What happens inside our minds when we listen to music? Why does enjoying music or being able to enjoy music make us have more grandchildren? What is the formula for calculating musicality?
You are right that some of the combatants in the "war" have a vested interest in the distribution model sustained by the current legal system. But I don't think that copyright as we know it continues to exist just because of big distribution companies. There are many people working in the production side of the "premium content" industry, who are not necessarily dependent on the existing distribution systems. Suggesting to these people that they should just wear the loss of protection, and hope that their employers will magically discover some new up-to-date "business model", is not providing them with a convincing alternative.
Until a satisfactory alternative is found, a fairly broad constituency in favour of defending existing notions of copyright will continue to exist, and it will continue to inhabit the moral high ground. The large distribution companies are de facto spokesmen for this constituency, and they see themselves as occuping that same moral high ground, whether or not they fully deserve to.
No alternative is going to get 100% of supporters of the existing system on board. But if even 10% of those supporters can be convinced to at least consider the possibility of practical alternatives, this might be enough to tip the balance in favour of trying something new.
One political advantage of Voted Compensation is that it can be introduced gradually. The only element of compulsion is that a suitable tax has to be raised, and this decision has to be made by the elected representatives of the taxpayers in question. ("Copyright levies" are already being set in some countries, but allocation is not being decided by the taxpayers, because the tax is seen as compensation for victims of crime, rather than payment for a public service.) The funds available can be initially limited, and content creators can choose whether or not to register their content in the system (which requires them to make it freely available, at least within the relevant country), or whether to continue with existing systems. After the system has operated for a while, the taxpayers can look at the quality of content being compensated for by the scheme and they can decide if they want to raise the initial tax levels.
If prizes are being given for the production of public goods, such as ideas or content, the prizes should be awarded by the people paying for the prizes, i.e. the taxpayers. Prizes should be awarded after the goods are produced and not before. So the production of the content would still be a very entrepreneurial activity. Something like the Slashdot moderation/meta-moderation system could be used to prevent abuse of the voting system (i.e. trying to vote money to yourself or to your friends).
Inspired by Guttman's article, I wrote an article Looking for a Win/Win Solution to the War Between "Premium Content" and Digital Freedom, reiterating the need for everyone to get out of the intellectual property/digital freedom dichotomy mindset. Find a way to pay the people who make expensive movies and expensive music (is music still expensive? I don't know), without taking away digital freedoms, i.e. the freedom to copy data around and the freedom to write software. It's not like the amount of money involved is all that large, when you calculate it per person. (How much of the money that we spend on content ends up being paid as royalties?)
Make up some really good music. Play to large crowds at concerts. Get spotted by record company scout, etc. (There is no straightforward way of making up really good music, because we do not have a scientific understanding of what music is.)
Combine basic music theory with some semi-random source of information that probably has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is that makes music musical. Post link to web page on Slashdot/Digg/Delicious/Reddit.
In Bootstrapping the Mind, I compare the loading of a "world view" into the human brain to the loading of an operating system into a computer. There isn't enough information on the genome to contain a full world view, and evolution is too slow anyway, compared to the development of culturally defined world views. Under this analogy, the genome is like a small boot ROM that contains just enough information so that the computer knows how to load the real boot code from somewhere else.
The only way to load a world view quickly into your brain is to import it from other people. To do this efficiently, your brain must be capable of entering a mode where it uncritically accepts information provided in spoken form (probably mostly from your parents, but other people may play a role). To avoid the risk of abuse, there must be some instinctive criteria that determine when this uncritical uploading of new information should occur. Hypnosis occurs under conditions which mimic the circumstances that satisfy these criteria.
In my blog entry Disorganized Incremental Software Development, I describe an idea for a programming language where all implementations and specifications are named using cryptographic hash codes of their contents. This avoids all name collisions, and means that you can let anyone be a "committer", and indeed dispense with version control altogether (except for comments, which still have to be written by someone who knows what they are writing).
As I explained (as long ago as 2000) in Miski: A White Paper, we need a system with the following features:
Each producer of link suggestions has a unique address, something like channel/user@example.com. (This implies resolution via DNS, but probably people will end up using the URL of an XML file.)
The channel address points to the producer's server.
The subscriber to a channel tells their server to subscribe to the channel. The subscriber's server talks to the producer's server.
When the producer makes a new link suggestion, their client pushes it to their server, which pushes it to all the servers whose subscribers have subscribed to the channel.
Each server pushes the link suggestion to their clients (by whatever means).
The pattern of client to server to server to client is a bit like the architecture of email, but it is quite spam-proof because you only ever receive what you asked for.
Additionally, subscribers can instantly "repost" a suggestion to their own channel, which will be read by their subscribers. To avoid reading duplicate posts, servers will optionally filter out duplicates. However, this has a major consequence, which is that subscribers are only ever guaranteed to see the URL, which means that anything you want to say about the content of a new page has to go into the URL. The current system of RSS titles and descriptions will not work under reposting and duplicate filtering.
The combination of real-time pushing and reposting could lead to a speeded up Internet, where exciting new ideas spread from one user to the next in a matter of minutes, without having to go through the bottlenecks of centralised attention and popular websites (such as Slashdot). This could be enough to turn the Internet into a "Global Brain", and perhaps even trigger the Technological Singularity.
I invented Miski to solve the problem of getting people to take notice of new ideas without having to engage in a massive publicity effort, but unfortunately I've failed to get anyone to take any notice of the Miski idea.
The fallacy of his computability argument can be summed up as follows:
Suppose there was an algorithm for generating mathematical truths which described the mathematical understanding of a human mathematician.
Show the algorithm to the mathematician, telling them that this is the algorithm which describes their understanding of mathematics.
The mathematician then understands that the algorithm is sound as a means of generating mathematical truths.
This truth cannot be in the set of mathematical truths generated by the algorithm (by Godel's incompleteness theory).
Therefore the mathematician understands something which is not within their understanding -- a contradiction.
Therefore human mathematical understanding is not computable.
Q.E.D.
What's the catch? The hypothetical algorithm described the mathematician's understanding of mathematics, but only on the assumption that the mathematician is not informed of the algorithm and told that it is sound as a system for generating mathematical truths.
The "proof" is a more sophisticated version of the following argument that human behaviour is not predictable according to the laws of physics:
Predict what my behaviour is going to be.
I will then decide to do something different.
Therefore my behaviour is not predictable.
Q.E.D.
It would appear that Penrose's understanding of complex analysis etc is better than his understanding of logic and computability.
A predictive algorithm is one which accepts music or alleged music as an input, and outputs an estimate of its musicality. A generative algorithm is one which generates new and original music. The secret Hit Song Science algorithm is a predictive algorithm. The Future of Music (according to my book) is that someone will eventually discover a generative algorithm, and when that happens, and we all have an implementation of it installed on our computers, much of the existing music industry will become irrelevant.
In the Hit Song Science FAQ, Polyphonic HMI state that their technology cannot create new music. So they are not claiming to have a generative algorithm. Also there is the obvious fact that they have to get other people to send them musical items.
In principle a predictive algorithm can be converted into a generative algorithm, simply by feeding randomly generated music into it until an item of music is found that has a high score. The practical problem with this approach is that strong music may be very rare compared to not so strong music, so you will be waiting a very long time for a hit to be found. However, unless there is something intrinsically irreversible about the predictive algorithm (in the sense that a cryptographic hash function is intrinsically irreversible), it should be possible to reverse the predictive algorithm in some way to define a generative algorithm which generates different items of music, such that the generated music scores highly according to the predictive algorithm.
As I point out in my book, it is very unlikely that we will discover a complete predictive or generative algorithm until we properly understand the biology of music, i.e. what happens inside our brains when we respond to music, and why such a response has evolved.
The details of how Polyphonic HMI have developed their algorithm raises some further issues:
The initial analysis is restricted to items that have already been selected as being musical by at least someone. What predictions would it make about randomly generated musical compositions?
The analysis requires access to a database of music. Copyright law makes it very difficult for anyone else to do this, unless, of course, they don't care about copyright law and they are prepared to take the necessary risks. (Soon we won't even be able to perform scientific analysis of music that we do legally "own", since the music that we buy is licensed only for the purpose of listening to it on some specific music playing device.)
Is my book a better deal than a Hit Song Science report?
My book costs less (only US$30 + postage, and the preview is free).
It does not provide a complete theory of music, but there is a very good chance that the
theory in the book is correct enough that any complete theory of music will build on the theory
I have developed.
If you do develop a complete theory of music, you should be able to use that theory to formulate
a composition algorithm, and make a fortune, even if you have no musical talent.
In 2000 I tried to invent a spam-proof usenet. The result of my efforts was Miski. The idea of Miski was that users would have addresses on servers representing what are effectively RSS channels, and other users would subscribe to these channels through their servers. There would be a DNS extension for the naming of servers. Channels would have names like username@example.com/"Java Programming". The system would be spam-proof because your server would only send you what you had subscribed to. It would be "push", because as soon as you posted something to a channel, your server would pass the message on to the servers of those who had subscribed to your channel. Only the notifications would be push: ordinary http would be used to retrieve the actual content.
Miski also had the important concept of "reposting", whereby if you saw something you liked, you could press a single button in your client to repost the notification, so that any subscribers to you could know about the item being reposted, if they had not already heard about it from somewhere else. The presumption was that the client (or the reader's server) would trim out duplicates, so that people posting would have no inhibitions about reposting stuff that maybe many of their subscribers already knew about.
Miski was more than just an attempt to create scalable-push RSS, or a spam-proof equivalent of Usenet: it was a vision of the "global brain". Using posting and reposting, notification of a new "interesting" idea could spread very quickly from the inventor of the idea to almost anyone in the world likely to be interested in that idea, even if the inventor was not well known.
We would all be like neurons in the brain, with signals passing from one person to the next as fast as possible. It was an attempt to solve the dual problems of "How can I tell the world what I have to say when I have to compete against the efforts of all those other people trying to tell the world stuff?" and "How can I find out new stuff that's really interesting to me from among all this junk that I am getting from all these people trying to tell stuff to the world?".
I asked the question How fast is the Internet?. Although packets can travel from one computer to another in seconds, or even less, information can still take days, weeks, months or even years to travel from the person who created it to another person who is interested in it. One way to measure this is to consider how often you find a document on the web which is interesting, but which you did not know about, and which has nevertheless been available for months or years, and which would have been interesting to you even when it was originally posted on the web.
Sadly Miski was never implemented, and I reduced my ambitions to write Womcat Bookmarks, which attempted to be a less dynamic version of Miski, but has ended up being just another RSS reader.
For Lisp you could use ACL2.
For Java you could use JML , together with Krakatoa, Why (which could also be used to program the solution) and Coq. For all the other languages that appear in the solutions list I think you're on your own.
It depends on the exact numbers, but considering a 128 bit key, and assuming n is the number of bits, and treating O(f(n)) as being f(n), we have 128^19 = (2^7)^19 = 2^133 > 2^128. Which leads to the following predictions:
The Future Solution to the NP problem
3 Feb 2016. A solution to the NP/P problem is announced with all NP shown to be in P with complexity O(n^d) for some d.
15 Feb 2016. Controversy arises given that the proof is non-constructive, and there is no procedure for computing d (not even in principle).
6 July 2016. The solution is followed up by another solution from the same mathematician which is constructive. The upper bound for d is so large that it gets into the Guiness Book of Records as the largest number ever appearing in a mathematical proof.
7 August 2006. Someone else comes up with an improved upper bound for d which is 2467.
3 March 2007. Guiness Book of Records split their "largest number used in a proof" entry into two entries: one for "largest number used in a proof", and one for "largest number used in a proof not yet superseded by a better proof with a smaller upper bound".
The economics of spam is that you can annoy 99.9999% of your readers and still make a profit from the 0.0001% who buy something from you. This equation does not quite compute for political spam: if you annoy more than 50% of readers the exercise becomes self-defeating.
And if you are a major political party, the whole system of forged email headers and root-kitted cable-modem customers is not available to you.
I feel an anti-spam solution developing out of this -- if we can somehow make ordinary citizens work under the same limitations as major political parties, we would have much less spam. What we need is a global register of annoying people. Whenever we receive a spam, we vote against the spam sender and our vote is recorded on the register. If your mission in life is one that annoys some people and benefits others, then so be it, and you will live with being known as annoying to some. But if you are only annoying and have no positive side, then you must live with the shame and the humiliation.
There will have to be some way for annoyance votes to "flow through" the communications system. In general the sender of spam is only indirectly identifiable via the "payload", e.g. a domain name or toll-free number. If we vote annoyance against a toll-free number, this will apply to the phone company, unless the company reveals the renter of the number, in which case the votes can then flow past the phone company and on to the individual in question. (Your 0800 contract will have fine print allowing the phone company to do this if too many people identify you as being annoying.)
How to bet on a theory of music ...
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 1
(This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic, honest!) If you hurry you may be able to buy a rare first edition of What is Music? (Solving a Scientific Mystery). How rare is it? The proof for the second edition is in the post, and once I receive the proof and see it's OK and advertise it for sale, the first edition will be withdrawn from sale (forever!). If my theory turns out to be correct, then first editions of the book are sure to acquire significant value as a collectible.
I can't offer fixed odds (so to speak), as the rarity and value of the first edition will be a function of how many people buy it (it's POD). But you can read about the theory on the website and in the preview, and make up your own mind, decide for yourself, etc. You can also get a very indirect indication of how many copies have already been sold by looking at the Lulu Sales Rank.
The copyright system says that the only way you can expect to receive substantial revenue from your efforts to create useful content is to prevent free access to your content. If you provide your content in the most useful form, to the largest number of people who might find it useful, your income is guaranteed to be arbitrarily close to $0.
Spyware/adware is a natural response to this problem. Closed source is less useful than open source to users of software, but the intellectual property regime says it is a better business model, precisely because customers don't know what is in the software. Spyware just takes this principle to its logical conclusion: if it is good for the customer not to know what is in their software, let's exploit this ignorance to the maximum extent possible.
This will gradually kill the market for individual developers of mass-market software. Previously you had to convince your customers that it is worth the effort to download and try out your software, and then you had to convince them to pay you for it if they liked it, even though it is dead easy for them to not pay you and to keep on using the software anyway. Now you also have the hopeless task of convincing your customers that someone they have never heard of is not a spyware author.
Today a spokesperson for the World Government announced a new scheme to slow down technological progress, to prevent the occurrence of the disastrous Technological Singularity.
"With the introduction of the Internet, it becomes possible for a software implementation of a new idea to be uploaded, distributed, downloaded by anyone or everyone who might be interested in the idea, improved upon, and re-uploaded, all in a matter of hours. The consequences of this speed are downright scary."
"To preserve a sense of balance, we have decided to award 'ownership' of an idea to the first person who thinks of it, and give that 'owner' the right to demand arbitrarily high financial compensation from any other person who seeks to implement improved versions of the owner's original idea. We plan to set the period of ownership to 20 years, which is tens of thousands times longer than an uncontrolled Internet-based development cycle."
"At last we can all sleep soundly, knowing that the singularity will not happen in our lifetimes or even those of our children or grandchildren."
Slashdot Mirror
In http://www.1729.com/blog/PossiblePriorArtForKootolPatentDated2001.html I examine the relationship between the Kootol patent, Twitter, and my unimplemented Miski system which is (or could have been) similar in many ways to how Twitter actually works. http://web.archive.org/web/20010223204516/miski.sourceforge.net/miski-white-paper.html is a copy of the description of Miski captured 23 Feb 2001 on Wayback.
The Biology of Morality
What happens inside our minds when we listen to music? Why does enjoying music or being able to enjoy music make us have more grandchildren? What is the formula for calculating musicality?
You are right that some of the combatants in the "war" have a vested interest in the distribution model sustained by the current legal system. But I don't think that copyright as we know it continues to exist just because of big distribution companies. There are many people working in the production side of the "premium content" industry, who are not necessarily dependent on the existing distribution systems. Suggesting to these people that they should just wear the loss of protection, and hope that their employers will magically discover some new up-to-date "business model", is not providing them with a convincing alternative.
Until a satisfactory alternative is found, a fairly broad constituency in favour of defending existing notions of copyright will continue to exist, and it will continue to inhabit the moral high ground. The large distribution companies are de facto spokesmen for this constituency, and they see themselves as occuping that same moral high ground, whether or not they fully deserve to.
No alternative is going to get 100% of supporters of the existing system on board. But if even 10% of those supporters can be convinced to at least consider the possibility of practical alternatives, this might be enough to tip the balance in favour of trying something new.
One political advantage of Voted Compensation is that it can be introduced gradually. The only element of compulsion is that a suitable tax has to be raised, and this decision has to be made by the elected representatives of the taxpayers in question. ("Copyright levies" are already being set in some countries, but allocation is not being decided by the taxpayers, because the tax is seen as compensation for victims of crime, rather than payment for a public service.) The funds available can be initially limited, and content creators can choose whether or not to register their content in the system (which requires them to make it freely available, at least within the relevant country), or whether to continue with existing systems. After the system has operated for a while, the taxpayers can look at the quality of content being compensated for by the scheme and they can decide if they want to raise the initial tax levels.
I explain this idea in more detail in my article Published Digital Information is a Public Good: The Case for Voted Compensation.
My article also includes a relevant cartoon.
More details at How I Invented a Decentralised Scaleable Push-Based Micronews System in 2000.
If nothing else, my documented but unimplemented invention might be good prior art, should it be needed.
The only way to load a world view quickly into your brain is to import it from other people. To do this efficiently, your brain must be capable of entering a mode where it uncritically accepts information provided in spoken form (probably mostly from your parents, but other people may play a role). To avoid the risk of abuse, there must be some instinctive criteria that determine when this uncritical uploading of new information should occur. Hypnosis occurs under conditions which mimic the circumstances that satisfy these criteria.
In my blog entry Disorganized Incremental Software Development, I describe an idea for a programming language where all implementations and specifications are named using cryptographic hash codes of their contents. This avoids all name collisions, and means that you can let anyone be a "committer", and indeed dispense with version control altogether (except for comments, which still have to be written by someone who knows what they are writing).
The pattern of client to server to server to client is a bit like the architecture of email, but it is quite spam-proof because you only ever receive what you asked for.
Additionally, subscribers can instantly "repost" a suggestion to their own channel, which will be read by their subscribers. To avoid reading duplicate posts, servers will optionally filter out duplicates. However, this has a major consequence, which is that subscribers are only ever guaranteed to see the URL, which means that anything you want to say about the content of a new page has to go into the URL. The current system of RSS titles and descriptions will not work under reposting and duplicate filtering.
The combination of real-time pushing and reposting could lead to a speeded up Internet, where exciting new ideas spread from one user to the next in a matter of minutes, without having to go through the bottlenecks of centralised attention and popular websites (such as Slashdot). This could be enough to turn the Internet into a "Global Brain", and perhaps even trigger the Technological Singularity.
I invented Miski to solve the problem of getting people to take notice of new ideas without having to engage in a massive publicity effort, but unfortunately I've failed to get anyone to take any notice of the Miski idea.
The fallacy of his computability argument can be summed up as follows:
What's the catch? The hypothetical algorithm described the mathematician's understanding of mathematics, but only on the assumption that the mathematician is not informed of the algorithm and told that it is sound as a system for generating mathematical truths.
The "proof" is a more sophisticated version of the following argument that human behaviour is not predictable according to the laws of physics:
It would appear that Penrose's understanding of complex analysis etc is better than his understanding of logic and computability.
And just in case Penrose is not wrong, I launched a new mathematical journal titled The Algorithmically Unbounded Journal of Mathematical Truths.
In my book What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery, I discuss predictive algorithms, generative algorithms and (in the last chapter) the Future of Music.
A predictive algorithm is one which accepts music or alleged music as an input, and outputs an estimate of its musicality. A generative algorithm is one which generates new and original music. The secret Hit Song Science algorithm is a predictive algorithm. The Future of Music (according to my book) is that someone will eventually discover a generative algorithm, and when that happens, and we all have an implementation of it installed on our computers, much of the existing music industry will become irrelevant.
In the Hit Song Science FAQ, Polyphonic HMI state that their technology cannot create new music. So they are not claiming to have a generative algorithm. Also there is the obvious fact that they have to get other people to send them musical items.
In principle a predictive algorithm can be converted into a generative algorithm, simply by feeding randomly generated music into it until an item of music is found that has a high score. The practical problem with this approach is that strong music may be very rare compared to not so strong music, so you will be waiting a very long time for a hit to be found. However, unless there is something intrinsically irreversible about the predictive algorithm (in the sense that a cryptographic hash function is intrinsically irreversible), it should be possible to reverse the predictive algorithm in some way to define a generative algorithm which generates different items of music, such that the generated music scores highly according to the predictive algorithm.
As I point out in my book, it is very unlikely that we will discover a complete predictive or generative algorithm until we properly understand the biology of music, i.e. what happens inside our brains when we respond to music, and why such a response has evolved.
The details of how Polyphonic HMI have developed their algorithm raises some further issues:
Is my book a better deal than a Hit Song Science report?
In 2000 I tried to invent a spam-proof usenet. The result of my efforts was Miski. The idea of Miski was that users would have addresses on servers representing what are effectively RSS channels, and other users would subscribe to these channels through their servers. There would be a DNS extension for the naming of servers. Channels would have names like username@example.com/"Java Programming". The system would be spam-proof because your server would only send you what you had subscribed to. It would be "push", because as soon as you posted something to a channel, your server would pass the message on to the servers of those who had subscribed to your channel. Only the notifications would be push: ordinary http would be used to retrieve the actual content.
Miski also had the important concept of "reposting", whereby if you saw something you liked, you could press a single button in your client to repost the notification, so that any subscribers to you could know about the item being reposted, if they had not already heard about it from somewhere else. The presumption was that the client (or the reader's server) would trim out duplicates, so that people posting would have no inhibitions about reposting stuff that maybe many of their subscribers already knew about.
Miski was more than just an attempt to create scalable-push RSS, or a spam-proof equivalent of Usenet: it was a vision of the "global brain". Using posting and reposting, notification of a new "interesting" idea could spread very quickly from the inventor of the idea to almost anyone in the world likely to be interested in that idea, even if the inventor was not well known. We would all be like neurons in the brain, with signals passing from one person to the next as fast as possible. It was an attempt to solve the dual problems of "How can I tell the world what I have to say when I have to compete against the efforts of all those other people trying to tell the world stuff?" and "How can I find out new stuff that's really interesting to me from among all this junk that I am getting from all these people trying to tell stuff to the world?".
I asked the question How fast is the Internet?. Although packets can travel from one computer to another in seconds, or even less, information can still take days, weeks, months or even years to travel from the person who created it to another person who is interested in it. One way to measure this is to consider how often you find a document on the web which is interesting, but which you did not know about, and which has nevertheless been available for months or years, and which would have been interesting to you even when it was originally posted on the web.
Sadly Miski was never implemented, and I reduced my ambitions to write Womcat Bookmarks, which attempted to be a less dynamic version of Miski, but has ended up being just another RSS reader.
For Lisp you could use ACL2. For Java you could use JML , together with Krakatoa, Why (which could also be used to program the solution) and Coq. For all the other languages that appear in the solutions list I think you're on your own.
It depends on the exact numbers, but considering a 128 bit key, and assuming n is the number of bits, and treating O(f(n)) as being f(n), we have 128^19 = (2^7)^19 = 2^133 > 2^128. Which leads to the following predictions:
The Future Solution to the NP problem
The economics of spam is that you can annoy 99.9999% of your readers and still make a profit from the 0.0001% who buy something from you. This equation does not quite compute for political spam: if you annoy more than 50% of readers the exercise becomes self-defeating.
And if you are a major political party, the whole system of forged email headers and root-kitted cable-modem customers is not available to you.
I feel an anti-spam solution developing out of this -- if we can somehow make ordinary citizens work under the same limitations as major political parties, we would have much less spam. What we need is a global register of annoying people. Whenever we receive a spam, we vote against the spam sender and our vote is recorded on the register. If your mission in life is one that annoys some people and benefits others, then so be it, and you will live with being known as annoying to some. But if you are only annoying and have no positive side, then you must live with the shame and the humiliation.
There will have to be some way for annoyance votes to "flow through" the communications system. In general the sender of spam is only indirectly identifiable via the "payload", e.g. a domain name or toll-free number. If we vote annoyance against a toll-free number, this will apply to the phone company, unless the company reveals the renter of the number, in which case the votes can then flow past the phone company and on to the individual in question. (Your 0800 contract will have fine print allowing the phone company to do this if too many people identify you as being annoying.)
(This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic, honest!) If you hurry you may be able to buy a rare first edition of What is Music? (Solving a Scientific Mystery) . How rare is it? The proof for the second edition is in the post, and once I receive the proof and see it's OK and advertise it for sale, the first edition will be withdrawn from sale (forever!). If my theory turns out to be correct, then first editions of the book are sure to acquire significant value as a collectible.
I can't offer fixed odds (so to speak), as the rarity and value of the first edition will be a function of how many people buy it (it's POD). But you can read about the theory on the website and in the preview, and make up your own mind, decide for yourself, etc. You can also get a very indirect indication of how many copies have already been sold by looking at the Lulu Sales Rank.
The copyright system says that the only way you can expect to receive substantial revenue from your efforts to create useful content is to prevent free access to your content. If you provide your content in the most useful form, to the largest number of people who might find it useful, your income is guaranteed to be arbitrarily close to $0.
Spyware/adware is a natural response to this problem. Closed source is less useful than open source to users of software, but the intellectual property regime says it is a better business model, precisely because customers don't know what is in the software. Spyware just takes this principle to its logical conclusion: if it is good for the customer not to know what is in their software, let's exploit this ignorance to the maximum extent possible.
This will gradually kill the market for individual developers of mass-market software. Previously you had to convince your customers that it is worth the effort to download and try out your software, and then you had to convince them to pay you for it if they liked it, even though it is dead easy for them to not pay you and to keep on using the software anyway. Now you also have the hopeless task of convincing your customers that someone they have never heard of is not a spyware author.
Today a spokesperson for the World Government announced a new scheme to slow down technological progress, to prevent the occurrence of the disastrous Technological Singularity.
"With the introduction of the Internet, it becomes possible for a software implementation of a new idea to be uploaded, distributed, downloaded by anyone or everyone who might be interested in the idea, improved upon, and re-uploaded, all in a matter of hours. The consequences of this speed are downright scary."
"To preserve a sense of balance, we have decided to award 'ownership' of an idea to the first person who thinks of it, and give that 'owner' the right to demand arbitrarily high financial compensation from any other person who seeks to implement improved versions of the owner's original idea. We plan to set the period of ownership to 20 years, which is tens of thousands times longer than an uncontrolled Internet-based development cycle."
"At last we can all sleep soundly, knowing that the singularity will not happen in our lifetimes or even those of our children or grandchildren."