They began stealing from the public when they expanded copyright from anything reasonable, when they declared war on fair use copying, and when they have such a monopoly on distribution that artists have no choice but to sign over their rights
The guerrela warfare reaction is the public's response to corporate theft.
It might be technically illegal to break into my neighbor's house to steal something, but if that something was originally stolen from me, and the neighbor has bought off the police so I can't get it back, then technicalities be damned, I have the moral right to retrieve it.
The RIAA have stolen my public domain rights, and stolen artists' rights, and they are suffering the consequences.
Did you see the news about Louis Prima's estate and Disney? Disney says that even though they pay royalties for audio recordings of The Jungle Book, they don't owe royalties on video recordings, even though there is an audio track, because the contract didn't specifically mention the new technologies.
Do you *still* claim the congolmerates have any rights? Do you *still* claim they protect artists?
You are assuming that every download is a purchase avoided. I doubt very much that college kids with hundreds of MP3s could actually have purchased all those CDs.
There are also people (myself included) who have bought CDs they never would have known about because an MP3 provided a practical means of trying out new music. The only alternative would have been to order the CD and try to send it back after opening and playing it.
I bet it's a wash. I bet the only money the RIAA is losing is from legal expenses, and of course the opportunity lost from not cooperating with the new distribution methods.
The media conglomerates have abused the copyright system. They have stretched it far beyond any reasonable interpretation of being for the public good. It used to be 14 years plus a 14 year extension, now it's 75 years after the author dies. They want to stop fair use. If anyone proposed libraries today, they would scream about copyright infringement.
In other words, they are stealing from the public, using the force of the government to back them up. This has nothing to do with artists' rights and everything to do with theft from the public domain.
They have declared war on the public, and the public is fighting back in the only way possible. The public has overreacted, but the RIAA started the war. When the powerful push the weak too far, the weak fight back in the only way possible. Like the Brits prior to the American Revolution, there comes a time when the oppressed have had enough, and after all these years of overpriced overpadded CDs, the consumers are reacting.
The future involves priceless distribution. The RIAA can no more stop it than King Canute could stop the tide. The RIAA would be better off getting in bed with Napster than trying to kill them, but they are so short sighted they don't see it. They will die.
On another take, how much do you really think the conglomerates are actually losing? Your little brother -- how many of those tunes could he have actually bought? That's the only cost. You can't say he has 100 CD equivalents and that's how much they lost.
Seriously, not just to bash M$ (but that's always fun in its own easy way:-), how much of this is simply because it isn' necessarily compatible with NT4 and its multiple service packs? In other words, was NT 4 stable when it first started? Will W2K be more unstable in 2 or 3 years?
I don't run NT myself, in fact, I got my job partly because my resume said "No Windows experience and I don't want it" and the job ad said (in all caps) "MICROSOFT PROGRAMMERS NEED NOT APPLY". So this really is a curiosity question, with about as much serious content as wondering whether snakes prefer to eat rodents tail first or head first.
Used to be copyright was good for just 14 years, with a 14 year extension possible (in the USA). Now corporations have extended this to (75? 95?) years after the author's death.
No one in their right mind pretends this is for the public good. It benefits corporations only. Well, lawyers who battle over it, and the politicians whose pockets were lined, yeh, they got some benefit too, but I digress:-)
As far as I am concerned, they have stolen information from the public, and napster and all these other so-called "pirates" are simply stealing back what was once theirs. I don't care that they also steal back more than what the corporations stole in the first place, because the corporations started this war on public access to info, and the public will finish it (and them!).
It's like the old Aesop fable about the monkey who was so greedy that he would not release a few peas from his handfull and thus could not get his overfull hand out of the jar. The corporations are so afraid of losing even the tiniest bit of control that they are going to lose it all.
Too bad, so sad.
Lest the conclusion jumpers out their misconstrue this, I don't hate businesses, I just hate greed and the over-powerful.
I believe it's just standard power control freak activity. Look at telephone wiretaps. I personally find them abhorrent, a violation of privacy, etc. Way too open to abuse. I don't even like the idea of police listening to closed doors. But I digress:-)
Think back to before the telephone. Criminals has to meet face to face or send letters, and I doubt letters did much for simple crime. Most likely, to organize a bank robbery or any kind of activity, they met face to face. The only way for police to listen in was informers in the meeting, or ear to the door. I doubt there was much ear to the door stuff, it would be too easy to prevent. So there wasn't a whole ot of police listening in on crooks.
Then along comes the phone. Crooks weren't stupid, they could see how they could get together for a combined effort so much easier with a few phone calls. Police recognized this too, but suddenly they had the *capability* of listening in without having to put their asses in danger from twitchy guards protecting the meeting. And just like nowadays, they conned a mostly ignorant public into going along with their plans, with much the same message -- the innocent had nothing to fear, there would be no abuses, etc.
IIRC wiretaps were originally thrown out of court until Congress passed some enabling legislation, which did not get completely smooth sailing. There was debate, but not enough. Probably a web search would refresh my memory, but I haven't a clue now where I read this, or how much I remember correctly.
Of course only honorable law-abiding agencies and agents will use this to fight eveil, evil I say.
As the FBI forged evidence against Martin Luther King, Jr, not to bust him criminally, but to make him appear untrustworthy to his family, friends, associates, and the general public. Well, I suppose by your reckoning, James Earl Ray saved him the possibility of getting busted by killing him.
As the Ramparts division of the LA cops framed untold numbers of people, killed others, stole pounds of cocaine from the evidence locker, and, gosh, nobody knew, wow, shocked, I am shocked, shocked. Round up the usual suspects.
As Richard Milhouse "I am not a crook" Nixon and his gang of plumbers flouted the law in every which way, withheld TV broadcast licenses to punish the unfriendly press, and on and on and on.
Don't forget Ollie North, fine upstanding American dealer in cocaine and truth and loyalty.
There's the current Clinton and Clinton, investigating people they don't like, firing people they don't like, smearing them in public when they knew who the real liar was.
Yes, we can certainly trust all these fine outstanding examples of people who have sworn to uphold the constitution and laws. Of course, all these fine people were Americans, so it's perfectly alright for the honorable Brits to have R.I.P., for they surely would never abuse it as we have done.
Elsewhere I wrote that what I don't like about IP is how it rewards handsomely the very few who did the last bit of work, leaving all the others with nothing, and that the only way to fix IP is to protect absolutely everything, so that everyone will have to constantly log every time they used anybody else's thoughts, no matter how trivial, and cut checks once a month for a hundredth of a cent in royalties.
Here I explore some of the more extreme possibilities if the current IP expansion continues to (even more) ridiculous conclsuions.
Lawyers. I have read of serious proposals to allow lawyers to patent their styles. After all, that's their sole stock in trade, isn't it?
Anyone who invents a new phrase that catches the public imagination. Remember, Eddie Murphy isn't dead yet, so that "trademark" laugh of his is not something you can repeat in public without permission and without paying royalties. Oh yes, I am dead serious about this. That is his stock in trade, right? Or George Carlin's seven dirty words. Not only will you owe him for mentioning that phrase of his, but he probably owes royalties to the FCC for banning them and making his phrase generate income.
As mentioned in the article, the Fosbury Flop and other athletic tricks. Really -- Fosbury had a new way of setting records. Surely that is patentable. Does that mean that every high school kid who got an athletic scholarship for his high jump prowess now owes royatlies to Fosbury?
Who invented "Hungarian notation"? Come on folks, pay up! I understand Microsoft will owe a fortune, but -- ha ha -- you would have to get a look at their own IP (their source code) to know how much. Quite a quandry, eh?
Wanna pay royalties to K&R for C and every language which aped it?
IP as it currently stands is broken because it is such a half hearted attempt. The only way to fix it is to protect literally everything, or protect nothing.
Some of the most outraged comments in this discussion are the equivalent of no one will invent without IP. They forget that for a long time there WAS no IP, and people still invented, and wrote, and painted.
The ones that gall me the most are the ones who complain about how bad things would be without IP, and never acknowledge how bad things are *with* IP. I myself haven't a clue which would be better or worse. I simply do not believe the current IP situation is fixable, so I would be quite willing to try having no IP. But I don't claim to have any argument that it would be clearly better, only that those arguing against anti-IP are not arguing for IP, they are merely ranting with blinders on.
His thesis is in part that no invention stands alone. The most obvious is scientific discovery. How many scientific discoveries were truly years ahead of their field? How many were invented completely out of the blue and had no genesis in the ideas that came before?
About zero. In other words, all would have been invented by some other worker soon enough anyway.
As I wrote in a response elsewhere, the current IP rewards only a few, all out of proportion to their actual contribution. There is no allowance for those who contribute the pure math, or the drudge work trying to replicate other work, or who tested a million reagents or ran a million particle experiments. Why should the one who did the last little bit of work get the jackpot, and the hundreds, or thousands, or millions of others, get nothing?
Why should Alexander Graham Bell have gotten the patent on the phone, and the incredible monopoly riches which followed, simply because he beat that other forgotten man to the patent office by an hour or two?
Should Einstein have patented relativity? Or copyrighted it? Good gosh, there's an idea! Suppose Bohr had to pay royalties to Planck, who had to pay royalties to Maxwell, and so on?
The current IP is broken because it rewards so unevenly and unjustly. The only fix is to patent everything, and I mean everything. That biologist in the lab -- he will need a lab book next to him, and every single idea he uses, every equation, every drawing of a benzene ring, he will log that, and every month, he will cut checks for 13.5 cents to this patent holder,.24 cents to that one, and so on.
But wait! Did he get permission to use that benzene ring? Oh, ho, no he didn't! Quick -- some one will sue him. Remember, copyrights are now good for 95 years after death. I bet that benzene ring is still under copyright protection.
Yes, that is unworkable. But that's the trade off you have to make to make IP fair and just.
I bet you could get exactly the same results and put a lot of lawyers and accountants out of work if you simply threw out IP. But I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
You say if you invent something really valuable, you would keep it a secret if there were no IP protection.
Your hidden assumption is that this invention would be such a breakthrough that no one else could possibly duplicate it.
One of his points is that IP differs from physical goods in that no invention stands alone. Your breakthrough would stand on the shoulders of everyone who came before you. He is objecting to the fact that others may have done the pure science background while you scarfed up the next natural step, got to the patent office a few hours (days, months, makes no difference) before all the others who could also come up with the idea, and now you alone stand to reap the reward.
You are outraged that you will not make a fortune. He is outraged that you alone make a fortune.
This is why he says IP benefits one at the expense of many.
If there is no IP at all, then some, like you, would lose out on a fortune which you did not earn purely by the sweat of just your own brow, but by the sweat of all the brows that came before you. The only fix for this, if IP is to be kept, is to protect literally everything. Then you will have to pay royalties everytime you use literally every other idea. Your every working minute will be spent with a logbook by your side, documenting every single idea you use. How would you like it if those big pharmaceuticals you are so fond of turn around and sue the bejazus out of you for all those incredibly trivial ideas you forgot to document?
I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. I don't have time to refute this entire article point by point
You are too busy to answer fully, but you have time to waste on slashdot. And this is an extremely important issue, but you don't have time to refute it. Apparently all the other issues you deal with are more important, including reading slashdot, but not leaving imperfect rebuttals behind.
Or, maybe you just like to sound important and sound off, but it's really not quite as important as you make it to be. That makes me wonder how important your post actually is to you, and to me.
Here are some more examples of hyperbole:
Sigh. "From each according to his ability... to each according to his need." "Why can't we all just be even?"
I don't quite see what smearing with the Marxist slogan has to do with ran actual discussion.
Every writer, actor, producer, director, programmer, designer, architect, publisher, and many millions of other people all make their living from intellectual property whether they know it or not.
I betcha it's not even 1%. Unless you define writer, actor, etc as only those who make a living at it. A self-fulfilling definition.
Let's just collect more taxes and subsidize everybody that wants to be creative!...I'm pretty sure most scientists work for corporations, colleges, or for the government doing specific work for the military or public health and environment issues. I've never heard of a general subsidy for scientists.
Nowhere does he say a subsidy paid from taxes. You say that scientists work for corporations, and that there is no general subsidy for scientists. Why then do you bring in a strawman of a fictional tax subsidy for creative people?
I got a telemarketer in trouble for violating two rules:
Must be a human who makes the call, and only switches to a recording when the recipient agrees to listen to it. This guy had a war dialer.
Must disconnect when the recipient disconnects. This is to allow someone to hang up and call 911 if necessary. This idiot's machine kept the line tied up for several minutes.
To make it short, I left my name and asked for a callback, then had a zillion reasons for being busy, until he finally gave me his number. Then a quick call to Pac Bell, who refused to do anything, and a call to the state PUC, who straightened them out.
It's nice and easy to say they will bend over because they are a corporation and have shareholders.
You apparently don't know that many many newspapers, incorporated newspapers in fact, have refused to bend over. Reporters have gone to jail and the newspapers have paid the legal fees to get them out. All while having shareholders to answer to.
Here's another way to think of it. Slashdot's value to Andover would plummet if all ACs knew that Andover owuld not shield them. Indeed, it is not impossible that shareholders would sue for not defending their sources.
This will happen here regardless of laws passed, and, just as in Russia, it will be the private sector doing most of it. The private sector's scale of operations will dwarf any goverment snooping.
Why? Because microtechnology will make it possible and incredibly cheap. Look at the micro air vehicles in development - only a couple of inches wingspan. Cameras the size of buttons. Microphones much smaller.
I expect that within ten years you will be able to buy cameras and microphones by the bucketload. It will come down to the Diamand Age fluff floating thru the air.
There is a difference between recording and broadcasting, though. I also expect that almost all recording will be done for review purposes, like black boxes in airliners -- something happens, you review the record. There will be so much recorded that actually watching it will be boring beyond belief.
When snooping becomes this easy and cheap and undetectable, it will be pervasive. Older generations will shudder in fear, but kids will grow up knowing their every move is recorded, whether in public or private. In a generation, it will be accepted and expected practice. I personally both dread it and look forward to it. Dread because it's not what I am used to, anticipate it because one of the causes of so much inequity in the world is the rich and powerful having access to information that the poor and weak don't. But if you can bug them as easily as they can bug you, power shifts. No longer will the powerful get away with crimes that their victims are punished for.
A very concrete example was Rodney King being beaten by the L.A. cops -- and video recorded. That recording was the beginning of the end. That's why so many cop cars now have video cameras -- to protect the cops from the citizens. A delicious harbinger of things to come!
I think physical crime will drop dramatically, because it will be so easy to find out who did it. Proof might be harder due to the ease of making false recordings, but anonymous email to friends and family of the accused will be rampant.
The brief makes it clear that non-commercial copying of music for friends, even if it might prevent a purchase by that friend, is explicitly authorized by the Home Recording Act. You can make tapes and give them away; that is non-commercial and explicitly authorized.
Not so sorry to say I don't care about music as an industry. I feel about it exactly as I do about the current US Federal laws requiring some percentage (1%? 3%?) of a federal project's budget be devoted to art. Art springs from artists not to industry.
The demise of the music industry leaves me in rapture. Corporate art, art industry, all the same, a huge bloated oxymoron of no relevance to art.
Because no matter how you divide it up, the same principle still applies. For the same price of linking 10 2.4 meter telescopes in orbit, you could link 10 ten meter telescopes on the ground.
Someday space construction won't be so expensive, but it is now.
I constantly argue with myself as to whether we have more or less democracy than before. Everytime I read another report on copyright extension, monopolies, etc, I worry that we are becoming more and more controlled by the megacorp cartels.
Then I compare to what we had 100 years ago. 100 years ago unions were practically illegal, or perhaps just coming out from that status. Standard Oil, the railroads, etc -- huge monopolies. ATT started its monopolistic practices in the early 1900s. The National Guard was called out to break up strikes in the 1930s. General MacArthur used the standing army to break up a demonstration by WW I veterans around 1930.
Any period I look at, the abuses were worse. I start to come out of my funk, and look at the LA police and Rodney King, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and realize that a lot more abuses are known publicly now, and widely distributed. This publicity is not what the powers want -- they want darkness and invisibility. This openness can only get better.
In just 5 or 10 years, home computers will have a standard web site package included, people will wear micro cams at all times as a matter of course, broadcasting back to the home computer constantly, available for the world to see or review, and public crime will drop drastically.
I come to the conclusion that the megacorps are fighting for (and winning) the rights to the corpses of obsolete prizes. They are waging death matches for nothing that matters tomorrow. The new life is proceeding without them, they don't know how to react, so they lash out in their old style methods, and will win precisely nothing useful.
You've got a thousand moves. You could always spend the first few on a dumb pattern, hope the other player falls for it, and especially if the other player doesn't adapt strategy after its first decision -- then change strategy.
Old keypunch standard practice was to keypunch the holes in the cards, then someone else repunched in verify mode -- it compared and notched the card if it didn't match. For some reason, that practice seems to have disappeared. Do data entry shops still verify the entered data?
So hire two sets of interns or high school kids. Compare the two. Pretty easy. Twice as expensive to get the data in, but it would be more accurate.
Doesn't solve the problem of unreadable original documents which are misread both times, but that's a different story.
Long long ago in a city far far away, I used to work for BaronData, one of the first makers of personal computer systems for court reporters. We heard some wonderful stories which might actually be true.
One reporter on his first job was so caught up in the proceedings that he forgot to take notes, and didn't realize it until he was asked to read back his notes.
Another was just the opposite. He was so focused on taking notes that when he was asked to read back, he simply wrote down the request and waited for things to continue.
Most of the good ones I talked with said they were very detached from everything. Simply took the notes and didn't think about much at all other than the process of taking the notes. Relax and transcribe, that's the trick.
Topless beaches are more common in Europe than America. I have been to other countries where movie posters on the street showed as much nudity as the movie itself.
What is weird is the extent to which you say things of which you know not.
Slashdot Mirror
They began stealing from the public when they expanded copyright from anything reasonable, when they declared war on fair use copying, and when they have such a monopoly on distribution that artists have no choice but to sign over their rights
The guerrela warfare reaction is the public's response to corporate theft.
It might be technically illegal to break into my neighbor's house to steal something, but if that something was originally stolen from me, and the neighbor has bought off the police so I can't get it back, then technicalities be damned, I have the moral right to retrieve it.
The RIAA have stolen my public domain rights, and stolen artists' rights, and they are suffering the consequences.
Did you see the news about Louis Prima's estate and Disney? Disney says that even though they pay royalties for audio recordings of The Jungle Book, they don't owe royalties on video recordings, even though there is an audio track, because the contract didn't specifically mention the new technologies.
Do you *still* claim the congolmerates have any rights? Do you *still* claim they protect artists?
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You are assuming that every download is a purchase avoided. I doubt very much that college kids with hundreds of MP3s could actually have purchased all those CDs.
There are also people (myself included) who have bought CDs they never would have known about because an MP3 provided a practical means of trying out new music. The only alternative would have been to order the CD and try to send it back after opening and playing it.
I bet it's a wash. I bet the only money the RIAA is losing is from legal expenses, and of course the opportunity lost from not cooperating with the new distribution methods.
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The media conglomerates have abused the copyright system. They have stretched it far beyond any reasonable interpretation of being for the public good. It used to be 14 years plus a 14 year extension, now it's 75 years after the author dies. They want to stop fair use. If anyone proposed libraries today, they would scream about copyright infringement.
In other words, they are stealing from the public, using the force of the government to back them up. This has nothing to do with artists' rights and everything to do with theft from the public domain.
They have declared war on the public, and the public is fighting back in the only way possible. The public has overreacted, but the RIAA started the war. When the powerful push the weak too far, the weak fight back in the only way possible. Like the Brits prior to the American Revolution, there comes a time when the oppressed have had enough, and after all these years of overpriced overpadded CDs, the consumers are reacting.
The future involves priceless distribution. The RIAA can no more stop it than King Canute could stop the tide. The RIAA would be better off getting in bed with Napster than trying to kill them, but they are so short sighted they don't see it. They will die.
On another take, how much do you really think the conglomerates are actually losing? Your little brother -- how many of those tunes could he have actually bought? That's the only cost. You can't say he has 100 CD equivalents and that's how much they lost.
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Seriously, not just to bash M$ (but that's always fun in its own easy way :-), how much of this is simply because it isn' necessarily compatible with NT4 and its multiple service packs? In other words, was NT 4 stable when it first started? Will W2K be more unstable in 2 or 3 years?
I don't run NT myself, in fact, I got my job partly because my resume said "No Windows experience and I don't want it" and the job ad said (in all caps) "MICROSOFT PROGRAMMERS NEED NOT APPLY". So this really is a curiosity question, with about as much serious content as wondering whether snakes prefer to eat rodents tail first or head first.
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Used to be copyright was good for just 14 years, with a 14 year extension possible (in the USA). Now corporations have extended this to (75? 95?) years after the author's death.
:-)
No one in their right mind pretends this is for the public good. It benefits corporations only. Well, lawyers who battle over it, and the politicians whose pockets were lined, yeh, they got some benefit too, but I digress
As far as I am concerned, they have stolen information from the public, and napster and all these other so-called "pirates" are simply stealing back what was once theirs. I don't care that they also steal back more than what the corporations stole in the first place, because the corporations started this war on public access to info, and the public will finish it (and them!).
It's like the old Aesop fable about the monkey who was so greedy that he would not release a few peas from his handfull and thus could not get his overfull hand out of the jar. The corporations are so afraid of losing even the tiniest bit of control that they are going to lose it all.
Too bad, so sad.
Lest the conclusion jumpers out their misconstrue this, I don't hate businesses, I just hate greed and the over-powerful.
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I believe it's just standard power control freak activity. Look at telephone wiretaps. I personally find them abhorrent, a violation of privacy, etc. Way too open to abuse. I don't even like the idea of police listening to closed doors. But I digress :-)
Think back to before the telephone. Criminals has to meet face to face or send letters, and I doubt letters did much for simple crime. Most likely, to organize a bank robbery or any kind of activity, they met face to face. The only way for police to listen in was informers in the meeting, or ear to the door. I doubt there was much ear to the door stuff, it would be too easy to prevent. So there wasn't a whole ot of police listening in on crooks.
Then along comes the phone. Crooks weren't stupid, they could see how they could get together for a combined effort so much easier with a few phone calls. Police recognized this too, but suddenly they had the *capability* of listening in without having to put their asses in danger from twitchy guards protecting the meeting. And just like nowadays, they conned a mostly ignorant public into going along with their plans, with much the same message -- the innocent had nothing to fear, there would be no abuses, etc.
IIRC wiretaps were originally thrown out of court until Congress passed some enabling legislation, which did not get completely smooth sailing. There was debate, but not enough. Probably a web search would refresh my memory, but I haven't a clue now where I read this, or how much I remember correctly.
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Of course only honorable law-abiding agencies and agents will use this to fight eveil, evil I say.
As the FBI forged evidence against Martin Luther King, Jr, not to bust him criminally, but to make him appear untrustworthy to his family, friends, associates, and the general public. Well, I suppose by your reckoning, James Earl Ray saved him the possibility of getting busted by killing him.
As the Ramparts division of the LA cops framed untold numbers of people, killed others, stole pounds of cocaine from the evidence locker, and, gosh, nobody knew, wow, shocked, I am shocked, shocked. Round up the usual suspects.
As Richard Milhouse "I am not a crook" Nixon and his gang of plumbers flouted the law in every which way, withheld TV broadcast licenses to punish the unfriendly press, and on and on and on.
Don't forget Ollie North, fine upstanding American dealer in cocaine and truth and loyalty.
There's the current Clinton and Clinton, investigating people they don't like, firing people they don't like, smearing them in public when they knew who the real liar was.
Yes, we can certainly trust all these fine outstanding examples of people who have sworn to uphold the constitution and laws. Of course, all these fine people were Americans, so it's perfectly alright for the honorable Brits to have R.I.P., for they surely would never abuse it as we have done.
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Elsewhere I wrote that what I don't like about IP is how it rewards handsomely the very few who did the last bit of work, leaving all the others with nothing, and that the only way to fix IP is to protect absolutely everything, so that everyone will have to constantly log every time they used anybody else's thoughts, no matter how trivial, and cut checks once a month for a hundredth of a cent in royalties.
Here I explore some of the more extreme possibilities if the current IP expansion continues to (even more) ridiculous conclsuions.
Lawyers. I have read of serious proposals to allow lawyers to patent their styles. After all, that's their sole stock in trade, isn't it?
Anyone who invents a new phrase that catches the public imagination. Remember, Eddie Murphy isn't dead yet, so that "trademark" laugh of his is not something you can repeat in public without permission and without paying royalties. Oh yes, I am dead serious about this. That is his stock in trade, right? Or George Carlin's seven dirty words. Not only will you owe him for mentioning that phrase of his, but he probably owes royalties to the FCC for banning them and making his phrase generate income.
As mentioned in the article, the Fosbury Flop and other athletic tricks. Really -- Fosbury had a new way of setting records. Surely that is patentable. Does that mean that every high school kid who got an athletic scholarship for his high jump prowess now owes royatlies to Fosbury?
Who invented "Hungarian notation"? Come on folks, pay up! I understand Microsoft will owe a fortune, but -- ha ha -- you would have to get a look at their own IP (their source code) to know how much. Quite a quandry, eh?
Wanna pay royalties to K&R for C and every language which aped it?
IP as it currently stands is broken because it is such a half hearted attempt. The only way to fix it is to protect literally everything, or protect nothing.
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Some of the most outraged comments in this discussion are the equivalent of no one will invent without IP. They forget that for a long time there WAS no IP, and people still invented, and wrote, and painted.
.24 cents to that one, and so on.
The ones that gall me the most are the ones who complain about how bad things would be without IP, and never acknowledge how bad things are *with* IP. I myself haven't a clue which would be better or worse. I simply do not believe the current IP situation is fixable, so I would be quite willing to try having no IP. But I don't claim to have any argument that it would be clearly better, only that those arguing against anti-IP are not arguing for IP, they are merely ranting with blinders on.
His thesis is in part that no invention stands alone. The most obvious is scientific discovery. How many scientific discoveries were truly years ahead of their field? How many were invented completely out of the blue and had no genesis in the ideas that came before?
About zero. In other words, all would have been invented by some other worker soon enough anyway.
As I wrote in a response elsewhere, the current IP rewards only a few, all out of proportion to their actual contribution. There is no allowance for those who contribute the pure math, or the drudge work trying to replicate other work, or who tested a million reagents or ran a million particle experiments. Why should the one who did the last little bit of work get the jackpot, and the hundreds, or thousands, or millions of others, get nothing?
Why should Alexander Graham Bell have gotten the patent on the phone, and the incredible monopoly riches which followed, simply because he beat that other forgotten man to the patent office by an hour or two?
Should Einstein have patented relativity? Or copyrighted it? Good gosh, there's an idea! Suppose Bohr had to pay royalties to Planck, who had to pay royalties to Maxwell, and so on?
The current IP is broken because it rewards so unevenly and unjustly. The only fix is to patent everything, and I mean everything. That biologist in the lab -- he will need a lab book next to him, and every single idea he uses, every equation, every drawing of a benzene ring, he will log that, and every month, he will cut checks for 13.5 cents to this patent holder,
But wait! Did he get permission to use that benzene ring? Oh, ho, no he didn't! Quick -- some one will sue him. Remember, copyrights are now good for 95 years after death. I bet that benzene ring is still under copyright protection.
Yes, that is unworkable. But that's the trade off you have to make to make IP fair and just.
I bet you could get exactly the same results and put a lot of lawyers and accountants out of work if you simply threw out IP. But I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
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You say if you invent something really valuable, you would keep it a secret if there were no IP protection.
Your hidden assumption is that this invention would be such a breakthrough that no one else could possibly duplicate it.
One of his points is that IP differs from physical goods in that no invention stands alone. Your breakthrough would stand on the shoulders of everyone who came before you. He is objecting to the fact that others may have done the pure science background while you scarfed up the next natural step, got to the patent office a few hours (days, months, makes no difference) before all the others who could also come up with the idea, and now you alone stand to reap the reward.
You are outraged that you will not make a fortune. He is outraged that you alone make a fortune.
This is why he says IP benefits one at the expense of many.
If there is no IP at all, then some, like you, would lose out on a fortune which you did not earn purely by the sweat of just your own brow, but by the sweat of all the brows that came before you. The only fix for this, if IP is to be kept, is to protect literally everything. Then you will have to pay royalties everytime you use literally every other idea. Your every working minute will be spent with a logbook by your side, documenting every single idea you use. How would you like it if those big pharmaceuticals you are so fond of turn around and sue the bejazus out of you for all those incredibly trivial ideas you forgot to document?
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I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. I don't have time to refute this entire article point by point
You are too busy to answer fully, but you have time to waste on slashdot. And this is an extremely important issue, but you don't have time to refute it. Apparently all the other issues you deal with are more important, including reading slashdot, but not leaving imperfect rebuttals behind.
Or, maybe you just like to sound important and sound off, but it's really not quite as important as you make it to be. That makes me wonder how important your post actually is to you, and to me.
Here are some more examples of hyperbole:
Sigh. "From each according to his ability... to each according to his need." "Why can't we all just be even?"
I don't quite see what smearing with the Marxist slogan has to do with ran actual discussion.
Every writer, actor, producer, director, programmer, designer, architect, publisher, and many millions of other people all make their living from intellectual property whether they know it or not.
I betcha it's not even 1%. Unless you define writer, actor, etc as only those who make a living at it. A self-fulfilling definition.
Let's just collect more taxes and subsidize everybody that wants to be creative!...I'm pretty sure most scientists work for corporations, colleges, or for the government doing specific work for the military or public health and environment issues. I've never heard of a general subsidy for scientists.
Nowhere does he say a subsidy paid from taxes. You say that scientists work for corporations, and that there is no general subsidy for scientists. Why then do you bring in a strawman of a fictional tax subsidy for creative people?
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I got a telemarketer in trouble for violating two rules:
Must be a human who makes the call, and only switches to a recording when the recipient agrees to listen to it. This guy had a war dialer.
Must disconnect when the recipient disconnects. This is to allow someone to hang up and call 911 if necessary. This idiot's machine kept the line tied up for several minutes.
To make it short, I left my name and asked for a callback, then had a zillion reasons for being busy, until he finally gave me his number. Then a quick call to Pac Bell, who refused to do anything, and a call to the state PUC, who straightened them out.
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It's nice and easy to say they will bend over because they are a corporation and have shareholders.
You apparently don't know that many many newspapers, incorporated newspapers in fact, have refused to bend over. Reporters have gone to jail and the newspapers have paid the legal fees to get them out. All while having shareholders to answer to.
Here's another way to think of it. Slashdot's value to Andover would plummet if all ACs knew that Andover owuld not shield them. Indeed, it is not impossible that shareholders would sue for not defending their sources.
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Say, didja ever think that maybe forks also take advantage of multiple processors?
And didja ever think that user threads, where the kernel knows nothing of the threads, can't take advantage of multiple processors?
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This will happen here regardless of laws passed, and, just as in Russia, it will be the private sector doing most of it. The private sector's scale of operations will dwarf any goverment snooping.
Why? Because microtechnology will make it possible and incredibly cheap. Look at the micro air vehicles in development - only a couple of inches wingspan. Cameras the size of buttons. Microphones much smaller.
I expect that within ten years you will be able to buy cameras and microphones by the bucketload. It will come down to the Diamand Age fluff floating thru the air.
There is a difference between recording and broadcasting, though. I also expect that almost all recording will be done for review purposes, like black boxes in airliners -- something happens, you review the record. There will be so much recorded that actually watching it will be boring beyond belief.
When snooping becomes this easy and cheap and undetectable, it will be pervasive. Older generations will shudder in fear, but kids will grow up knowing their every move is recorded, whether in public or private. In a generation, it will be accepted and expected practice. I personally both dread it and look forward to it. Dread because it's not what I am used to, anticipate it because one of the causes of so much inequity in the world is the rich and powerful having access to information that the poor and weak don't. But if you can bug them as easily as they can bug you, power shifts. No longer will the powerful get away with crimes that their victims are punished for.
A very concrete example was Rodney King being beaten by the L.A. cops -- and video recorded. That recording was the beginning of the end. That's why so many cop cars now have video cameras -- to protect the cops from the citizens. A delicious harbinger of things to come!
I think physical crime will drop dramatically, because it will be so easy to find out who did it. Proof might be harder due to the ease of making false recordings, but anonymous email to friends and family of the accused will be rampant.
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The brief makes it clear that non-commercial copying of music for friends, even if it might prevent a purchase by that friend, is explicitly authorized by the Home Recording Act. You can make tapes and give them away; that is non-commercial and explicitly authorized.
It is NOT piracy.
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Not so sorry to say I don't care about music as an industry. I feel about it exactly as I do about the current US Federal laws requiring some percentage (1%? 3%?) of a federal project's budget be devoted to art. Art springs from artists not to industry.
The demise of the music industry leaves me in rapture. Corporate art, art industry, all the same, a huge bloated oxymoron of no relevance to art.
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Because no matter how you divide it up, the same principle still applies. For the same price of linking 10 2.4 meter telescopes in orbit, you could link 10 ten meter telescopes on the ground.
Someday space construction won't be so expensive, but it is now.
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Yes I know you're just being funny, but you should realize that that OverWhelmingly Large Telescope is otherwise known as OWL. Get it? :-)
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A. A whole lot cheaper, factor of ten or so I believe.
B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.
C. Much easier to upgrade ground based equipment.
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I constantly argue with myself as to whether we have more or less democracy than before. Everytime I read another report on copyright extension, monopolies, etc, I worry that we are becoming more and more controlled by the megacorp cartels.
Then I compare to what we had 100 years ago. 100 years ago unions were practically illegal, or perhaps just coming out from that status. Standard Oil, the railroads, etc -- huge monopolies. ATT started its monopolistic practices in the early 1900s. The National Guard was called out to break up strikes in the 1930s. General MacArthur used the standing army to break up a demonstration by WW I veterans around 1930.
Any period I look at, the abuses were worse. I start to come out of my funk, and look at the LA police and Rodney King, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and realize that a lot more abuses are known publicly now, and widely distributed. This publicity is not what the powers want -- they want darkness and invisibility. This openness can only get better.
In just 5 or 10 years, home computers will have a standard web site package included, people will wear micro cams at all times as a matter of course, broadcasting back to the home computer constantly, available for the world to see or review, and public crime will drop drastically.
I come to the conclusion that the megacorps are fighting for (and winning) the rights to the corpses of obsolete prizes. They are waging death matches for nothing that matters tomorrow. The new life is proceeding without them, they don't know how to react, so they lash out in their old style methods, and will win precisely nothing useful.
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You've got a thousand moves. You could always spend the first few on a dumb pattern, hope the other player falls for it, and especially if the other player doesn't adapt strategy after its first decision -- then change strategy.
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Old keypunch standard practice was to keypunch the holes in the cards, then someone else repunched in verify mode -- it compared and notched the card if it didn't match. For some reason, that practice seems to have disappeared. Do data entry shops still verify the entered data?
So hire two sets of interns or high school kids. Compare the two. Pretty easy. Twice as expensive to get the data in, but it would be more accurate.
Doesn't solve the problem of unreadable original documents which are misread both times, but that's a different story.
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Long long ago in a city far far away, I used to work for BaronData, one of the first makers of personal computer systems for court reporters. We heard some wonderful stories which might actually be true.
One reporter on his first job was so caught up in the proceedings that he forgot to take notes, and didn't realize it until he was asked to read back his notes.
Another was just the opposite. He was so focused on taking notes that when he was asked to read back, he simply wrote down the request and waited for things to continue.
Most of the good ones I talked with said they were very detached from everything. Simply took the notes and didn't think about much at all other than the process of taking the notes. Relax and transcribe, that's the trick.
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Topless beaches are more common in Europe than America. I have been to other countries where movie posters on the street showed as much nudity as the movie itself.
What is weird is the extent to which you say things of which you know not.
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