If copyright was done away with, at least in regards to code, what stops me from modifying the Linux code, compiling and selling my modified version without releasing the source?
Competition.
If everybody else releases their software in source form, but you don't, then your product is the odd man out and people are unlikely to trust in you enough to warrant spending the money. After all, if you are hiding the source, who knows what malicious code might be hidden in there, never mind the fact without source your software is severely crippled compared to software the does include the source.
Its going to be a little harder to do the long haul part of the network, since you are going to have to do a lot of hops and latency will be terrible.
Nah, just use the "trusted" anti-network to tunnel your "Alternet" packets. Not only do you get to almost the original performance of the internet, but now all Alternet packets will be encrypted and unsniffable.
Today, EDS released a report on the quality of open source software. Citing over 6,000 known bugs in KDE 3.3 versus zero known bugs in Microsoft Windows, Senior EDS Industry Analyst Joe Isuzu said, "There is no question that open source software is of very poor quality and completely unreliable, the evidence is very clear for anyone to see. Microsoft Windows is head and shoulders above the free alternatives, downhill in a hurricane."
the Australian equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, the MEAA, has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions. 'The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be inappropriate.'
I'm sure I don't have the correct terminology, but in the USA independent productions (i.e. very little, if any pay) can get exemptions from SAG which allow union actors to officially work on the project - I guess there are still some minium standards they require of the production like workmans comp.
Furthermore, union actors often work on non-union projects under a pseudonym and to the best of my knowlege. no SAG member has ever been forced out of the union for working in a non-union project.
I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success.
Or, perhaps, 9/11 has had the desired effect and further terrorist actions haven't been particularly necessary to achieve their goals.
Anecdotes aren't much to go by, here's some real numbers:
Three-quarters of the students at the country's top 146 colleges come from the richest socio-economic fourth, compared with just 3% who come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.
...
In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, "legacies" make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to be admitted than others. -- Meritocracy in America, The Economist, Dec 29th, 2004
Many of these kids were probably under enormous pressure to get in.
Interesting (to me at least) riff from a recent Economist article...
One factor contributing to the stratification of US society is precisely that enormous pressure. There is extreme pressure in competition for entrance to top schools (and then to get good jobs at top employers and then to advance up the ranks at said employers). But, this competition is primarily localized to members of the upper and upper-middle classes.
Meanwhile, American society is measurably breaking into the haves and the have-nots with a shrinking middle-class. A similar bifurcation occurred in the early 1900s, but was checked by the very people at the top who recognized that American society needs to be dynamic in order to be robust. Thus came the creation of measures of merit like the SATs.
The difference between now and then is that in the early 1900s, the upper classes easily perceived the stratification making it relatively easy to motivate people to address the problem. With the extremes of the current merit system, all the upper-classes perceive is extreme competition - but only among themselves. From their perpsective it is still a merit based system. But when it takes a $90K prep-school and a $10K SAT-prep course plus a "legacy" contribution to gain entrance to a top-school, we are very close to where we were at the start of the 20th century -- excluding huge swathes of society from the opportunity to advance themselves.
One nice side note (hopefully) - since it's government funded through NASA, does this mean this work won't be patented and re-sold in the market for an even higher price than it will already cost?
Don't count on it - NASA "technology transfer" usually means paying a contractor to develop something and then letting the contractor keep all the rights to the work funded by taxpayers.
We actually benefitted from this once upon a time. I'm fuzzy on the details but I believe Russ Nelson developed some of the early ethernet drivers for linux as a NASA contractor and was able to release them under the GPL precisely because he had been able to maintain ownership of the copyright on them. I've heard similar stories about a lot of the original beowulf work, except in them, NASA management(?) was actively looking to give the work to a close-sourced shop but were thwarted by the legitimate GPLing of said work.
Of course that's all rumour and conjecture, but of course this is slashdot too.
Gulliver's Travels was more than just fiction. It was political satire. Gulliver represented Great Britain and his experience in Lilliputia was Swift's commentary on how Great Britain was on its way to ending up not so great.
Given how GB has declined over the last century, looks like Swift had a pretty good point. Not that some short-sighted, randian slashdork could be expected to have an inkling about actual history or western culture.
Often they have this checkbox saying 'inform me of future products' or similar that you have to uuncheck, do so if provided, if not, and f they are not absolutely clear that they will not mail commercial junk, do not do business with them.
Such checkboxes, privacy policies and whatnot are meaningless.
They may with absolute good faith say that they won't spam me today. But tomorrow, when they get a new director of marketing, or when their revenues take a surprise dip, or whatever flavor of excuse pops into their heads, there is nothing preventing them from changing the policy.
However, the main problem is the Writers Guild of Great Britain, which is extremely upset that the BBC plans to offer these shows without paying royalties to the writers.
The Writers Guild needs to wake up and smell the internet.
They can negotiate a single up-front payment for their work and let the BBC officially distribute the results of their work. Or they can "hold out" for royalties that will never come as a million p2pirates unofficially distribute the results of their work.
Personally I would find that useful. Way too many companies automatically sign me up for their spam-lists just because I've made a purchase with them. I consider those messages to be spam, "pre-existing business relationship" or not, I didn't ask for them - I gave them an email address for order status updates, period.
I've never even been to cloudmark's web page, but seems to me that if you actively want specific marketing email they ought to have a whitelist option.
But, your honor, I'm not a Con Artist, I'm a professional Social Engineer!
You are better off as an artist.
As a social engineering, your socializing will just be outsourced to Indians in bollywood. As an artist, your work is eligible for protection under the DMCA. Slap some security on it and nobody will be able to legally access your work and thus nobody will be able to legally prosecute you.
Might want to start a trade association to bank you up - CAAA - Con Artists Association of America.
Who, aside from perhaps RMS, is calling MS evil for trying to make money?
Dude, you seriously mis-represent RMS by even making that suggestion. RMS is not not some commie hippie. He has no problem with, in fact he ENCOURAGES, people and companies making money by selling software.
Sure, patent law has existed for years but software patent laws are not currently recognised in Europe. If they do get through, by the same logic, no software written before those laws were enforced can come under them - is that the case or am I missing something?
Yep you are missing something. No shame though, it is really stupid. What you are missing is that the patent offices of the various member states have been granting software patents for years now. The patents are currently unenforceable, but they do exist.
If the law, as written, is passed, all those patents will immediately come into force. It will be a free-for-all - the ultimate "submarine patent" situation.
WTF were those patent offices thinking? I don't know, but sure does seem messed up.
People watch TV and they aren't going to stop just because "they want to download". Personally, I don't know anyone outside of a handfull of friends that care about downloading shows or even watching them timeshifted.
I feel that we are standing before the knee in the curve on this. In the last week I've had requests from three friends for me to show them how to use bittorrent to find shows that they missed the night before. They didn't know it was bittorrent, they just had heard you could do it and wanted to know how.
These three people are not hardcore internet geeks, two are women. They all read email, browse the web, and yes they all have tivos or replaytvs, so they do time-shifting already. But when somebody mentions tivo on Leno/Letterman/etc at least once or twice a month, I think we are at the point where timeshifting has entered the mainstream consciousness.
Another year or two without significant legal intervention and downloading tv will be just as much in the mainstream consciousness.
Most ISPs are NOT common carriers, unless they are an ILEC or CLEC.
But the only ISPs blocking VOIP are ILECs and CLECs and it makes sense that they would WANT to block VOIP because they have a legacy market (POTS) that they wish to protect. ISPs that don't also sell POTS have little to no financial incentive to block VOIP.
Also I love my.sig , its like a magnet for grammar nazis *g*
There is a difference between a few simple spelling or grammar errors and writing that is so incomprehensible that nobody can understand your point. People who complain about the former are indeed "nazis" but the people who complain about the later are telling you something valuable - that your point is not getting across, that you just wasted your time posting and the time of hundreds of people who read what you wrote but could not understand it.
The problem with a pay per view model is that we will still have "pirates" distributing the content for free because - A) it is human nature to seek the best deal (free market principles) and B) the Internet is designed to make information sharing as cheap as possible. Thus a pay per view model will not alleviate the problem of piracy.
I propose a comission model.
First some background info on TV production in the USA:
"Top-tier" 30 minute show costs ~$2M per episode to produce.
"Top-tier" 60 minute show costs ~$4M per episode to produce.
Almost all shows are deficit funded - that means bank loans to fund production costs which are more than the income generated by the first airing of each episode.
Deficit funded shows only become profitable in syndication (if someone has some hard numbers for the revenue generated by TV on DVD sales, PLEASE POST)
A show must run for at least 4, and more generally 5 seasons, before it is elligible for syndication (you need X number of episodes before syndication is really feasible - just look at Star Trek Enterprise, they waited for the 4th season before cancelling it because they know they can still syndicate it and make their money back there.).
More than 80% of shows never make it to a 4th season.
Many shows that do rack up enough episodes for syndication are still not suitable for other reasons - like not being episodic (think 24 - it is unlikely to be syndicated) or being to violent or adult (e.g. Miami Vice)
Add all that up and you have an industry that is much like cinema - they need that 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 mega-hit just to break even on all the money losing shows. This fact is probably the biggest reason you see networks cancel promising shows after less than one season without giving them a chance to "find their niche."
So, if a production company could be guaranteed a reasonable (say 10-20%) profit immediately upon release of each episode, that would be a huge change in the way hollywood does business. It would allow more niche programming, one might even say more intelligent programming because the need to pander to the lowest common denominator in order to appeal to the largest possible audience would be gone. All you need to do is keep enough of an audience to proftiably fund the next episode.
But, how do you guarantee a profit on each episode? Commission.
Just as the net makes it easy for the pirates to share a show with thousands and even millions of their best friends on the net, so to can the net bring together millions of people to hire the production company to produce each episode.
Let's take Star Trek Enterprise as an example again. Look at the price on DVD for one season of Star Trek Voyager - MSRP is $140 and street is no better than $90. I'm going to guess and say there are 22 episodes per season - that's over $4 per episode. Viewership numbers for first run episodes of Enterprise in the USA are in the 3 million range - that ignores viewers in other countries and during any second showings (if there are any) later in the week.
For the sake of argument, let us say every one of those 3M viewers were to pony up an average of $1.50 per episode. That would produce $4.5M - enough to pay for $4M in production costs with ~13% return on investment in less than a month. In return, the people who paid for the production of the show would now own it - since there are so many owners, it is simpler to just make it public domain and not worry any more about the ownership details - we would all own it.
There are a couple of secondary benefits of releasing it to the public domain -- for both the production company and for society at large:
Every show becomes free advertising to "hook" new viewers on the series and get them to pay for the production of new episodes
Since the show is not copyrighted, you don't have to worry about pirates, instead of "stealing" revenue from the creators these same peop
The jury is still out on OSS business models. So far, no OSS company has seen wild success.
HP saw about $1.4B in revenue and IBM had about $1.2B in revenue during 2004 solely from linux-based server sales. That seems like a pretty successful OSS business model to me.
Slashdot Mirror
If copyright was done away with, at least in regards to code, what stops me from modifying the Linux code, compiling and selling my modified version without releasing the source?
Competition.
If everybody else releases their software in source form, but you don't, then your product is the odd man out and people are unlikely to trust in you enough to warrant spending the money. After all, if you are hiding the source, who knows what malicious code might be hidden in there, never mind the fact without source your software is severely crippled compared to software the does include the source.
Its going to be a little harder to do the long haul part of the network, since you are going to have to do a lot of hops and latency will be terrible.
Nah, just use the "trusted" anti-network to tunnel your "Alternet" packets. Not only do you get to almost the original performance of the internet, but now all Alternet packets will be encrypted and unsniffable.
I could crack this in 5 seconds with your pay stub on your desk, and your address book on your desktop.
But yet you still can't seem to crack the secret code known as humor.
KDE 3.4 weighs in at 6,500+ bug fixes,
Today, EDS released a report on the quality of open source software.
Citing over 6,000 known bugs in KDE 3.3 versus zero known bugs in Microsoft Windows, Senior EDS Industry Analyst Joe Isuzu said, "There is no question that open source software is of very poor quality and completely unreliable, the evidence is very clear for anyone to see. Microsoft Windows is head and shoulders above the free alternatives, downhill in a hurricane."
the Australian equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, the MEAA, has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions. 'The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be inappropriate.'
I'm sure I don't have the correct terminology, but in the USA independent productions (i.e. very little, if any pay) can get exemptions from SAG which allow union actors to officially work on the project - I guess there are still some minium standards they require of the production like workmans comp.
Furthermore, union actors often work on non-union projects under a pseudonym and to the best of my knowlege. no SAG member has ever been forced out of the union for working in a non-union project.
Here is the most detailed explanation of the facts of the case that I have found.
I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success.
Or, perhaps, 9/11 has had the desired effect and further terrorist actions haven't been particularly necessary to achieve their goals.
Many of these kids were probably under enormous pressure to get in.
Interesting (to me at least) riff from a recent Economist article...
One factor contributing to the stratification of US society is precisely that enormous pressure. There is extreme pressure in competition for entrance to top schools (and then to get good jobs at top employers and then to advance up the ranks at said employers). But, this competition is primarily localized to members of the upper and upper-middle classes.
Meanwhile, American society is measurably breaking into the haves and the have-nots with a shrinking middle-class. A similar bifurcation occurred in the early 1900s, but was checked by the very people at the top who recognized that American society needs to be dynamic in order to be robust. Thus came the creation of measures of merit like the SATs.
The difference between now and then is that in the early 1900s, the upper classes easily perceived the stratification making it relatively easy to motivate people to address the problem. With the extremes of the current merit system, all the upper-classes perceive is extreme competition - but only among themselves. From their perpsective it is still a merit based system. But when it takes a $90K prep-school and a $10K SAT-prep course plus a "legacy" contribution to gain entrance to a top-school, we are very close to where we were at the start of the 20th century -- excluding huge swathes of society from the opportunity to advance themselves.
One nice side note (hopefully) - since it's government funded through NASA, does this mean this work won't be patented and re-sold in the market for an even higher price than it will already cost?
Don't count on it - NASA "technology transfer" usually means paying a contractor to develop something and then letting the contractor keep all the rights to the work funded by taxpayers.
We actually benefitted from this once upon a time. I'm fuzzy on the details but I believe Russ Nelson developed some of the early ethernet drivers for linux as a NASA contractor and was able to release them under the GPL precisely because he had been able to maintain ownership of the copyright on them. I've heard similar stories about a lot of the original beowulf work, except in them, NASA management(?) was actively looking to give the work to a close-sourced shop but were thwarted by the legitimate GPLing of said work.
Of course that's all rumour and conjecture, but of course this is slashdot too.
Yes, that was some nice fiction, wasn't it ?
Gulliver's Travels was more than just fiction. It was political satire. Gulliver represented Great Britain and his experience in Lilliputia was Swift's commentary on how Great Britain was on its way to ending up not so great.
Given how GB has declined over the last century, looks like Swift had a pretty good point. Not that some short-sighted, randian slashdork could be expected to have an inkling about actual history or western culture.
Often they have this checkbox saying 'inform me of future products' or similar that you have to uuncheck, do so if provided, if not, and f they are not absolutely clear that they will not mail commercial junk, do not do business with them.
Such checkboxes, privacy policies and whatnot are meaningless.
They may with absolute good faith say that they won't spam me today. But tomorrow, when they get a new director of marketing, or when their revenues take a surprise dip, or whatever flavor of excuse pops into their heads, there is nothing preventing them from changing the policy.
However, the main problem is the Writers Guild of Great Britain, which is extremely upset that the BBC plans to offer these shows without paying royalties to the writers.
The Writers Guild needs to wake up and smell the internet.
They can negotiate a single up-front payment for their work and let the BBC officially distribute the results of their work. Or they can "hold out" for royalties that will never come as a million p2pirates unofficially distribute the results of their work.
Personally I would find that useful. Way too many companies automatically sign me up for their spam-lists just because I've made a purchase with them. I consider those messages to be spam, "pre-existing business relationship" or not, I didn't ask for them - I gave them an email address for order status updates, period.
I've never even been to cloudmark's web page, but seems to me that if you actively want specific marketing email they ought to have a whitelist option.
But, your honor, I'm not a Con Artist, I'm a professional Social Engineer!
You are better off as an artist.
As a social engineering, your socializing will just be outsourced to Indians in bollywood. As an artist, your work is eligible for protection under the DMCA. Slap some security on it and nobody will be able to legally access your work and thus nobody will be able to legally prosecute you.
Might want to start a trade association to bank you up - CAAA - Con Artists Association of America.
Who, aside from perhaps RMS, is calling MS evil for trying to make money?
Dude, you seriously mis-represent RMS by even making that suggestion. RMS is not not some commie hippie. He has no problem with, in fact he ENCOURAGES, people and companies making money by selling software.
"I lost my virginity, but I still have the box that it came in"
That sig is just so wrong in so many ways.
Sure, patent law has existed for years but software patent laws are not currently recognised in Europe. If they do get through, by the same logic, no software written before those laws were enforced can come under them - is that the case or am I missing something?
Yep you are missing something. No shame though, it is really stupid.
What you are missing is that the patent offices of the various member states have been granting software patents for years now. The patents are currently unenforceable, but they do exist.
If the law, as written, is passed, all those patents will immediately come into force. It will be a free-for-all - the ultimate "submarine patent" situation.
WTF were those patent offices thinking? I don't know, but sure does seem messed up.
People watch TV and they aren't going to stop just because "they want to download". Personally, I don't know anyone outside of a handfull of friends that care about downloading shows or even watching them timeshifted.
I feel that we are standing before the knee in the curve on this. In the last week I've had requests from three friends for me to show them how to use bittorrent to find shows that they missed the night before. They didn't know it was bittorrent, they just had heard you could do it and wanted to know how.
These three people are not hardcore internet geeks, two are women. They all read email, browse the web, and yes they all have tivos or replaytvs, so they do time-shifting already. But when somebody mentions tivo on Leno/Letterman/etc at least once or twice a month, I think we are at the point where timeshifting has entered the mainstream consciousness.
Another year or two without significant legal intervention and downloading tv will be just as much in the mainstream consciousness.
Most ISPs are NOT common carriers, unless they are an ILEC or CLEC.
But the only ISPs blocking VOIP are ILECs and CLECs and it makes sense that they would WANT to block VOIP because they have a legacy market (POTS) that they wish to protect. ISPs that don't also sell POTS have little to no financial incentive to block VOIP.
I sometimes wonder if it is ethical to attract the employees of a rival organization (maybe by offering better perks)
Poaching may or may not be ethical.
But,"turnabout is fair play," or in other cliche, "what's good for the goose is good for gander."
See: Borland Brain Drain Continues
Also I love my .sig , its like a magnet for grammar nazis *g*
There is a difference between a few simple spelling or grammar errors and writing that is so incomprehensible that nobody can understand your point. People who complain about the former are indeed "nazis" but the people who complain about the later are telling you something valuable - that your point is not getting across, that you just wasted your time posting and the time of hundreds of people who read what you wrote but could not understand it.
I propose a comission model.
First some background info on TV production in the USA:
Add all that up and you have an industry that is much like cinema - they need that 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 mega-hit just to break even on all the money losing shows. This fact is probably the biggest reason you see networks cancel promising shows after less than one season without giving them a chance to "find their niche."
So, if a production company could be guaranteed a reasonable (say 10-20%) profit immediately upon release of each episode, that would be a huge change in the way hollywood does business. It would allow more niche programming, one might even say more intelligent programming because the need to pander to the lowest common denominator in order to appeal to the largest possible audience would be gone. All you need to do is keep enough of an audience to proftiably fund the next episode.
But, how do you guarantee a profit on each episode? Commission.
Just as the net makes it easy for the pirates to share a show with thousands and even millions of their best friends on the net, so to can the net bring together millions of people to hire the production company to produce each episode.
Let's take Star Trek Enterprise as an example again. Look at the price on DVD for one season of Star Trek Voyager - MSRP is $140 and street is no better than $90. I'm going to guess and say there are 22 episodes per season - that's over $4 per episode. Viewership numbers for first run episodes of Enterprise in the USA are in the 3 million range - that ignores viewers in other countries and during any second showings (if there are any) later in the week.
For the sake of argument, let us say every one of those 3M viewers were to pony up an average of $1.50 per episode. That would produce $4.5M - enough to pay for $4M in production costs with ~13% return on investment in less than a month. In return, the people who paid for the production of the show would now own it - since there are so many owners, it is simpler to just make it public domain and not worry any more about the ownership details - we would all own it.
There are a couple of secondary benefits of releasing it to the public domain -- for both the production company and for society at large:
Doesn't it sound strange to you?
You sure got that right, what the heck did you just say?
The jury is still out on OSS business models. So far, no OSS company has seen wild success.
HP saw about $1.4B in revenue and IBM had about $1.2B in revenue during 2004 solely from linux-based server sales. That seems like a pretty successful OSS business model to me.