Are imaginary papers protected under the 4th amendment?
I can't see why they shouldn't be. Yes, I can imagine a world where those files are considered immune to this amendment, but on the other hand, I can imagine a world where car trunks are also considered immune. I can imagine lots of worlds where the government gets away with unjust and irrational distinctions, but I don't believe that a Constitution alone can prevent that.
The right to privacy is a recent idea (in terms of it being a right guaranteed by the US Constitution).
It's not actually in there, and I think court cases that have interpreted it as being in there have been flat out wrong.
Well first of all, I wasn't necessarily talking about the question of whether we in the US have a "right to privacy", but just noting that it's a question to ask when formulating the constitution.
However, I disagree to some extent. If you understand the structure of the US Constitution and the political philosophy of the people who wrote it, then it should be clear that the Constitution does not need to grant citizens a right in order for them to have that right.
The "founding fathers" believed that men essentially had god-given rights that no government should be permitted to deny. The Constitution was not written in order to grant citizens certain rights, but rather as a means of documenting which powers the citizens were granting to the government. In the actual Constitution, those powers are listed explicitly, and though there's room for interpretation of intent and application, the Constitution does not grant the federal government any powers not listed.
The Bill of Rights is also not granting rights, but listing some of the citizens' innate rights that the founders believed important enough to strictly and explicitly forbid the government from impinging on. However, it's not intended to be an exhaustive list of those innate rights that the citizens have (as is made explicit in the 9th and 10th). Furthermore, some of the rights (1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) have a definite connotation of allowing citizens to keep secrets and enjoy private communication without interference.
Because of this, I find it very hard to deny that citizens generally have a right to privacy. However, that doesn't specify the specific boundaries of that right. Citizens are specified to have the right to bear arms, but we deny arms to prison inmates, obviously.
There would be no need to steal information from the content creator since you could just link to their information.
Well that's not entirely true. There'd be an incentive to steal information and post it on your own site so you're the one who gets a cut of the ISP's fee instead of the legitimate owner. It seems to me that, even if there were no other problems, it might still be difficult at times to know who should be paid for what. And what about the times when you're uploading/downloading non-copyrighted material? Who gets paid for that?
At this moment in time the value I'm paying for it is $60 a month to Comcast, and the only one making money off of it is Comcast, not the people who are actually supplying me content.
Well theoretically that $60 is just paying for the infrastructure and ISP services. If you think that's too high, I can definitely sympathize, but I wouldn't expect that your scheme would end up with you paying $60 but a big cut going to content providers. It's much more likely that you'd end up paying more than you currently do for your ISP+[cable+iTunes+(whatever other content you pay for)].
And offers such iron-clad evidence as "If you even think about it, it can't be true," and "I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different."
Well what if we put it another way? You're talking about basic human rights issues, and I think you're right to indicate that those shouldn't change (at least not in an essential way) because we're using new tools. On the other hand, some things have changed in the digital/internet age, and that may warrant some consideration.
For example, in the US Constitution, the federal government isn't given any particular powers regarding the Internet (obviously). It's technically not even given the right to have an interstate highways system (obviously). However, the federal government is given the right to create roads for the purpose of delivering mail. So in this new constitution, what role do you want to assign the government in terms of creating/maintaining/regulating communications infrastructure?
The US Constitution also gives the federal government the power to grant copyrights. Given the current technological age, if you were writing the Constitution today, would you have included that? Would you have been more specific?
Should the government be required by the constitution to disseminate any particular information in any particular way? Just a random example: you could make it required that any laws be posted on the Internet at least 5 days before any vote. What format do you want it in?
What kinds of records may the government keep on the citizenry? What kinds of databases and compilations of information can they reference, and under what circumstances? Would it make sense to have some time frame after which records expire? Is there some time frame for when even the most secure documents become public?
There are lots of decisions that have different ramifications today than they did 20 years ago. It's not a dumb question to ask.
But really, those things still don't make digital rights a special case. The real questions are, do you have freedom of speech? Freedom of assembly? What about a right to privacy? If you can answer those questions, those rights should be protected regardless of the technology.
The particulars about how those rights are protected will have to change over time, as the culture and technology change. Those can be individual laws and court cases, but probably shouldn't be in a constitution.
Computers don't sue you when you try to fix them and you accidentally make things worse.
The computers themselves won't, no. But there's no guarantee that the computer's owner won't sue me. All the more reason to do good work, instead of ignoring the customers' complaints and failing to diagnose their problems.
You seem to be proposing some other system that is very different from what Disney is trying to do, and also very different from the Internet as it is. It seems like your suggestion is to have the ISP charge per byte instead of a monthly fee, and then be responsible for paying a share of that charge back to the content owners, based on what was downloaded?
It's interesting, but I'm not sure how well it would work out.
Yeah, I've long been a proponent of the idea of breaking up the vertical monopolies that are causing a lot of these problems. However, I think the key thing to break up is that the infrastructure providers should be prohibited from being service providers or content providers.
So, for example, if Verizon is laying the fiber and hooking up the routers to provide the internet, then they should be forbidden from being an ISP or providing voice service or acting as a "cable company" (providing video services). They should be required to openly license their infrastructure to basically any service provider at a set price (no special deals). Cable companies (like Comcast, Time Warner, etc) should be required to cease providing video services themselves, and allow some method of allowing customers to choose their own video providers from a free marketplace.
This would mean that everyone looking to provide services, whether they be web hosting, voice, or video (including original content) would essentially be on equal footing. No one would be able to use special access to the infrastructure as leverage to squeeze out competitors.
However, the cablecos will say that large channels subsidize the smaller ones (of course that's true), and that if they did a la carte, smaller channels couldn't survive. E.g., fewer people would be paying for BET or whatever, so BET would die out.
And what's the real reason they don't want to do a la carte? I doubt it's to save BET. I mean, if the bigger channels subsidize the smaller ones, then presumably they carry BET at a loss. (I mean, that's the logic, right?) So then why don't the cable providers want to drop BET, stop taking a loss, and make a bigger profit on carrying only the popular channels?
To some people FOSS is just software to get work done. So they use it where they see fit. They contribute where they see benefit. But they don't sacrafice themselve to the holy crusade of FOSS.
I would say that's probably a fair share of even FOSS developers. The stereotypical lone developer working to "scratch his own itch" is only developing and contributing where he sees some kind of benefit.
But lots of people who are enamored with FOSS seem not to recognize that a lot of the development on major projects comes from paid developers working at companies like Google, IBM, Novell, and Redhat. Those companies are "friends" to FOSS, but at the same time, they're contributing to areas where they see benefit. They're profiting from sales of products and services that use FOSS, and they contribute funds and code for the purpose of improving the capabilities of the products and services they sell. There's nothing nefarious about it, but that's just where a lot of the funding and code comes from.
So some other company doesn't contribute as much, but they also don't benefit as much or as directly from ongoing development. So what? Forgetting everything I wrote in the preceding paragraphs, here's something else to consider: none of these FOSS licenses prevent you from leeching. There's not a clause in the GPL that says you have to contribute in any way in order to make use of the software, or even to distribute the software. The developers who license their software under the GPL have knowingly given the entire world full permission to leech off of their work. If they don't like those terms, then they picked the wrong license.
Yeah, I more had in mind something like, "We spent $X on expanding our network, $Y worth of that being hardware costs. It costs $A for us to support 1 minute of calling, and $B to support the transmission of a single SMS message. Those numbers are taking factors J, K, and L into consideration, but ignoring factors M, N, and O."
I recognize that businesses generally don't report in such detail, but most businesses aren't raking in profits from maintaining a near monopoly on vital national infrastructure.
I'm a Verizon customer. They have HORRID billing practices (throw in lots of ambiguous "fees"
That's another little problem that I'm sure we're all familiar with: all the "taxes" and "fees" on your cell phone bill. Why are they allowed to do that?
If I were running a store and I advertised an item for $50, but when you came in to buy it I said, "Well, it's $50, plus sales tax, plus another $10 to cover various taxes associated with running my store, plus another $5 in fees," what would happen? I would guess I'd get in trouble for false advertising. Yet my $40 cell phone bill always comes out $60. Every single month.
Personally, I've always thought it was kind of silly that advertised prices don't already include sales tax, but cell phone plans definitely take it too far.
I haven't used Blackberries for a few years now, because at the time I switched, their Exchange support sucked. They didn't support ActiveSync, so you either needed to be running a BES or a desktop redirector, which is insanely stupid. On top of that, what each of those things did was redirect the user's email to RIM's servers, which wasn't something I was particularly fond of doing. Beyond that, their web browser was horrible and HTML support in email was non-existent. And they really stank as phones, weren't too hot as PDAs. The only thing they did well was act as a portable Exchange client, but even that had problems (as I mentioned).
I'm guessing all of that must have changed by now, or else they'd deserve to be the laughingstock of the industry. But at the time I switched to Windows-based phones, which were really slow and crashed a lot, but seemed overall to be a better deal. I switched from them to iPhones for my company, because the iPhones crashed less frequently, provided equivalent Exchange support, a better browser, and better support for Macs (we run both Macs and Windows at my company). Plus, the employees are generally much happier because they can listen to their music and get games and applications really easily.
If you want REAL competition among handset producers leading to technological advancement, you have to end the tying of phone purchases to cell contracts.
True, but even then you won't have REAL competition until you force them to be more open about various things. Like when you advertise "unlimited" data plans, what are the restrictions? Those plans aren't unlimited. Or why do SMS messages cost so much? What is the real status of each network's 3G rollout? Their 4G rollout? What are their real costs/profits?
I get much more upset about our wired data infrastructure, since there's pretty much zero competition in that space, but my objection is pretty much the same: If we're going to allow a private company to build out our national communications infrastructure, then that company should be forced to adhere to a higher standard of fairness and transparency. If there isn't sufficient competition (or even if the barrier to entry is too high) then they should also be heavily regulated.
Yeah, I don't get it. If you think you're closing the "analog hole" then I think you've missed the point of what the "analog hole" is. Sooner or later, the digital signal has to be displayed. The audio has to be pumped to a speaker, and the video to a display, at which point it can be captured. If it can't be captured before it hits the display and speakers, then worst case scenario, you set up a mic and camera and record it that way.
Really, what's going on is that you have tech companies coming out with snake-oil DRM schemes that won't work, and continuing to re-sell them to media companies over and over again. It's fitting, I suppose.
Yeah, I have to call bullshit on some of this. Not because I'm calling you out personally, but from my experience with doctors, they aren't looking for zebras, but they aren't looking for horses either. When you tell them you're hearing hoofbeats, they say, "Meh, noises happen sometimes. Most likely harmless. If it is a horse, let me know after you've been trampled and I'll see if I can patch you up then. See you next time!"
I've had a few different doctors in the past few years. I came in complaining of a set of symptoms one year, and the doctor said, "Meh, probably nothing. Don't worry about it." The next year, I made the same complaint to another doctor, and he blew me off too. The next year, I was hospitalized for a condition that was completely connected to the prior symptoms. Gee, might that have been worth looking into?
Still, no diagnosis. The doctors I've gone to don't know what it is, but don't want to do any more tests, either. I have insurance, but they still give me the run-around. Every time I go into the doctor, I can tell that he hasn't done any research, reviewed my records, or put a single thought into my situation other than during the 10 minutes I'm in the room with him. He opens up a little folder, looks at his notes from last time, says, "Nope, still don't know what it is. But you're not doing too badly right now, so let's not worry about it. See you next time!"
I don't want to offend you personally, but your profession sucks. I used to fix computers for a living, and if I put in as little effort into my diagnostics as the doctors that I've seen in my life, I would have gotten fired. Still every doctor that I go to acts as though he's doing me a favor, like he's my boss and gets to tell me what to do.
The only excuse that I've heard that I find at all understandable is, I've read that PCPs are overloaded because there's a shortage, and they're forced to spend their time dealing with insurance companies rather than treating patients. I don't know if that's politically motivated hogwash, but either way, these "professionals" aren't doing their job.
Yeah, I'm not really doing anything but rambling on about your point that you already made, but it wasn't long that I was in the workforce that I realized most of the people I worked with in my field were deeply incompetent. Even when dealing with people with good professional reputations, they didn't know what they were doing. We hired a consultant at one point who was an upper-level troubleshooter for a big/major vendor, and the consultant knew less about their own product than I did after a few months of use. I was very concerned.
And then I mentioned that to someone who worked in another department for the same company, and he was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Everyone in my department is pretty incompetent too. [Employee A] never does any work, and [Employee B] makes mistakes that a smart highschool kid wouldn't make, even though he's been working in our field for 20 years." I talked to lots of other people from other fields, and at least everyone who seemed at all smart and dedicated agreed: most of the people in their field were not good at their jobs.
It's scary to think about. The people in our government, in our military, running our power plants, working in our hospitals, preparing our food, etc. Most likely, a large percentage of the people in each of those fields are simply bad at their jobs, and they might not even be trying.
Even in my own experience, doctors don't seem to be the exception.
Or don't take Gates as an example, take Paris Hilton as an example.
Or hell, take Donald Trump as an example. Yeah, you think Donald Trump is some kind of a self-made genius businessman, until you learn that his dad was a wealthy New York real estate tycoon who left the Donald a ton of money, and Donald Trump's business ventures have flopped almost as often as they've succeeded. The guy got rich off of getting rich, and then got famous for being famous, which is no great accomplishment.
Yeah, I don't doubt that he's made money at times, and his net worth may be far larger than his original inheritance, so you can talk about him being a self-made man. But it's a lot easier to make $100 million dollars when you have $100 million to begin with.
Take it a step farther, and think of how much money the record industry could make if they could just impose an arbitrary tax on all people! There are, what, 300 million people in the US? Assume each person really should be buying 10 albums a year (whether they want them or not) at $20 per CD, and the RIAA can pull down $60 billion a year. Think of how good that would be for the economy!
I mean, if we're going to absolve the industry from having to provide a service that people want to pay for, then we may as well go in whole hog.
The other possibility is that you could get him to come around to seeing how much economic damage the RIAA and MPAA positions are doing to our economy.
Part of the problem comes from how you think about economics. Some people think, "whatever is very most profitable for the most businesses," is the definition of "good for the economy". Those companies can then hire more people, invest in things, etc. This seems to be the way Hatch is seeing things, and it's not at all uncommon, even among Democrats.
On the other hand, you might say, "greater efficiency is better for the economy." Cut down on all the red-tape, bureaucracy, and middlemen and it will free up more real wealth to be spent on things that are actually beneficial. You can think of it like a forest fire. We used to prevent small forest fires because they were dangerous, but then we found out that smaller forest fires clear out some excess growth, fertilize the soil, and prevent the next forest fire from getting too out of control. Similarly, allowing some economic destruction can clear out bad business models, free up capital for better investments, and prevent economic downturns from getting quite so ugly.
Now if you're a believer in the second idea, then you might not be all that interested in protecting our entertainment industry, regardless of how much money they're making. Online distribution means much less waste. There's no packaging, no transportation costs, no storage/shelving costs, and no waste of unsold products. It's a much more efficient model, which is an economic boon whether or not these particular businesses can figure out how to profit from it.
Either way, I'm a bit uneasy about the implication that our economy is reliant on our entertainment industry. It'd be nice if our economy was built on actual production of goods, and not on copyright enforcement.
If I'm not thinking about it, my immediate response to these stories has been, "Why are we listening to what Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have to say about viruses?"
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Are imaginary papers protected under the 4th amendment?
I can't see why they shouldn't be. Yes, I can imagine a world where those files are considered immune to this amendment, but on the other hand, I can imagine a world where car trunks are also considered immune. I can imagine lots of worlds where the government gets away with unjust and irrational distinctions, but I don't believe that a Constitution alone can prevent that.
The right to privacy is a recent idea (in terms of it being a right guaranteed by the US Constitution). It's not actually in there, and I think court cases that have interpreted it as being in there have been flat out wrong.
Well first of all, I wasn't necessarily talking about the question of whether we in the US have a "right to privacy", but just noting that it's a question to ask when formulating the constitution.
However, I disagree to some extent. If you understand the structure of the US Constitution and the political philosophy of the people who wrote it, then it should be clear that the Constitution does not need to grant citizens a right in order for them to have that right.
The "founding fathers" believed that men essentially had god-given rights that no government should be permitted to deny. The Constitution was not written in order to grant citizens certain rights, but rather as a means of documenting which powers the citizens were granting to the government. In the actual Constitution, those powers are listed explicitly, and though there's room for interpretation of intent and application, the Constitution does not grant the federal government any powers not listed.
The Bill of Rights is also not granting rights, but listing some of the citizens' innate rights that the founders believed important enough to strictly and explicitly forbid the government from impinging on. However, it's not intended to be an exhaustive list of those innate rights that the citizens have (as is made explicit in the 9th and 10th). Furthermore, some of the rights (1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) have a definite connotation of allowing citizens to keep secrets and enjoy private communication without interference.
Because of this, I find it very hard to deny that citizens generally have a right to privacy. However, that doesn't specify the specific boundaries of that right. Citizens are specified to have the right to bear arms, but we deny arms to prison inmates, obviously.
There would be no need to steal information from the content creator since you could just link to their information.
Well that's not entirely true. There'd be an incentive to steal information and post it on your own site so you're the one who gets a cut of the ISP's fee instead of the legitimate owner. It seems to me that, even if there were no other problems, it might still be difficult at times to know who should be paid for what. And what about the times when you're uploading/downloading non-copyrighted material? Who gets paid for that?
At this moment in time the value I'm paying for it is $60 a month to Comcast, and the only one making money off of it is Comcast, not the people who are actually supplying me content.
Well theoretically that $60 is just paying for the infrastructure and ISP services. If you think that's too high, I can definitely sympathize, but I wouldn't expect that your scheme would end up with you paying $60 but a big cut going to content providers. It's much more likely that you'd end up paying more than you currently do for your ISP+[cable+iTunes+(whatever other content you pay for)].
And offers such iron-clad evidence as "If you even think about it, it can't be true," and "I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different."
Yay, get your favorite artists entire catalog at 96kHz on a single disk.
Except that's not what they'll do. They'll put the same recordings as on the CD, and then fill the rest of the disk with ads.
Well what if we put it another way? You're talking about basic human rights issues, and I think you're right to indicate that those shouldn't change (at least not in an essential way) because we're using new tools. On the other hand, some things have changed in the digital/internet age, and that may warrant some consideration.
For example, in the US Constitution, the federal government isn't given any particular powers regarding the Internet (obviously). It's technically not even given the right to have an interstate highways system (obviously). However, the federal government is given the right to create roads for the purpose of delivering mail. So in this new constitution, what role do you want to assign the government in terms of creating/maintaining/regulating communications infrastructure?
The US Constitution also gives the federal government the power to grant copyrights. Given the current technological age, if you were writing the Constitution today, would you have included that? Would you have been more specific?
Should the government be required by the constitution to disseminate any particular information in any particular way? Just a random example: you could make it required that any laws be posted on the Internet at least 5 days before any vote. What format do you want it in?
What kinds of records may the government keep on the citizenry? What kinds of databases and compilations of information can they reference, and under what circumstances? Would it make sense to have some time frame after which records expire? Is there some time frame for when even the most secure documents become public?
There are lots of decisions that have different ramifications today than they did 20 years ago. It's not a dumb question to ask.
But really, those things still don't make digital rights a special case. The real questions are, do you have freedom of speech? Freedom of assembly? What about a right to privacy? If you can answer those questions, those rights should be protected regardless of the technology.
The particulars about how those rights are protected will have to change over time, as the culture and technology change. Those can be individual laws and court cases, but probably shouldn't be in a constitution.
Computers don't sue you when you try to fix them and you accidentally make things worse.
The computers themselves won't, no. But there's no guarantee that the computer's owner won't sue me. All the more reason to do good work, instead of ignoring the customers' complaints and failing to diagnose their problems.
You seem to be proposing some other system that is very different from what Disney is trying to do, and also very different from the Internet as it is. It seems like your suggestion is to have the ISP charge per byte instead of a monthly fee, and then be responsible for paying a share of that charge back to the content owners, based on what was downloaded?
It's interesting, but I'm not sure how well it would work out.
Yeah, I've long been a proponent of the idea of breaking up the vertical monopolies that are causing a lot of these problems. However, I think the key thing to break up is that the infrastructure providers should be prohibited from being service providers or content providers.
So, for example, if Verizon is laying the fiber and hooking up the routers to provide the internet, then they should be forbidden from being an ISP or providing voice service or acting as a "cable company" (providing video services). They should be required to openly license their infrastructure to basically any service provider at a set price (no special deals). Cable companies (like Comcast, Time Warner, etc) should be required to cease providing video services themselves, and allow some method of allowing customers to choose their own video providers from a free marketplace.
This would mean that everyone looking to provide services, whether they be web hosting, voice, or video (including original content) would essentially be on equal footing. No one would be able to use special access to the infrastructure as leverage to squeeze out competitors.
However, the cablecos will say that large channels subsidize the smaller ones (of course that's true), and that if they did a la carte, smaller channels couldn't survive. E.g., fewer people would be paying for BET or whatever, so BET would die out.
And what's the real reason they don't want to do a la carte? I doubt it's to save BET. I mean, if the bigger channels subsidize the smaller ones, then presumably they carry BET at a loss. (I mean, that's the logic, right?) So then why don't the cable providers want to drop BET, stop taking a loss, and make a bigger profit on carrying only the popular channels?
the new ones are worth nothing at all.
I don't agree with that. Not if you include Pixar's stuff.
Are you trying to argue that the practice isn't dishonest or unethical because it similar to the practices of car dealers?
To some people FOSS is just software to get work done. So they use it where they see fit. They contribute where they see benefit. But they don't sacrafice themselve to the holy crusade of FOSS.
I would say that's probably a fair share of even FOSS developers. The stereotypical lone developer working to "scratch his own itch" is only developing and contributing where he sees some kind of benefit.
But lots of people who are enamored with FOSS seem not to recognize that a lot of the development on major projects comes from paid developers working at companies like Google, IBM, Novell, and Redhat. Those companies are "friends" to FOSS, but at the same time, they're contributing to areas where they see benefit. They're profiting from sales of products and services that use FOSS, and they contribute funds and code for the purpose of improving the capabilities of the products and services they sell. There's nothing nefarious about it, but that's just where a lot of the funding and code comes from.
So some other company doesn't contribute as much, but they also don't benefit as much or as directly from ongoing development. So what? Forgetting everything I wrote in the preceding paragraphs, here's something else to consider: none of these FOSS licenses prevent you from leeching. There's not a clause in the GPL that says you have to contribute in any way in order to make use of the software, or even to distribute the software. The developers who license their software under the GPL have knowingly given the entire world full permission to leech off of their work. If they don't like those terms, then they picked the wrong license.
Yeah, I more had in mind something like, "We spent $X on expanding our network, $Y worth of that being hardware costs. It costs $A for us to support 1 minute of calling, and $B to support the transmission of a single SMS message. Those numbers are taking factors J, K, and L into consideration, but ignoring factors M, N, and O."
I recognize that businesses generally don't report in such detail, but most businesses aren't raking in profits from maintaining a near monopoly on vital national infrastructure.
I'm a Verizon customer. They have HORRID billing practices (throw in lots of ambiguous "fees"
That's another little problem that I'm sure we're all familiar with: all the "taxes" and "fees" on your cell phone bill. Why are they allowed to do that?
If I were running a store and I advertised an item for $50, but when you came in to buy it I said, "Well, it's $50, plus sales tax, plus another $10 to cover various taxes associated with running my store, plus another $5 in fees," what would happen? I would guess I'd get in trouble for false advertising. Yet my $40 cell phone bill always comes out $60. Every single month.
Personally, I've always thought it was kind of silly that advertised prices don't already include sales tax, but cell phone plans definitely take it too far.
I haven't used Blackberries for a few years now, because at the time I switched, their Exchange support sucked. They didn't support ActiveSync, so you either needed to be running a BES or a desktop redirector, which is insanely stupid. On top of that, what each of those things did was redirect the user's email to RIM's servers, which wasn't something I was particularly fond of doing. Beyond that, their web browser was horrible and HTML support in email was non-existent. And they really stank as phones, weren't too hot as PDAs. The only thing they did well was act as a portable Exchange client, but even that had problems (as I mentioned).
I'm guessing all of that must have changed by now, or else they'd deserve to be the laughingstock of the industry. But at the time I switched to Windows-based phones, which were really slow and crashed a lot, but seemed overall to be a better deal. I switched from them to iPhones for my company, because the iPhones crashed less frequently, provided equivalent Exchange support, a better browser, and better support for Macs (we run both Macs and Windows at my company). Plus, the employees are generally much happier because they can listen to their music and get games and applications really easily.
If you want REAL competition among handset producers leading to technological advancement, you have to end the tying of phone purchases to cell contracts.
True, but even then you won't have REAL competition until you force them to be more open about various things. Like when you advertise "unlimited" data plans, what are the restrictions? Those plans aren't unlimited. Or why do SMS messages cost so much? What is the real status of each network's 3G rollout? Their 4G rollout? What are their real costs/profits?
I get much more upset about our wired data infrastructure, since there's pretty much zero competition in that space, but my objection is pretty much the same: If we're going to allow a private company to build out our national communications infrastructure, then that company should be forced to adhere to a higher standard of fairness and transparency. If there isn't sufficient competition (or even if the barrier to entry is too high) then they should also be heavily regulated.
Yeah, I don't get it. If you think you're closing the "analog hole" then I think you've missed the point of what the "analog hole" is. Sooner or later, the digital signal has to be displayed. The audio has to be pumped to a speaker, and the video to a display, at which point it can be captured. If it can't be captured before it hits the display and speakers, then worst case scenario, you set up a mic and camera and record it that way.
Really, what's going on is that you have tech companies coming out with snake-oil DRM schemes that won't work, and continuing to re-sell them to media companies over and over again. It's fitting, I suppose.
Yeah, I have to call bullshit on some of this. Not because I'm calling you out personally, but from my experience with doctors, they aren't looking for zebras, but they aren't looking for horses either. When you tell them you're hearing hoofbeats, they say, "Meh, noises happen sometimes. Most likely harmless. If it is a horse, let me know after you've been trampled and I'll see if I can patch you up then. See you next time!"
I've had a few different doctors in the past few years. I came in complaining of a set of symptoms one year, and the doctor said, "Meh, probably nothing. Don't worry about it." The next year, I made the same complaint to another doctor, and he blew me off too. The next year, I was hospitalized for a condition that was completely connected to the prior symptoms. Gee, might that have been worth looking into?
Still, no diagnosis. The doctors I've gone to don't know what it is, but don't want to do any more tests, either. I have insurance, but they still give me the run-around. Every time I go into the doctor, I can tell that he hasn't done any research, reviewed my records, or put a single thought into my situation other than during the 10 minutes I'm in the room with him. He opens up a little folder, looks at his notes from last time, says, "Nope, still don't know what it is. But you're not doing too badly right now, so let's not worry about it. See you next time!"
I don't want to offend you personally, but your profession sucks. I used to fix computers for a living, and if I put in as little effort into my diagnostics as the doctors that I've seen in my life, I would have gotten fired. Still every doctor that I go to acts as though he's doing me a favor, like he's my boss and gets to tell me what to do.
The only excuse that I've heard that I find at all understandable is, I've read that PCPs are overloaded because there's a shortage, and they're forced to spend their time dealing with insurance companies rather than treating patients. I don't know if that's politically motivated hogwash, but either way, these "professionals" aren't doing their job.
Yeah, I'm not really doing anything but rambling on about your point that you already made, but it wasn't long that I was in the workforce that I realized most of the people I worked with in my field were deeply incompetent. Even when dealing with people with good professional reputations, they didn't know what they were doing. We hired a consultant at one point who was an upper-level troubleshooter for a big/major vendor, and the consultant knew less about their own product than I did after a few months of use. I was very concerned.
And then I mentioned that to someone who worked in another department for the same company, and he was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Everyone in my department is pretty incompetent too. [Employee A] never does any work, and [Employee B] makes mistakes that a smart highschool kid wouldn't make, even though he's been working in our field for 20 years." I talked to lots of other people from other fields, and at least everyone who seemed at all smart and dedicated agreed: most of the people in their field were not good at their jobs.
It's scary to think about. The people in our government, in our military, running our power plants, working in our hospitals, preparing our food, etc. Most likely, a large percentage of the people in each of those fields are simply bad at their jobs, and they might not even be trying.
Even in my own experience, doctors don't seem to be the exception.
Or don't take Gates as an example, take Paris Hilton as an example.
Or hell, take Donald Trump as an example. Yeah, you think Donald Trump is some kind of a self-made genius businessman, until you learn that his dad was a wealthy New York real estate tycoon who left the Donald a ton of money, and Donald Trump's business ventures have flopped almost as often as they've succeeded. The guy got rich off of getting rich, and then got famous for being famous, which is no great accomplishment.
Yeah, I don't doubt that he's made money at times, and his net worth may be far larger than his original inheritance, so you can talk about him being a self-made man. But it's a lot easier to make $100 million dollars when you have $100 million to begin with.
Take it a step farther, and think of how much money the record industry could make if they could just impose an arbitrary tax on all people! There are, what, 300 million people in the US? Assume each person really should be buying 10 albums a year (whether they want them or not) at $20 per CD, and the RIAA can pull down $60 billion a year. Think of how good that would be for the economy!
I mean, if we're going to absolve the industry from having to provide a service that people want to pay for, then we may as well go in whole hog.
The other possibility is that you could get him to come around to seeing how much economic damage the RIAA and MPAA positions are doing to our economy.
Part of the problem comes from how you think about economics. Some people think, "whatever is very most profitable for the most businesses," is the definition of "good for the economy". Those companies can then hire more people, invest in things, etc. This seems to be the way Hatch is seeing things, and it's not at all uncommon, even among Democrats.
On the other hand, you might say, "greater efficiency is better for the economy." Cut down on all the red-tape, bureaucracy, and middlemen and it will free up more real wealth to be spent on things that are actually beneficial. You can think of it like a forest fire. We used to prevent small forest fires because they were dangerous, but then we found out that smaller forest fires clear out some excess growth, fertilize the soil, and prevent the next forest fire from getting too out of control. Similarly, allowing some economic destruction can clear out bad business models, free up capital for better investments, and prevent economic downturns from getting quite so ugly.
Now if you're a believer in the second idea, then you might not be all that interested in protecting our entertainment industry, regardless of how much money they're making. Online distribution means much less waste. There's no packaging, no transportation costs, no storage/shelving costs, and no waste of unsold products. It's a much more efficient model, which is an economic boon whether or not these particular businesses can figure out how to profit from it.
Either way, I'm a bit uneasy about the implication that our economy is reliant on our entertainment industry. It'd be nice if our economy was built on actual production of goods, and not on copyright enforcement.
If I'm not thinking about it, my immediate response to these stories has been, "Why are we listening to what Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have to say about viruses?"