In this case, let's say I'm the person who spent years of effort creating that work. Because without me that work would not exist. At all. Period.
How is that any different from someone who spends years of effort, hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a business only to have it fail because customers won't buy what he's selling? Just because he puts all that into his work doesn't mean society owes him squat.
And the "encouraging more public knowledge" portion of your rant is correct, although you forget that unless I can pay the rent and feed the kids, I'm not creating MORE work and adding to the whole.
How is this a moral argument? Stick to your guns man. Either its morality or it isn't. So far each time I disprove one argument, you switch to the other, then switch back when that one is disproven. You are arguing in circles and the fundamental problem is that you think that copyright is the only mechanism that can fund creation. Face up to your FAITH, yes FAITH, nothing more than faith, in that belief and you'll approach enlightenment. Until then, all you are doing is clouding your understanding.
You are NOT entitled.
Proof by assertion doesn't cut it. But when your beliefs are all based on faith, you can't do any better than that.
I want them to spend ALL of their time (or as much as possible) creating new works for me to enjoy.
Then you really don't want the copyright model. That model encourages people who create high quality work to do it once and then retire on the ever lasting royalties. The best creators are actually economically discouraged from any further creations. Its only the mediocre and barely-passable who have any incentive to keep producing new work.
Without copyright, and without that potential payoff, the same level of investment is simply not going to be made.
That's just your lack of imagination talking. You only see one economic model. But look around you, creative people are paid for their effort all the time. Make-up artists, set designers, recording engineers, etc, all those jobs traditionally pay by the hour or by the production, not by royalties on copies. Software engineers, copy writers (not copyrighters), commercial artists, they all get paid on comission too. There is no reason that some form of assurance contract can not be used to fund the development of big-ticket creations too.
As I said in another post, it's a question of morality and respect. If you have no respect for those who would create what you enjoy, then, in the end, you're going to get everything you're "entitled" to... which is nothing.
Do you respect the men who designed your car? The carpenters who built your house? If you do, how come you don't pay them a fee every time you drive somewhere or sleep comfortably in your home?
Ultimately respect has nothing to do with it, its just economics, just like it is for all the other jobs in the universe.
But if not, who are you to decide you're entitled to it anyway?
Who are you to decide I am not entitled to it anyway? Making a copy of it changes nothing, not one thing, about the state of the creater. Seriously, do you know the origin and justification for copyright under anglo-saxon law? It has nothing to do with ownership of the creation, it is all about encouraging more public knowledge (and paying taxes to the king, but that's particularly relevant to the discussion).
Human nature? Yeah, the selfish, greedy, immature side of it...
No, the civilization building side of it. If humans were not natural information-sharing creatures we would never have been able to rise past the level of small nomadic family groups.
Because without guys like Tamte, people would have nothing to steal.
And this, as I like to say, is demonstrably false, even if you buy into the whole broken paradigm of "stealing" - if it were true then all the free software, all the free music, free art, free stories, none of that would exist. There are other ways to fund the development of ideas than simply charging for distribution. Nowadays, especially, trying to charge for distribution is a particularly BAD way to fund development.
No, I get your point. It's you who are deliberately avoiding my point. Ideas, information, knowledge, they are all lay synonyms for a specific group of non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods.
You don't pay for the "idea", but the actual representation of it, and indirectly, for the work, skill, money, time, and talent that went into that creation.
And why is it that this payment must be made indirectly? In fact, that's where the system breaks down. You can't expect to get paid for non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods. Copyright law tries to manufacture excludability, but as the original poster demonstrated it doesn't work. So, it is only reasonable to find the point in the production where rivalrous and excludable goods (e.g. work, skill, money, time, talent) are used and charge for their use.
I am sure there are some, and I am also sure there are some who use their personal addresses for their day-job related activities because they tend to use the same tools no matter who their employer is. But based on my experience with various projects, those cases are the exception, not the rule.
"Destineer President Peter Tamte... said that when his company shipped its squad-based first-person shooter First to Fight last year, it found within a few weeks that more people were trying to log on to multiplayer servers with a single banned serial number than the total number of copies Destineer had sold combined."
Again, further proof that you can't control an idea. Despite what the other guy said, morality has nothing to do with it. It is human nature to share information, trying to fight it is like trying to keep teenagers from having sex.
Too bad Tamte's an idiot. If he were a smart businessman he would have seen the huge potential to make money - instead of trying to charge for copies of the software, he should charge for use of the servers. After all, if he's got more people who want to use them than he's even sold copies of the game, then obviously the market for the service of multiplayer gaming is bigger than the market for physical CDs with copies of the game on them.
Software is not just an "idea", any more than a book, song, or movie is just an "idea". "Ideas" are a dime a dozen.
Right, they are ALL ideas. Good, bad, simple, complex, but still just ideas.
the work, money, skill, talent, time and effort it took to go from "idea" to "product" is what you're actually paying for, and what is "owned".
We are in complete agreement. Work, money, skill, talent, time and effort - although the list is a little redundant, those are all the means of production, and are owned and should be paid for.
But the idea itself, it can't be owned. You might want to own it, you might have been trained to think it is ownable, but it is not and the original poster's experience is proof of exactly that.
So you should not pay for ideas any more at all then. Thats interesting. Kiss goodbye to all new pharmaceutical drugs.
You can certainly charge for the development of ideas -- I do it all the time myself and so do the vast majority of white-collar workers, but trying to control the distribution of ideas is impossible.
The only feasible level of control you have over the redistribution of an idea is the first copy - the point at which you give that idea to someone else. After that, trying to control further distribution is fruitless. So if you want to make money by creating ideas, you can only feasibly charge for the effort that leads up to and includes that first copy.
However in the end it's a fraction of all the free software devs, especially those working on smaller projects.
You are demonstrably wrong. Most of the people contributing to free software are "scratching an itch" - an itch that is part of their daily jobs. They are not paid to be dedicated free software developers, but they are paid to get their jobs done and that often involves improvements and fixes to Free software tools. The few people who do spend most of their time working on Free software are doing it professionally - it may be as professionally employed software engineers for a salary or as part of their studies at university for a degree, but they are still being compensated for their work. Indeed there are some who work on Free software as a hobby, but it's a myth that they are the driving force behind any of the projects that are in widespread usage.
So he should abandon software development and go learn plumbing instead? Sounds like you want the information tech revolution to grind to a halt immediately. nice one. or should he work for free, while you get the benefit?
Nope. He should be a capitalist, like myself. He needs to make use of the fact that he has ownership of the means of production and charge the most the market will bear for its employment. I do well, very well, selling the use of my expertise to people who want software developed. If he's any good at all, he could do the same.
Congratulations. You've learned the truth that no matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, you can not control an idea and it only cost yout $10 and 50 hours of your time. Some companies are spending billions of their dollars and billions of our dollars in the process of learning the same thing.
People call BECAUSE those agencies have the information and have been selling it. So it is information they already have.
No, you are wrong.
I use a bogus name for my telephone directory listing (it is like getting an unlisted number, but better because it is free and it avoids having my real name on the "list of people with unlisted numbers"). I get tons of snail-mail marketing for this bogus person, I also get plenty of sales calls asking for this bogus person by name.
There is no way the credit marketing agencies are giving away this info because this person does not exist and the name was made up on the spot for the telephone listing - they certainly have no SSN and my real name is the one used for the bills so there isn't even any "credit history" to the name.
So you see, you are 100% demonstrably incorrect in saying that the sales contacts are due only to the credit marketing agencies. Even if this bogus person somehow did aqcuire an entry in their databases, there is no way for me to remove them because the person has no SSN to give them.
In theory there are no "slashdot moderators" all moderation is suppossed to be done by readers who have "earned" the privilege by contributing valulable postings of there own. No reader is suppossed to be able to moderate in a topic in which they have posted, although that isn't terribly hard to find technical loopholes.
BTW, (b) tells his client when it is in the wrong sounds a lot lawyerese for "doesn't have a case" which is just one end of the spectrum of maximum legal representation that they are entitled to under the law.
One call to the Opt Out Request Line is all it takes to permanently remove your name from all marketing lists that the credit agencies supply to direct marketers.
And get your name on the "high-value" target list they sell to everyone else, and the "has something to hide" list they sell to the NSA.
Seriously, it is so bogus that in order to "opt out" you have to hand over your personal info -- SSN, address, full name - to the very same people who are abusing that info in the first place. Somehow I just don't trust them to keep it safe and never figure out a new way to abuse it for their own gain.
A real opt-out list would be maintained by a 3rd party with contractual and legal penalties for distributing your personal info. Then the agencies would be required send their lists to the 3rd who would filter out the people who have opted out. That way, even if the agencies were to reverse engineer the list by comparing before-and-afters, they would not know anything about the people whom they missed because they were never on the first list, nor would they get any sort of corrective information (like updated address, corrected spelling of names, etc).
Hell, while I am dreaming, these lists would be opt-in to start with and we wouldn't have these problems.
So, after a quick read, it looks like the attacker has to convince a user to get to the attacked website via his own website - how else would he be able to forcefeed his own code into the $error variable to begin with?
What are the chances that:
1) A user will go to the bad guy's website 2) That the user will have an account on the attacked website 3) That said user will want to log into the attacked website right after going to the badguy website?
Sure, it is possible and a potential risk, but it sure seems to be highly-specific, probably only good if you are targetting known users to begin with.
One has to wonder just what kind of person would work as a lawyer for the RIAA, since they must know as does anyone who's been following along on Slashdot that their lawsuits are unfair and an abuse of the legal system
Ask any lawyer - they will tell you that it is not their place to judge their client, only to see that they get the maximum legal representation that they are entitled to under the law. Of course lawyers judge their clients all the time - but it tends to be that the more money they have, the less judged they are.
They must be either atheists or fools to not fear the cost of abusing the bereaved for profit upon their souls.
As if the only reason not to be asshole is fear for your mortal soul. Quite a commentary on your own morality.
Jeeezus Keerist! There those frenchies go again with their obstructionist, anti-freedom policies. I say we stand up to those cowards and rename Open Office to Libre Office! That'll show'em what Freedom is all about.
Lol! My analysis is purely about how more volume does not necessarily equal more losses. Thus my referral to topic drift. If you read carefully you will see no mention of onesies in either my post, nor in the post I was responding to. Thus my referral to topic drift. Should I repeat that a third time?
All of what you said is true except for the fact that it's completly irrelevant.
So why are you telling me this? The irrelevancy started 2 or 3 posts up the chain. Or rather, the conversation moved on -- we stopped talking about samples almost immediately after the OP, please try to follow along.
I don't think that the snide remark at the end of your comment was really necessary either.
Your statement makes absolutely no sense. The only thing selling at a per unit loss in high volumes will get you is high losses.
That would be false.
You make the false assumption that cost per unit is constant regardless of volume. That is rarely the case in real life, and especially not so in the case of high-tech manufacturing.
There are a bunch of very large fixed costs - the highlights include R&D and the construction of the manufacturing plant. If the marginal manufacturing cost is less than the selling price, then the higher your volumes, the more units there are to amortize those fixed costs. Thus larger volumes mean smaller losses.
Presuming your marginal cost is relatively constant, then at some point larger volumes will mean a cross from red to black, or in other words profitability. But even if that point is unattainable (say for instance it is larger than the total market) you still lose less money by selling higher volumes.
I realize this site is not MBAdot, but this stuff is basic econ101 and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who went to college, or even the honors track in high school.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, let's say I'm the person who spent years of effort creating that work. Because without me that work would not exist. At all. Period.
How is that any different from someone who spends years of effort, hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a business only to have it fail because customers won't buy what he's selling? Just because he puts all that into his work doesn't mean society owes him squat.
And the "encouraging more public knowledge" portion of your rant is correct, although you forget that unless I can pay the rent and feed the kids, I'm not creating MORE work and adding to the whole.
How is this a moral argument? Stick to your guns man. Either its morality or it isn't. So far each time I disprove one argument, you switch to the other, then switch back when that one is disproven. You are arguing in circles and the fundamental problem is that you think that copyright is the only mechanism that can fund creation. Face up to your FAITH, yes FAITH, nothing more than faith, in that belief and you'll approach enlightenment. Until then, all you are doing is clouding your understanding.
You are NOT entitled.
Proof by assertion doesn't cut it. But when your beliefs are all based on faith, you can't do any better than that.
I want them to spend ALL of their time (or as much as possible) creating new works for me to enjoy.
Then you really don't want the copyright model. That model encourages people who create high quality work to do it once and then retire on the ever lasting royalties. The best creators are actually economically discouraged from any further creations. Its only the mediocre and barely-passable who have any incentive to keep producing new work.
Without copyright, and without that potential payoff, the same level of investment is simply not going to be made.
That's just your lack of imagination talking. You only see one economic model. But look around you, creative people are paid for their effort all the time. Make-up artists, set designers, recording engineers, etc, all those jobs traditionally pay by the hour or by the production, not by royalties on copies. Software engineers, copy writers (not copyrighters), commercial artists, they all get paid on comission too. There is no reason that some form of assurance contract can not be used to fund the development of big-ticket creations too.
As I said in another post, it's a question of morality and respect. If you have no respect for those who would create what you enjoy, then, in the end, you're going to get everything you're "entitled" to... which is nothing.
Do you respect the men who designed your car? The carpenters who built your house? If you do, how come you don't pay them a fee every time you drive somewhere or sleep comfortably in your home?
Ultimately respect has nothing to do with it, its just economics, just like it is for all the other jobs in the universe.
But if not, who are you to decide you're entitled to it anyway?
Who are you to decide I am not entitled to it anyway? Making a copy of it changes nothing, not one thing, about the state of the creater. Seriously, do you know the origin and justification for copyright under anglo-saxon law? It has nothing to do with ownership of the creation, it is all about encouraging more public knowledge (and paying taxes to the king, but that's particularly relevant to the discussion).
Human nature? Yeah, the selfish, greedy, immature side of it...
No, the civilization building side of it. If humans were not natural information-sharing creatures we would never have been able to rise past the level of small nomadic family groups.
Because without guys like Tamte, people would have nothing to steal.
And this, as I like to say, is demonstrably false, even if you buy into the whole broken paradigm of "stealing" - if it were true then all the free software, all the free music, free art, free stories, none of that would exist. There are other ways to fund the development of ideas than simply charging for distribution. Nowadays, especially, trying to charge for distribution is a particularly BAD way to fund development.
You miss the point, as they're not just "ideas".
No, I get your point. It's you who are deliberately avoiding my point. Ideas, information, knowledge, they are all lay synonyms for a specific group of non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods.
You don't pay for the "idea", but the actual representation of it, and indirectly, for the work, skill, money, time, and talent that went into that creation.
And why is it that this payment must be made indirectly? In fact, that's where the system breaks down. You can't expect to get paid for non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods. Copyright law tries to manufacture excludability, but as the original poster demonstrated it doesn't work. So, it is only reasonable to find the point in the production where rivalrous and excludable goods (e.g. work, skill, money, time, talent) are used and charge for their use.
I am sure there are some, and I am also sure there are some who use their personal addresses for their day-job related activities because they tend to use the same tools no matter who their employer is. But based on my experience with various projects, those cases are the exception, not the rule.
"Destineer President Peter Tamte ... said that when his company shipped its squad-based first-person shooter First to Fight last year, it found within a few weeks that more people were trying to log on to multiplayer servers with a single banned serial number than the total number of copies Destineer had sold combined."
Again, further proof that you can't control an idea. Despite what the other guy said, morality has nothing to do with it. It is human nature to share information, trying to fight it is like trying to keep teenagers from having sex.
Too bad Tamte's an idiot. If he were a smart businessman he would have seen the huge potential to make money - instead of trying to charge for copies of the software, he should charge for use of the servers. After all, if he's got more people who want to use them than he's even sold copies of the game, then obviously the market for the service of multiplayer gaming is bigger than the market for physical CDs with copies of the game on them.
Software is not just an "idea", any more than a book, song, or movie is just an "idea". "Ideas" are a dime a dozen.
Right, they are ALL ideas. Good, bad, simple, complex, but still just ideas.
the work, money, skill, talent, time and effort it took to go from "idea" to "product" is what you're actually paying for, and what is "owned".
We are in complete agreement. Work, money, skill, talent, time and effort - although the list is a little redundant, those are all the means of production, and are owned and should be paid for.
But the idea itself, it can't be owned. You might want to own it, you might have been trained to think it is ownable, but it is not and the original poster's experience is proof of exactly that.
So you should not pay for ideas any more at all then. Thats interesting. Kiss goodbye to all new pharmaceutical drugs.
You can certainly charge for the development of ideas -- I do it all the time myself and so do the vast majority of white-collar workers, but trying to control the distribution of ideas is impossible.
The only feasible level of control you have over the redistribution of an idea is the first copy - the point at which you give that idea to someone else. After that, trying to control further distribution is fruitless. So if you want to make money by creating ideas, you can only feasibly charge for the effort that leads up to and includes that first copy.
Look at the email addresses of the contributors list for most projects - either .com (and not ISP .com's either) or .edu.
However in the end it's a fraction of all the free software devs, especially those working on smaller projects.
You are demonstrably wrong. Most of the people contributing to free software are "scratching an itch" - an itch that is part of their daily jobs. They are not paid to be dedicated free software developers, but they are paid to get their jobs done and that often involves improvements and fixes to Free software tools. The few people who do spend most of their time working on Free software are doing it professionally - it may be as professionally employed software engineers for a salary or as part of their studies at university for a degree, but they are still being compensated for their work. Indeed there are some who work on Free software as a hobby, but it's a myth that they are the driving force behind any of the projects that are in widespread usage.
He is a capitalist, like msyelf.
No he is not. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, it is not private ownership of ideas.
Guess what? Many of those "developers" work as programmers on paid software to pay the bills.
Guess what? Many of those "developers" work as paid programmers to develop the free software and pay the bills.
Nope. He should be a capitalist, like myself. He needs to make use of the fact that he has ownership of the means of production and charge the most the market will bear for its employment. I do well, very well, selling the use of my expertise to people who want software developed. If he's any good at all, he could do the same.
They are communists, as their actions clearly show, but they tend to get annoyed when described as such.
So, is it correct to presume you believe that patio11 is a capitalist?
Congratulations. You've learned the truth that no matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, you can not control an idea and it only cost yout $10 and 50 hours of your time. Some companies are spending billions of their dollars and billions of our dollars in the process of learning the same thing.
People call BECAUSE those agencies have the information and have been selling it. So it is information they already have.
No, you are wrong.
I use a bogus name for my telephone directory listing (it is like getting an unlisted number, but better because it is free and it avoids having my real name on the "list of people with unlisted numbers"). I get tons of snail-mail marketing for this bogus person, I also get plenty of sales calls asking for this bogus person by name.
There is no way the credit marketing agencies are giving away this info because this person does not exist and the name was made up on the spot for the telephone listing - they certainly have no SSN and my real name is the one used for the bills so there isn't even any "credit history" to the name.
So you see, you are 100% demonstrably incorrect in saying that the sales contacts are due only to the credit marketing agencies. Even if this bogus person somehow did aqcuire an entry in their databases, there is no way for me to remove them because the person has no SSN to give them.
In theory there are no "slashdot moderators" all moderation is suppossed to be done by readers who have "earned" the privilege by contributing valulable postings of there own. No reader is suppossed to be able to moderate in a topic in which they have posted, although that isn't terribly hard to find technical loopholes.
BTW, (b) tells his client when it is in the wrong sounds a lot lawyerese for "doesn't have a case" which is just one end of the spectrum of maximum legal representation that they are entitled to under the law.
Seriously, it is so bogus that in order to "opt out" you have to hand over your personal info -- SSN, address, full name - to the very same people who are abusing that info in the first place. Somehow I just don't trust them to keep it safe and never figure out a new way to abuse it for their own gain.
A real opt-out list would be maintained by a 3rd party with contractual and legal penalties for distributing your personal info. Then the agencies would be required send their lists to the 3rd who would filter out the people who have opted out. That way, even if the agencies were to reverse engineer the list by comparing before-and-afters, they would not know anything about the people whom they missed because they were never on the first list, nor would they get any sort of corrective information (like updated address, corrected spelling of names, etc).
Hell, while I am dreaming, these lists would be opt-in to start with and we wouldn't have these problems.
So, after a quick read, it looks like the attacker has to convince a user to get to the attacked website via his own website - how else would he be able to forcefeed his own code into the $error variable to begin with?
What are the chances that:
1) A user will go to the bad guy's website
2) That the user will have an account on the attacked website
3) That said user will want to log into the attacked website right after going to the badguy website?
Sure, it is possible and a potential risk, but it sure seems to be highly-specific, probably only good if you are targetting known users to begin with.
One has to wonder just what kind of person would work as a lawyer for the RIAA, since they must know as does anyone who's been following along on Slashdot that their lawsuits are unfair and an abuse of the legal system
Ask any lawyer - they will tell you that it is not their place to judge their client, only to see that they get the maximum legal representation that they are entitled to under the law. Of course lawyers judge their clients all the time - but it tends to be that the more money they have, the less judged they are.
They must be either atheists or fools to not fear the cost of abusing the bereaved for profit upon their souls.
As if the only reason not to be asshole is fear for your mortal soul. Quite a commentary on your own morality.
Jeeezus Keerist! There those frenchies go again with their obstructionist, anti-freedom policies. I say we stand up to those cowards and rename Open Office to Libre Office! That'll show'em what Freedom is all about.
I was saying that your analysis is wrong.
Lol! My analysis is purely about how more volume does not necessarily equal more losses. Thus my referral to topic drift. If you read carefully you will see no mention of onesies in either my post, nor in the post I was responding to. Thus my referral to topic drift. Should I repeat that a third time?
All of what you said is true except for the fact that it's completly irrelevant.
So why are you telling me this? The irrelevancy started 2 or 3 posts up the chain. Or rather, the conversation moved on -- we stopped talking about samples almost immediately after the OP, please try to follow along.
I don't think that the snide remark at the end of your comment was really necessary either.
Ditto, but you wrote it anyway.
That would be false.
You make the false assumption that cost per unit is constant regardless of volume. That is rarely the case in real life, and especially not so in the case of high-tech manufacturing.
There are a bunch of very large fixed costs - the highlights include R&D and the construction of the manufacturing plant. If the marginal manufacturing cost is less than the selling price, then the higher your volumes, the more units there are to amortize those fixed costs. Thus larger volumes mean smaller losses.
Presuming your marginal cost is relatively constant, then at some point larger volumes will mean a cross from red to black, or in other words profitability. But even if that point is unattainable (say for instance it is larger than the total market) you still lose less money by selling higher volumes.
I realize this site is not MBAdot, but this stuff is basic econ101 and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who went to college, or even the honors track in high school.