Is a major industry being damaged by the law as it exists now? Maybe
You don't get it. When I said "first, last and inbetween" I meant no other issue matters. The help or harm of the current law to that industry is of no concern, they exist purely at society's whim.
you brought up a comment of mine that was in a different part of this thread, to somebody else, in a somewhat different context,
Internal consistency not relevant to your arguments. Check.
The issue that should be debated first is: Is the recording industry actually suffering overall damage as a result?
Absolutely not. Society invented copyright for its benefit, not for the benefit of creators. The issue that should be debated first, last and inbetween is: Is society receiving a net benefit from the copyright system any more.
That's why I disagree with your claim that a society without copyright leads to creative stagnation -- the circumstances have changed immensely since your examples were relevant. To compare piano rolls to the internet is to presume that circumstances have not changed, that enforcement costs have not gone up by many orders of magnitude, that the value of the public domain has increased just as substantially.
All you seem to see in my statements are the arguments you want to see, even if that is not what I stated at all. Please show me where I stated that copyright was the only solution,
If you don't believe that, then why did you bring up the entire bit about "if there were no incentive to create?" In a discussion about copyright WHY would you bring up such a HUGE red herring as assuming that there would ever be no incentive to create unless you didn't believe it to be a red herring at all? For all your ranting on being called out, I see absolutely no justification for centering your post on that argument.
Couple that with your total misdirection of claiming that some digital publishers are profitable the frictionless nature digital distribution BY EVERYONE ELSE of the same content is somehow irrelevant when said profit is in fact due to two wholly unrelated characteristics - convenience and copyright enforcement. The first being a potential business model and the second being a buggy whip. I expect now you will conflate the artificial scarcity of copyright enforcement with the natural scarcity of piano rolls.
Yeah, we are kind of beyond your points now. The discussion you have responded to is about whether or not GPLv3 is a further refinement of, a or a departure from, the principles of GPLv2. Your personal use of the GPL and what you think it means in your personal case, not really relevant to the current discussion. You might try replying further up the tree where that wasn't yet moot.
And here we come to an end. You, like so many of the brainwashed and uncreative masses, assume that copyright is the best and only incentive. That because some businesses are able to be successful despite all the costs of the model, most of them externalities, that there is no better way. That it is impossible to earn significant amounts of money from one's creative labors without copyright and that the frictionless environment of the internet offers no new business methods without such externalities. Until you are able to get past that misconception you'll forever be stuck in the world of buggy-whips, or piano-rolls.
Yes, but they aren't the same people who wrote it. People's opinions and ideals change over time, the document doesn't.
A big ole "whatever" to that. RMS's apocryphal printer driver story hasn't changed since he first told it and he's still the driving force behind the FSF. You say people change, I say people can change, but RMS's opinions that are central to the GPL have only become more refined.
Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
However, the only valid interpretation of the "spirit" of the GPL is that of the FSF. They wrote it, thus they know what they intended. Any differing interpretations are just misinterpretations - just like this original xpilot author's mistaken belief that GPLv2 means a price of zero.
Another aspect of returning fiduciary control back to patients is tort reform. But not the BS kinda tort reform the republicans are always pushing for that leave the fucked without recourse. I'm talking about shifting the cost of insurance to the patient. In effect cost is already shifted there by higher prices for procedures. But that is passive, it pushes the cost on the patient without much control.
Doctors should not carry liability insurance, patients should purchase insurance on each procedure they undergo. The cost of the insurance would be determined by the danger of the procedure and the quality of the medical facility and the historical record of the doctor. No need to go to court to fight over malpractice, if the procedure goes badly the insurance pays out. No need to assign fault, although the actuaries will certainly record the fact and use it to calculate the price of future coverage.
You make the mistake of confusing responsibility with direct payment. I already suggested vouchers as a simplistic model for "solidarity." You should be ashamed of trying to frame the debate in cliches.
Profit is irrelevant. In fact, the very reason nobody is doing it for profit today because it is so much easier to do it. Valenti was right when he said that you can't compete with free. He just didn't realize that the logical conclusion was to change the business model to one where competition was possible.
The right to legally monopolize distribution is of no value when distribution is no longer a service of any value. Therefore copyright is no longer a significant incentive so never granting copyright, as was done in socialist countries like the USSR. is no loss to a capitalist system that includes the internet.
Not at all. "Recordings" (which included piano rolls) were the "internet" of their day.
Are piano rolls excludable? Are piano rolls rival? The answer is yes to both questions which puts them in an entirely different category than efficient digital distribution. Any comparison to fixing ideas in an excludable and rivalrous medium will not yield significant insight.
Your argument rests on the fact that the NHS won't pay for super expensive treatments (rationing as you put it) and your solution is that everyone pays for ALL their treatments.
Huh? Where the fuck did you get that from? I never said a thing about the NHS, just pointed out that the parent's claim that there is no news coverage of problems like the 'FUD' of the us debate is demonstrably false.
My actual argument is that the reason healthcare costs in the USA are out of proportion is because of the disconnect between the person receiving the treatment and the person responsible for the bills. My "solution" is that the disconnect be connected. That doesn't mean the poor must pay for everything, it could be as simple as a voucher system. But whatever the mechanism is to give patients back control over their own treatment costs, all the current proposals in the US are going in the opposite direction - further removing the patients from participating in the process of their own healthcare.
There wouldn't be any rationing if it weren't for your damn country overcharging us.
Again I didn't say shit about "your country" - but I did point out that rationing already occurs in the US and it isn't about the cost of any particular treatments, it is the lack of fiduciary discipline on the prescriber end that results in rationing from the beancounters. It doesn't really matter what something costs, as long as it doesn't directly cost something to the consumer they will consume as much of it as they can. Its called the tragedy of the commons.
Don't think so. A lot of that book is about the externalities of car ownership, and availability of free parking isn't going to change that. The author's own analogies are badly flawed - free parking does not cause car ownership in the way free gasoline would cause excessive driving. Cars do not exist to park, but gasoline exists to drive. Its clear from the reviews that the book does not even consider the big brother implications of the escalation of parking enforcement.
That's interesting and all, but doesn't really address my point about the internet being a frictionless medium for distribution and payment, its really just circular reasoning for justifying copyright, as in we already have one kind of copyright on sheet music so we out to have another copyright on recordings and performances. It is still in the box.
Gah. I hate it when I give a reasoned reply to somebody, then they get modded down so it looks like I am talking to air. I guess the lesson there is: "Don't feed the trolls."
OR, just quote the relevant parts of the post you are responding to.
I should also point out that letting original works and inventions automatically be in the public domain from the beginning has been tried in other countries, and guess what? You end up with a society that on the whole does not create, and does not innovate. (Think, "Soviet Union" during its heyday.)
They also didn't have the internet - a nearly frictionless vehicle for distribution of original works and money, although we could stand lose even more friction on the money part.
You do NOT get fined for being overweight. You don't get fined for being unhealthy.
However you DO get fined for not buying government approved coverage. Massachusetts, the only US state to try socialized medicine does exactly that. They've also discovered that the system doesn't work - i.e. cost overruns for the program have been enormous since day one.
America is the ONLY country in the first world that doesn't have nationalized health care. Why is it you mainly hear about all this supposed dissatisfaction all over the world with their supposedly horrible health care from US news, not the BBC, or AP, or Reuters, or any other news agency actually in these countries?
The problem with health coverage in the US is not a lack of nationalization, it is a lack of putting the responsibility for the cost of the procedures with person receiving the procedures. Thus doctors are encouraged to over-test and prescribe the latest, most expensive drugs since "its free." Nationalization is only going to further divorce that connection and the only logical result is going to be rationing - rationing already happens now with a lot of the private coverage, its only going to get more bureaucratic when the government steps in.
We need to be going in the exact opposite direction - divorce health coverage from employers, open up the market so that people have a broader choice in the coverage they purchase and let the patients take the responsibility for how their healthcare dollars are spent. When there is a direct and immediate correlation between what tests, drugs and procedures a patient receives and what the patient has to pay, then you'll see see costs come down and satisfaction go up. See your own example of how paying cash out of your pocket is so much less costly than using "somebody else's money" of insurance.
1984 isn't on either side of the "conservative-liberal" spectrum, it is heavily on the freedom side of the "freedom-fascism" spectrum which is orthogonal to the "conservative-liberal" spectrum.
Really, it's the admins of those insecure computers who should be prosecuted. I thought it was a federal offense negligently to give access to secret data?
There is no way McKinnon got access to classified data from his house. All classified networks are air-gapped.
And they will target electronic metres too, just as soon as they figure out how to do it.
One of the primary drivers was the estimated £120,000 per week being lost to organised crime [and a murder].
If, as jellomizer postulated, the reason for having meters in the first place is to prevent "tragedy of the commons" type results for public parking spaces, then organized crime's theft of the money collected really doesn't affect that goal.
A metal detector under the parking space and a camera nearby, and the computer could automatically issue a ticket (or automatically bill for the correct duration). And tell drivers how many spaces are available.
It is really amazing how all public problems seem to lead us gently down the path of good intentions and into the maw of big brother.
Maybe the tragedy of the commons problem isn't so bad after all. Maybe we should just reduce parking enforcement to the barest minimum - have a guy with a piece of chalk walk around marking tires - pay his salary from the property taxes of the stores along his route. If a car is in place for more than a couple of days, tow it. Leave it at that and forget about all the expense - monetary and socially - of massively complex and invasive enforcement systems.
After all, its not fort knox, its just a fucking parking place.
Slashdot Mirror
Is a major industry being damaged by the law as it exists now? Maybe
You don't get it. When I said "first, last and inbetween" I meant no other issue matters. The help or harm of the current law to that industry is of no concern, they exist purely at society's whim.
you brought up a comment of mine that was in a different part of this thread, to somebody else, in a somewhat different context,
Internal consistency not relevant to your arguments. Check.
It looks like violent crimes are down over the last 15 years:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/10/it_is_an_almighty_embarrassmen.html
But, the 10 years before that seem to have seen a huge climb, such that it is only back down to roughly the original levels of ~|25 years ago:
http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/policy_review/security/key_facts.asp
The issue that should be debated first is: Is the recording industry actually suffering overall damage as a result?
Absolutely not. Society invented copyright for its benefit, not for the benefit of creators. The issue that should be debated first, last and inbetween is: Is society receiving a net benefit from the copyright system any more.
That's why I disagree with your claim that a society without copyright leads to creative stagnation -- the circumstances have changed immensely since your examples were relevant. To compare piano rolls to the internet is to presume that circumstances have not changed, that enforcement costs have not gone up by many orders of magnitude, that the value of the public domain has increased just as substantially.
Also, I don't think you can honestly say that piano rolls were "rival" to sheet music in any meaningful sense of the term.
I just saw this. Lol. You really don't know your terminology, no wonder you think physical copies are the same as digital copies.
All you seem to see in my statements are the arguments you want to see, even if that is not what I stated at all. Please show me where I stated that copyright was the only solution,
If you don't believe that, then why did you bring up the entire bit about "if there were no incentive to create?" In a discussion about copyright WHY would you bring up such a HUGE red herring as assuming that there would ever be no incentive to create unless you didn't believe it to be a red herring at all? For all your ranting on being called out, I see absolutely no justification for centering your post on that argument.
Couple that with your total misdirection of claiming that some digital publishers are profitable the frictionless nature digital distribution BY EVERYONE ELSE of the same content is somehow irrelevant when said profit is in fact due to two wholly unrelated characteristics - convenience and copyright enforcement. The first being a potential business model and the second being a buggy whip. I expect now you will conflate the artificial scarcity of copyright enforcement with the natural scarcity of piano rolls.
Yeah, we are kind of beyond your points now. The discussion you have responded to is about whether or not GPLv3 is a further refinement of, a or a departure from, the principles of GPLv2. Your personal use of the GPL and what you think it means in your personal case, not really relevant to the current discussion. You might try replying further up the tree where that wasn't yet moot.
Second, if there were no incentive to create,
And here we come to an end. You, like so many of the brainwashed and uncreative masses, assume that copyright is the best and only incentive. That because some businesses are able to be successful despite all the costs of the model, most of them externalities, that there is no better way. That it is impossible to earn significant amounts of money from one's creative labors without copyright and that the frictionless environment of the internet offers no new business methods without such externalities. Until you are able to get past that misconception you'll forever be stuck in the world of buggy-whips, or piano-rolls.
Yes, but they aren't the same people who wrote it. People's opinions and ideals change over time, the document doesn't.
A big ole "whatever" to that. RMS's apocryphal printer driver story hasn't changed since he first told it and he's still the driving force behind the FSF. You say people change, I say people can change, but RMS's opinions that are central to the GPL have only become more refined.
Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
However, the only valid interpretation of the "spirit" of the GPL is that of the FSF. They wrote it, thus they know what they intended. Any differing interpretations are just misinterpretations - just like this original xpilot author's mistaken belief that GPLv2 means a price of zero.
Another aspect of returning fiduciary control back to patients is tort reform. But not the BS kinda tort reform the republicans are always pushing for that leave the fucked without recourse. I'm talking about shifting the cost of insurance to the patient. In effect cost is already shifted there by higher prices for procedures. But that is passive, it pushes the cost on the patient without much control.
Doctors should not carry liability insurance, patients should purchase insurance on each procedure they undergo. The cost of the insurance would be determined by the danger of the procedure and the quality of the medical facility and the historical record of the doctor. No need to go to court to fight over malpractice, if the procedure goes badly the insurance pays out. No need to assign fault, although the actuaries will certainly record the fact and use it to calculate the price of future coverage.
You make the mistake of confusing responsibility with direct payment. I already suggested vouchers as a simplistic model for "solidarity." You should be ashamed of trying to frame the debate in cliches.
How does supermarket provides cheaper food than local store?
How does supermarket provides more expensive food than local store?
Power of monopoly once the local store has been run out of business.
Same with health care. Today we have an oligopoly on healthcare and prices are through the roof. Going to monopoly isn't going to help.
Why do you think drug in the US are so much more expensive than in Europe?
Are they?
Profit is irrelevant. In fact, the very reason nobody is doing it for profit today because it is so much easier to do it. Valenti was right when he said that you can't compete with free. He just didn't realize that the logical conclusion was to change the business model to one where competition was possible.
The right to legally monopolize distribution is of no value when distribution is no longer a service of any value. Therefore copyright is no longer a significant incentive so never granting copyright, as was done in socialist countries like the USSR. is no loss to a capitalist system that includes the internet.
Not at all. "Recordings" (which included piano rolls) were the "internet" of their day.
Are piano rolls excludable? Are piano rolls rival? The answer is yes to both questions which puts them in an entirely different category than efficient digital distribution. Any comparison to fixing ideas in an excludable and rivalrous medium will not yield significant insight.
Your argument rests on the fact that the NHS won't pay for super expensive treatments (rationing as you put it) and your solution is that everyone pays for ALL their treatments.
Huh? Where the fuck did you get that from? I never said a thing about the NHS, just pointed out that the parent's claim that there is no news coverage of problems like the 'FUD' of the us debate is demonstrably false.
My actual argument is that the reason healthcare costs in the USA are out of proportion is because of the disconnect between the person receiving the treatment and the person responsible for the bills. My "solution" is that the disconnect be connected. That doesn't mean the poor must pay for everything, it could be as simple as a voucher system. But whatever the mechanism is to give patients back control over their own treatment costs, all the current proposals in the US are going in the opposite direction - further removing the patients from participating in the process of their own healthcare.
There wouldn't be any rationing if it weren't for your damn country overcharging us.
Again I didn't say shit about "your country" - but I did point out that rationing already occurs in the US and it isn't about the cost of any particular treatments, it is the lack of fiduciary discipline on the prescriber end that results in rationing from the beancounters. It doesn't really matter what something costs, as long as it doesn't directly cost something to the consumer they will consume as much of it as they can. Its called the tragedy of the commons.
Don't think so. A lot of that book is about the externalities of car ownership, and availability of free parking isn't going to change that. The author's own analogies are badly flawed - free parking does not cause car ownership in the way free gasoline would cause excessive driving. Cars do not exist to park, but gasoline exists to drive. Its clear from the reviews that the book does not even consider the big brother implications of the escalation of parking enforcement.
That's interesting and all, but doesn't really address my point about the internet being a frictionless medium for distribution and payment, its really just circular reasoning for justifying copyright, as in we already have one kind of copyright on sheet music so we out to have another copyright on recordings and performances. It is still in the box.
Gah. I hate it when I give a reasoned reply to somebody, then they get modded down so it looks like I am talking to air.
I guess the lesson there is: "Don't feed the trolls."
OR, just quote the relevant parts of the post you are responding to.
I should also point out that letting original works and inventions automatically be in the public domain from the beginning has been tried in other countries, and guess what? You end up with a society that on the whole does not create, and does not innovate. (Think, "Soviet Union" during its heyday.)
They also didn't have the internet - a nearly frictionless vehicle for distribution of original works and money, although we could stand lose even more friction on the money part.
You do NOT get fined for being overweight. You don't get fined for being unhealthy.
However you DO get fined for not buying government approved coverage. Massachusetts, the only US state to try socialized medicine does exactly that. They've also discovered that the system doesn't work - i.e. cost overruns for the program have been enormous since day one.
America is the ONLY country in the first world that doesn't have nationalized health care. Why is it you mainly hear about all this supposed dissatisfaction all over the world with their supposedly horrible health care from US news, not the BBC, or AP, or Reuters, or any other news agency actually in these countries?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/249938.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/politics_show/7103648.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8091427.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7579422.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7030304.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1523402.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7699582.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/7709342.stm
The problem with health coverage in the US is not a lack of nationalization, it is a lack of putting the responsibility for the cost of the procedures with person receiving the procedures. Thus doctors are encouraged to over-test and prescribe the latest, most expensive drugs since "its free." Nationalization is only going to further divorce that connection and the only logical result is going to be rationing - rationing already happens now with a lot of the private coverage, its only going to get more bureaucratic when the government steps in.
We need to be going in the exact opposite direction - divorce health coverage from employers, open up the market so that people have a broader choice in the coverage they purchase and let the patients take the responsibility for how their healthcare dollars are spent. When there is a direct and immediate correlation between what tests, drugs and procedures a patient receives and what the patient has to pay, then you'll see see costs come down and satisfaction go up. See your own example of how paying cash out of your pocket is so much less costly than using "somebody else's money" of insurance.
1984 isn't on either side of the "conservative-liberal" spectrum, it is heavily on the freedom side of the "freedom-fascism" spectrum which is orthogonal to the "conservative-liberal" spectrum.
Really, it's the admins of those insecure computers who should be prosecuted. I thought it was a federal offense negligently to give access to secret data?
There is no way McKinnon got access to classified data from his house. All classified networks are air-gapped.
Crimanal gangs target coin operated metres.
And they will target electronic metres too, just as soon as they figure out how to do it.
One of the primary drivers was the estimated £120,000 per week being lost to organised crime [and a murder].
If, as jellomizer postulated, the reason for having meters in the first place is to prevent "tragedy of the commons" type results for public parking spaces, then organized crime's theft of the money collected really doesn't affect that goal.
A metal detector under the parking space and a camera nearby, and the computer could automatically issue a ticket (or automatically bill for the correct duration). And tell drivers how many spaces are available.
It is really amazing how all public problems seem to lead us gently down the path of good intentions and into the maw of big brother.
Maybe the tragedy of the commons problem isn't so bad after all. Maybe we should just reduce parking enforcement to the barest minimum - have a guy with a piece of chalk walk around marking tires - pay his salary from the property taxes of the stores along his route. If a car is in place for more than a couple of days, tow it. Leave it at that and forget about all the expense - monetary and socially - of massively complex and invasive enforcement systems.
After all, its not fort knox, its just a fucking parking place.
Courts have ruled that a phone directory is copyright-able,
Not in the USA.
Are you sure he didn't just go to AOL and can't get any email out?
subtrac hominem