> "How is breathing air without paying the trees that scrubbed the CO2 out of it anything other than personal greed?"
So, in your view, musicians, authors, software developers, movie and TV creators are just like trees - who neither desire payment, nor have a need to buy food or shelter? Maybe if my grocery store didn't require payment for food, my local auto-dealer would just give me free cars, and my mortgage company would just forgive my mortgage then I could afford to make software for your personal entertainment. Out of curiosity, what do you do, and what do you think of people who think you shouldn't be paid for doing it?
It's also worth pointing out that their pricing has changed over time:
Current webpage: (http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php)
"Price* $54M - $59.5M *Standard launch prices for 2013"
Their webpage on Jan 2, 2010: (http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20100102224858/http://spacex.com/falcon9.php)
Pricing:
SpaceX offers open and fixed pricing that is the same for all customers, including a best price guarantee. Modest discounts are available for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases. A half bay flight of Falcon 9 is available to accommodate customers with payloads in between Falcon 1 and 9.
Mission Type Price*
LEO (s/c < 80% capacity) $44M
LEO (s/c > 80% capacity) $49.5M
GTO (s/c < 3,000 kg)** $44M
GTO $49.5M
*Standard Launch Services Pricing through 12/31/09.
What's funny is that I read down your list and got to "Developer Friendly Free PHP5 OOP Codebase", and expected it to be part of your larger list. (Gee, climate change is responsible for a free php5 codebase? That doesn't sound too bad.)
"What Happened To the Climate Refugees?" Easy, they disappeared to the same place as all the "I'm going to go John Galt" Republicans complaining about socialism (even though taxes on the rich are much lower than they were through most of the Cold War).
"And we've just had the two coldest winters in decades/centuries here in Europe (and Northern America)... So much for global warming. IMHO of course."
No kidding! They keep telling me that summer is coming, too, but we just had some really cold days here. So much for the "summer is coming" crowd.
"Forget solar power and wind as they're both unreliable and requires so many windmills and solar farms just to cover our current needs that every square mile of the Earth will be filled with them."
No kidding. I mean, the earth has 148,940,000 km of land, and we'd need "496,905 square kilometers to power the world with solar energy" (http://www.greencrawler.com/blog/?p=1513), with a infographic of wind and solar power (http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021@N00/3895429285/sizes/l/in/photostream/) That's the whole surface of the earth, right?
To be fair, if you really were a terrorist carrying something (a knife or gun or bomb), I think you'd complain, too. Just like people carrying drugs in their cars might suddenly get angry and combative with police about being pulled over "for no good reason". I suppose the relevant question is: are there too many false positives (caused by ordinary passengers getting legitimately angry over an overzealous TSA) to be of much value. Certainly, if the police were pulling people over all the time to search their car, they'd start getting a lot more false positives (i.e. people complaining about being illegitimately pulled over so the police can rummage through their stuff and make them late).
And it's obvious to us that people like Lee should realize that getting a pirate compilation from her friend is the same thing that a lot of us do on the Internet with music files. But it's absolutely not obvious to her (at least, I assume, from the obvious dissonance between her actions and her words).
That's basically true. Although, things are a whole lot better for businesses if people are getting limited compilations of music, rather than going out and just pirating it off the internet. Why do I say that? It's because the transaction is very limited when someone gives you music - you're not getting the music you're after, you're getting maybe one or two songs from a musician (which potentially gives you an incentive to buy more), you're getting introduced to new music you didn't pick for yourself (which might cause you to go buy more), and the exchange is limited between a few friends which requires some time. (Copying each other's hard-drives full of music is a different issue, of course.) When you go and get it off the internet, then none of that applies because the minute you want more of that artist, you can just go and pirate the rest of their stuff. That's why I don't really look at music compilations passed between friends or handed out at weddings as being in the same league as full-scale piracy. I know people who, because of their access to piracy, think that paying for anything digital is a ridiculous waste of money. The scale of the piracy matters, just as taking a pen from someone's desk and not returning it isn't a huge deal, but we'd all agree that going to the supply closet and cleaning out entire boxes of pens is a different issue -- even though the only difference is the scale of the theft.
It seems to me that "independent distributors" will end up having all the same problems with piracy that big companies do. The only thing that will give is the amount of money going into creating them in the first place. If 90% of the public pirates, then the investment put into creating books, music, software, etc will also be forced to decline, which generally means poorer quality and more bugs. I see things unraveling and the public being unhappy with the result. I hope you like fan fiction and YouTube videos.
> "Plus he can sell his music DRM-free and at a low price (killing the incentive to pirate)"
To be fair, any price above $0 is an incentive to pirate. I know people who, because they learned how to pirate, regard paying any money for anything digital as the equivalent of throwing money in the trash.
Now, of course, the "music industry" isn't just recorded music. It's also concerts, and those have been rising, right? Yes, but certainly not enough to makeup for the shortfall. According to this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16507.pdf), the number of concerts in the US in 2002 was 22,033, an average of 2,459.34 tickets sold per concert at an average price of $36.02. That adds up to $1,950,449,292. That's $1.95 billion dollars. In order to makeup for the shortfall in record sales, concert revenues would need to be topping $12 billion, which I highly doubt.
I think it's pretty much a cliche that people don't like 'new music' as they get older, and argue that music was much better when they were young. My own interpretation is that young people have young, impressionable brains, they absorb the music of their generation, they like it, and as their brains start to harden up, they're dismissive of the 'new stuff' because it's different from the stuff they absorbed when they were young and impressionable.
Sales of recorded music in the year 1999: over $17 billion/year. Sales of recorded music in 2008: around $8 billion/year. It's been dropping fast, and by 2008, sales were less than half of what they were 9 years earlier. Sure, you might be able to argue that there "never been proven that the internet has had ANY negative effects" - as in "you can't prove that it was the internet, as opposed to 'everyone decided to stop buying music and spend money on other things", but I think the trends are a little more than suggestive. I'd be willing to bet that the last two or three years have also seen a decline - how do I know? My amazing crystal ball. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/the-death-of-the-music-industry/
Oh, hey, I found an updated chart, with numbers upto 2010 and adjustments for inflation and population. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, you can see that recorded music peaked around 1999 with $71/year per capita, and now it's down to $26/year per capita. Another interesting fact: Napster was released in June 1999. Coincidence? http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
Having 101 million viewers doesn't mean that the viewers actually liked it.
Somebody posted it on facebook with a comment about how "I can't believe kids actually listen to this crap", which showed up in my news feed. I watched it. My overall reaction was something along the lines of "well... if you try to ignore the lyrics, her voice, and the video, it's actually almost bearable."
Indeed. Here's what YouTube says: 267,472 likes, 2,041,843 dislikes. That's the most skewed ratio of likes to dislikes I've ever seen - 9 "dislikes" for every "like".
Brad Wardell has had a huge chip on his shoulder about Steam for a long time. He never seemed to miss a chance to criticize it, and seemed on his blog to continually stress out about Steam and his own competing product, Impulse (which was recently sold to GameStop). So, yeah, Brad Wardell is a little bit biased on this issue. Based on his longstanding battle against them, I have a hard time believing that he's going to give an objective assessment of Steam, even after he sold-off Impulse.
"'Access to the Web is now a human right,' he said. 'It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.'""
A right? In what sense? Certainly, he could make the same argument about telephones and cars - people without them will be at a disadvantage. Are those "a right" as well, now? I also have a problem with him comparing it to water. For one thing, I think the government should - in limited circumstances - be allowed to deprive criminals of the "right" to internet access (I'm thinking primarily of convicted hackers and people convicted of child-porn). Further, if the jails and prisons decide not to allow prisoners access to the internet, I'm fine with that. Suggesting it's "a right" means the government *has* to provide prisoners with internet access. On the other hand, I don't think the government should ever be allowed to deprive someone of water. Even if you're in prison, the government has to provide you with water.
"Bill Gates may have been a decent enough fellow at one time, but even he wanted to RUIN Java as he saw it as a threat to his empire. Really. The man was already worth more than a billion and he wanted more, more, moar."
I don't think it's because their greed is boundless.
I think it's for a few different reasons: people get used to whatever their current situation is. This is known as "anchoring" - which is comparing your situation to whatever your situation was. Are you going up or are you going down? People often imagine themselves being very generous when they imagine themselves in the role of someone much richer - but that's because, for us, that extra money seems like a windfall, and people are always much more generous with windfalls (there's plenty of psychological studies that show that people treat windfalls differently than "earned money"). People in third-world countries often blame people in the first world, too, for not helping them out more - in their perception, we always want more, more, more so we can buy a bigger house, better car, newest gadgets while they're starving, having trouble getting clean water, or getting education. To them, the greed of everyone in the middle and upper classes in the developed world - also seems boundless.
Also, people don't want to lose. Once you're on top, you don't want to be overthrown by a threat you could've/should've stopped. I mean, if a guy rises to the top and becomes CEO and earns tens of millions of dollars, he still doesn't want to get disgraced by having some upstart middle-manager come around, knock him over, and take his position out from underneath him. Even if the CEO earned more money than he'll ever spend, there's still the disgrace of "losing", of not stopping a threat that ultimately knocked him out of the game. In a lot of cases, these are the people who acted shrewdly their whole lives to get where they are, they're in the habit of countering threats, there's a certain pride in being able to navigate the strategic landscape and win, but now they're supposed to turn off that ingrained habit and allow themselves to be dethroned because they've "earned enough". For many rich people, money is a way of keeping score.
Maybe you need to look around a little more. For example, look at the camcorder section of Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/photo/172421). Flip currently has the #2 best selling camcorder at Amazon, plus they hold another 6 spots in the top 20.
Dear Slashdot. Both the article you link to and the summary itself are clearly uninformed flamebait. You can do better. I would post a much longer comment disputing both the claim that Google will destroy Film and Music and the counter-claim that defending copyright makes you a "luddite". However, the summary text certainly doesn't invite reasoned discussion, and I'm not going to bother feeding the trolls.
"If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent."
First of all, you're graded on getting the answer right (often including showing how you arrived at your answer), not on your agreement with your classmates. If 90% of your classmates got the same wrong answer, you aren't "intelligent" for getting the same answer as they did. Second, if everyone in your class gets the same answer, then something is very wrong - probably the course-work is way too easy.
"For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith."
By that definition, almost everything is "faith", including history. I've never seen the Roman Empire. I never met Abraham Lincoln. Heck, I've never even seen modern-day China. Some "expert" told me these things existed. Accepting that history is "faith" leads to the erroneous conclusion that historical knowledge is no better than religious faith in tree spirits or Zeus. Perhaps the distinction is that I trust that history professors aren't lying and I trust their method for arriving at the truth (same for science). On the other hand, religious knowledge often has a poor foundation and different religions often contradict each other (meaning at least one of them, and probably both, is wrong about that particular point).
What a retarded premise. So what: you can't get your music and movies for free? What "tech innovation" have they stopped? The super-duper holograph audio/video machine? Even the examples in the story are pathetically weak - the RIAA tried to eliminate the MP3 - guess what? The MP3 still exists, and even if it didn't, some audio-compression format would have to exist. And spotify already has a deal with the record companies in the US (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20040498-17.html). Sorry, but the two items in the summary are just an unnatural mashup of two things that Slashdotters care about: tech innovation and hating the RIAA/MPAA. For some reason (probably their rage against the RIAA/MPAA and the RIAA/MPAA's attack on "getting free entertainment") the commenters can't see past the fact that the argument doesn't actually make sense. Is this April 1st again or something?
FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.
Yes, "free" as in the concept of freedom or liberty, not software at no charge or profit.
You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it.
Oh, I see you're in marketing . ..
Or maybe you're the one in marketing. It's completely obvious that the phrase "free as in freedom, not free as in beer" is a flat-out false statement. It be accurate, it should be restated as "free as in freedom, AND free as in beer". Here's what the FSF says:
"When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”"
Notice the phrase "to redistribute copies" - that's "free as in beer". The FSF wants to paint is as a "freedom" issue when they're also smuggling in "free" under that banner.
Whether it was a "license" or a "copy", it's still subject to copyright law. Afterall, when you buy a copy, you still have limited rights to what you're allowed to do with it - e.g. you can't make a thousand copies and sell them in stores or on the street, even though it's "yours". Effectively, copyright is in some ways like a license, even if you saw no EULA.
I hope I'm wrong but I find it entirely credible that in the not so near but also not too distant future writing programs -- be it for yourself, for OSS, or for small commerce -- will become an unlawful underground activity. All software and information will be controlled by a small group of huge stock enterprises, the sole survivors of the first international patent and copyright war. Unless they work for one of those giants, programmers will have to meet conspiratively in old cellars, private apartments, and unknown bars but often these meetings, which are only announced by mouth to mouth propaganda, will be interrupted and dispersed by violent police raids, often resulting in people getting killed, arrested, or being sued for statutory damages of 75 trillion dollar.
Hopefully, if this is going to happen it will be a bit like Half Life 2 (except, perhaps, for the aliens).
Nice, but unlikely due to patents actually having a reasonable shelf life as opposed to copyright which can go on seemingly forever (disney).
And that scenario is unlikely to happen with copyrights, since copyright really just covers using someone else's work in your own product. It's pretty hard to violate copyright unless you're playing fast and loose with other people's copyrighted material. It's not like someone sitting in their basement writing software is going to accidentally duplicate 100,000+ lines of code, or reproduce word-for-word an entire chapter of a Harry Potter novel on accident.
I especially like this part: " I find it entirely credible that in the not so near but also not too distant future writing programs -- be it for yourself, for OSS, or for small commerce -- will become an unlawful underground activity... Unless they work for one of those giants, programmers will have to meet conspiratively in old cellars, private apartments, and unknown bars but often these meetings" Those programmers can't run afoul of copyright law unless what they're doing is intentionally integrating other people's code into their own products.
Not a european developer's nemesis. Because, software patents are not recognized there, due to higher level of common sense and less greedy control over society. "
Slashdot Mirror
> "How is breathing air without paying the trees that scrubbed the CO2 out of it anything other than personal greed?"
So, in your view, musicians, authors, software developers, movie and TV creators are just like trees - who neither desire payment, nor have a need to buy food or shelter? Maybe if my grocery store didn't require payment for food, my local auto-dealer would just give me free cars, and my mortgage company would just forgive my mortgage then I could afford to make software for your personal entertainment. Out of curiosity, what do you do, and what do you think of people who think you shouldn't be paid for doing it?
It's also worth pointing out that their pricing has changed over time:
Current webpage: (http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php)
Their webpage on Jan 2, 2010: (http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20100102224858/http://spacex.com/falcon9.php)
What's funny is that I read down your list and got to "Developer Friendly Free PHP5 OOP Codebase", and expected it to be part of your larger list. (Gee, climate change is responsible for a free php5 codebase? That doesn't sound too bad.)
"What Happened To the Climate Refugees?" Easy, they disappeared to the same place as all the "I'm going to go John Galt" Republicans complaining about socialism (even though taxes on the rich are much lower than they were through most of the Cold War).
"And we've just had the two coldest winters in decades/centuries here in Europe (and Northern America)... So much for global warming. IMHO of course."
No kidding! They keep telling me that summer is coming, too, but we just had some really cold days here. So much for the "summer is coming" crowd.
"Forget solar power and wind as they're both unreliable and requires so many windmills and solar farms just to cover our current needs that every square mile of the Earth will be filled with them."
No kidding. I mean, the earth has 148,940,000 km of land, and we'd need "496,905 square kilometers to power the world with solar energy" (http://www.greencrawler.com/blog/?p=1513), with a infographic of wind and solar power (http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021@N00/3895429285/sizes/l/in/photostream/) That's the whole surface of the earth, right?
To be fair, if you really were a terrorist carrying something (a knife or gun or bomb), I think you'd complain, too. Just like people carrying drugs in their cars might suddenly get angry and combative with police about being pulled over "for no good reason". I suppose the relevant question is: are there too many false positives (caused by ordinary passengers getting legitimately angry over an overzealous TSA) to be of much value. Certainly, if the police were pulling people over all the time to search their car, they'd start getting a lot more false positives (i.e. people complaining about being illegitimately pulled over so the police can rummage through their stuff and make them late).
That's basically true. Although, things are a whole lot better for businesses if people are getting limited compilations of music, rather than going out and just pirating it off the internet. Why do I say that? It's because the transaction is very limited when someone gives you music - you're not getting the music you're after, you're getting maybe one or two songs from a musician (which potentially gives you an incentive to buy more), you're getting introduced to new music you didn't pick for yourself (which might cause you to go buy more), and the exchange is limited between a few friends which requires some time. (Copying each other's hard-drives full of music is a different issue, of course.) When you go and get it off the internet, then none of that applies because the minute you want more of that artist, you can just go and pirate the rest of their stuff. That's why I don't really look at music compilations passed between friends or handed out at weddings as being in the same league as full-scale piracy. I know people who, because of their access to piracy, think that paying for anything digital is a ridiculous waste of money. The scale of the piracy matters, just as taking a pen from someone's desk and not returning it isn't a huge deal, but we'd all agree that going to the supply closet and cleaning out entire boxes of pens is a different issue -- even though the only difference is the scale of the theft.
It seems to me that "independent distributors" will end up having all the same problems with piracy that big companies do. The only thing that will give is the amount of money going into creating them in the first place. If 90% of the public pirates, then the investment put into creating books, music, software, etc will also be forced to decline, which generally means poorer quality and more bugs. I see things unraveling and the public being unhappy with the result. I hope you like fan fiction and YouTube videos.
> "Plus he can sell his music DRM-free and at a low price (killing the incentive to pirate)"
To be fair, any price above $0 is an incentive to pirate. I know people who, because they learned how to pirate, regard paying any money for anything digital as the equivalent of throwing money in the trash.
This article shows the decline of music sales - from a peak of around $17 billion or $71/year per capita in 1999 to around $8 billion or $26/year per capita in 2009.
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
Now, of course, the "music industry" isn't just recorded music. It's also concerts, and those have been rising, right? Yes, but certainly not enough to makeup for the shortfall. According to this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16507.pdf), the number of concerts in the US in 2002 was 22,033, an average of 2,459.34 tickets sold per concert at an average price of $36.02. That adds up to $1,950,449,292. That's $1.95 billion dollars. In order to makeup for the shortfall in record sales, concert revenues would need to be topping $12 billion, which I highly doubt.
I think it's pretty much a cliche that people don't like 'new music' as they get older, and argue that music was much better when they were young. My own interpretation is that young people have young, impressionable brains, they absorb the music of their generation, they like it, and as their brains start to harden up, they're dismissive of the 'new stuff' because it's different from the stuff they absorbed when they were young and impressionable.
Sales of recorded music in the year 1999: over $17 billion/year. Sales of recorded music in 2008: around $8 billion/year. It's been dropping fast, and by 2008, sales were less than half of what they were 9 years earlier. Sure, you might be able to argue that there "never been proven that the internet has had ANY negative effects" - as in "you can't prove that it was the internet, as opposed to 'everyone decided to stop buying music and spend money on other things", but I think the trends are a little more than suggestive. I'd be willing to bet that the last two or three years have also seen a decline - how do I know? My amazing crystal ball.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/the-death-of-the-music-industry/
Oh, hey, I found an updated chart, with numbers upto 2010 and adjustments for inflation and population. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, you can see that recorded music peaked around 1999 with $71/year per capita, and now it's down to $26/year per capita. Another interesting fact: Napster was released in June 1999. Coincidence?
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
Indeed. Here's what YouTube says: 267,472 likes, 2,041,843 dislikes. That's the most skewed ratio of likes to dislikes I've ever seen - 9 "dislikes" for every "like".
Brad Wardell has had a huge chip on his shoulder about Steam for a long time. He never seemed to miss a chance to criticize it, and seemed on his blog to continually stress out about Steam and his own competing product, Impulse (which was recently sold to GameStop). So, yeah, Brad Wardell is a little bit biased on this issue. Based on his longstanding battle against them, I have a hard time believing that he's going to give an objective assessment of Steam, even after he sold-off Impulse.
A right? In what sense? Certainly, he could make the same argument about telephones and cars - people without them will be at a disadvantage. Are those "a right" as well, now? I also have a problem with him comparing it to water. For one thing, I think the government should - in limited circumstances - be allowed to deprive criminals of the "right" to internet access (I'm thinking primarily of convicted hackers and people convicted of child-porn). Further, if the jails and prisons decide not to allow prisoners access to the internet, I'm fine with that. Suggesting it's "a right" means the government *has* to provide prisoners with internet access. On the other hand, I don't think the government should ever be allowed to deprive someone of water. Even if you're in prison, the government has to provide you with water.
I don't think it's because their greed is boundless.
I think it's for a few different reasons: people get used to whatever their current situation is. This is known as "anchoring" - which is comparing your situation to whatever your situation was. Are you going up or are you going down? People often imagine themselves being very generous when they imagine themselves in the role of someone much richer - but that's because, for us, that extra money seems like a windfall, and people are always much more generous with windfalls (there's plenty of psychological studies that show that people treat windfalls differently than "earned money"). People in third-world countries often blame people in the first world, too, for not helping them out more - in their perception, we always want more, more, more so we can buy a bigger house, better car, newest gadgets while they're starving, having trouble getting clean water, or getting education. To them, the greed of everyone in the middle and upper classes in the developed world - also seems boundless.
Also, people don't want to lose. Once you're on top, you don't want to be overthrown by a threat you could've/should've stopped. I mean, if a guy rises to the top and becomes CEO and earns tens of millions of dollars, he still doesn't want to get disgraced by having some upstart middle-manager come around, knock him over, and take his position out from underneath him. Even if the CEO earned more money than he'll ever spend, there's still the disgrace of "losing", of not stopping a threat that ultimately knocked him out of the game. In a lot of cases, these are the people who acted shrewdly their whole lives to get where they are, they're in the habit of countering threats, there's a certain pride in being able to navigate the strategic landscape and win, but now they're supposed to turn off that ingrained habit and allow themselves to be dethroned because they've "earned enough". For many rich people, money is a way of keeping score.
Maybe you need to look around a little more. For example, look at the camcorder section of Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/photo/172421). Flip currently has the #2 best selling camcorder at Amazon, plus they hold another 6 spots in the top 20.
Dear Slashdot. Both the article you link to and the summary itself are clearly uninformed flamebait. You can do better. I would post a much longer comment disputing both the claim that Google will destroy Film and Music and the counter-claim that defending copyright makes you a "luddite". However, the summary text certainly doesn't invite reasoned discussion, and I'm not going to bother feeding the trolls.
"If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent."
First of all, you're graded on getting the answer right (often including showing how you arrived at your answer), not on your agreement with your classmates. If 90% of your classmates got the same wrong answer, you aren't "intelligent" for getting the same answer as they did. Second, if everyone in your class gets the same answer, then something is very wrong - probably the course-work is way too easy.
"For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith."
By that definition, almost everything is "faith", including history. I've never seen the Roman Empire. I never met Abraham Lincoln. Heck, I've never even seen modern-day China. Some "expert" told me these things existed. Accepting that history is "faith" leads to the erroneous conclusion that historical knowledge is no better than religious faith in tree spirits or Zeus. Perhaps the distinction is that I trust that history professors aren't lying and I trust their method for arriving at the truth (same for science). On the other hand, religious knowledge often has a poor foundation and different religions often contradict each other (meaning at least one of them, and probably both, is wrong about that particular point).
What a retarded premise. So what: you can't get your music and movies for free? What "tech innovation" have they stopped? The super-duper holograph audio/video machine? Even the examples in the story are pathetically weak - the RIAA tried to eliminate the MP3 - guess what? The MP3 still exists, and even if it didn't, some audio-compression format would have to exist. And spotify already has a deal with the record companies in the US (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20040498-17.html). Sorry, but the two items in the summary are just an unnatural mashup of two things that Slashdotters care about: tech innovation and hating the RIAA/MPAA. For some reason (probably their rage against the RIAA/MPAA and the RIAA/MPAA's attack on "getting free entertainment") the commenters can't see past the fact that the argument doesn't actually make sense. Is this April 1st again or something?
Or maybe you're the one in marketing. It's completely obvious that the phrase "free as in freedom, not free as in beer" is a flat-out false statement. It be accurate, it should be restated as "free as in freedom, AND free as in beer". Here's what the FSF says:
"When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”"
Notice the phrase "to redistribute copies" - that's "free as in beer". The FSF wants to paint is as a "freedom" issue when they're also smuggling in "free" under that banner.
Whether it was a "license" or a "copy", it's still subject to copyright law. Afterall, when you buy a copy, you still have limited rights to what you're allowed to do with it - e.g. you can't make a thousand copies and sell them in stores or on the street, even though it's "yours". Effectively, copyright is in some ways like a license, even if you saw no EULA.
And that scenario is unlikely to happen with copyrights, since copyright really just covers using someone else's work in your own product. It's pretty hard to violate copyright unless you're playing fast and loose with other people's copyrighted material. It's not like someone sitting in their basement writing software is going to accidentally duplicate 100,000+ lines of code, or reproduce word-for-word an entire chapter of a Harry Potter novel on accident.
I especially like this part: " I find it entirely credible that in the not so near but also not too distant future writing programs -- be it for yourself, for OSS, or for small commerce -- will become an unlawful underground activity... Unless they work for one of those giants, programmers will have to meet conspiratively in old cellars, private apartments, and unknown bars but often these meetings" Those programmers can't run afoul of copyright law unless what they're doing is intentionally integrating other people's code into their own products.
Wasn't gif under a patent in europe until 2004?
"The US LZW patent expired on June 20, 2003.[21] The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on June 18, 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on June 20, 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on July 7, 2004."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement