The reason the BSA is much less reviled is because it hardly has to come after home consumers. Most get their software when they buy a new PC so they don't have to bother with those really. And it is called the "Business Software Alliance" after all!
At some point government has to stop interfering in the markets. You can buy a very cheap phone that does what you want on just about any network. Without iPhone exclusivity, perhaps Sprint may not have invested in the Palm pre, and perhaps AT&T would not have invested in the iPhone either. The promise of exclusivity probably allowed Apple to demand pretty favourable terms which benefit consumers (such as unlimited data) as standard. That, for me, was one of the attractions of the iPhone. In situations were there is no monopoly, or even a quasi monopoly, I would much rather government kept out.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is perhaps to enable consumers to switch carriers easily. Consumers are responsible for their buying behaviours. We can, and do weigh up the total package, the hardware + the services. We don't need government to protect "us poor consumers" from everything. Right now the system is working fine. Not perfectly, but well enough.
Whether someone gets beat up because of the color of their skin or for the wallet in their pocket, the effect is the same and both should be punished the same way. Giving an extra sentence because of the motivations of the person doesn't make them hate any less, it only gives a new reason for other potential haters to hate.
Actually, the two are very different. There is a different between being singled out because of the colour of your skin, and being unlucky. I agree with the extra punishment for any race motivated crime because it doesn't just harm the direct victim, but it can have a really bad effect on vulnerable sections of society, as well as on relations between different sections of society. would you like to live in a society in which it was legal, if not OK, to spew speech that exhorted people to be violent towards you. Sometimes society needs to send out a really big message that we are on the side of the little guys. That is important.
You obviously haven't seen the GPL which states something similar. That you can't assert any copyright or patent claims against software which you are distributing.
Actually, I think this will end up being a competitive advantage in the long run. If Nokia smartphones end up being the *only* smartphones that run (mostly) raw native code compiled straight for the metal, they will end up being the fastest in the long run, given equivalent hardware.
For that to be true, they would have to make sure their software was optimised for all different hardware they produce. If they are going to stick to one processor then maybe. But that is a lot of work for the developers, with the way current app stores work. Native code for applications is overrated. Users do not care about it. and oh, the long run absolutely does not matter.
The opposite of what you said is true actually. GPS can tell you how much you travelled, and where you travelled. An odometer only tells you how much you travelled. Unless you want to have toll booths all over the place with people popping their heads in your car to check you mileage as you leave each state, GPS is the way to go.
Obviously, a GPS based system is open to abuse though. They might very quickly find out that they can find out if you have been speeding, among other things.
I think you are confusing free markets with capitalism. Capitalism is about resource ownership, and the rights relating to those resources.
Free markets are a different beast. You can have capitalism without free markets, e.g., most utilities, where the prices are pretty much set by government regulators and/or access to the market is severely restricted. Heck you could even have free market communism although I am not sure it has been tried.
The cellphone market in the USA is very capitalistic. It's the free market bit that the Senators seem to want to tackle.
You don't know that. That argument is really fallacious. If the only way for you to use your computer was to install an operating system you had to pay for, and you really wanted to use your computer you would buy the OS.
Now, if one is available 'freely', i.e., pirated, you may download it and argue that you didn't want to pay for one, so there is no lost revenue. That ignores the fact that the software has value. Now cost is different than value. People will generally buy something only if its value exceeds its cost, which by definition, pirated goods generally do, since they are free.
The material loss argument is a strawman. And yes, many people would buy the movies/software/music if that was the only way they could get it. So the lost revenue argument is justified, although the figures they like to parrot are usually way overstated.
Yes slashdot is jumping the shark. It is almost never suggested that the way to protest against this is to stop consuming the product, thereby legitimately depriving the creators of the content of income, at least until they offer the product at more palatable terms. You want to have your cake and eat it too, and all the rationalisation is indeed specious.
The moral and economic landscape are not changed in the least. By your reasoning, anything that is abundant and can be reproduced at zero cost can be taken from its producer without compensation.
Correct.
That the good required a expenditures of labor and resources somehow vanishes from the equation.
Incorrect. The expenditure of labor and resources should be proportionally paid for once.
It's all well and good to say you believe that a person should be paid once for their labour. On the face of it, it seems a very reasonable position to take. But you don't suggest how it should be done. A great many people had a long hard think about it, and copyrights were established centuries ago for this kind of situation. The only difference is that back then, it was books which could be printed by anyone with a printing press, but good stories were hard to come by. The only difference now is the cost of reproduction is now approximately zero, but still below the value of the good in question, and so, the question is basically the same, and so is the answer incidentally. The zero cost of reproduction is the strawman here.
perhaps we'll find out it's just too hard to raise $400 million to make the next Transformers movie
To be fair, would that be a bad thing?
Studio produced films tend to be dominated by big budget, special effect laden titles which people go to see because of a huge amount of advertising and because the title releases are staggered at the cinema so that there is a good chance that of the films available in a given week there might only be one or two films you would even consider watching (maybe a choice between genre more than film title). I often (not always) come out of those films feeling a little underwhelmed.
A payment before production method of producing films may give smaller budget more story driven films a better chance of
a) getting produced
b) being shown to a wider audience.
People are willing to pay the new special effect laden Transformers movie more than they want to watch the lower budget story driven films. Hence the question of which movie should make the most money is entirely democratic. People are entitled to watch movies you find shallow and pointless. Not everyone is as pretentious as you.
Most people working on a movie are paid before the movie is released. Very few people are paid after production. In fact, its the financial backers, the ones who risk their money, who are paid after production.
Even the smaller budget films require financial backing from someone, even if it is only buying cameras and spending a few nights in the woods like on the Blair Witch project.
Well, economically speaking, payment for 'real' goods is not directly linked to the labour used to produce it either. It's all about demand and supply.
Internet access in any industrialized country is NOT expensive and people should not be forced to pay money so that someone else can have a better luxury than they currently have.
If I take your argument to the extreme, then I could argue that even for necessities (such as healthcare - at least, most people in the UK believe that it is a necessity) then no one should be forced to pay for others to get it. Imagine how it would impact those with medical conditions requiring expensive treatment. I suppose that already the case in the US.
I think the distinction between necessity and luxury is quite spurious anyway. In a developed country, I expect people to aspire to more than just meeting bare necessities.
You seem to have a limited understanding of diversity. You get more diversity by inter-racial breeding because you create more intermediate breeds. Where you previously had either completely black, white or asian offspring, you now have any mixtures of those, including 100% black, white and asian.
Instead of having a few distinct hundred 'species' of man, you actually have a continuum of 'species'.
Also remember it was Jobs that took Apple down the road away from Intel due to childish feeling of being shunned by Intel President Andy Grove...The industry has benefitted having Job's but he also takes credit for shite (Pixar?!) that he had very little to do with.
Well, very little except to - Fund it with his own money - Negotiate with Disney - Stay out of the way of the real talent (Which is something many studio owners would find difficult)
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Trust me, I've thought longer about it than you have.;)
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Yes, of course. Just like under the current system: if a musician is going to spend a year recording an album, he has to expect to eventually earn a year's wages plus other costs. The difference is that under the current system, the musician is forced to gamble, because he doesn't know how many copies he'll eventually sell; under my proposed system, he knows ahead of time whether it's a good investment.
The economy doesn't work like that. When BMW designs a car, they do not know ahead of time how successful it will be. If they knew, then no company would ever be in trouble.
Capitalism is about gambling, to a very large extent. That is why musicians can end up very wealthy, because they take huge risks. I choose a more mundane and predictable profession. And my rewards are consequently more pedestrian.
The system works.
No, that's what my proposed system does. Copyright encourages works to be created regardless of whether there's any actual demand for them, on the off-chance that they might end up selling a lot of copies.
And that is not a bad thing. In fact, it is one of the things copyright was trying to achieve, so on that count, it has succeeded.
And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
Sorry, but the "fruits of a man's labor" argument is bullshit. You don't own words just because you write them, any more than you own numbers just because you calculate them, or own a house just because you paint it.
We all take advantage of other people's labor for free every day, and it's fine. You didn't invent the transistor, TCP/IP, or the English language, and yet here you are using all three of them without paying a dime to any of the people who did invent them.
Er. It id not my problem if the inventor of TCP/IP did not make sure he became rich of his invention. I am not saying there is a requirement for people to pay. The point is I have a right to choose whether I want payment or not. Different people will create works for different purposes. The law should not force us to be altruistic.
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Now how do you decide which artist gets the money? Is it any artist who produces some work who gets the money? And how many people are really going to pay for someone to produce works which everyone else will get to enjoy for free? Do you want to go back to the days when a few patrons paid for music works?
Copyright created means for the process of the production of artistic works to be democratised. With consumers' money being the votes or course! Artists take risks. Heck, even the record labels and film producers, by putting their money on the line, take risks. If they get it wrong, they do not get their initial investment back.
The law is not only intended to reflect what we believe to be 'natural law'. Sometimes, it is enacted to create order out of chaos. There are lots of things we, the public, could legitimately claim to belong to us, and not to any corporation. Mining rights, or drilling rights, to name a few. Yet I don't see too many claims here on slashdot that we should have the right to drill for oil on Exxon's oil fields. And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
How are they pushing their works onto the public? Are you saying because they advertise their works they lose their right to revenue from these works.
Leaving my car running in the driveway, with the keys in the ignition is not a clever thing to do. But it also isn't an invitation to steal it.
And having a distribution model without anything to distribute is just silly. People do not consume a distribution model. They want the convenience so that they get the works they want as easily and as cost effectively as possible. But not having it is not justification for taking without permission, which is what the copyright law requires consumers to have. In the past, that permission entailed going into a shop and buying a CD. Of course the distributors need to change their distribution models, but for their own survival.
The biggest disservice people do to genuine arguments against the recording industries is to allow them the moral high ground. As a consumer, your biggest power is to not buy their offerings until they offer them with acceptable conditions. Perhaps, instead of using the internet to break the law and we should use it to organise mass boycotts of their products until they change the way they do business.
What has happened is that the legitimate debate has been taken over by a rather loud radical minority which doesn't believe in most rights that most people believe in, including the rights of artists to make money of their works.
You seem to have missed the point. I am disagreeing with the notion that since people should not expect to get paid for their works, then it's OK to take their works for free.
It's a very bad argument to make applied to anything, including copyright infringement.
So you really think that giving credit to the idea of expecting money for a work nobody asked you nor promised compensation for is not puerile?
If I take your argument to the logical extreme, BMW should not expect payment for the cars it makes because no one promised to pay for them once they are made. So stealing their cars is OK.
Artists do not expect money from people who do not want to own copies of their works. Only from those who do. They can do without your money, if you will do without their works.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the BSA is much less reviled is because it hardly has to come after home consumers. Most get their software when they buy a new PC so they don't have to bother with those really. And it is called the "Business Software Alliance" after all!
At some point government has to stop interfering in the markets. You can buy a very cheap phone that does what you want on just about any network. Without iPhone exclusivity, perhaps Sprint may not have invested in the Palm pre, and perhaps AT&T would not have invested in the iPhone either. The promise of exclusivity probably allowed Apple to demand pretty favourable terms which benefit consumers (such as unlimited data) as standard. That, for me, was one of the attractions of the iPhone. In situations were there is no monopoly, or even a quasi monopoly, I would much rather government kept out.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is perhaps to enable consumers to switch carriers easily. Consumers are responsible for their buying behaviours. We can, and do weigh up the total package, the hardware + the services. We don't need government to protect "us poor consumers" from everything. Right now the system is working fine. Not perfectly, but well enough.
Whether someone gets beat up because of the color of their skin or for the wallet in their pocket, the effect is the same and both should be punished the same way. Giving an extra sentence because of the motivations of the person doesn't make them hate any less, it only gives a new reason for other potential haters to hate.
Actually, the two are very different. There is a different between being singled out because of the colour of your skin, and being unlucky. I agree with the extra punishment for any race motivated crime because it doesn't just harm the direct victim, but it can have a really bad effect on vulnerable sections of society, as well as on relations between different sections of society. would you like to live in a society in which it was legal, if not OK, to spew speech that exhorted people to be violent towards you. Sometimes society needs to send out a really big message that we are on the side of the little guys. That is important.
1)There is already more women than men.
Not true. Check World factbook. There are actually more men than women in the world.
The number are approximately 3,412,990,488 men and 3,377,071,728 women around.
You obviously haven't seen the GPL which states something similar. That you can't assert any copyright or patent claims against software which you are distributing.
Actually, I think this will end up being a competitive advantage in the long run. If Nokia smartphones end up being the *only* smartphones that run (mostly) raw native code compiled straight for the metal, they will end up being the fastest in the long run, given equivalent hardware.
For that to be true, they would have to make sure their software was optimised for all different hardware they produce. If they are going to stick to one processor then maybe. But that is a lot of work for the developers, with the way current app stores work. Native code for applications is overrated. Users do not care about it. and oh, the long run absolutely does not matter.
The reason for buying was that it could be bought. GTK couldn't be bought, hence Nokia couldn't buy it.
Because then they own it, and can do whatever they want with it, include release non-free software based on Qt as copyright holders.
The opposite of what you said is true actually. GPS can tell you how much you travelled, and where you travelled. An odometer only tells you how much you travelled. Unless you want to have toll booths all over the place with people popping their heads in your car to check you mileage as you leave each state, GPS is the way to go.
Obviously, a GPS based system is open to abuse though. They might very quickly find out that they can find out if you have been speeding, among other things.
I mostly agree with you, but if I am playing devil's advocate, what about the plug-in hybrids?
I think you are confusing free markets with capitalism. Capitalism is about resource ownership, and the rights relating to those resources.
Free markets are a different beast. You can have capitalism without free markets, e.g., most utilities, where the prices are pretty much set by government regulators and/or access to the market is severely restricted. Heck you could even have free market communism although I am not sure it has been tried.
The cellphone market in the USA is very capitalistic. It's the free market bit that the Senators seem to want to tackle.
You wouldn't charge per megabite costs for web hosting. The end users would pay for the bandwidth.
You don't know that. That argument is really fallacious. If the only way for you to use your computer was to install an operating system you had to pay for, and you really wanted to use your computer you would buy the OS.
Now, if one is available 'freely', i.e., pirated, you may download it and argue that you didn't want to pay for one, so there is no lost revenue. That ignores the fact that the software has value. Now cost is different than value. People will generally buy something only if its value exceeds its cost, which by definition, pirated goods generally do, since they are free.
The material loss argument is a strawman. And yes, many people would buy the movies/software/music if that was the only way they could get it. So the lost revenue argument is justified, although the figures they like to parrot are usually way overstated.
Yes slashdot is jumping the shark. It is almost never suggested that the way to protest against this is to stop consuming the product, thereby legitimately depriving the creators of the content of income, at least until they offer the product at more palatable terms. You want to have your cake and eat it too, and all the rationalisation is indeed specious.
The moral and economic landscape are not changed in the least. By your reasoning, anything that is abundant and can be reproduced at zero cost can be taken from its producer without compensation.
Correct.
That the good required a expenditures of labor and resources somehow vanishes from the equation.
Incorrect. The expenditure of labor and resources should be proportionally paid for once.
It's all well and good to say you believe that a person should be paid once for their labour. On the face of it, it seems a very reasonable position to take. But you don't suggest how it should be done. A great many people had a long hard think about it, and copyrights were established centuries ago for this kind of situation. The only difference is that back then, it was books which could be printed by anyone with a printing press, but good stories were hard to come by. The only difference now is the cost of reproduction is now approximately zero, but still below the value of the good in question, and so, the question is basically the same, and so is the answer incidentally. The zero cost of reproduction is the strawman here.
To be fair, would that be a bad thing?
Studio produced films tend to be dominated by big budget, special effect laden titles which people go to see because of a huge amount of advertising and because the title releases are staggered at the cinema so that there is a good chance that of the films available in a given week there might only be one or two films you would even consider watching (maybe a choice between genre more than film title). I often (not always) come out of those films feeling a little underwhelmed.
A payment before production method of producing films may give smaller budget more story driven films a better chance of a) getting produced b) being shown to a wider audience.
People are willing to pay the new special effect laden Transformers movie more than they want to watch the lower budget story driven films. Hence the question of which movie should make the most money is entirely democratic. People are entitled to watch movies you find shallow and pointless. Not everyone is as pretentious as you.
Most people working on a movie are paid before the movie is released. Very few people are paid after production. In fact, its the financial backers, the ones who risk their money, who are paid after production.
Even the smaller budget films require financial backing from someone, even if it is only buying cameras and spending a few nights in the woods like on the Blair Witch project.
Well, economically speaking, payment for 'real' goods is not directly linked to the labour used to produce it either. It's all about demand and supply.
Internet access in any industrialized country is NOT expensive and people should not be forced to pay money so that someone else can have a better luxury than they currently have.
If I take your argument to the extreme, then I could argue that even for necessities (such as healthcare - at least, most people in the UK believe that it is a necessity) then no one should be forced to pay for others to get it. Imagine how it would impact those with medical conditions requiring expensive treatment. I suppose that already the case in the US.
I think the distinction between necessity and luxury is quite spurious anyway. In a developed country, I expect people to aspire to more than just meeting bare necessities.
You seem to have a limited understanding of diversity. You get more diversity by inter-racial breeding because you create more intermediate breeds. Where you previously had either completely black, white or asian offspring, you now have any mixtures of those, including 100% black, white and asian.
Instead of having a few distinct hundred 'species' of man, you actually have a continuum of 'species'.
Also remember it was Jobs that took Apple down the road away from Intel due to childish feeling of being shunned by Intel President Andy Grove...The industry has benefitted having Job's but he also takes credit for shite (Pixar?!) that he had very little to do with.
Well, very little except to
- Fund it with his own money
- Negotiate with Disney
- Stay out of the way of the real talent (Which is something many studio owners would find difficult)
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Trust me, I've thought longer about it than you have. ;)
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Yes, of course. Just like under the current system: if a musician is going to spend a year recording an album, he has to expect to eventually earn a year's wages plus other costs. The difference is that under the current system, the musician is forced to gamble, because he doesn't know how many copies he'll eventually sell; under my proposed system, he knows ahead of time whether it's a good investment.
The economy doesn't work like that. When BMW designs a car, they do not know ahead of time how successful it will be. If they knew, then no company would ever be in trouble.
Capitalism is about gambling, to a very large extent. That is why musicians can end up very wealthy, because they take huge risks. I choose a more mundane and predictable profession. And my rewards are consequently more pedestrian.
The system works.
No, that's what my proposed system does. Copyright encourages works to be created regardless of whether there's any actual demand for them, on the off-chance that they might end up selling a lot of copies.
And that is not a bad thing. In fact, it is one of the things copyright was trying to achieve, so on that count, it has succeeded.
And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
Sorry, but the "fruits of a man's labor" argument is bullshit. You don't own words just because you write them, any more than you own numbers just because you calculate them, or own a house just because you paint it.
We all take advantage of other people's labor for free every day, and it's fine. You didn't invent the transistor, TCP/IP, or the English language, and yet here you are using all three of them without paying a dime to any of the people who did invent them.
Er. It id not my problem if the inventor of TCP/IP did not make sure he became rich of his invention. I am not saying there is a requirement for people to pay. The point is I have a right to choose whether I want payment or not. Different people will create works for different purposes. The law should not force us to be altruistic.
That's just silly. If you think long and hard about what you are suggesting, you would realise that it doesn't work.
Let's say it takes a year for a musician to come up with material for a single album. To pay them to produce this, you are going to have to pay them a year's wages, plus other costs.
Now how do you decide which artist gets the money? Is it any artist who produces some work who gets the money? And how many people are really going to pay for someone to produce works which everyone else will get to enjoy for free? Do you want to go back to the days when a few patrons paid for music works?
Copyright created means for the process of the production of artistic works to be democratised. With consumers' money being the votes or course! Artists take risks. Heck, even the record labels and film producers, by putting their money on the line, take risks. If they get it wrong, they do not get their initial investment back.
The law is not only intended to reflect what we believe to be 'natural law'. Sometimes, it is enacted to create order out of chaos. There are lots of things we, the public, could legitimately claim to belong to us, and not to any corporation. Mining rights, or drilling rights, to name a few. Yet I don't see too many claims here on slashdot that we should have the right to drill for oil on Exxon's oil fields. And such claims would ultimately have more legitimacy than the claim that we own the fruits of another man or woman's labour, and should be able to take it for free.
How are they pushing their works onto the public? Are you saying because they advertise their works they lose their right to revenue from these works.
Leaving my car running in the driveway, with the keys in the ignition is not a clever thing to do. But it also isn't an invitation to steal it.
And having a distribution model without anything to distribute is just silly. People do not consume a distribution model. They want the convenience so that they get the works they want as easily and as cost effectively as possible. But not having it is not justification for taking without permission, which is what the copyright law requires consumers to have. In the past, that permission entailed going into a shop and buying a CD. Of course the distributors need to change their distribution models, but for their own survival.
The biggest disservice people do to genuine arguments against the recording industries is to allow them the moral high ground. As a consumer, your biggest power is to not buy their offerings until they offer them with acceptable conditions. Perhaps, instead of using the internet to break the law and we should use it to organise mass boycotts of their products until they change the way they do business.
What has happened is that the legitimate debate has been taken over by a rather loud radical minority which doesn't believe in most rights that most people believe in, including the rights of artists to make money of their works.
You seem to have missed the point. I am disagreeing with the notion that since people should not expect to get paid for their works, then it's OK to take their works for free.
It's a very bad argument to make applied to anything, including copyright infringement.
So you really think that giving credit to the idea of expecting money for a work nobody asked you nor promised compensation for is not puerile?
If I take your argument to the logical extreme, BMW should not expect payment for the cars it makes because no one promised to pay for them once they are made. So stealing their cars is OK.
Artists do not expect money from people who do not want to own copies of their works. Only from those who do. They can do without your money, if you will do without their works.