(I should say, the manual skill in creation and reproduction. Dune is Dune is Dune, on pulp or magazine stock, as the same words are there, but a Rodin is not a Rodin when it's been carved from meat by a blind robot.)
We're not talking about some product where the skill in creation is vital to the end result, though. If someone takes your un-noticed novel, copies it word for word, and puts it back out to great acclaim, popularity, and gigantic sacks of cash, you would feel rightly aggrieved, no?
Those works were largely public domain to begin with (the Grimms were collectors of local fables, and you can't copyright a version of your nation's Johnny Appleseed) and even if they weren't, the authors have been dead for quite some time. I'm sure we can both agree that copyright protection should've lapsed in those cases.
Sony may have anticipated these regulations to some extent - the Sixaxis/Dualshock 3 instructions detail how to take the controller apart and extract the battery, but the last step is the instruction to take controller and battery to be recycled. There is no "put in new battery" stage, nor is there any instruction on how to get the various spring-loaded bits of controller to mate again.
Market selection has a historically poor track record when it comes to encouraging improvements in the safety, health, and environmental impact of products until the horse has bolted. The market selected Chinese-made lead-filled products over more expensive, safer products made by companies in the US. The safety problems weren't noticed until the products were literally everywhere. If China's manufacturing industry had the environmental health and safety oversight of the US, this would've been avoided.
No, you didn't have enough money off the book. You didn't make any. Unlike the movie, nobody noticed it. It languished on the shelves for ten years until some random screenwriter decided that it was great. And everyone lapped it up, and that jerk's published your own book as "the novelisation of the movie", because it's out of copyright, and he's making thousands of dollars off it, and you're a joke because you're pretending to have written the movie. And legally there's nothing you can do about it.
I'd say that smartphones are the one kind of phone that really need a replacable battery in their lifetime, too. At a day to a charge or thereabouts you can burn through the battery life fairly quickly (within a few years), at least in principle. And they're more expensive to replace as a whole device. I find it terribly ironic that my phone has a replacable battery, yet it goes about 10 days on a charge cycle it's cheaper to buy a whole new phone than the battery itself anyway.
I'm not talking about what happens after a book has taken off, though. In that case the book's popularity is obviously sufficient protection from infringement. I'm talking about the 99.99% of cases where somebody creates something which isn't a hugely successful cash-engine, or which has yet to become one.
Imagine if Jon Stevens got his hands on Watchmen back in the 1980s, in the copyright climate you propose. No legal power on Earth could've stopped him from producing a movie in which a flamboyantly camp Rosarch battled giant spiders. He could've turned it into a kids' TV show, and a cereal, and become de facto creator of Watchmen, because nobody would know about Alan Moore apart from his terrible, violet, twisted parody of Stevens' incredibly popular childrens' series.
And it's not what the EU's looking for anyway. It has to be easily removable (I'm assuming with common or garden tools) by the end-user or any old electronics recycling facility. They're not going to take "you can send all the phones to us and pay us to take the batteries out" as an acceptable solution.
In fact, perusing what manufacturers have user-replacable battieres these days, they've decided to protect Japan's (Sony-Ericsson) and Korea's (LG, Samsung) phone manufacturers while they were at it. And the US's (Motorola) too! How terrible, that their protectionism will harm the economy of the People's Republic of Cupertino so that tiny nations like the US, EU, Japan, and Korea will be able to prosper.
It should last no longer than is needed to get your book published and on the shelves or your song recorded and into peoples ipods.
So you'd be happy for Dreamworks to rake it in with a multi-million dollar multimedia franchise based on Megatokyo, starring Rob Schneider and Paris Hilton? I mean, it's hit the bookstore, it's fair game right? I'm all for stamping out ridiculous copyright protections, but that goes way in the opposite direction. Creators need some sort of protection.
I'm not sure where you're getting "space exploration projects being talked about and planned for the 2020s". There is literally no timetable for a "return to the moon", let alone permanent occupation, let alone Big Science like a lunar telescope. The closest thing I can get to your "2010-2020s" estimate is that there's going to be a review of lunar habitation concepts around about 2011.
Ten times the Earth-Pluto distance? You'd better be banking on a long MTBF for that. And the time required to change the telescope's orientation would make Hubble look nippy.;) You'd really want a vast constellation of telescopes out at that range, distributed for redundancy. Combining the various telescopes' signals could give you a mighty resolution, as a bonus. A proposal for a civisation making a Dyson sphere, perhaps.
It's a movie about how if you teach evolution, it's like taking people to the gas chambers. If it could be sued for lack of taste, believe me, it would've.
I think you'd be rightly pissed off if you wrote a book, it didn't really sell, and then ten years later Fox released a profoundly successful blockbuster hit based on it, starring Bruce Willis in that role you really imagined for Herman Munster. And you got absolutely nothing for that. Likewise if ten years after your underground rock anthem was released to cult popularity, it was the best-selling techno-remixed ring-tone-tastic theme tune to Big Brother: The Z-List Edition, and your only available course of action was to kill yourself for being associated with such an abomination.
(I should also point out, of course, that Shermer's backing down is an example of the too-expensive-to-defend situation again. For those with too little money, fair use de facto doesn't exist.)
Actually, in a wonderfully apt counterexample, Yoko Ono refused to let Michael Shermer use an excerpt in one of his books a few years before. (The chapter in question was on changing attitudes to religion, for maximum appropriateness.) Difference is, of course, that Shermer actually asked and deferred to her for the sake of a quiet life. She's famously protective of the Lennon estate.
There's no doubt who mantanmoreland is and what he did. However there's a vast, well-populated planetary system of doubt around the idea that an elite Wikipedia cabal favoured him because they're out to promote naked shorting and are deliberately keeping Byrne out. Byrne was blocked for behaving like a collosal douche, and went on an offline campaign against the Wikipedia editors who he says are out on a well-laid scheme to destroy his company. That's why he's not allowed to edit any more. That's all there is to it.
He wasn't caught "manipulating" anything. He wrote some articles that took a specific stance on naked shorting, and which carried his name. He wrote a book with a chapter on the same. He edited Wikipedia to reflect this, and has been outed. How is that manipulation? Well, let's look at the course of events:
Writer/journalist edits own Wikipedia article, article of Overstock.com CEO, article on naked shorting to reflect own stance. CEO of Overstock.com reads Wikipedia, disagrees, gets in edit war. CEO starts personal attacks on writer/journalist's own wikipedia page. CEO is blocked. CEO registers new account. CEO is blocked again. Repeat until CEO's IP range is blocked. Writer/journalist continues to edit, by virtue of not being caught doing anything as absurdly mean.
CEO goes on campaign against Wikipedia editors who banned him. (Too much to explain here, but he won't be happy until he has the names, addresses, and affiliations of everyone even tangentally involved in his "silencing".) CEO goes to The Register declaring that writer/journalist and Wikipedia are in cahoots to promote the naked shorting of his own company. Regular media reports his theory, less than flatteringly. CEO goes back to The Register declaring that writer/journalist and Wikipedia are in cahoots to promote naked shorting in general and are culpable in the current financial crisis, and that he has proof, but does not present it. I'm sure the regular media will happily report his conspiracy theory, but it's going to be hard to do so in a flattering way.
Seriously, this is a story about Wikipedia editing, not naked shorting, and not the financial crisis. Dramas like this unfold all the time, except it's usually an alleged bias for/against Israel/intelligent design/the moon landing hoax/Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series instead of an issue with a dubious trading practice. The only "media manipulation" in the whole thing is that Byrne is getting a sympathetic journalist to depict the whole thing as a conspiracy, and it's backfiring horribly for him.
Because he's written a book on the subject with that stance? This is no more mysterious than Byrne's own editing of the articles, which involved the same tricks. There's no reason to assume a conspiracy in either case.
You can start up at the top of the page, with the last Reg story about this. Byrne's stance is not only that Wikipedia is biased against him and in favour of blind shorting, but that it's specifically targetting his company under the orders of the mysterious "sith lord". The only difference this time is that he's saying said fictional evil jedi is after the entire stock market.
Slashdot Mirror
(I should say, the manual skill in creation and reproduction. Dune is Dune is Dune, on pulp or magazine stock, as the same words are there, but a Rodin is not a Rodin when it's been carved from meat by a blind robot.)
We're not talking about some product where the skill in creation is vital to the end result, though. If someone takes your un-noticed novel, copies it word for word, and puts it back out to great acclaim, popularity, and gigantic sacks of cash, you would feel rightly aggrieved, no?
Those works were largely public domain to begin with (the Grimms were collectors of local fables, and you can't copyright a version of your nation's Johnny Appleseed) and even if they weren't, the authors have been dead for quite some time. I'm sure we can both agree that copyright protection should've lapsed in those cases.
Sony may have anticipated these regulations to some extent - the Sixaxis/Dualshock 3 instructions detail how to take the controller apart and extract the battery, but the last step is the instruction to take controller and battery to be recycled. There is no "put in new battery" stage, nor is there any instruction on how to get the various spring-loaded bits of controller to mate again.
Market selection has a historically poor track record when it comes to encouraging improvements in the safety, health, and environmental impact of products until the horse has bolted. The market selected Chinese-made lead-filled products over more expensive, safer products made by companies in the US. The safety problems weren't noticed until the products were literally everywhere. If China's manufacturing industry had the environmental health and safety oversight of the US, this would've been avoided.
No, you didn't have enough money off the book. You didn't make any. Unlike the movie, nobody noticed it. It languished on the shelves for ten years until some random screenwriter decided that it was great. And everyone lapped it up, and that jerk's published your own book as "the novelisation of the movie", because it's out of copyright, and he's making thousands of dollars off it, and you're a joke because you're pretending to have written the movie. And legally there's nothing you can do about it.
I'd say that smartphones are the one kind of phone that really need a replacable battery in their lifetime, too. At a day to a charge or thereabouts you can burn through the battery life fairly quickly (within a few years), at least in principle. And they're more expensive to replace as a whole device. I find it terribly ironic that my phone has a replacable battery, yet it goes about 10 days on a charge cycle it's cheaper to buy a whole new phone than the battery itself anyway.
Slashdot uses whatever the blog that posted the blog that posted the blog that posted the link to the original article used to get clicks. ;)
I think it's more about the environment, personally. RoHS regs are pretty strict here and the battery is one big, readily recyclable component.
I'm not talking about what happens after a book has taken off, though. In that case the book's popularity is obviously sufficient protection from infringement. I'm talking about the 99.99% of cases where somebody creates something which isn't a hugely successful cash-engine, or which has yet to become one.
Imagine if Jon Stevens got his hands on Watchmen back in the 1980s, in the copyright climate you propose. No legal power on Earth could've stopped him from producing a movie in which a flamboyantly camp Rosarch battled giant spiders. He could've turned it into a kids' TV show, and a cereal, and become de facto creator of Watchmen, because nobody would know about Alan Moore apart from his terrible, violet, twisted parody of Stevens' incredibly popular childrens' series.
And it's not what the EU's looking for anyway. It has to be easily removable (I'm assuming with common or garden tools) by the end-user or any old electronics recycling facility. They're not going to take "you can send all the phones to us and pay us to take the batteries out" as an acceptable solution.
In fact, perusing what manufacturers have user-replacable battieres these days, they've decided to protect Japan's (Sony-Ericsson) and Korea's (LG, Samsung) phone manufacturers while they were at it. And the US's (Motorola) too! How terrible, that their protectionism will harm the economy of the People's Republic of Cupertino so that tiny nations like the US, EU, Japan, and Korea will be able to prosper.
It should last no longer than is needed to get your book published and on the shelves or your song recorded and into peoples ipods.
So you'd be happy for Dreamworks to rake it in with a multi-million dollar multimedia franchise based on Megatokyo, starring Rob Schneider and Paris Hilton? I mean, it's hit the bookstore, it's fair game right? I'm all for stamping out ridiculous copyright protections, but that goes way in the opposite direction. Creators need some sort of protection.
I'm not sure where you're getting "space exploration projects being talked about and planned for the 2020s". There is literally no timetable for a "return to the moon", let alone permanent occupation, let alone Big Science like a lunar telescope. The closest thing I can get to your "2010-2020s" estimate is that there's going to be a review of lunar habitation concepts around about 2011.
Ten times the Earth-Pluto distance? You'd better be banking on a long MTBF for that. And the time required to change the telescope's orientation would make Hubble look nippy. ;) You'd really want a vast constellation of telescopes out at that range, distributed for redundancy. Combining the various telescopes' signals could give you a mighty resolution, as a bonus. A proposal for a civisation making a Dyson sphere, perhaps.
It's a movie about how if you teach evolution, it's like taking people to the gas chambers. If it could be sued for lack of taste, believe me, it would've.
More reasonably, they can (as happens in some other cases) be banned from filing lawsuits for being a vexatious litigant. I think.
I think you'd be rightly pissed off if you wrote a book, it didn't really sell, and then ten years later Fox released a profoundly successful blockbuster hit based on it, starring Bruce Willis in that role you really imagined for Herman Munster. And you got absolutely nothing for that. Likewise if ten years after your underground rock anthem was released to cult popularity, it was the best-selling techno-remixed ring-tone-tastic theme tune to Big Brother: The Z-List Edition, and your only available course of action was to kill yourself for being associated with such an abomination.
(I should also point out, of course, that Shermer's backing down is an example of the too-expensive-to-defend situation again. For those with too little money, fair use de facto doesn't exist.)
Actually, in a wonderfully apt counterexample, Yoko Ono refused to let Michael Shermer use an excerpt in one of his books a few years before. (The chapter in question was on changing attitudes to religion, for maximum appropriateness.) Difference is, of course, that Shermer actually asked and deferred to her for the sake of a quiet life. She's famously protective of the Lennon estate.
You're telling me that Lowg-burrow isn't right? I can't wait to tell all the guys in Glasgau and She-field.
There's no doubt who mantanmoreland is and what he did. However there's a vast, well-populated planetary system of doubt around the idea that an elite Wikipedia cabal favoured him because they're out to promote naked shorting and are deliberately keeping Byrne out. Byrne was blocked for behaving like a collosal douche, and went on an offline campaign against the Wikipedia editors who he says are out on a well-laid scheme to destroy his company. That's why he's not allowed to edit any more. That's all there is to it.
He wasn't caught "manipulating" anything. He wrote some articles that took a specific stance on naked shorting, and which carried his name. He wrote a book with a chapter on the same. He edited Wikipedia to reflect this, and has been outed. How is that manipulation? Well, let's look at the course of events:
Writer/journalist edits own Wikipedia article, article of Overstock.com CEO, article on naked shorting to reflect own stance. CEO of Overstock.com reads Wikipedia, disagrees, gets in edit war. CEO starts personal attacks on writer/journalist's own wikipedia page. CEO is blocked. CEO registers new account. CEO is blocked again. Repeat until CEO's IP range is blocked. Writer/journalist continues to edit, by virtue of not being caught doing anything as absurdly mean.
CEO goes on campaign against Wikipedia editors who banned him. (Too much to explain here, but he won't be happy until he has the names, addresses, and affiliations of everyone even tangentally involved in his "silencing".) CEO goes to The Register declaring that writer/journalist and Wikipedia are in cahoots to promote the naked shorting of his own company. Regular media reports his theory, less than flatteringly. CEO goes back to The Register declaring that writer/journalist and Wikipedia are in cahoots to promote naked shorting in general and are culpable in the current financial crisis, and that he has proof, but does not present it. I'm sure the regular media will happily report his conspiracy theory, but it's going to be hard to do so in a flattering way.
Seriously, this is a story about Wikipedia editing, not naked shorting, and not the financial crisis. Dramas like this unfold all the time, except it's usually an alleged bias for/against Israel/intelligent design/the moon landing hoax/Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series instead of an issue with a dubious trading practice. The only "media manipulation" in the whole thing is that Byrne is getting a sympathetic journalist to depict the whole thing as a conspiracy, and it's backfiring horribly for him.
Because he's written a book on the subject with that stance? This is no more mysterious than Byrne's own editing of the articles, which involved the same tricks. There's no reason to assume a conspiracy in either case.
You can start up at the top of the page, with the last Reg story about this. Byrne's stance is not only that Wikipedia is biased against him and in favour of blind shorting, but that it's specifically targetting his company under the orders of the mysterious "sith lord". The only difference this time is that he's saying said fictional evil jedi is after the entire stock market.