As a example, consider the case of Limp Bizkit, who got sued for presenting a 17-minute concert. Certainly, we shouldn't expect consumers to suffer through more episodes like that.
Objective measurements like length can easily be written into a contract, as can requirements to follow standard accounting practices. However, it is impossible to reasonably enforce any kind of subjective measure of 'quality.' Poor quality is a risk the investors take -- be they financiers under the current system or the end-buyer under the proposed comission system -- in exchange for actual ownership of the results.
In real life, an AC Production house will produce a crappy esipode with the lowest budget possible, boost "management fees" and other expense to friendly vendors, and thus rip off your 10M fans.
In real life, a production house that does that will not be able to get buyers for a second episode and will go bankrupt.
It's not the buck that's important, per se, it's the idea that unsatisfactory effort remains rewarded and unpunished.
Sorry, I forgot to address that part.
The punishment for crappy work is that you - and everyone else who thinks it sucked - won't put up a buck for the next episode/movie/song/whatever from the same guys. Either they have to do better with less money next time around, or they go out of business.
The one thing left out of your method is a system of refunding unsatisfied consumers. If I spend that buck on a show and I'm seriously dissatisfied, I want my money back (the same as with any other good or service).
There is no mechanism for refund. The reason you get to own the result, not just own a single copy, but own it outright to do with as you please because it is in the public domain, is that you are shouldering the risk that the end result will suck.
You want the option to get your money back? You have to give up ownership of the end result. Just like real investors who currently shoulder the financial risk of production.
Besides, your analogy is broken anyway. You don't get a refund if you sit through a crappy movie at the theater, and you will have a hell of a time getting your money back after watching a DVD of a crappy movie.
I tend to agree with this, but at the same time, it's perfectly to do all of this within the confines of copyright law. And since this is true, then it can't really be true that such a system benefits all parties, because if it benefitted all parties, then all parties would agree to it
Do not underestimate the power of inertia. There is a lot of investment in the current copyright regime. These people don't see any upside to changing, and they think they can avoid having change forced upon them. These are the same types who are trying to introduce artificial scarcity via DRM and the DMCA.
Remember that the carrot is guaranteed return on investment, practially zero risk. But there are people who want to hold out for bigger potential returns under the system of copyright.
So the stick is piracy. People are going to copy their shit no matter what kind measures are taken. When "old hollywood" dies off and "new hollywood" accepts this, then we will see changes. Until then, the changes will only be around the edges and in other countries where copyright is not so strongly worshipped.
So how do you keep an ad agency from ponying up ALL the money to have the program made, inserting product and/or advertising into it, and then claiming they own the result since they paid for it?
You don't let them? The production company has complete control of the product until it is released. If somebody wants to edit the end result to insert commercials, let them. Nobody will watch it as long as the original is available and being in the public domain it will always be around. If somebody does watch it, so what? It was the watchers choice to do so.
Your scheme is designed around the business model so often touted on Slashdot: "give me everything I want, for free, without limits, without string, now now,now, NOW ".
You are correct sir. Do you know why it is designed that way? Because that is HUMAN NATURE we all want the most for the least. To argue otherwise is pure naivete. The thing is that before the internet "every I want for free" was not feasible. But now it is.
And whether you like it or not, people will always take advantage of free stuff. Furthermore, it is human nature to want to share good stuff, so there will always be people looking to share songs, shows, etc that they think are cool.
No, it's not. It's a model designed from the outset to 'prove' a particular point
Far from it. It is a model designed to deal with the simple fact of life that the internet has made zero marginal cost copying easily available to just about everyone. You can't stop it without dismantling the internet, so you might as well find a profitable business model that fits the new environment.
By the way, the idea is hardly recent, nor hardly my own. If you google for the "street performer protocol" you should find a paper and discussion of such a system dating back at least to 1998.
There are a variety of ways. Mostly I think a reputation-based model would help. Right now the reputation of directors and actors, and sometimes producers is what sells movies. That sort of idea can be used to sell new shows that make use of "old" talent. Get a big name on board and his fans will pony up the escrow bucks.
That does not address the issue of brand new players. They've got two options - go totally indy and give it away. Like most unsigned bands do today. It is a loss, but the productions are much smaller and can be offset by selling "shares" of future productions to investors. For example, someone might put up $100K to fund the pilot episode in exchange for $200K out of the funding for the 2nd episode. That $200k just becomes another piece of the production cost.
The other approach is to tag along. New guys cut their teeth in small parts and jobs on productions with big names. Play a mid-level part (actor, director, etc) in a successful production and you can leverage that to become a big name "headliner" for a brand new production.
Both approaches are pretty similar to the way hollywood deals with personal fame today under the current copyright regime so it isn't much of a stretch to see it working similarly without copyrights too.
Two efforts to do pretty much what you describe, one for Firefly and one for Enterprise, have recently failed to get anywhere near the scale of popular support they would require to achieve their goals.
Ignoring the issues with Paramount there are two key hurdles to be overcome:
1) There is currently no mechanism in place to collect and handle such escrow accounts with low overhead. That's why I said to watch what google is doing, when they say they don't intend to compete with paypal that leaves the door wide open for a global escrow system - and a whole lot of other options too.
2) Neither of the campaigns were anything close to the terms that I propose - the people paying for the production didn't get to own squat. They take all the financial risk of a crappy show, but they don't even get to own what they paid for. That is a bad deal, I'm not surprised response was tepid.
3) Yeah, I know I said two. The first few productions to take such a route have lots of inertia to overcome. Going back to a comissioned model requires people on all sides to get out of the mental rut that the copyright industry has been working as hard as possible to squeeze us into. There will inevitably be a lot of mistarts and failures before someone can pull it off.
If the development company does this for even one episode, then someone else - Spielberg, Warner, Fox, etc. - can take the Farscape line and produce their own episodes, or their own feature films.
So what? That does not stop the original creators from continuing to produce their own shows. Furthermore, the real value is not in the characters - it is in the creators - the writers, the actors, the fx guys, the set designers. They are what make a show good or bad - the characters are just one piece of creation.
And just maybe, if someone else comes along and "re-interprets" the story, the result would be better. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, but without all the lawyers.
Now if you want to talk about commercial licensing for ancilliary markets like happy-meals and such, then that is the domain of trademarks, not copyrights.
I don't think any television or movie production company would go for such a deal.
What you underestimate is the value of guaranteed 10%+ returns over a couple of months. There are people buying bonds with abysmal rates of return just for the guarantee. A guarantee of 10% over 3 months is HUGE. Maybe current production companies won't play the game - but others are likely to because that kind of ROI with zero risk is huge compared to most investments opportunities.
we are not going to get anywhere with the type of lazy thinking which asserts things like, "If copyright law forbids people from sharing, copyright law is wrong." I'll take Lawrence Lessig's ideas over Mr. Stallman's any day.
One thing Stallman is not is a lazy thinker. In fact, I charge you with being a lazy thinker. You who are too lazy to see your way past the status quo. Who, in endorsing Lessig over Stallman seem to think a simple modification of the principles of copyright are enough to reconcile the creator's need for compensation with the internet's inherent zero-marginal cost nature.
You are wrong and Stallman is right. Jack Valenti unknowingly said it best -- "You can't compete with free." What Valenti did not understand, you do not understand and Stallman does understand is that basic axiom - if you can't beat them, join them.
One such method of "joining them" is a modern version of comissioned art. The internet makes it easy to share copies with a billion of your best friends, it also has the potential to easily aggregate funding from a billion "patrons."
Take the defunct TV show "Farscape" as an example. Production costs per episode were on the order of $2-3M each. If the production company is able to guarantee $3.3M in revenue per episode that means a ROI of at least 10% which is decent in the TV world were 90% of the shows aren't profitable until they reach syndication.
So, how could the production company have earned that kind of revenue? Without copyright. Yep, you read that right. Here's the details:
As a SWAG, lets say there was a fanbase of 10M worldwide. If just one third could be convinced to pony up $1 per episode - that's $3.3M right there. By using the internet and some sort of paypal like system (pay attention to what google is doing in this area, they seem to be thinking right along these lines) they could collect that $1 per episode and put it into an escrow account. When the balance reaches $3.3M production begins. When the episode is completed, it is released to the public domain and the money is released to the production company.
Such a system benefits all parties - the production company is guaranteed a profit before they invest a single dime, something completely unheard of in the world of entertainment business. In return for that guarantee, the end result is made freely available to one and all so that the people who funded the creation can share it with anyone they want without legal or moral issues. Ultimately the free distribution of previous episodes acts as advertising for future episodes.
Furthermore it is 100% free-market, no government intervention required, no dollars wasted on the FBI tracking down pirates because piracy is meaningless in such a system. And if the show sucks? People are only out a buck, not a big a loss and the chances of the next episode being funded goes down - it is survival of the fittest with no middlemen like advertisers and "programming execs" to muddle up the difference between good shows and crappy shows.
So - that's one idea demonstrating why copyright is indeed obsolete. How about you come up with one yourself instead of hiding behind the status quo?
Ok, this is going nowhere. I feel that software should expand, gas-like, to fill every available nook and cranny of its environment, and you feel that it should be prevented from shipping on platforms that you feel limit freedoms.
Thanks for the summary, but you got it wrong. I, and I'm pretty sure the FSF, believe that software should be fully Free as in liberty, not as in gratis. Your opinion much more closely matches the "Open Source" philosophy and not the "Free Software" philosophy which is ok with limited or partial liberty.
No it is not the exact same situation, in fact it is fundamentally different - the difference is that the DRM's SOLE PURPOSE is to prevent users from tinkering. Platforms with specialized compilers do not have specialized compilers to prevent the end user from tinkering, that's just a side-effect and there is no law preventing someone from re-implementing the compiler while there is a big nasty law preventing someone from cracking the DRM.
A much more accurate analogy is that of the car with the hood welded shut, but a copy of the engine schematic in the glove compartment. The only point in welding the hood shut is to prevent people from tinkering with the engine - sure you are free to go build a brand new, identical engine in some other car, just don't touch the one you already paid for, under penalty of jail time.
Nothing about that software is secret to you except for a key.
Bingo - the key is effectively part of the source, without it, you can not completely recreate the original shipping binaries. From your perspective, that's already a violation under GPLv2.
When he got calls from people like that, he'd apparently just insert words like "penis" and "assrape" into their conversations. He said that saying such things would confuse the hell out of the callers, and their confusion would quickly override their arrogance and anger.
Didn't you learn anything?
The first rule of Tech Support Club is You do not talk about tech support club. The second rule of Tech Support Club is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT TECH SUPPORT CLUB.
Ever hear of a freelance photographer? He takes a picture, sells the copyright to a newspaper, and gets paid a commision. The newspaper now owns the copyright and distributes to millions. Copyright enforces what you want. You want to distribute to millions for free, buy out the copyright. Oh what a surprise, the copyright is worth more than one copy.
In the scenario you describe, first the photographer puts his capital at risk - equipment, time, materials, etc - then the newspaper does the same with pure money.
What I describe is the customer shouldering the capital risk. For example - when you have 5 million customers who each put $5 into an escrow account for the next release of Firefox, then the software developer has close to zero capital at risk - all he has to do is produce the next version and he is guaranteed $25M. No need to worry about copyright at all. Similar mechanism can be applied to just about any kind of "IP."
Again, great argument against DRM. Bad argument against software that runs equally on all platforms.
You just refuse to get it don't you? The end user doesn't give a crap if the software runs on some other platform. He cares if it runs on the platform he paid for.
Intellectual property is something that should be defended in order to preserve good order
Huh? Sounds like you are saying "we should never change because is bad."
and for the sake of those who do the work.
I think you mean - for the sake of the capitalists who pay the hourly wages of those who do the work and expect to sell the results of that work over and over again.
If there is no incentive to make money in a certain field, progress will suffer in a society such as a capitalist one.
You are correct - but it has NOTIHING to do with intellectual property. Nobody pays me more than once for the work I do, why should anyone else be different?
Used to be that artists were paid on comission - their customer put up the money, maybe with an advance, and when the work was completed the customer owned the result and the artist was fully compensated. There is no strong reason why we can't move on to a similar system of comissioned creation today, where the customers put up the money and own the result to do with as they wish, including copy and share with a million and one friends. Creators still get compensated and thus still have incentive to create and improve their creations.
The GPLv3 would, for example, rule out allowing a company to ship a Linux distribution on a hardware platform that required the software to use secret keys in order to run, even if the code that had the hooks were open source. This does not hurt the hardware vendor, but does hurt the open source project which will be passed over by anyone who needs to interact with that platform.
Hey, you forgot someone in that paragraph.
The person you forgot is the END USER you know, the one the GPL is designed to protect. As far as that end user is concerned, DRM-keyed "Open Source" software is no more Free than beer, it certainly ain't one iota Free as in Liberty.
The liberty to tinker, customize and improve is what the GPL is about and DRMing a platform to lock out tinkered versions of the software is antithetical to the prime goal of the GPL - regardless of version. The proposed v3 wording just makes that fact explicit with respect to DRM.
The farmer's quote: "It's a good tractor, but not that good."
Little does he know that his kids have been hot-rodding it and now it is equipped with a turbo-charger, racing-stripe and 44" spinners. Since they are minors he is still responsible for their use of his tractor.
Now that's just a heartless thing to say. Many good parents still lose their children, often through no fault of their own.
"Many" is a relative term. Curiously, nobody seems to be keeping statistics on this particular crime. Kind of odd considering how "popular" child abuction and murder crimes are in the news. But at least one study has been done and it indicates a rate of less than 100 per year nationwide.
I'm pretty sure that nationwide more than 100 kids die due to falling out of trees each year. So, while it certainly sucks to be one of those kids who fall out of a tree or who are kidnapped and murdered, it is not really a problem that can be described as happening to "many" parents.
But then you are not interested in rational discussion, only filling you mind with hate and then releasing it on any that cross your path.
You first dimwit. Your whole show of arrogance was exactly the same thing you accuse me of. The only difference is that I chose to speak plainly, no need to pussy-foot around like a fop.
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As a example, consider the case of Limp Bizkit, who got sued for presenting a 17-minute concert. Certainly, we shouldn't expect consumers to suffer through more episodes like that.
Objective measurements like length can easily be written into a contract, as can requirements to follow standard accounting practices. However, it is impossible to reasonably enforce any kind of subjective measure of 'quality.' Poor quality is a risk the investors take -- be they financiers under the current system or the end-buyer under the proposed comission system -- in exchange for actual ownership of the results.
What if the balance only ever reaches $2.9M? What happens to the money?
The production company must either decide to lower their asking price, or the money is eventually returned from escrow.
In real life, an AC Production house will produce a crappy esipode with the lowest budget possible, boost "management fees" and other expense to friendly vendors, and thus rip off your 10M fans.
In real life, a production house that does that will not be able to get buyers for a second episode and will go bankrupt.
It's not the buck that's important, per se, it's the idea that unsatisfactory effort remains rewarded and unpunished.
Sorry, I forgot to address that part.
The punishment for crappy work is that you - and everyone else who thinks it sucked - won't put up a buck for the next episode/movie/song/whatever from the same guys. Either they have to do better with less money next time around, or they go out of business.
The one thing left out of your method is a system of refunding unsatisfied consumers. If I spend that buck on a show and I'm seriously dissatisfied, I want my money back (the same as with any other good or service).
There is no mechanism for refund. The reason you get to own the result, not just own a single copy, but own it outright to do with as you please because it is in the public domain, is that you are shouldering the risk that the end result will suck.
You want the option to get your money back? You have to give up ownership of the end result. Just like real investors who currently shoulder the financial risk of production.
Besides, your analogy is broken anyway. You don't get a refund if you sit through a crappy movie at the theater, and you will have a hell of a time getting your money back after watching a DVD of a crappy movie.
I tend to agree with this, but at the same time, it's perfectly to do all of this within the confines of copyright law. And since this is true, then it can't really be true that such a system benefits all parties, because if it benefitted all parties, then all parties would agree to it
Do not underestimate the power of inertia. There is a lot of investment in the current copyright regime. These people don't see any upside to changing, and they think they can avoid having change forced upon them. These are the same types who are trying to introduce artificial scarcity via DRM and the DMCA.
Remember that the carrot is guaranteed return on investment, practially zero risk. But there are people who want to hold out for bigger potential returns under the system of copyright.
So the stick is piracy. People are going to copy their shit no matter what kind measures are taken. When "old hollywood" dies off and "new hollywood" accepts this, then we will see changes. Until then, the changes will only be around the edges and in other countries where copyright is not so strongly worshipped.
So how do you keep an ad agency from ponying up ALL the money to have the program made, inserting product and/or advertising into it, and then claiming they own the result since they paid for it?
You don't let them? The production company has complete control of the product until it is released. If somebody wants to edit the end result to insert commercials, let them. Nobody will watch it as long as the original is available and being in the public domain it will always be around. If somebody does watch it, so what? It was the watchers choice to do so.
Your scheme is designed around the business model so often touted on Slashdot: "give me everything I want, for free, without limits, without string, now now,now, NOW ".
You are correct sir. Do you know why it is designed that way? Because that is HUMAN NATURE we all want the most for the least. To argue otherwise is pure naivete. The thing is that before the internet "every I want for free" was not feasible. But now it is.
And whether you like it or not, people will always take advantage of free stuff. Furthermore, it is human nature to want to share good stuff, so there will always be people looking to share songs, shows, etc that they think are cool.
No, it's not. It's a model designed from the outset to 'prove' a particular point
Far from it. It is a model designed to deal with the simple fact of life that the internet has made zero marginal cost copying easily available to just about everyone. You can't stop it without dismantling the internet, so you might as well find a profitable business model that fits the new environment.
By the way, the idea is hardly recent, nor hardly my own. If you google for the "street performer protocol" you should find a paper and discussion of such a system dating back at least to 1998.
Sounds good, but how do you get a new show made?
There are a variety of ways. Mostly I think a reputation-based model would help. Right now the reputation of directors and actors, and sometimes producers is what sells movies. That sort of idea can be used to sell new shows that make use of "old" talent. Get a big name on board and his fans will pony up the escrow bucks.
That does not address the issue of brand new players. They've got two options - go totally indy and give it away. Like most unsigned bands do today. It is a loss, but the productions are much smaller and can be offset by selling "shares" of future productions to investors. For example, someone might put up $100K to fund the pilot episode in exchange for $200K out of the funding for the 2nd episode. That $200k just becomes another piece of the production cost.
The other approach is to tag along. New guys cut their teeth in small parts and jobs on productions with big names. Play a mid-level part (actor, director, etc) in a successful production and you can leverage that to become a big name "headliner" for a brand new production.
Both approaches are pretty similar to the way hollywood deals with personal fame today under the current copyright regime so it isn't much of a stretch to see it working similarly without copyrights too.
Two efforts to do pretty much what you describe, one for Firefly and one for Enterprise, have recently failed to get anywhere near the scale of popular support they would require to achieve their goals.
Ignoring the issues with Paramount there are two key hurdles to be overcome:
1) There is currently no mechanism in place to collect and handle such escrow accounts with low overhead. That's why I said to watch what google is doing, when they say they don't intend to compete with paypal that leaves the door wide open for a global escrow system - and a whole lot of other options too.
2) Neither of the campaigns were anything close to the terms that I propose - the people paying for the production didn't get to own squat. They take all the financial risk of a crappy show, but they don't even get to own what they paid for. That is a bad deal, I'm not surprised response was tepid.
3) Yeah, I know I said two. The first few productions to take such a route have lots of inertia to overcome. Going back to a comissioned model requires people on all sides to get out of the mental rut that the copyright industry has been working as hard as possible to squeeze us into. There will inevitably be a lot of mistarts and failures before someone can pull it off.
If the development company does this for even one episode, then someone else - Spielberg, Warner, Fox, etc. - can take the Farscape line and produce their own episodes, or their own feature films.
So what? That does not stop the original creators from continuing to produce their own shows. Furthermore, the real value is not in the characters - it is in the creators - the writers, the actors, the fx guys, the set designers. They are what make a show good or bad - the characters are just one piece of creation.
And just maybe, if someone else comes along and "re-interprets" the story, the result would be better. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, but without all the lawyers.
Now if you want to talk about commercial licensing for ancilliary markets like happy-meals and such, then that is the domain of trademarks, not copyrights.
I don't think any television or movie production company would go for such a deal.
What you underestimate is the value of guaranteed 10%+ returns over a couple of months. There are people buying bonds with abysmal rates of return just for the guarantee. A guarantee of 10% over 3 months is HUGE. Maybe current production companies won't play the game - but others are likely to because that kind of ROI with zero risk is huge compared to most investments opportunities.
we are not going to get anywhere with the type of lazy thinking which asserts things like, "If copyright law forbids people from sharing, copyright law is wrong." I'll take Lawrence Lessig's ideas over Mr. Stallman's any day.
One thing Stallman is not is a lazy thinker. In fact, I charge you with being a lazy thinker. You who are too lazy to see your way past the status quo. Who, in endorsing Lessig over Stallman seem to think a simple modification of the principles of copyright are enough to reconcile the creator's need for compensation with the internet's inherent zero-marginal cost nature.
You are wrong and Stallman is right. Jack Valenti unknowingly said it best -- "You can't compete with free." What Valenti did not understand, you do not understand and Stallman does understand is that basic axiom - if you can't beat them, join them.
One such method of "joining them" is a modern version of comissioned art. The internet makes it easy to share copies with a billion of your best friends, it also has the potential to easily aggregate funding from a billion "patrons."
Take the defunct TV show "Farscape" as an example. Production costs per episode were on the order of $2-3M each. If the production company is able to guarantee $3.3M in revenue per episode that means a ROI of at least 10% which is decent in the TV world were 90% of the shows aren't profitable until they reach syndication.
So, how could the production company have earned that kind of revenue? Without copyright. Yep, you read that right. Here's the details:
As a SWAG, lets say there was a fanbase of 10M worldwide. If just one third could be convinced to pony up $1 per episode - that's $3.3M right there. By using the internet and some sort of paypal like system (pay attention to what google is doing in this area, they seem to be thinking right along these lines) they could collect that $1 per episode and put it into an escrow account. When the balance reaches $3.3M production begins. When the episode is completed, it is released to the public domain and the money is released to the production company.
Such a system benefits all parties - the production company is guaranteed a profit before they invest a single dime, something completely unheard of in the world of entertainment business. In return for that guarantee, the end result is made freely available to one and all so that the people who funded the creation can share it with anyone they want without legal or moral issues. Ultimately the free distribution of previous episodes acts as advertising for future episodes.
Furthermore it is 100% free-market, no government intervention required, no dollars wasted on the FBI tracking down pirates because piracy is meaningless in such a system. And if the show sucks? People are only out a buck, not a big a loss and the chances of the next episode being funded goes down - it is survival of the fittest with no middlemen like advertisers and "programming execs" to muddle up the difference between good shows and crappy shows.
So - that's one idea demonstrating why copyright is indeed obsolete. How about you come up with one yourself instead of hiding behind the status quo?
Ok, this is going nowhere. I feel that software should expand, gas-like, to fill every available nook and cranny of its environment, and you feel that it should be prevented from shipping on platforms that you feel limit freedoms.
Thanks for the summary, but you got it wrong. I, and I'm pretty sure the FSF, believe that software should be fully Free as in liberty, not as in gratis. Your opinion much more closely matches the "Open Source" philosophy and not the "Free Software" philosophy which is ok with limited or partial liberty.
It's the exact same situation,
No it is not the exact same situation, in fact it is fundamentally different - the difference is that the DRM's SOLE PURPOSE is to prevent users from tinkering. Platforms with specialized compilers do not have specialized compilers to prevent the end user from tinkering, that's just a side-effect and there is no law preventing someone from re-implementing the compiler while there is a big nasty law preventing someone from cracking the DRM.
A much more accurate analogy is that of the car with the hood welded shut, but a copy of the engine schematic in the glove compartment. The only point in welding the hood shut is to prevent people from tinkering with the engine - sure you are free to go build a brand new, identical engine in some other car, just don't touch the one you already paid for, under penalty of jail time.
Nothing about that software is secret to you except for a key.
Bingo - the key is effectively part of the source, without it, you can not completely recreate the original shipping binaries. From your perspective, that's already a violation under GPLv2.
Why is it a bad thing to provide users with what they want?
The core point of the GPL is that it guarantees users the freedom to tinker. You deny them that freedom when you lock it up with DRM.
If you don't think your customers should have the freedom to tinker, then don't use GPL'd software in your products.
When he got calls from people like that, he'd apparently just insert words like "penis" and "assrape" into their conversations. He said that saying such things would confuse the hell out of the callers, and their confusion would quickly override their arrogance and anger.
Didn't you learn anything?
The first rule of Tech Support Club is You do not talk about tech support club.
The second rule of Tech Support Club is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT TECH SUPPORT CLUB.
"Casual piracy is the result of abusive pricing!"
False. Casual piracy is the result of human nature, and will occur no matter what pricing is set at.
Ever hear of a freelance photographer? He takes a picture, sells the copyright to a newspaper, and gets paid a commision. The newspaper now owns the copyright and distributes to millions. Copyright enforces what you want. You want to distribute to millions for free, buy out the copyright. Oh what a surprise, the copyright is worth more than one copy.
In the scenario you describe, first the photographer puts his capital at risk - equipment, time, materials, etc - then the newspaper does the same with pure money.
What I describe is the customer shouldering the capital risk. For example - when you have 5 million customers who each put $5 into an escrow account for the next release of Firefox, then the software developer has close to zero capital at risk - all he has to do is produce the next version and he is guaranteed $25M. No need to worry about copyright at all. Similar mechanism can be applied to just about any kind of "IP."
Again, great argument against DRM. Bad argument against software that runs equally on all platforms.
You just refuse to get it don't you? The end user doesn't give a crap if the software runs on some other platform. He cares if it runs on the platform he paid for.
Intellectual property is something that should be defended in order to preserve good order
Huh? Sounds like you are saying "we should never change because is bad."
and for the sake of those who do the work.
I think you mean - for the sake of the capitalists who pay the hourly wages of those who do the work and expect to sell the results of that work over and over again.
If there is no incentive to make money in a certain field, progress will suffer in a society such as a capitalist one.
You are correct - but it has NOTIHING to do with intellectual property. Nobody pays me more than once for the work I do, why should anyone else be different?
Used to be that artists were paid on comission - their customer put up the money, maybe with an advance, and when the work was completed the customer owned the result and the artist was fully compensated. There is no strong reason why we can't move on to a similar system of comissioned creation today, where the customers put up the money and own the result to do with as they wish, including copy and share with a million and one friends. Creators still get compensated and thus still have incentive to create and improve their creations.
The GPLv3 would, for example, rule out allowing a company to ship a Linux distribution on a hardware platform that required the software to use secret keys in order to run, even if the code that had the hooks were open source. This does not hurt the hardware vendor, but does hurt the open source project which will be passed over by anyone who needs to interact with that platform.
Hey, you forgot someone in that paragraph.
The person you forgot is the END USER you know, the one the GPL is designed to protect. As far as that end user is concerned, DRM-keyed "Open Source" software is no more Free than beer, it certainly ain't one iota Free as in Liberty.
The liberty to tinker, customize and improve is what the GPL is about and DRMing a platform to lock out tinkered versions of the software is antithetical to the prime goal of the GPL - regardless of version. The proposed v3 wording just makes that fact explicit with respect to DRM.
The farmer's quote: "It's a good tractor, but not that good."
Little does he know that his kids have been hot-rodding it and now it is equipped with a turbo-charger, racing-stripe and 44" spinners. Since they are minors he is still responsible for their use of his tractor.
Now that's just a heartless thing to say. Many good parents still lose their children, often through no fault of their own.
"Many" is a relative term. Curiously, nobody seems to be keeping statistics on this particular crime. Kind of odd considering how "popular" child abuction and murder crimes are in the news. But at least one study has been done and it indicates a rate of less than 100 per year nationwide.
I'm pretty sure that nationwide more than 100 kids die due to falling out of trees each year. So, while it certainly sucks to be one of those kids who fall out of a tree or who are kidnapped and murdered, it is not really a problem that can be described as happening to "many" parents.
P.S. - the example was a greyhound bus, for future reference.
P in this S, you self-righteous ass - greyhound DOES require photo id in order to travel.
But then you are not interested in rational discussion, only filling you mind with hate and then releasing it on any that cross your path.
You first dimwit. Your whole show of arrogance was exactly the same thing you accuse me of. The only difference is that I chose to speak plainly, no need to pussy-foot around like a fop.