even if they wanted to, LEA don't have the computing power available to monitor every call.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links, so go ahead and mod me for missing my tin-foil-hat...
With all the talk of Bush authorizing international wire-taps on US-to-non-US citizens, it came up that the most probably reason the NSA is involved (see the current case EFF vs ATT) is that the NSA's Echelon system does have the throughput to handle that kind of workload. That Echelon was initially designed to snoop on purely international traffic, but it is just as easily turned on US citizens if the right (or wrong) person wants it to be so.
Just from an algorithmic viewpoint - that kind of workload is going to fall in the "embarrasingly parallel" group which means you can just keep adding PCs to scale-up to a volume of phone calls that is limited only by floorspace and electricity.
After reading the recent article about people in the UK being healthier than people in the USA, it struck me that if we ever have nationalized health-care in the USA, it is guaranteed to come with a national-id card as part of the implementation.
Sure, it is technically possible, even technically easier, to not implement a full-on big-brother national-id just to do socialized medicine. But the political climate in the USA is such that it just won't come to pass without such a draconian requirement. There are just too many corporate and political powers with an interest in tracking all citizens at some level or another and too few citizens that understand or care about the huge risks that such systems bring with them.
So, while some arguments for a single-payer healthcare system are compelling, I find the threat of the one database to rule them all and in the darkness bind us to be sufficiently compelling on its own to oppose any nationalized health-care system in the USA.
I guess it could be worse - we could still end up with the identity card and the subsequent corporate-police-state-utopia without any of the benefits like nationalized healthcare.
1) As long as you "rolling your own" then you don't face much in the way of endemic risks by having an RFID implanted. It only becomes a major risk when the RFID's are standardized and then keyed to various large databases. As it is now, even you if your personal implanted RFID gets scanned, it means nothing to any scanner-system besides your own.
2) What's the big deal with getting implanted? Just put a few in your regular "carry-ons" like your watch, your keyring, your cellphone, your sunglasses, a wedding ring if you wear one, etc. No risk of infection or other health problems and for the same reasons in #1 losing one more of them is low-risk because there are no wide-spread standardized systems. If EVERYONE's wedding ring unlocked their front door and started the car's engines, then you might have concerns, but as long as your system is a "one-off" a thief is more likely to steal your car with a slimjim than with a lost rfid-enabled watch.
PS - I own the patent on RFID-in-the-finger-ring-to-open-doors-and-start-ca r-engines.
You can always tell the level of sexual experience in a group of men by how willing they are to believe the "pussy smells like fish" myth. Anyone who's ever spent much time around (or inside) one knows that is simply not true.
You give your own inexperience away. The "fishy" smell occurs in women with a variety of common bacterial infections.
So while you may have spent plenty of time around and inside ONE, I suggest you get some experience and get inside a few more before you start strutting about it on slashdot. Word of advice to the nube - stay out of the stinky ones - no matter what they smell like.
I think it's fair to impose a stricter standard upon him than on the average person on the street who's just trying to make a buck.
With that, I whole heartedly disagree. What is fair is only to test his actions against his stated philosophy. Is he consistent or not? Charging for autographs is consistent with Free software because it is effectively the same thing as charging for the work of custom development - in this case the work result is an autograph, not software.
But to say that because his philosophy says there are good and bad ways to do business and thus he opens himself to a higher-level of scrutiny is silly. EVERYBODY makes judgements about business, and for that matter everything else in life, in relationship to their own personal philosophy. RMS is no different, he just has a much more publically reasoned and detailed philosophy to which he abides meticulously.
The law extends protection to workers only in the case where various material considerations are satisfied. I looked to that law not for precedent in terms of outcome, but in terms of considered thought on material elements. Venue seems to me a material element.
You looked to the law for "considered thought on material elements" but not on the RESULTS of that thought? That's like saying, hell there is a law about leashes for dogs in public, I guess that means RMS should have had to wear a leash. After all the law does contain considered thought about leashes! Even if you are that silly, that's not what you wrote - what you wrote was that the california law codifies A when in fact it codifies B where A is almost the unilateral oppossite of B.
In this regard, one of Stallman's implicit claims is that "other people do it" or "I do it because I can" are not adequate defenses of why one makes money.
This is the root of your misunderstanding. He never made the claims you say he did, they aren't implicit - they are non existent. What he did explicitly claim is that the reason he started charging for autographs was to 1) compensate for his time (not the convention organizer's time) and 2) reduce the demands on his time.
In any place of business, you pay workers for only a period of time. That doesn't mean that on premises they can set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people that have come to your business for their own economic gain.
This is a poor analogy for the simple reason that whether the people are your employees or not makes no difference in their ability to set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people who have come to your business. If you are going to let people come in off the street and do that, but prevent employees from doing the same on their own time, you will probably have legal troubles.
Since your initial complaint was about double-billing, your analogy only goes to support my point that on their own time employees are effectively the same as non-employees.
If I write a book "on my own time" while full-time employed and my employer isn't going to claim ownership, my contract says it has to be not just on my own time but on my own premises/equipment for it to be free and clear. (I'm pretty sure some places--the State of California [California Labor code section 2870] is an example--codify this obvious bit of common sense into law.)
This is a total divergence, but I suggest you re-read section 2870 again - it is the reverse of what you claim - it does not in anyway say that using your employer's time and equipment puts ownership of the result in the hands of the employer (and 99% of intellectual property law actually says otherwise) - it simply prevents the employer from claiming ownership of work created outside of the employer's time and equipment no matter what their contract says. The law is protecting the employee's rights - not the employer's rights, it is presumed that the employer, being the dominate partner in the employment relationship will be able to take care of itself when it writes the contract.
Meanwhile, you might try attending any sort of non-professional convention - celebrities selling autographs is de rigueur.
Where feasible, speakers should get paid for time and travel.
Except you aren't paying for ALL of their time - if you had paid for every hour of RMS's time on the floor then you would have some claim to control his actions during that time. But you didn't - you paid for his performance as a speaker and the costs to put him in earshot. Once the speaking is done, you got what you paid for.
Hey, you have to pay to do this, and prostitution is a no-no.
Says you - in the USA there are places like that county outside of Vegas and most of the rest of the first world where prostitution is a yes, yes, oh baby YES!
If you were to ask the Fox and NPR audience if they believed it had been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, you'd probably find that the Fox viewers are "better informed."
First you would have to define "scientifically proven" since science never proves anything, it only disproves theories and their lighter-weight cousins.
Newsflash: the government holds a lot of data about you. Unfortunately, the data is currently linked by an universal and extremly weak key, namely a 9 digit number
And just where is the value to *me* in the government having a strongly-keyed link between all the information it ALREADY has on me? I value my freedom and if the price of that freedom means it is a little bit easier for some scoff-laws to get away with tax fraud, then so be it - I'm sure the true cost to implement a strongly keyed system could never be made up by the hypothetical reduction in such crimes. And don't even start about identity theft - because of corporate influence and desire there is no way we would ever see a national-id system that had even half-an-ass of protection against smart identity thieves.
while a scene where a girl is fully clothed but it is treaded as a piece of meat by a machist football player is less apropriated (again in my point of view)while a scene where a girl is fully clothed but it is treaded as a piece of meat by a machist football player is less apropriated (again in my point of view)
I totally agree -- that supersonic foot-fetish stuff is really over the top.
To me it's obvious that there is some content that is not appropriate for minors, that's why we have ratings on movies PG-13 and R -- video games are no different
Do you really think we'd be in Iraq now if Gore had been (s)elected? Afghanistan, probably, but not Iraq. And do you think that a Kerry administration would be sabre rattling at Iran, or trying to work with the UN to find a peaceful solution. No Difference, yeah... What a fucking joke that is. Tell it to the dead soldiers.
I do believe that we would be in *SOME* mid-east country. While Bush lied about WMD and Terrorism, ETC - both parties appear to believe they need to force change on the middle-east and the democrats are JUST as beholden to the military-industrial complex as the republicans are so war would have been the first and probably only choice for them too. Maybe they wouldn't have been so arrogant about it and ignored the expert opinions of people like Shinseki and we would be done with the fighting by now, but I am pretty sure there would have been fighting and dying.
That is not an obvious conclusion. The obvious conclusion - at least to any reasonable adult - is that the only way to change is long and slow - that voting for 3rd parties for a few decades is the only thing that can make a difference.
I'm sorry, but 1% or 1.2% is not going to make a dent in the conviction of the larger parties. As long as you don't get up to double digits you ARE throwing your vote away. But I don't see anyone waiting 40 years to get there!!
What you need to understand is that voting for either of republicans or the democrats is the REAL waste of a vote.
The two parties are IDENTICAL except for a couple knee-jerk issues that make good sound-bytes but have zero to do with the day to day operation of the government.
I know nobody who is willing to wait that long when things need to change NOW
And by voting for either major party NOW, they guarantee that there will be no significant changes EVER.
Any girl that tastes like chicken has to have something wrong with her. Stay the fuck away from that...
That's still 10x better than smelling like fish.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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Craftsmen have usually been paid by the hour or job, where as artist, in prior ages required a patron, but since the advent of the mass media, are now freed to make a living by controlling copyright.
Your definitions are totally out of whack. Going by that definition, Bill Gates is the greatest artist in the history of humanity. Trying to make a distinction between artistry and craftsmanship does nothing to enhance understanding of the issue -- if anything it just caters to the stereotype of the artist trying to pump up their own ego by randomly picking some attribute and labeling it "better."
Reign in the corporate bully boy tactics against private individuals, but make peering services liable for enforcing copyright. Sure it's easy to get around the restrictions, but that does not make it right.
This solution belongs squarely in the "pie-in-the-sky "people are good so trust them"" category. Right and wrong mean NOTHING in the market. Is it "right" that Brittany Spears has made multi-platinum albums?
The only thing that matters in a market is human nature. Unless you can figure out how to change human nature (good luck with that!) then no "trust people to do the right thing" approach will work beyond short-term and niche markets with very tight communities.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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That is stupid, obviously that song belongs to the artist untill the artist is dead and longer if he leaves it to his estate.
Yes, obviously!
Lollerskates
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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the problem with that is that somebody then has to front the money.
I am sorry, I did not read the rest of your comment, the lack of paragraph breaks hurt my head too much. But I suspect it was all elaboration of that one idea so I will address it.
The answer comes from the problem. The internet makes it feasible to send copies of a song out to 100 million people for no marginal cost. What we need is an infrastructure to collect money from those 100 million people with no marginal cost. A way that people from all over the world can easily put small amounts of money (from $1 to $100 or so) into one central account.
With such an infrastructure in place, then the people fronting the money will be the ones who actually want the end product. Not some middleman who doesn't give a rats ass about the quality or the content, the actual consumers.
Briefly, the way it should work is for the artist to publish his asking price. The buyers all pay into the escrow fund, once it hits the asking price the artist gets to work and upon releasing the fruits of his labor to the public domain, he collects the money from escrow. The buyers get what they want, no strings attached and the artist gets compensated. If the results are good, then they will be passed around to other non-buyers, acting as advertising for the artist's next project for which he can ask even more money for.
If, on the other hand, the escrow balance never reaches the asking price - the artist can either lower his price to something attainable, or give the money back. Or go on a fundraising drive like NPR.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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I just love it when people who have not done anything creative since pre-school preach to those blessed/cursed with talent on how they deserve free access to their creations.
I code for a living. I do it as a contractor and every single new contract I sign is based on the quality of the work I have done before. If you think coding in general is not 'creative' then you need to see some of the GUI's I've designed - they are at least as artistic as any sort of commercial art design or layout - simple, elegant, functional and intuitive.
But you know what? FUCK YOU. It doesn't matter how "creative" I am. What matters is my ability to clearly perceive the situation.
What I see is a world in which it is impossible to stop people from making copies of digital information - be movies, music, books, architectural plans, or even software, therefore it is pointless to try to charge money for copies. Instead of whining about it, I have come up with another method to compensate the creators. A method that can be at least as lucrative as the current copyright model without any of the social damage that copyright model is inflicting on society today.
If you are so damn creative - where is your solution? And puh-leaze, no pie-in-the-sky "people are good so trust them" bullshit either. Something that acknowledges the realities of modern society instead of pretending they don't exist.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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Then where's the incentive to write a good book that people want to read? If you're lucky, you'll get paid on the basis of what your last book earned...but I'm pretty sure this would just be an opportunity for book publishers to screw authors--particularly new authors.
Are you a published author? Then you know quite well that under today's system the book publishers royally screw over the new and even the semi-established authors.
You hit upon the solution and then dismissed it with a fallacy. EVERYBODY pays their dues - be it in an entertainment industry or not, we all start out small and work our way up. Your worth is constantly evaluated on what you did last - do you think that Stephen King could get multi-million dollar contracts for his unwritten books if his previous books were not best sellers? Just about everybody's future earnings are based on their reputation from prior work.
PS - under a comission model, book (and most other media) "publishers" would be vastly different - today they serve the role of "venture capitalist" but under a comission model they would work for the author and simply be promoters and possibly distributers.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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But it should be done not through monopoly rights on works, but through levies off those profiting from the duplication, fixation in media, performance and distribution of those materials.
How do you define (and measure) 'profiting?'
What if the 'record companies' give away the recording on CD in order to promote some other product? How are you going to measure the profit from such an action in order to tax it?
What if no one makes copies commercially and everyone just p2p's it, or emails it to their friends? Each day, the use of the net for private distribution becomes more and more prevalent.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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I can record stuff I could never play live. I've enjoyed gigging, but I don't think I'd like to tour really. But why shouldn't I make a living selling music?
You aren't asking the right question.
The right question is - "Why shouldn't you be able to earn a living making music?"
The answer is - you should be able to try.
Just like when Joe the Office Peon goes to work for 8 hours, he gets paid for 8 hours of office droning. If his employer takes the reports that Joe wrote and distributes copies to everyone in the company and all of their customers, Joe does not get paid anything for each of those copies.
Just like when Bob the Construction Hand builds a bathroom, he gets paid for building the bathroom. But Bob does not get paid everytime someone uses that bathroom to take a crap.
You should be paid to produce a recording of music - by the hour or by the song, or whatever. But once the actual work of making the music is over, you don't deserve to get paid anything more. You don't deserve to get paid every time somebody makes a copy of the music nor do you deserve to get paid every time somebody listens to that music either.
Just like Joe, Bob and 99.99% of the rest of the working public you deserve to get paid for the actual work that you do. In effect, we all work on comission - being a musician (or an actor, or writer, or key grip, or scene painter or a wardrobe specialist, etc) doesn't mean you deserve special treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
even if they wanted to, LEA don't have the computing power available to monitor every call.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links, so go ahead and mod me for missing my tin-foil-hat...
With all the talk of Bush authorizing international wire-taps on US-to-non-US citizens, it came up that the most probably reason the NSA is involved (see the current case EFF vs ATT) is that the NSA's Echelon system does have the throughput to handle that kind of workload. That Echelon was initially designed to snoop on purely international traffic, but it is just as easily turned on US citizens if the right (or wrong) person wants it to be so.
Just from an algorithmic viewpoint - that kind of workload is going to fall in the "embarrasingly parallel" group which means you can just keep adding PCs to scale-up to a volume of phone calls that is limited only by floorspace and electricity.
After reading the recent article about people in the UK being healthier than people in the USA, it struck me that if we ever have nationalized health-care in the USA, it is guaranteed to come with a national-id card as part of the implementation.
Sure, it is technically possible, even technically easier, to not implement a full-on big-brother national-id just to do socialized medicine. But the political climate in the USA is such that it just won't come to pass without such a draconian requirement. There are just too many corporate and political powers with an interest in tracking all citizens at some level or another and too few citizens that understand or care about the huge risks that such systems bring with them.
So, while some arguments for a single-payer healthcare system are compelling, I find the threat of the one database to rule them all and in the darkness bind us to be sufficiently compelling on its own to oppose any nationalized health-care system in the USA.
I guess it could be worse - we could still end up with the identity card and the subsequent corporate-police-state-utopia without any of the benefits like nationalized healthcare.
1) As long as you "rolling your own" then you don't face much in the way of endemic risks by having an RFID implanted. It only becomes a major risk when the RFID's are standardized and then keyed to various large databases. As it is now, even you if your personal implanted RFID gets scanned, it means nothing to any scanner-system besides your own.
a r-engines.
2) What's the big deal with getting implanted? Just put a few in your regular "carry-ons" like your watch, your keyring, your cellphone, your sunglasses, a wedding ring if you wear one, etc. No risk of infection or other health problems and for the same reasons in #1 losing one more of them is low-risk because there are no wide-spread standardized systems. If EVERYONE's wedding ring unlocked their front door and started the car's engines, then you might have concerns, but as long as your system is a "one-off" a thief is more likely to steal your car with a slimjim than with a lost rfid-enabled watch.
PS - I own the patent on RFID-in-the-finger-ring-to-open-doors-and-start-c
You can always tell the level of sexual experience in a group of men by how willing they are to believe the "pussy smells like fish" myth. Anyone who's ever spent much time around (or inside) one knows that is simply not true.
You give your own inexperience away. The "fishy" smell occurs in women with a variety of common bacterial infections.
Don't believe me? Maybe the makers of Vagisil know a thing or two about pussy. http://www.vagisil.com/understanding_itch.shtml
Or if that's not serious enough for you - try the National Institutes of Health. http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/vaginitis.htm
So while you may have spent plenty of time around and inside ONE, I suggest you get some experience and get inside a few more before you start strutting about it on slashdot. Word of advice to the nube - stay out of the stinky ones - no matter what they smell like.
I think it's fair to impose a stricter standard upon him than on the average person on the street who's just trying to make a buck.
With that, I whole heartedly disagree. What is fair is only to test his actions against his stated philosophy. Is he consistent or not? Charging for autographs is consistent with Free software because it is effectively the same thing as charging for the work of custom development - in this case the work result is an autograph, not software.
But to say that because his philosophy says there are good and bad ways to do business and thus he opens himself to a higher-level of scrutiny is silly. EVERYBODY makes judgements about business, and for that matter everything else in life, in relationship to their own personal philosophy. RMS is no different, he just has a much more publically reasoned and detailed philosophy to which he abides meticulously.
The law extends protection to workers only in the case where various material considerations are satisfied. I looked to that law not for precedent in terms of outcome, but in terms of considered thought on material elements. Venue seems to me a material element.
You looked to the law for "considered thought on material elements" but not on the RESULTS of that thought? That's like saying, hell there is a law about leashes for dogs in public, I guess that means RMS should have had to wear a leash. After all the law does contain considered thought about leashes! Even if you are that silly, that's not what you wrote - what you wrote was that the california law codifies A when in fact it codifies B where A is almost the unilateral oppossite of B.
In this regard, one of Stallman's implicit claims is that "other people do it" or "I do it because I can" are not adequate defenses of why one makes money.
This is the root of your misunderstanding. He never made the claims you say he did, they aren't implicit - they are non existent. What he did explicitly claim is that the reason he started charging for autographs was to 1) compensate for his time (not the convention organizer's time) and 2) reduce the demands on his time.
In any place of business, you pay workers for only a period of time. That doesn't mean that on premises they can set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people that have come to your business for their own economic gain.
This is a poor analogy for the simple reason that whether the people are your employees or not makes no difference in their ability to set themselves up in a shop and capitalize on the people who have come to your business. If you are going to let people come in off the street and do that, but prevent employees from doing the same on their own time, you will probably have legal troubles.
Since your initial complaint was about double-billing, your analogy only goes to support my point that on their own time employees are effectively the same as non-employees.
If I write a book "on my own time" while full-time employed and my employer isn't going to claim ownership, my contract says it has to be not just on my own time but on my own premises/equipment for it to be free and clear. (I'm pretty sure some places--the State of California [California Labor code section 2870] is an example--codify this obvious bit of common sense into law.)
This is a total divergence, but I suggest you re-read section 2870 again - it is the reverse of what you claim - it does not in anyway say that using your employer's time and equipment puts ownership of the result in the hands of the employer (and 99% of intellectual property law actually says otherwise) - it simply prevents the employer from claiming ownership of work created outside of the employer's time and equipment no matter what their contract says. The law is protecting the employee's rights - not the employer's rights, it is presumed that the employer, being the dominate partner in the employment relationship will be able to take care of itself when it writes the contract.
Meanwhile, you might try attending any sort of non-professional convention - celebrities selling autographs is de rigueur.
Where feasible, speakers should get paid for time and travel.
Except you aren't paying for ALL of their time - if you had paid for every hour of RMS's time on the floor then you would have some claim to control his actions during that time. But you didn't - you paid for his performance as a speaker and the costs to put him in earshot. Once the speaking is done, you got what you paid for.
Hey, you have to pay to do this, and prostitution is a no-no.
Says you - in the USA there are places like that county outside of Vegas and most of the rest of the first world where prostitution is a yes, yes, oh baby YES!
If you were to ask the Fox and NPR audience if they believed it had been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, you'd probably find that the Fox viewers are "better informed."
First you would have to define "scientifically proven" since science never proves anything, it only disproves theories and their lighter-weight cousins.
Newsflash: the government holds a lot of data about you. Unfortunately, the data is currently linked by an universal and extremly weak key, namely a 9 digit number
And just where is the value to *me* in the government having a strongly-keyed link between all the information it ALREADY has on me? I value my freedom and if the price of that freedom means it is a little bit easier for some scoff-laws to get away with tax fraud, then so be it - I'm sure the true cost to implement a strongly keyed system could never be made up by the hypothetical reduction in such crimes. And don't even start about identity theft - because of corporate influence and desire there is no way we would ever see a national-id system that had even half-an-ass of protection against smart identity thieves.
while a scene where a girl is fully clothed but it is treaded as a piece of meat by a machist football player is less apropriated (again in my point of view)while a scene where a girl is fully clothed but it is treaded as a piece of meat by a machist football player is less apropriated (again in my point of view)
I totally agree -- that supersonic foot-fetish stuff is really over the top.
To me it's obvious that there is some content that is not appropriate for minors, that's why we have ratings on movies PG-13 and R -- video games are no different
So - you would be in favor of ratings on books?
Do you really think we'd be in Iraq now if Gore had been (s)elected? Afghanistan, probably, but not Iraq. And do you think that a Kerry administration would be sabre rattling at Iran, or trying to work with the UN to find a peaceful solution. No Difference, yeah... What a fucking joke that is. Tell it to the dead soldiers.
I do believe that we would be in *SOME* mid-east country. While Bush lied about WMD and Terrorism, ETC - both parties appear to believe they need to force change on the middle-east and the democrats are JUST as beholden to the military-industrial complex as the republicans are so war would have been the first and probably only choice for them too. Maybe they wouldn't have been so arrogant about it and ignored the expert opinions of people like Shinseki and we would be done with the fighting by now, but I am pretty sure there would have been fighting and dying.
Begging is what Jah-Wren Ryel's suggestion amounts to.
That's total bullshit. Votes are the way the citizens pay politicians. With-holding payment is not even close to begging.
That is not an obvious conclusion. The obvious conclusion - at least to any reasonable adult - is that the only way to change is long and slow - that voting for 3rd parties for a few decades is the only thing that can make a difference.
I'm sorry, but 1% or 1.2% is not going to make a dent in the conviction of the larger parties. As long as you don't get up to double digits you ARE throwing your vote away. But I don't see anyone waiting 40 years to get there!!
What you need to understand is that voting for either of republicans or the democrats is the REAL waste of a vote.
The two parties are IDENTICAL except for a couple knee-jerk issues that make good sound-bytes but have zero to do with the day to day operation of the government.
I know nobody who is willing to wait that long when things need to change NOW
And by voting for either major party NOW, they guarantee that there will be no significant changes EVER.
So then can we assume this will be the long desired porn-centric distro we have all been waiting for?
You missed it - that was the first Ubuntu release and it got a lot of coverage for having an orgy of naked people on the root window.
Any girl that tastes like chicken has to have something wrong with her. Stay the fuck away from that...
That's still 10x better than smelling like fish.
Craftsmen have usually been paid by the hour or job, where as artist, in prior ages required a patron, but since the advent of the mass media, are now freed to make a living by controlling copyright.
Your definitions are totally out of whack. Going by that definition, Bill Gates is the greatest artist in the history of humanity. Trying to make a distinction between artistry and craftsmanship does nothing to enhance understanding of the issue -- if anything it just caters to the stereotype of the artist trying to pump up their own ego by randomly picking some attribute and labeling it "better."
Reign in the corporate bully boy tactics against private individuals, but make peering services liable for enforcing copyright. Sure it's easy to get around the restrictions, but that does not make it right.
This solution belongs squarely in the "pie-in-the-sky "people are good so trust them"" category. Right and wrong mean NOTHING in the market. Is it "right" that Brittany Spears has made multi-platinum albums?
The only thing that matters in a market is human nature. Unless you can figure out how to change human nature (good luck with that!) then no "trust people to do the right thing" approach will work beyond short-term and niche markets with very tight communities.
That is stupid, obviously that song belongs to the artist untill the artist is dead and longer if he leaves it to his estate.
Yes, obviously!
Lollerskates
the problem with that is that somebody then has to front the money.
I am sorry, I did not read the rest of your comment, the lack of paragraph breaks hurt my head too much. But I suspect it was all elaboration of that one idea so I will address it.
The answer comes from the problem. The internet makes it feasible to send copies of a song out to 100 million people for no marginal cost. What we need is an infrastructure to collect money from those 100 million people with no marginal cost. A way that people from all over the world can easily put small amounts of money (from $1 to $100 or so) into one central account.
With such an infrastructure in place, then the people fronting the money will be the ones who actually want the end product. Not some middleman who doesn't give a rats ass about the quality or the content, the actual consumers.
Briefly, the way it should work is for the artist to publish his asking price. The buyers all pay into the escrow fund, once it hits the asking price the artist gets to work and upon releasing the fruits of his labor to the public domain, he collects the money from escrow. The buyers get what they want, no strings attached and the artist gets compensated. If the results are good, then they will be passed around to other non-buyers, acting as advertising for the artist's next project for which he can ask even more money for.
If, on the other hand, the escrow balance never reaches the asking price - the artist can either lower his price to something attainable, or give the money back. Or go on a fundraising drive like NPR.
I just love it when people who have not done anything creative since pre-school preach to those blessed/cursed with talent on how they deserve free access to their creations.
I code for a living. I do it as a contractor and every single new contract I sign is based on the quality of the work I have done before. If you think coding in general is not 'creative' then you need to see some of the GUI's I've designed - they are at least as artistic as any sort of commercial art design or layout - simple, elegant, functional and intuitive.
But you know what? FUCK YOU. It doesn't matter how "creative" I am. What matters is my ability to clearly perceive the situation.
What I see is a world in which it is impossible to stop people from making copies of digital information - be movies, music, books, architectural plans, or even software, therefore it is pointless to try to charge money for copies. Instead of whining about it, I have come up with another method to compensate the creators. A method that can be at least as lucrative as the current copyright model without any of the social damage that copyright model is inflicting on society today.
If you are so damn creative - where is your solution? And puh-leaze, no pie-in-the-sky "people are good so trust them" bullshit either. Something that acknowledges the realities of modern society instead of pretending they don't exist.
Then where's the incentive to write a good book that people want to read? If you're lucky, you'll get paid on the basis of what your last book earned...but I'm pretty sure this would just be an opportunity for book publishers to screw authors--particularly new authors.
Are you a published author? Then you know quite well that under today's system the book publishers royally screw over the new and even the semi-established authors.
You hit upon the solution and then dismissed it with a fallacy. EVERYBODY pays their dues - be it in an entertainment industry or not, we all start out small and work our way up. Your worth is constantly evaluated on what you did last - do you think that Stephen King could get multi-million dollar contracts for his unwritten books if his previous books were not best sellers? Just about everybody's future earnings are based on their reputation from prior work.
PS - under a comission model, book (and most other media) "publishers" would be vastly different - today they serve the role of "venture capitalist" but under a comission model they would work for the author and simply be promoters and possibly distributers.
But it should be done not through monopoly rights on works, but through levies off those profiting from the duplication, fixation in media, performance and distribution of those materials.
How do you define (and measure) 'profiting?'
What if the 'record companies' give away the recording on CD in order to promote some other product? How are you going to measure the profit from such an action in order to tax it?
What if no one makes copies commercially and everyone just p2p's it, or emails it to their friends? Each day, the use of the net for private distribution becomes more and more prevalent.
I can record stuff I could never play live. I've enjoyed gigging, but I don't think I'd like to tour really. But why shouldn't I make a living selling music?
You aren't asking the right question.
The right question is - "Why shouldn't you be able to earn a living making music?"
The answer is - you should be able to try.
Just like when Joe the Office Peon goes to work for 8 hours, he gets paid for 8 hours of office droning. If his employer takes the reports that Joe wrote and distributes copies to everyone in the company and all of their customers, Joe does not get paid anything for each of those copies.
Just like when Bob the Construction Hand builds a bathroom, he gets paid for building the bathroom. But Bob does not get paid everytime someone uses that bathroom to take a crap.
You should be paid to produce a recording of music - by the hour or by the song, or whatever. But once the actual work of making the music is over, you don't deserve to get paid anything more. You don't deserve to get paid every time somebody makes a copy of the music nor do you deserve to get paid every time somebody listens to that music either.
Just like Joe, Bob and 99.99% of the rest of the working public you deserve to get paid for the actual work that you do. In effect, we all work on comission - being a musician (or an actor, or writer, or key grip, or scene painter or a wardrobe specialist, etc) doesn't mean you deserve special treatment.