It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
It shouldn't. It would be extremely foolhardy to assume that all people infected with AIDS will be chipped. Hell, many people don't even know it themselves (yet). You would be no better off relying on a chip, or a tattoo because of the false negative effect. You still have treat everyone you meet as potentially infected.
The only thing this chip would do is make it easier to persecute the people who have sought medical help for their condition. One obvious side-effect will be that people who suspect they are infected will be reluctant to get tested in order to avoid the stigma of the chip. That's the same reason we have doctor-patient confidentiality - if you can't trust your doctor not to rat you out, then people will seek black-market treatments and the social health problem becomes worse over the long run.
99% is not good enough for something as rare as AIDS.
It completely depends on the way you use the information.
If you decide to forgo sex with anyone who shows a positive reading, whether a true or false positive, you've just cut down your rate of exposure by 99%. Sure that still leaves the other 1%, but as long as you don't take a negative reading as justification to have unprotected sex, you are no worse off than you would be without the tester.
Is everyone smart enough to use a test like that? No, but you can only do so much to cater to the stupidest people of society,I say the chances are those are the same people that would have unprotected sex anyway.
Who think Majesco's decision to laugh it off instead of sic the lawyers was due to PETA's reputation for bordering on domestic terrorism and Majesco just decided they would be better off to avoid any escalation?
Perhaps we need a new PLO - Parody Liberation Organization - to scare the crap out of companies that issue bogus DMCA notices.
whatever you want to mean by that,/. is not uniform.
I never said it was. Let me try for a third and final time. Copyright issues are one of the most, if not the most, frequently discussed topic on slashdot. For you to have missed these kinds of details despite being a reader for what, 8 years at least?, is exceptional.
You are making assumptions about me based on nothing.
Nothing more than your writing in this thread and your participation in this community. But, it is becoming apparent by that writing that the benefit of the doubt is not merited on this topic.
- I never changed my 'tact' or whatever. I believe in copyright.
Clearly you do believe in copyright, almost unconditionally it seems. Almost like an article of faith I would say.
My view is that copyright should exist and that society does gain from it and that this is the reason why copyright exists as a law at all. Just like property right, copyright is a human construct. Without such laws we can all go back bashing each other on the head with stones and sticks and those with the biggest sticks will win.
It's comments like that, which I have to agree, mean the benefit of the doubt is wasted on you. Real property is both scarce and rivalrous. Anything that can be digitized is both abundant and nonrival. Copyright laws are an attempt to create artificial scarcity and thus enable rent seeking which is clearly not an efficient use of resources. Comparisons between the economics of real property and the economics of ideas are extremely tenuous and need to be evaluated with a highly critical eye. One I daresay you have not applied and seem content not to.
Copyright as it is currently standing in the US has certain problems, I don't see those exact same problems in Canada.
Copyright as it is currently standing in the US has certain problems, I do see those exact same problems in Canada.
I like that sentence, I think it perfectly sums up your position. Yah like it, but that's as far as you go. All this foofaw about monopolies and inefficiencies and rivalrousness be damned. Never mind that the internet changed the rules of the game long ago, same as it ever was.
Hmmm... I'm not sure that copyright is actually limiting who can sell what to whom per se.
Copyright is a government enforced monopoly, by definition it does limit who can sell what to whom.
I'm all for shorter copyright terms myself, but I think getting rid of the system entirely would be a mistake.
That's a common belief among those who have not thought through the consequences of maintaining the copyright monopoly. While the duration of copyrights is certainly abusive today, that is far from the largest problem with copyright. The largest problem is that copyright is unenforceable in any real fashion and is in contradiction to the natural right of free expression. Business models work at the intersection of the laws of man and the laws of real world. The real world changed in the late 1960's with the start of the internet. What was once naturally enforceable - making copies was expensive, time-consuming and capital-intensive - is now impossible to enforce because making copies requires essentially zero marginal cost and can be effectively anonymous.
Unless you want to return to a patronage system.
Sure, that is a viable model in certain circumstances - I really like the idea of custom performances that, for a moderate fee, say in the triple digits, tailor the work to the patron's wishes - like a professional recording of "Happy Birthday" which includes the name of your child, or a jazz-vocal love song with your girl-friend's name substituted so that you can play it when you propose. Thanks to the wide reach of the internet, there is so much more opportunity for the patronage business model than there was before.
Another model is subscriptions where as long as there are enough paid up subscriptions, the creator releases each work to the public domain. The subscription model, and other variations of the ransom model like escrow are extremely beneficial to both parties - if you don't have to start work until the money is already in the bank, that means financial risk is reduced to nearly zero - which is the holy grail of hollywood.
The flip-side of subscriptions is the people paying are the ones who directly consume the results, thus there is no middle-man selling advertising who can distort the market and require that the creators cater to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize potential revenue. And finally, instead of having to spend money fighting the freeloaders, these models harness the natural human instinct to share cool stuff and turn those same "evil pirates" of today into viral advertisers and potential subscribers for the next production.
There are MANY more business models available and I expect that they will all slowly take root despite the ongoing inertia of the copyright cartel. One day the MAFIAA will wake up to find that they are no longer obsolete in theory but in practice as well. The sooner that day comes, the better because, while I have not mentioned the societal costs of the current copyright-based system, they are enormously wasteful.
I think Microsoft wins either way. They are not generally a patent troll company, nor are other large companies (IBM) with massive patent portfolios.
Just because they aren't trolls doesn't mean they do not make a significant portion of their income from patent licensing. If their patents are no longer valid, then obviously their licensees are going to stop paying royalties.
While I am too lazy to dig for URLs right now, if you look, you will find that patent licensing is a huge part of IBM's business nowadays and that about a decade ago, Microsoft hired the man chiefly responsible for monetizing IBM's patent portfolio so that he could do the same for Microsoft.
I am sure some animal has took a leak in one of those sources and there is urine floating around in the water all the time, fish... animals in the woods, humans dumping sewage, humans in the woods... aliens in the woods...... bears... damn bears
Don't forget the Pope, damn Popes always shitting in the woods.
Gee, I don't know. Maybe it was your assertion that:
those who benefit directly from the system who should have the least say in how the system is run
Defining the system by which people buy and sell creative works is a far cry from being "in charge of the people" who produce creative works. This gets back to my original point about you being constitutionally illiterate. Clearly you are not familiar with the constitutionally defined justification for copyright, and because you are an ass, I won't bother quoting it to you either.
Your vaporous suggestions about how that audience's money should instead be re-allocated... blah blah.. soviets
Not just constitutionally illiterate, but functionally illiterate too. I never once even hinted at socialist "re-allocation" - everything I've said has been in the context of more free markets than currently exist. If anything copyright is socialism.
I don't base my dialogs on UIDs but on the merits of an argument.
My point was simply that your arguments are old ground on slashdot, it is odd that someone with a low uid has not heard them before and heard them be discredited.
My argument is very simple: Rowling is an author, who created a piece of work that people are willing to pay for. She has invested time and money to create this work, which apparently is worth something of value, otherwise there would be no money made. However the money that is made can be either going to Rowling for producing the original content
Well, as best as I can tell you've changed your entire tact. You've gone from arguing that copyright is essentially the way things ought to be, to belaboring the obvious and stating things like "copyright is an active law" and that Rowling has used the current system to her benefit.
I see no point in arguing the obvious with you. If you would like to come back to MY original point that copyright is inefficient and thus not the best bargain for society, please do.
You make it sound like I can feed all data related to a society into a computer and then determine the most appropriate course of action with societies resources.
Yeah, it is called the science of economics. You might want to look it up.
Well that worked well with the banking industry didn't it...
The root of the problem with the banking industry was a lack of transparency. The banks really had know idea how well the CDS's they were buying from each other were backed, thus the system all ran on faith and when that faith was shaken so did the entire banking system shake.
I am all for government enforced transparency - accurate information is an essential ingredient of free markets. What I am not for is when the government grants monopolies like copyright, but also like broadband internet, telephone, etc.
I hope you can see the difference between requiring adequate disclosure and actually limiting who can sell what to whom.
For someone with such a low uid, it seems you haven't been paying any attention to the technical discussions of the economics of copyright that have occurred here over the years. This is all old ground. Very old ground.
- again I don't understand. You are saying that once even one book is published by Rowling through her affiliated publisher anyone should be able to copy it and republish for profit at a lesser cost or something?
Yes and much more, not just distribution but everything copyright restricts. I can tell from the way you write that you have a fundamental error as a basis for all of your arguments. You believe that copyright - as in controlling distribution - is the only business model for creative work. In fact, it is a business model that became obsolete the day a few engineers at BBN built four imps back in 1969, today it functions mainly on inertia.
- this contradicts your previous statements, where you suggest that money that Rowling made should have gone to some other 'starving authors', who clearly did not produce anything of the same value to the society (value in this case defined by the amount of cash that this product generated).
(a) You seem to think that "should have gone to" means government redistribution. The irony in your assumption is that the government is the one affecting the market to effect redistribution to Rowling, et al. (b) You say "clearly did not produce anything of the same value" - your assumption is a poor one because you assume that the market is not skewed by the government mandated monopoly of copyright. In effect you are making a circular argument - copyright is good because the those who benefit the most from the copyright system benefit the most from the copyright system.
You are clearly not a free marketer, you want wealth redistribution in ways, that only you agree with.
If you can't accept that copyright is a government enforced monopoly, then I can see why you come to this conclusion.
I don't get it, it's not the government that paid Rowling the money, is it?
It does not need to do so directly. You need to understand that copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Monopolies distort markets and lead to inefficiencies.
Are you some sort of a radical communist or something?
Far from it, if anything, I am a radical free-marketer. The copyright monopoly is clearly welfare for some creators and most distributors.
There you go! Now that's some insightful feedback. I especially like how you've circled back and refuted the details.
"Refuted the details" -- bullshit, they were refuted in my original post by example of history. You just ignored them so you could blabber about a strawman.
I now think it's appropriate for people who don't create anything to be in charge of the people who do.
Why do you think that? It was never my argument in the first place, although it seems to be your personal red herring.
So, just hand everyone a ticket as they leave the highway, if their average speed was X% higher than the posted speed limit (65) (or mail them one if they use EasyPass).
Which will have all kinds of unintended side-effects. Like people stopping 100 feet before the exit and waiting for 30 seconds, "just to be sure" they don't get a ticket. And people deciding they would rather take the back roads instead of the turnpike. Things like that. Depending on their specific response, as little as a handful of people per day could seriously screw up the system of commuting. And since commuting, not ticketing, is the reason for the existence of the turnpike, I don't see your ideas being particularly successful.
Most big name pop bands don't make a dime off their first hit album. Its only their 3rd or 4th hit album where their contract has expired and they are able to renegotiate based on how much money their work has earned for someone else. And the reason that is so is precisely because of the 'lotto-winner' effect of the current system which is directly caused by the stranglehold that copyright gives distributors.
On the flip side, Rowling definitely didn't need even 0.01% of that money in order to keep writing more books. From a society's point of view, all the money in excess of what was required for her to continue writing was wasted and could have been spent better elsewhere on hundreds of other promising writers that have now been crowded out of the marketplace by the harry potter monster. Similarly look at how Lucas has squandered his royalties. Sure he made a handful of good films, but all he really makes now are "just" films. How much more utility would society get for its money if it weren't squandered on things like 'The Clone Wars' and the Ewok Christmas Special that coast on the good name of his earlier works?
People often say that those who work for royalties "sit around and collect money when doing nothing" Those same people are the ones taking a daily wage for all those years when those royalty guys worked their asses off for zero salary, to try and get to that point.
Your implication is tantamount to arguing for taxation without representation. Royalties and copyright are a 100% consensual construct of society, thus every member of society has just as much right to criticize the system. If anything, it is those who benefit directly from the system who should have the least say in how the system is run. The last hundred years or so of copyright extensions and copyright scope creep demonstrate what happens when those with a vested interest are the ones who have the most say.
As long as we rely on the police to police themselves, there will always be possible ways to get around these kinds of things. What we would really need is for those real-time video feeds to be open to the public.
Exactly. Both the video and the information that video is not being transmitted need to be made available to the public in realtime so that both be recorded by people who do not have a vested interest in covering up events that might occur on video.
Even then, the result will be that illegal behavior by the police will just move off-camera - like into the backseat of the police car.
Since when is capitalism the opposite of central planning? Capitalism and free markets are two independent characteristics of an economy.
Hell, just read the 2nd sentence of the page you linked to: "While government intervention is kept at a minimum, government entities such as the sovereign wealth fund Temasek control corporations responsible for 60% of GDP"
To me that says the government stays out of the businesses it doesn't directly control ala AIG bailout, but it still is right there in the middle of at least 60% of the market since it does directly control them.
And don't forget the V-chip, which allows parents to disable certain TV channels. It's in all new TVs and unused in nearly all of them.
I find the V-chip to be a big, big let down. I figured that once every mom, dick and harry had the ability to protect precious lil junior's eyes from boobies and other pink parts that we would see a great increase in tv getting down and dirty on primetime. After all, if you didn't want to watch it, you could just tell your tv to block it for you.
But so far, Janet Jackson's jewelry encrusted nipple is the best we've had and frankly, that just doesn't cut it, in anything less than HDTV it looked like it was covered with a pasty anyway.
Sure. All those centrally planned economies that have historically been so prosperous give the lie to the very idea that free markets are the best way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
This just screams dedicated database storage.
NO, THIS JUST SCREAMS DEDICATED DATABASE STORAGE!!!
filter
fodder
There are any number of "old" positions routinely touted on this web site.
And random_mir seems ignorant of them to the point of not being able to understand the common vocabulary.
You, on the other hand, appear to know the story, but look for any little detail you can misinterpret so as to get your jollies by flaming away.
You're making a statement, without backing it up philosophically, practically, or in any other meaningful way.
What part of monopolies distort markets and lead to inefficiencies do you disagree with?
You don't propose or articulate an alternative,
What part of patronage models like custom performances and ransom models like subscriptions are not alternatives?
refer people to years of "information wants to be free" pablum
Do you dispute that information is neither rivalrous nor scarce?
It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
It shouldn't. It would be extremely foolhardy to assume that all people infected with AIDS will be chipped. Hell, many people don't even know it themselves (yet). You would be no better off relying on a chip, or a tattoo because of the false negative effect. You still have treat everyone you meet as potentially infected.
The only thing this chip would do is make it easier to persecute the people who have sought medical help for their condition. One obvious side-effect will be that people who suspect they are infected will be reluctant to get tested in order to avoid the stigma of the chip. That's the same reason we have doctor-patient confidentiality - if you can't trust your doctor not to rat you out, then people will seek black-market treatments and the social health problem becomes worse over the long run.
99% is not good enough for something as rare as AIDS.
It completely depends on the way you use the information.
If you decide to forgo sex with anyone who shows a positive reading, whether a true or false positive, you've just cut down your rate of exposure by 99%. Sure that still leaves the other 1%, but as long as you don't take a negative reading as justification to have unprotected sex, you are no worse off than you would be without the tester.
Is everyone smart enough to use a test like that? No, but you can only do so much to cater to the stupidest people of society,I say the chances are those are the same people that would have unprotected sex anyway.
Who think Majesco's decision to laugh it off instead of sic the lawyers was due to PETA's reputation for bordering on domestic terrorism and Majesco just decided they would be better off to avoid any escalation?
Perhaps we need a new PLO - Parody Liberation Organization - to scare the crap out of companies that issue bogus DMCA notices.
whatever you want to mean by that, /. is not uniform.
I never said it was. Let me try for a third and final time. Copyright issues are one of the most, if not the most, frequently discussed topic on slashdot. For you to have missed these kinds of details despite being a reader for what, 8 years at least?, is exceptional.
You are making assumptions about me based on nothing.
Nothing more than your writing in this thread and your participation in this community. But, it is becoming apparent by that writing that the benefit of the doubt is not merited on this topic.
- I never changed my 'tact' or whatever. I believe in copyright.
Clearly you do believe in copyright, almost unconditionally it seems. Almost like an article of faith I would say.
My view is that copyright should exist and that society does gain from it and that this is the reason why copyright exists as a law at all. Just like property right, copyright is a human construct. Without such laws we can all go back bashing each other on the head with stones and sticks and those with the biggest sticks will win.
It's comments like that, which I have to agree, mean the benefit of the doubt is wasted on you. Real property is both scarce and rivalrous. Anything that can be digitized is both abundant and nonrival. Copyright laws are an attempt to create artificial scarcity and thus enable rent seeking which is clearly not an efficient use of resources. Comparisons between the economics of real property and the economics of ideas are extremely tenuous and need to be evaluated with a highly critical eye. One I daresay you have not applied and seem content not to.
Copyright as it is currently standing in the US has certain problems, I don't see those exact same problems in Canada.
Copyright as it is currently standing in the US has certain problems, I do see those exact same problems in Canada.
I like that sentence, I think it perfectly sums up your position. Yah like it, but that's as far as you go. All this foofaw about monopolies and inefficiencies and rivalrousness be damned. Never mind that the internet changed the rules of the game long ago, same as it ever was.
Hmmm... I'm not sure that copyright is actually limiting who can sell what to whom per se.
Copyright is a government enforced monopoly, by definition it does limit who can sell what to whom.
I'm all for shorter copyright terms myself, but I think getting rid of the system entirely would be a mistake.
That's a common belief among those who have not thought through the consequences of maintaining the copyright monopoly. While the duration of copyrights is certainly abusive today, that is far from the largest problem with copyright. The largest problem is that copyright is unenforceable in any real fashion and is in contradiction to the natural right of free expression. Business models work at the intersection of the laws of man and the laws of real world. The real world changed in the late 1960's with the start of the internet. What was once naturally enforceable - making copies was expensive, time-consuming and capital-intensive - is now impossible to enforce because making copies requires essentially zero marginal cost and can be effectively anonymous.
Unless you want to return to a patronage system.
Sure, that is a viable model in certain circumstances - I really like the idea of custom performances that, for a moderate fee, say in the triple digits, tailor the work to the patron's wishes - like a professional recording of "Happy Birthday" which includes the name of your child, or a jazz-vocal love song with your girl-friend's name substituted so that you can play it when you propose. Thanks to the wide reach of the internet, there is so much more opportunity for the patronage business model than there was before.
Another model is subscriptions where as long as there are enough paid up subscriptions, the creator releases each work to the public domain. The subscription model, and other variations of the ransom model like escrow are extremely beneficial to both parties - if you don't have to start work until the money is already in the bank, that means financial risk is reduced to nearly zero - which is the holy grail of hollywood.
The flip-side of subscriptions is the people paying are the ones who directly consume the results, thus there is no middle-man selling advertising who can distort the market and require that the creators cater to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize potential revenue. And finally, instead of having to spend money fighting the freeloaders, these models harness the natural human instinct to share cool stuff and turn those same "evil pirates" of today into viral advertisers and potential subscribers for the next production.
There are MANY more business models available and I expect that they will all slowly take root despite the ongoing inertia of the copyright cartel. One day the MAFIAA will wake up to find that they are no longer obsolete in theory but in practice as well. The sooner that day comes, the better because, while I have not mentioned the societal costs of the current copyright-based system, they are enormously wasteful.
I think Microsoft wins either way. They are not generally a patent troll company, nor are other large companies (IBM) with massive patent portfolios.
Just because they aren't trolls doesn't mean they do not make a significant portion of their income from patent licensing. If their patents are no longer valid, then obviously their licensees are going to stop paying royalties.
While I am too lazy to dig for URLs right now, if you look, you will find that patent licensing is a huge part of IBM's business nowadays and that about a decade ago, Microsoft hired the man chiefly responsible for monetizing IBM's patent portfolio so that he could do the same for Microsoft.
I am sure some animal has took a leak in one of those sources and there is urine floating around in the water all the time, fish... animals in the woods, humans dumping sewage, humans in the woods... aliens in the woods...... bears... damn bears
Don't forget the Pope, damn Popes always shitting in the woods.
And, ummm, who doesn't? Most of us just have a bigger recycling plant than they do.
And much less efficient too.
Gee, I don't know. Maybe it was your assertion that:
those who benefit directly from the system who should have the least say in how the system is run
Defining the system by which people buy and sell creative works is a far cry from being "in charge of the people" who produce creative works. This gets back to my original point about you being constitutionally illiterate. Clearly you are not familiar with the constitutionally defined justification for copyright, and because you are an ass, I won't bother quoting it to you either.
Your vaporous suggestions about how that audience's money should instead be re-allocated ... blah blah .. soviets
Not just constitutionally illiterate, but functionally illiterate too. I never once even hinted at socialist "re-allocation" - everything I've said has been in the context of more free markets than currently exist. If anything copyright is socialism.
I don't base my dialogs on UIDs but on the merits of an argument.
My point was simply that your arguments are old ground on slashdot, it is odd that someone with a low uid has not heard them before and heard them be discredited.
My argument is very simple: Rowling is an author, who created a piece of work that people are willing to pay for. She has invested time and money to create this work, which apparently is worth something of value, otherwise there would be no money made. However the money that is made can be either going to Rowling for producing the original content
Well, as best as I can tell you've changed your entire tact. You've gone from arguing that copyright is essentially the way things ought to be, to belaboring the obvious and stating things like "copyright is an active law" and that Rowling has used the current system to her benefit.
I see no point in arguing the obvious with you. If you would like to come back to MY original point that copyright is inefficient and thus not the best bargain for society, please do.
You make it sound like I can feed all data related to a society into a computer and then determine the most appropriate course of action with societies resources.
Yeah, it is called the science of economics. You might want to look it up.
Well that worked well with the banking industry didn't it...
The root of the problem with the banking industry was a lack of transparency. The banks really had know idea how well the CDS's they were buying from each other were backed, thus the system all ran on faith and when that faith was shaken so did the entire banking system shake.
I am all for government enforced transparency - accurate information is an essential ingredient of free markets. What I am not for is when the government grants monopolies like copyright, but also like broadband internet, telephone, etc.
I hope you can see the difference between requiring adequate disclosure and actually limiting who can sell what to whom.
For someone with such a low uid, it seems you haven't been paying any attention to the technical discussions of the economics of copyright that have occurred here over the years. This is all old ground. Very old ground.
- again I don't understand. You are saying that once even one book is published by Rowling through her affiliated publisher anyone should be able to copy it and republish for profit at a lesser cost or something?
Yes and much more, not just distribution but everything copyright restricts. I can tell from the way you write that you have a fundamental error as a basis for all of your arguments. You believe that copyright - as in controlling distribution - is the only business model for creative work. In fact, it is a business model that became obsolete the day a few engineers at BBN built four imps back in 1969, today it functions mainly on inertia.
- this contradicts your previous statements, where you suggest that money that Rowling made should have gone to some other 'starving authors', who clearly did not produce anything of the same value to the society (value in this case defined by the amount of cash that this product generated).
(a) You seem to think that "should have gone to" means government redistribution. The irony in your assumption is that the government is the one affecting the market to effect redistribution to Rowling, et al.
(b) You say "clearly did not produce anything of the same value" - your assumption is a poor one because you assume that the market is not skewed by the government mandated monopoly of copyright. In effect you are making a circular argument - copyright is good because the those who benefit the most from the copyright system benefit the most from the copyright system.
You are clearly not a free marketer, you want wealth redistribution in ways, that only you agree with.
If you can't accept that copyright is a government enforced monopoly, then I can see why you come to this conclusion.
I don't get it, it's not the government that paid Rowling the money, is it?
It does not need to do so directly. You need to understand that copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Monopolies distort markets and lead to inefficiencies.
Are you some sort of a radical communist or something?
Far from it, if anything, I am a radical free-marketer. The copyright monopoly is clearly welfare for some creators and most distributors.
There you go! Now that's some insightful feedback. I especially like how you've circled back and refuted the details.
"Refuted the details" -- bullshit, they were refuted in my original post by example of history. You just ignored them so you could blabber about a strawman.
I now think it's appropriate for people who don't create anything to be in charge of the people who do.
Why do you think that? It was never my argument in the first place, although it seems to be your personal red herring.
Let me guess ... Obama voter?
No. Now my turn.
Let me guess... constitutional illiterate?
So, just hand everyone a ticket as they leave the highway, if their average speed was X% higher than the posted speed limit (65) (or mail them one if they use EasyPass).
Which will have all kinds of unintended side-effects. Like people stopping 100 feet before the exit and waiting for 30 seconds, "just to be sure" they don't get a ticket. And people deciding they would rather take the back roads instead of the turnpike. Things like that. Depending on their specific response, as little as a handful of people per day could seriously screw up the system of commuting. And since commuting, not ticketing, is the reason for the existence of the turnpike, I don't see your ideas being particularly successful.
Man, those are some bad examples.
Most big name pop bands don't make a dime off their first hit album. Its only their 3rd or 4th hit album where their contract has expired and they are able to renegotiate based on how much money their work has earned for someone else. And the reason that is so is precisely because of the 'lotto-winner' effect of the current system which is directly caused by the stranglehold that copyright gives distributors.
On the flip side, Rowling definitely didn't need even 0.01% of that money in order to keep writing more books. From a society's point of view, all the money in excess of what was required for her to continue writing was wasted and could have been spent better elsewhere on hundreds of other promising writers that have now been crowded out of the marketplace by the harry potter monster. Similarly look at how Lucas has squandered his royalties. Sure he made a handful of good films, but all he really makes now are "just" films. How much more utility would society get for its money if it weren't squandered on things like 'The Clone Wars' and the Ewok Christmas Special that coast on the good name of his earlier works?
People often say that those who work for royalties "sit around and collect money when doing nothing"
Those same people are the ones taking a daily wage for all those years when those royalty guys worked their asses off for zero salary, to try and get to that point.
Your implication is tantamount to arguing for taxation without representation. Royalties and copyright are a 100% consensual construct of society, thus every member of society has just as much right to criticize the system. If anything, it is those who benefit directly from the system who should have the least say in how the system is run. The last hundred years or so of copyright extensions and copyright scope creep demonstrate what happens when those with a vested interest are the ones who have the most say.
Even worse, a good portion of the students likely saw things that they have attached to their own bodies.
It's not what you got, but how you use it that counts!
As long as we rely on the police to police themselves, there will always be possible ways to get around these kinds of things. What we would really need is for those real-time video feeds to be open to the public.
Exactly. Both the video and the information that video is not being transmitted need to be made available to the public in realtime so that both be recorded by people who do not have a vested interest in covering up events that might occur on video.
Even then, the result will be that illegal behavior by the police will just move off-camera - like into the backseat of the police car.
Since when is capitalism the opposite of central planning? Capitalism and free markets are two independent characteristics of an economy.
Hell, just read the 2nd sentence of the page you linked to: "While government intervention is kept at a minimum, government entities such as the sovereign wealth fund Temasek control corporations responsible for 60% of GDP"
To me that says the government stays out of the businesses it doesn't directly control ala AIG bailout, but it still is right there in the middle of at least 60% of the market since it does directly control them.
And don't forget the V-chip, which allows parents to disable certain TV channels. It's in all new TVs and unused in nearly all of them.
I find the V-chip to be a big, big let down.
I figured that once every mom, dick and harry had the ability to protect precious lil junior's eyes from boobies and other pink parts that we would see a great increase in tv getting down and dirty on primetime. After all, if you didn't want to watch it, you could just tell your tv to block it for you.
But so far, Janet Jackson's jewelry encrusted nipple is the best we've had and frankly, that just doesn't cut it, in anything less than HDTV it looked like it was covered with a pasty anyway.
Bring on the primetime pr0n already!
Sure. All those centrally planned economies that have historically been so prosperous give the lie to the very idea that free markets are the best way to go.
Singapore.