People disclaiming their copyrights proves that copyright is an unnecessary evil for them (and the entire market that their software covers), but people disclaiming some or all of their physical property does not prove anything, and its not a necessary evil to begin with.
The other arguments I have mentioned (the availability of many programmers, etc) make these specific fixes that companies may want to implement very cheap.
Would a garage not pay a few thousand dollars to make its multi-million dollar operation a few percentages more efficient?
Would a law firm not pay 10000$ to fix a bug in OpenOffice that is making their lives difficult?
They have no interest vested in software, and those issues are unlikely to be "competative advantages" that they want to lose.
There is no reason for them to avoid "leaking" this, or to fear such leaks.
Also, companies may pool up to fund the software development required for an entire field. The RIAA (which now serves a completely negative function in society), could be a positive body and fund open software development that aids the entire industry.
A geological industry association can fund geologic developments, and so on.
Do you have a link to any threaded program you wrote that has no synchronization issues in the traditional approach?
Well, Anonymous Brave Guy already said a lot of what I was going to say, but I'll still add on:
I wish people would stop putting this in such black-and-white terms. Yes, people create free content. People create kinds of content for which they don't expect or intend to assert IP right. They also give away free muffins and babysitting. Does that mean property rights in physical goods or civil liberties are irrelevant? No.
You misunderstand completely. My right to property is a protection from the government - that physical things that have passed a certain process and are therefore declared "mine" cannot be deprived from me. The right to property is not used as an incentive - but as a protection meant to make people's lives better.
The "right" to "intellectual property" (its not a right, and its not property), are a power to deprive others of copies in order to make it possible for me to sell them copies as a means to create incentive for works.
Free Software shows that this incentive is not necessary and thus depriving people of copies of information is not a necessary evil as was deemed by the framers of the constitution, but just an evil.
The question is, how do you get those precious creative works that do require a huge investment that no one will charitably fund in advance?
"Uh..."?
Do you want my answer, or the straw man's?
Seriously: The precious creative work of the Linux kernel, or OpenOffice, required a huge investment, and yet without copyrights, it received the "magical funding" it needed. Amazing and miraculous? Or does large software not need these artificial incentives?
Software has various incentives already working for it, without copyrights thank you very much:
Remember, free ("Free") content can exist whether or not we have IP laws. The existence of the "rich culture" proves precisely nothing, yet people bring it up as if it's some ingenious point.
The fact that you missed its meaning (that the extra incentive is not required) does not mean its not there.
The argument that Copyrights do not prevent free software from being created is simply false.
Copyrights are a huge disincentive to make free software. People will pay for Microsoft Office if that's an option, whereas without copyrighted software, they would pay someone to improve OpenOffice, which would benefit society as a whole.
Copyrights also lure away programmers from creating Free Software (as the only software creation option) to create Non-free copyrighted software, as that pays more.
Copyrights, by creating this disincentive and luring away programmers, thus diminish the size of the Free Software pool, thereby harming society.
I don't know, chasing down a criminal who stabbed me will cost more than my medical bill, is it worth the cost?
Like most analogies, this is a bad one. If the true costs of you being stabbed were only the medical bill, then yes, I would fully agree. However, people being stabbed cost society much more than their medical bills, and therefore whatever costs necessary to chase down stabbers are probably worthwhile for society.
The same