Project management is already such a complex process to get right when the developers are all under one roof and able to talk to each other that it would be nearly impossible to get anything remotely like a working system from the process you described. The end result would be more like a mish-mash of routines, all written with subtle differences "standard" input/out data structures and different assumptions about requirements and behaviour.
I can only imagine how much invaluable code this company got from making this $1m offer. I can guarantee you it was probably worth a helluva lot more than $1m. But, of course, none of the other entrants received a penny. This is just a glorified example of what I described above.
I doubt that much of the code they received was particularly valuable on its own. Sure it is possible that the code might be incorporated into another project, but it is more than likely that re-inventing the wheel would be easier then re-using code that was a) not written with a plan of re-use and b) the original developers are not even around to ask about how the code works and what kind of ways it expects to interact with other code or systems. Its pretty much an all or nothing proposition - either submissions get used for what they were designed for or they are going to rot away at the bottom of some DVD-R spindle.
If so, what is the evidence? If it exists, does it outweigh the benefits?
There are no benefits to the people who have their data bought and sold. The only benefit is to the corporations doing the buying and selling.
As an exercise, pretend you had to defend Big Data. How would you do it? What do you think your opponents would argue?
I wouldn't because the only arguments for "Big Data" are the ones you've been making and they are so full of holes that I would not bother to try in the first place.
Examples please.
On average, each victim of identity theft spends $1,400 in out-of-pocket expenses and over 600 hours recovering from the crime. One common practice of those who buy from "Big Data" is to send unsolicited credit card offers. Those offers, dug out of the trash or picked right out of the mail itself, contain at a minimum name and address and indicate at least a minimum level of credit-worthiness are one of hundreds of enablers for identity theft.
A multi-million dollar industries of data collection and direct marketing completely disagrees with you. They believe personal information is a commodity to be collected, bought, and sold.
And for decades multi-million dollar industries of cigarette manufacturing completely disagreed that cigarette smoking causes cancer.
If that's the best you can do to support your position, you need to re-evaluate your beliefs.
This action is not illegal or harmful to anyone.
Not illegal YET and absolutely, provably harmful to many.
For example it is not illegal for me to own and drive a legally purchased and registered car. However it is illegal for me to drive the car in a way that violates traffic laws such as running red light.
For counter-example, in mosts states it is illegal for you to own lockpick tools, switchblade knives and machine guns. Such ownership causes no harm to anyone yet they are significant enough enablers for you to potentially do harm that your posession of them is outlawed.
Similarly your acquisition of personal information is a significant enough enabler for you to do harm to the owner of that information that such posession should be outlawed.
Any middle-of-the-road publicist could point out multiple reasons why Stallman has not (and likely will not) achieve mainstream recognition.
None of which have a thing to do with zealotry. Winning a popularity contest has nothing to do with being a zealot or not. But if it did, IBM's and HP's spending of billions of US dollars on Free software development should be sufficient validation.
In the case of the other three, the "mainstream" not only knows who they are, but "get them". Not being "gotten" by the mainstream puts one on the fringe.
They do now, they did not at the time. When MCI took on ATT and when TBS went national via a contractual loophole "the mainstream" had not heard of them before either, despite both of them having worked in their fields for years.
There are other words besides zealot to describe people who eagerly and ardently pursue something perceived as being on the fringe, but they tend to have more negative connotations.
The term zealot has enough negative connotations of its own to be simply a false description of Stallman. The most false of those connotations is that Stallman somehow does not understand what he promotes, that he has a blindspot of some sort. People who receive McArthur "genius" grants aren't zealots.
I've BEEN paid to do so since 1986, and rsts years before that.
You start with a definitive statement and then modify it by saying, "just like those three had in varying degrees". Which is it? The same or different?
Read it again, the modifier applies to "a strong business model with profound social implications" - the social implications of the changes MCI and TBS brought about are significantly larger than what MS has done so far.
The point is that all three of those men had an extreme vision for their industries that significantly large portions of the population doubted, but no one calls them zealots. The same is true of Stallman, yet people who don't understand his vision constantly label him a nut or zealot.
I'll point out that said zealotry has existed for much longer than MSFT has been concerned about FOSS as a threat. Case in point: Stallman.
Yet another high-id dotter dissing Stallman for all the wrong reasons.
Stallman is no more a zealot than Bill Gates, John Goeken or Ted Turner. Stallman has simply come up with a strong business model with profound social implications - just like those three had in varying degrees. Stallman's only difference is that he is not directly motivated by the money. While that may be heresy in America, home of the almighty dollar, it really should not be.
Dvorak is not really a crackpot leftover. He's apparently become an authoritarian, which is quite a bad thing. Originally he came up with an efficient solution to a problem created in an arbitrary manner, and he saw it fade into obscurity.
WTF are you talking about?
He's just a journalist. He's been writing basically the same column since at least the 80s.
You aren't confusing him with August Dvorak of the eponymous keyboard are you? That would be pretty damn funny.
you're argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere else or long ago thought it was good
Your argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere think it is bad then it IS bad.
You are just as guilty of generalization as I am. The original post did not specify Americans nor did it specify any sub-group of Americans - specifically just because Frist is pandering to the extremes of his party does not even mean those ideas are held by Americans in general.
This really isn't a Slashdot issue either
Your continued repetition of that thought is offensive. Social issues are of great interest to people on slashdot, ain't know way you can legitimately wall them off.
I bet you may even find the same sentences if you diff it to the other EULAs.
I bet you may even find the same sentences in the Bible and in many books of science fiction. That doesn't mean the bible is science fiction.
I'd post the sections that say we aren't liable for whatever
By any measure of common sense you aren't liable anyway, the GPL just makes it explicit.
and eula can add rights
Big deal, those rights would still be "enforceable" even if the eula was not valid, it would simply be up to the copyright owner which presumably wrote the "eula" and thus would have no interest in making an issue of the rights he already granted.
And here's killer to your arguement for adding rights, MySQL AB. If i need to explain it, you obviously have no clue.
And the utterly defeating counter to that point is PERL. If I need to explain that, you obviously have no clue. And chewbacca too.
Congradulations you just made the GPL unenforcable.
FALSE.
Copyright is a kind of "default" contract. EULAs ADD restrictons to that default contract. The GPL SUBTRACTS restrictions from that contract.
Thus, at a minimum, if no EULAs are allowed, then the default contract is still in place. Thus the GPL remains JUST as enforceable as it is today, but instead of being protected by the GPL, users would be at the mercy of the copyright owner to not prosecute based on restrictions that the GPL removes.
I would like to see protection for new business models to fund creative works. More specifically, I would like to see a safe-harbor for copyright violations of works incorporated into works released into the public domain and for the more free versions of the creative commons license. Any damages awarded for such a case would be limited to no more than the net revenue generated by the work.
This would allow a business to form enabling a work-for-hire model without fear that an accidental inclusion of an "old-style" copyrighted work would destroy the business.
For example, you record a song and it happens to include a bass-line that has been copyrighted by some music label 20 years ago. Studio time, etc costs you $600 to get the recording mixed and ready for production qualit release. You charge $1000 to release it to the public domain - 500 fans each pay $2 and so you relase it. Said big music label decides to file suit for copyright infringement, the most they can get are two things:
1) Song is "withdrawn" from the public domain. 2) $600 in damages because that was net revenue generated by the sale
This avoids the ability of the sudio to sue for $150,000 or so for every copy of the song ever made which is about what the current (USA) copyright laws allow for. $150,000 x millions of downloads would totally bankrupt any business.
So, if alternate business models are going to get off the ground, they need to be protected from legal attacks designed more to protect the current business model than to protect the artist. Changes to the law should enable creativity in art and in business, not fight it.
Jews used to practice polygamy and many muslims still do ("legally" up to 4 wives if the husband is able to financially support each of them, so none of this wife-is-another-name-for-slave business, at least in theory) and I'm pretty sure that a lot of early Christain sects had similar views. So, in a judeo-christain world, polygamy really isn't terribly extreme and offensiveness is as much in the eye of the beholder as it is in the practice itself.
For what it is worth, those charts are moderately deceptive. Like most amatuer sites, Anandtech doesn't have the equipment to measure actual cpu power consumption. So they measured the consumption of the entire system.
So, assuming they used the same system for all measurements and just swapped out the cpus, the relative differences are accurate. But you can not draw any conclusion about the absolute power requirements of the cpus based solely on Anandtech's review.
Maybe no one cares, but it would be easy to read that article and come away with the idea that the dual core cpu consumes (and thus must dissipate) 150 watts under load. While that might be in the realm of possibility for Intel's cpus which are little micro-furnaces, the AMD chips are significantly less hot than that.
Who is to say they didn't store that credit card number and ID to sell to that crime syndicate. No way of knowing.
I can absolutely know that - I used cash to make the purchase. I still had to show ID, but I was not required to use a credit card.
Whether a national ID has a scanning feature or not does not reduce the fact that my current form of ID has this magnetic strip.
Yours does, not all of them do. Just because you've been forced into a state of reduced privacy does not mean we all have. Even if we had, that does not mean we should continue to perpetuate that state of reduced security, we should be discontinuing them not mandating them.
They are criminals by definition. They broke immigration laws and entered the country illegally. Calling them undocumented workers or another PC term is intellectually dishonest.
Ever exceed the speed limit? Congratulations you, and just about every other citizen, are a criminal by definition.
It is not politically correct to use a term that reflects your feelings about the severity of the "crime." If anything, that is the exact opposite of political correctness. People who have a bug up their ass about the issue can call them wanton dangerous criminals while people who think immigration policy is no big deal can call them undocumented workers and then we can all better know each other's position than if we had simply used a rather non-descriptive catch-all term.
People infringe on copyright precisely because they don't see any repercussions for their actions. Furthermore, if people disregard intellectual property laws, of course those business models won't be profitable. My whole point was that society benefits from IP laws existing and people following them, although the laws aren't perfect and need to be changed.
The laws are both draconian and unenforceable. No matter how you change the laws, the unenforceable part will never change. Relying on unenforceable laws to support an arbitrary business model is pure folly. You can not fight human nature and win. You can try, you can make it a long, bloody battle, but in the end you will lose. You can not cite a single example in all of mankind's history that shows otherwise.
If that was true, then more people would use that system.
Again, circular reasoning proves nothing.
The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models are more lucrative.
The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models HAVE BEEN more lurcrative than traditional options. Times are changing. If they weren't changing, we would not be having this discussion because payment-pooling is a NEW option.
I can make sure the work is good before I buy it by listening to it in a store, or listening to a preview on iTunes. In the model you suggest
You can, most people don't. Even the people that do, do not "preview" the ENTIRE product before hand. Many people pre-order books, CDs and DVDs, buy movie tickets on opening night, go to concerts, susbcribe to magazines and premium cable channels. I subscribe to the Economist based on their editorial reputation. Heck, I even subscribe to Film Movement's DVD-of-the-month service based soley on their past ability to select good movies. A large amount, probably a large MAJORITY of entertainment purchasing decisions are based on the REPUTATION of the creators or service providers. Sure, some people read reviews, hear things through word of mouth, etc. But there is no better advertisement than free access to all of an artist's prior creations.
I would have to function as a venture capitalist. I don't want to do that, and neither do most people. We don't get a return on investment other than the work itself, so there is very little incentive for consumers to take that risk.
As I just demonstrated, people take equivalent risks all the time. The upside under either the current system or a work-for-hire system is that you get a good product, the downside is that you get a sucky product. That's the entire risk. If you went to the theater during open weekend for Gigli, you didn't get your money back, but you probably are going to think twice about shelling out for the next Ben Affleck movie. Under a work-for-hire system, you would have had EXACTLY the same experience.
This occurs very infrequently, if at all. If this model was as profitable as you say, they would choose this model instead.
Around and around you go with the circular reasoning - don't look at anything new because its not already old and well-understood... Mass payment pooling systems are JUST NOW on the verge of becoming possible - therefore few people have even had the chance to experiment with them. Even so, one musician has already won a grammy for an album funded in a somewhat similar fashion - jazz vocalist Maria Schneider.
The "get a new business model" argument is crap unless you want to see less creative works produced.
Have you considered that maybe we would see MORE works and MORE creativity if the current system was junked? ALL of your arguments are based on the UNPROVABLE contention that since what we have today has, to some extent, worked in the past, there can be no better way to do things in the future. The converse is also true, I can't prove that any new way would be better. But at least my proposal addresses the FUNDAMENTAL failing of the current system - that information wants to be free because it is human nature to make it so, and digital networks are the enabler for that. Your way tries to fight human nature, my way co-opts it and uses it to promote further creativity.
If this is really that lucrative of a business model, why aren't more people doing it? The reason is that it's not as profitable as traditional, intellectual property-backed models.
Just how profitable are these "traditional ip-backed models" when everyone is copying the "ip" on the net for nothing, despite it being illegal with draconian punishments to do so?
Maybe the reason more people aren't doing it yet is inertia. Intellectually, most people are still stuck in the payment via distribution system and haven't seriously considered any other option. Technologicly, the internet is still a baby. File copying has been easy to implement because there is no government involvement - money transfers is much more complicated due in part to all of the regulation, just ask paypal.
Arguing that any other approach is invalid because it is not already in use is just circular reasoning.
With this model, a creator only makes a fixed amount of money, whereas a creator can sell their work for the duration of their copyright
You are arguing that it is better to gamble on the popularity of a product after having invested in the effort to create it than it is to take a known return on an essentially risk free production? I know A LOT of investors that would love to be able to earn a guaranteed return of even just 10% a quarter.
all the proposed alternative business models have one thing in common: less profit for the creator.
I believe this to be false. The current approach encourages superstars and abject failures - for every michael jackson, there are 100,000 nobodies who gambled and lost.
I don't care about the creator, and neither does society.
I believe this to be false. Society cares about the creator immensely, the creator is effectively a brand name. If the creator has a good reputation for producing desirable work, then consumers are willing to trust that the creator's next work will be similarly desirable. To argue otherwise is to deny the obvious - Tom Cruise, Stephen King, Led Zeppelin, Quentin Tarantino - creators in all genres are just as important, if not more so, to the buying public than the most heavily promoted coroprate brands like Nike and Coke.
A work-for-hire mechanism can be at least as lucrative as the current system. Today, anyone starting out pretty much works for free - musicians either give it away on the net or give it away to the RIAA. Indie film producers are lucky to even be selected for a film festival, much less get distribution. So given that baseline, a work-for-hire model requires that initial creations be sold for little or no money in order to build a reputation for the creator. If the creator is good, he will be able to command increasingly higher fees for each new creation - not because people are necessarily willing to pay more, but because the better his stuff, the larger the pool of people who have experienced it and liked it enough to pay for the next work will be. For example, with roughly a billion people on the net, if only 0.1% think that Joe Cool's next album is worth $1 to them, that's $1,000,000 direct to Joe Cool. That's the kind of money only the super of the super-stars see on any regular basis.
it also guarantees that [insert evil corporation here] can't create a modified version of a GPLed program without releasing source code.
If we had a market in which access to source was an expected, baseline feature, then we would not need to enforce the GPL because the market would do so all on its own. Just like it is an expected baseline feature that you can open the hood on your own car and futz with the mechanicals if you so desire.
Copyright also keeps big publishers from simply printing and selling their own versions of popular books without paying the original author.
Your statement assumes that associating compensation with distribution is valid. Because the net makes distribution effectively a zero-cost operation, does it really make sense to add a fee to what is now baseline free? Perhaps the authors, and other creators, would be better off getting paid up front for the work they do in the process of creation - just like 99% of the rest of the working world.
I believe that artists, authors, and computer programmers should be able to decide how their creations are used.
Then your belief is in direct contradiction with the basis for American copyright law, the line goes thus,
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Your right to decide how your ideas are used is suppossed to end once it no longer promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. There is nothing in there about a moral right to determine the use. FWIW, moral right is a term of the art here, primarily rooted in european (as not English common-law based) copyright. If you are continental, then obviously the US constitution does not apply.
The truly chilling part was the brutal unquestioning efficiency with which the children carried out executions of prisoners.
It is a developmental thing. Kids go through stages, one big one in the pre-teen years is rigid and unquestioning obeyance of authority (the inverse of which occurs during the teen years, but then there are other methods of manipulation which work just as well, particularly if you don't care about the longevity or well-being of the teenager).
One model that is frequently suggested is that artists would distribute their albums for free as an advertisement for concerts and merchandise.
You admittedly pick ONE new model, pick it apart and use that as justification for disregarding all new models.
How about considering other models that have wider applicability? Such as group contracting - where consumers band together and pool their small sums to contract for the creation and then the end result is released to the public domain?
Such a work-for-hire model is as applicable to the limerick writer as it is to the $200M blockbuster movie - the only difference is the scale. But just as the internet destroys the current business model by making frictionless wide-scale copying feasible, it can enable such a new business model by making frictionless wide-scale payment pooling feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Now we're getting somewhere. Identity theft is a crime.
No we are not. You are arguing in circles.
See my first post about enablement, later rinse and repeat.
I've already achieved nirvana.
(d) "Hire" one person, enjoy working code.
Sounds like an urban legend.
Project management is already such a complex process to get right when the developers are all under one roof and able to talk to each other that it would be nearly impossible to get anything remotely like a working system from the process you described. The end result would be more like a mish-mash of routines, all written with subtle differences "standard" input/out data structures and different assumptions about requirements and behaviour.
I can only imagine how much invaluable code this company got from making this $1m offer. I can guarantee you it was probably worth a helluva lot more than $1m. But, of course, none of the other entrants received a penny. This is just a glorified example of what I described above.
I doubt that much of the code they received was particularly valuable on its own. Sure it is possible that the code might be incorporated into another project, but it is more than likely that re-inventing the wheel would be easier then re-using code that was a) not written with a plan of re-use and b) the original developers are not even around to ask about how the code works and what kind of ways it expects to interact with other code or systems. Its pretty much an all or nothing proposition - either submissions get used for what they were designed for or they are going to rot away at the bottom of some DVD-R spindle.
If so, what is the evidence? If it exists, does it outweigh the benefits?
There are no benefits to the people who have their data bought and sold. The only benefit is to the corporations doing the buying and selling.
As an exercise, pretend you had to defend Big Data. How would you do it? What do you think your opponents would argue?
I wouldn't because the only arguments for "Big Data" are the ones you've been making and they are so full of holes that I would not bother to try in the first place.
Examples please.
On average, each victim of identity theft spends $1,400 in out-of-pocket expenses and over 600 hours recovering from the crime. One common practice of those who buy from "Big Data" is to send unsolicited credit card offers. Those offers, dug out of the trash or picked right out of the mail itself, contain at a minimum name and address and indicate at least a minimum level of credit-worthiness are one of hundreds of enablers for identity theft.
A multi-million dollar industries of data collection and direct marketing completely disagrees with you. They believe personal information is a commodity to be collected, bought, and sold.
And for decades multi-million dollar industries of cigarette manufacturing completely disagreed that cigarette smoking causes cancer.
If that's the best you can do to support your position, you need to re-evaluate your beliefs.
This action is not illegal or harmful to anyone.
Not illegal YET and absolutely, provably harmful to many.
For example it is not illegal for me to own and drive a legally purchased and registered car. However it is illegal for me to drive the car in a way that violates traffic laws such as running red light.
For counter-example, in mosts states it is illegal for you to own lockpick tools, switchblade knives and machine guns. Such ownership causes no harm to anyone yet they are significant enough enablers for you to potentially do harm that your posession of them is outlawed.
Similarly your acquisition of personal information is a significant enough enabler for you to do harm to the owner of that information that such posession should be outlawed.
Any middle-of-the-road publicist could point out
multiple reasons why Stallman has not (and likely will not) achieve mainstream recognition.
None of which have a thing to do with zealotry. Winning a popularity contest has nothing to do with being a zealot or not. But if it did, IBM's and HP's spending of billions of US dollars on Free software development should be sufficient validation.
In the case of the other three, the "mainstream" not only knows who they are, but "get them". Not being "gotten" by the mainstream puts one on the fringe.
They do now, they did not at the time. When MCI took on ATT and when TBS went national via a contractual loophole "the mainstream" had not heard of them before either, despite both of them having worked in their fields for years.
There are other words besides zealot to describe people who eagerly and ardently pursue something perceived as being on the fringe, but they tend to have more negative connotations.
The term zealot has enough negative connotations of its own to be simply a false description of Stallman. The most false of those connotations is that Stallman somehow does not understand what he promotes, that he has a blindspot of some sort. People who receive McArthur "genius" grants aren't zealots.
Funny comment from user id 831,679.
Funny because I grok stallman and you don't?
I've paid to work with *NIX since 1983. You?
And how much did it cost you?
I've BEEN paid to do so since 1986, and rsts years before that.
You start with a definitive statement and then modify it by saying, "just like those three had in varying degrees". Which is it? The same or different?
Read it again, the modifier applies to "a strong business model with profound social implications" - the social implications of the changes MCI and TBS brought about are significantly larger than what MS has done so far.
The point is that all three of those men had an extreme vision for their industries that significantly large portions of the population doubted, but no one calls them zealots. The same is true of Stallman, yet people who don't understand his vision constantly label him a nut or zealot.
When they call your references they can get good or bad information.
Logical yes.
True no.
Welcome to America.
"Reference" or not, they can get sued for saying bad things and thus are unlikely to do so.
I'll point out that said zealotry has existed for much longer than MSFT has been concerned about FOSS as a threat. Case in point: Stallman.
Yet another high-id dotter dissing Stallman for all the wrong reasons.
Stallman is no more a zealot than Bill Gates, John Goeken or Ted Turner. Stallman has simply come up with a strong business model with profound social implications - just like those three had in varying degrees. Stallman's only difference is that he is not directly motivated by the money. While that may be heresy in America, home of the almighty dollar, it really should not be.
Dvorak is not really a crackpot leftover. He's apparently become an authoritarian, which is quite a bad thing. Originally he came up with an efficient solution to a problem created in an arbitrary manner, and he saw it fade into obscurity.
WTF are you talking about?
He's just a journalist. He's been writing basically the same column since at least the 80s.
You aren't confusing him with August Dvorak of the eponymous keyboard are you?
That would be pretty damn funny.
you're argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere else or long ago thought it was good
Your argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere think it is bad then it IS bad.
You are just as guilty of generalization as I am. The original post did not specify Americans nor did it specify any sub-group of Americans - specifically just because Frist is pandering to the extremes of his party does not even mean those ideas are held by Americans in general.
This really isn't a Slashdot issue either
Your continued repetition of that thought is offensive. Social issues are of great interest to people on slashdot, ain't know way you can legitimately wall them off.
I bet you may even find the same sentences if you diff it to the other EULAs.
I bet you may even find the same sentences in the Bible and in many books of science fiction. That doesn't mean the bible is science fiction.
I'd post the sections that say we aren't liable for whatever
By any measure of common sense you aren't liable anyway, the GPL just makes it explicit.
and eula can add rights
Big deal, those rights would still be "enforceable" even if the eula was not valid, it would simply be up to the copyright owner which presumably wrote the "eula" and thus would have no interest in making an issue of the rights he already granted.
And here's killer to your arguement for adding rights, MySQL AB. If i need to explain it, you obviously have no clue.
And the utterly defeating counter to that point is PERL. If I need to explain that, you obviously have no clue. And chewbacca too.
Congradulations you just made the GPL unenforcable.
FALSE.
Copyright is a kind of "default" contract.
EULAs ADD restrictons to that default contract.
The GPL SUBTRACTS restrictions from that contract.
Thus, at a minimum, if no EULAs are allowed, then the default contract is still in place. Thus the GPL remains JUST as enforceable as it is today, but instead of being protected by the GPL, users would be at the mercy of the copyright owner to not prosecute based on restrictions that the GPL removes.
[i]Slashbotters simply amaze me.[/i]
You are, apparently, easily entertained.
I would like to see protection for new business models to fund creative works. More specifically, I would like to see a safe-harbor for copyright violations of works incorporated into works released into the public domain and for the more free versions of the creative commons license. Any damages awarded for such a case would be limited to no more than the net revenue generated by the work.
This would allow a business to form enabling a work-for-hire model without fear that an accidental inclusion of an "old-style" copyrighted work would destroy the business.
For example, you record a song and it happens to include a bass-line that has been copyrighted by some music label 20 years ago. Studio time, etc costs you $600 to get the recording mixed and ready for production qualit release. You charge $1000 to release it to the public domain - 500 fans each pay $2 and so you relase it. Said big music label decides to file suit for copyright infringement, the most they can get are two things:
1) Song is "withdrawn" from the public domain.
2) $600 in damages because that was net revenue generated by the sale
This avoids the ability of the sudio to sue for $150,000 or so for every copy of the song ever made which is about what the current (USA) copyright laws allow for. $150,000 x millions of downloads would totally bankrupt any business.
So, if alternate business models are going to get off the ground, they need to be protected from legal attacks designed more to protect the current business model than to protect the artist. Changes to the law should enable creativity in art and in business, not fight it.
then the LDS's history of polygamy
Jews used to practice polygamy and many muslims still do ("legally" up to 4 wives if the husband is able to financially support each of them, so none of this wife-is-another-name-for-slave business, at least in theory) and I'm pretty sure that a lot of early Christain sects had similar views. So, in a judeo-christain world, polygamy really isn't terribly extreme and offensiveness is as much in the eye of the beholder as it is in the practice itself.
For what it is worth, those charts are moderately deceptive. Like most amatuer sites, Anandtech doesn't have the equipment to measure actual cpu power consumption. So they measured the consumption of the entire system.
So, assuming they used the same system for all measurements and just swapped out the cpus, the relative differences are accurate. But you can not draw any conclusion about the absolute power requirements of the cpus based solely on Anandtech's review.
Maybe no one cares, but it would be easy to read that article and come away with the idea that the dual core cpu consumes (and thus must dissipate) 150 watts under load. While that might be in the realm of possibility for Intel's cpus which are little micro-furnaces, the AMD chips are significantly less hot than that.
Who is to say they didn't store that credit card number and ID to sell to that crime syndicate. No way of knowing.
I can absolutely know that - I used cash to make the purchase. I still had to show ID, but I was not required to use a credit card.
Whether a national ID has a scanning feature or not does not reduce the fact that my current form of ID has this magnetic strip.
Yours does, not all of them do. Just because you've been forced into a state of reduced privacy does not mean we all have. Even if we had, that does not mean we should continue to perpetuate that state of reduced security, we should be discontinuing them not mandating them.
They are criminals by definition. They broke immigration laws and entered the country illegally. Calling them undocumented workers or another PC term is intellectually dishonest.
Ever exceed the speed limit? Congratulations you, and just about every other citizen, are a criminal by definition.
It is not politically correct to use a term that reflects your feelings about the severity of the "crime." If anything, that is the exact opposite of political correctness. People who have a bug up their ass about the issue can call them wanton dangerous criminals while people who think immigration policy is no big deal can call them undocumented workers and then we can all better know each other's position than if we had simply used a rather non-descriptive catch-all term.
People infringe on copyright precisely because they don't see any repercussions for their actions. Furthermore, if people disregard intellectual property laws, of course those business models won't be profitable. My whole point was that society benefits from IP laws existing and people following them, although the laws aren't perfect and need to be changed.
The laws are both draconian and unenforceable. No matter how you change the laws, the unenforceable part will never change. Relying on unenforceable laws to support an arbitrary business model is pure folly. You can not fight human nature and win. You can try, you can make it a long, bloody battle, but in the end you will lose. You can not cite a single example in all of mankind's history that shows otherwise.
If that was true, then more people would use that system.
Again, circular reasoning proves nothing.
The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models are more lucrative.
The reason artists don't use that model is because traditional models HAVE BEEN more lurcrative than traditional options. Times are changing. If they weren't changing, we would not be having this discussion because payment-pooling is a NEW option.
I can make sure the work is good before I buy it by listening to it in a store, or listening to a preview on iTunes. In the model you suggest
You can, most people don't. Even the people that do, do not "preview" the ENTIRE product before hand. Many people pre-order books, CDs and DVDs, buy movie tickets on opening night, go to concerts, susbcribe to magazines and premium cable channels. I subscribe to the Economist based on their editorial reputation. Heck, I even subscribe to Film Movement's DVD-of-the-month service based soley on their past ability to select good movies. A large amount, probably a large MAJORITY of entertainment purchasing decisions are based on the REPUTATION of the creators or service providers. Sure, some people read reviews, hear things through word of mouth, etc. But there is no better advertisement than free access to all of an artist's prior creations.
I would have to function as a venture capitalist. I don't want to do that, and neither do most people. We don't get a return on investment other than the work itself, so there is very little incentive for consumers to take that risk.
As I just demonstrated, people take equivalent risks all the time. The upside under either the current system or a work-for-hire system is that you get a good product, the downside is that you get a sucky product. That's the entire risk. If you went to the theater during open weekend for Gigli, you didn't get your money back, but you probably are going to think twice about shelling out for the next Ben Affleck movie. Under a work-for-hire system, you would have had EXACTLY the same experience.
This occurs very infrequently, if at all. If this model was as profitable as you say, they would choose this model instead.
Around and around you go with the circular reasoning - don't look at anything new because its not already old and well-understood... Mass payment pooling systems are JUST NOW on the verge of becoming possible - therefore few people have even had the chance to experiment with them. Even so, one musician has already won a grammy for an album funded in a somewhat similar fashion - jazz vocalist Maria Schneider.
The "get a new business model" argument is crap unless you want to see less creative works produced.
Have you considered that maybe we would see MORE works and MORE creativity if the current system was junked? ALL of your arguments are based on the UNPROVABLE contention that since what we have today has, to some extent, worked in the past, there can be no better way to do things in the future. The converse is also true, I can't prove that any new way would be better. But at least my proposal addresses the FUNDAMENTAL failing of the current system - that information wants to be free because it is human nature to make it so, and digital networks are the enabler for that. Your way tries to fight human nature, my way co-opts it and uses it to promote further creativity.
If this is really that lucrative of a business model, why aren't more people doing it? The reason is that it's not as profitable as traditional, intellectual property-backed models.
Just how profitable are these "traditional ip-backed models" when everyone is copying the "ip" on the net for nothing, despite it being illegal with draconian punishments to do so?
Maybe the reason more people aren't doing it yet is inertia. Intellectually, most people are still stuck in the payment via distribution system and haven't seriously considered any other option. Technologicly, the internet is still a baby. File copying has been easy to implement because there is no government involvement - money transfers is much more complicated due in part to all of the regulation, just ask paypal.
Arguing that any other approach is invalid because it is not already in use is just circular reasoning.
With this model, a creator only makes a fixed amount of money, whereas a creator can sell their work for the duration of their copyright
You are arguing that it is better to gamble on the popularity of a product after having invested in the effort to create it than it is to take a known return on an essentially risk free production? I know A LOT of investors that would love to be able to earn a guaranteed return of even just 10% a quarter.
all the proposed alternative business models have one thing in common: less profit for the creator.
I believe this to be false. The current approach encourages superstars and abject failures - for every michael jackson, there are 100,000 nobodies who gambled and lost.
I don't care about the creator, and neither does society.
I believe this to be false. Society cares about the creator immensely, the creator is effectively a brand name. If the creator has a good reputation for producing desirable work, then consumers are willing to trust that the creator's next work will be similarly desirable. To argue otherwise is to deny the obvious - Tom Cruise, Stephen King, Led Zeppelin, Quentin Tarantino - creators in all genres are just as important, if not more so, to the buying public than the most heavily promoted coroprate brands like Nike and Coke.
A work-for-hire mechanism can be at least as lucrative as the current system. Today, anyone starting out pretty much works for free - musicians either give it away on the net or give it away to the RIAA. Indie film producers are lucky to even be selected for a film festival, much less get distribution. So given that baseline, a work-for-hire model requires that initial creations be sold for little or no money in order to build a reputation for the creator. If the creator is good, he will be able to command increasingly higher fees for each new creation - not because people are necessarily willing to pay more, but because the better his stuff, the larger the pool of people who have experienced it and liked it enough to pay for the next work will be. For example, with roughly a billion people on the net, if only 0.1% think that Joe Cool's next album is worth $1 to them, that's $1,000,000 direct to Joe Cool. That's the kind of money only the super of the super-stars see on any regular basis.
If we had a market in which access to source was an expected, baseline feature, then we would not need to enforce the GPL because the market would do so all on its own. Just like it is an expected baseline feature that you can open the hood on your own car and futz with the mechanicals if you so desire.
Copyright also keeps big publishers from simply printing and selling their own versions of popular books without paying the original author.
Your statement assumes that associating compensation with distribution is valid. Because the net makes distribution effectively a zero-cost operation, does it really make sense to add a fee to what is now baseline free? Perhaps the authors, and other creators, would be better off getting paid up front for the work they do in the process of creation - just like 99% of the rest of the working world.
I believe that artists, authors, and computer programmers should be able to decide how their creations are used.
Then your belief is in direct contradiction with the basis for American copyright law, the line goes thus, Your right to decide how your ideas are used is suppossed to end once it no longer promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. There is nothing in there about a moral right to determine the use. FWIW, moral right is a term of the art here, primarily rooted in european (as not English common-law based) copyright. If you are continental, then obviously the US constitution does not apply.
The truly chilling part was the brutal unquestioning efficiency with which the children carried out executions of prisoners.
It is a developmental thing. Kids go through stages, one big one in the pre-teen years is rigid and unquestioning obeyance of authority (the inverse of which occurs during the teen years, but then there are other methods of manipulation which work just as well, particularly if you don't care about the longevity or well-being of the teenager).
It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books.
Perhaps that is so, in your country.
That doesn't mean the rest of world has been bludgeoned into agreement by your country.
One model that is frequently suggested is that artists would distribute their albums for free as an advertisement for concerts and merchandise.
You admittedly pick ONE new model, pick it apart and use that as justification for disregarding all new models.
How about considering other models that have wider applicability? Such as group contracting - where consumers band together and pool their small sums to contract for the creation and then the end result is released to the public domain?
Such a work-for-hire model is as applicable to the limerick writer as it is to the $200M blockbuster movie - the only difference is the scale. But just as the internet destroys the current business model by making frictionless wide-scale copying feasible, it can enable such a new business model by making frictionless wide-scale payment pooling feasible.