Ah, looks like you're another Intellectual Property anarchist. Quite frankly, I put you into the same category as regular anarchists - also people who don't make any sense. You might be armed with lots of excuses why anarchy is the best system, but it still won't work.
Without IP, that's perfectly okay. Sounds great. Lets do that.
So... nobody gets paid except the distributor. Do you ever just stop and think about how crazy your scheme is?
The fact of the matter is that with IP they're not getting paid much anyway
Nice. I like the "let's make stuff up" method of argument.
Basically any funding method would be better for creators, because it's hard to find one that works as bad as IP.
Actually, I'd describe it more as "IP is the worst form of profiting from your work; except for all the others" -- kind of like the old Churchill Democracy quote.
Sounds like you ought to read up on economics a bit.
Ha. You're funny.
If you're wondering why I'm not giving you more serious consideration and response to your idea, it's because your idea is so stunningly bad that it doesn't even warrant a response. It's like arguing with David Icke. You've already established yourself as being so far from reasonable that it's not even worth someone's time to try to use reason with you. Seriously, how did you even get to this level of unreasonableness?
IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.
IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.
Nah, you've got it wrong. Would you also say that Bruce Springsteen has a "monopoly" over sales of his concert tickets; monopolies are bad, therefore, everyone should be allowed to create and sell tickets to his concerts? Of course not. IP covers a whole lot of things - it includes trademarks (i.e. the right to exclusive use of a name). Do you think that Honda's "monopoly" over the name "Honda" constitutes some sort of unfair monopoly which degrades the economy? No. Do you think that open-source software has a right to put any restrictions on how people use their software (like whether or not to release the code, or sell it, or rename it)? Without the concept and enforcement of "intellectual property", then everyone should be allowed to to anything with it. What about a company coming along and taking a musician's songs or author's writing, packaging them up in a CD or book and selling them in stores? Without IP, that's perfectly okay. The fact of the matter is that without IP, it's pretty darn hard for creators to get paid for their work because it's all 100% public domain without IP laws. This idea about repealing copyright for a competitive marketplace is bizarrely out of touch with real-world economics, though I can certainly understand why it appeals to the freeloaders on the internet (who have much to gain by taking everything they can grab, but nothing to lose because they produce nothing for anyone to take). I really can't understand why Slashdot, of all places, seems to be so out of touch with economics in the real world.
The problem I have with your comment is that it treats websites as one monolithic group. The reality is more along the lines of:
- Company A shows advertising on their website to gain revenue.
- Company B comes along with "hard sell" tactics
- Users get angry and block all ads.
- Company A says that they've been responsible with advertising, but are getting hurt by ad-blocking.
- Then you come along and say that Company A is to blame for "hard sell" tactics, as if Company A and Company B were the same company, or that Company A has any control whatsoever over what Company B does. Now, not only does Company A lose ad-revenue, but users blame *them* for something they never did ("Ad-blocking is here to stay BECAUSE your foolish greed arrived first.")
My point isn't to "discredit open source development", but rather, to discredit the "everything needs to be open-source; piracy is okay because open-source will give us everything" approach. I'm suggesting both approaches (open-source and closed source with respect for copyright) are valid. Afterall, I did describe open-source as a public good in my first sentence.
Open Source leads to free software for society, which is a public good. It's the equivalent of charity.
Piracy undermines the ability of software developers to create the software that the public wants to use. The long term consequences is to deprive the public of software by undermining the engines that create it.
While it would be nice to believe that open-source would step in to fill the nitch left by piracy-bankrupted companies, I have a hard time believing that open-source, through volunteer effort, would create the variety and quality of software produced by the closed-source software businesses. Can anyone honestly claim that the video game industry would have anywhere near the quality and variety that it does if it was purely an open source effort? Would anything similar to WOW, Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead 2, Modern Warfare, etc, etc exist? I strongly doubt it. Yeah, I know open-source advocates are going to hate this post. If you want to disagree with me, then you should first run this mental test: think of the top one hundred closed-source games and compare their quality and depth to the top one hundred open-source games (preferably ones that aren't clones of closed-source ones).
Let he who is without copyright infringement cast the first takedown notice.
True story: when I was a kid, I shoplifted once and didn't get caught. Out of curiosity, does this mean that if I ever own a store, I can never prosecute anyone for shoplifting?
Could someone please point me to the section of the article which substantiates the claim that open-source is equivalent to piracy?
I've read the entire article, and the only thing I can find is the *article author's interpretation* that the document says encouraging the use of open-source software is in the same category ("Special 301 watchlist") as piracy. For one thing, saying they're in the same category is not the same as saying they are the same - just like shoplifting and murder are in the category of "criminal behavior" but that doesn't mean "they are the same thing".
As far as I can see, the article says that companies are complaining that countries that encourage the use of open-source are interfering with the market forces by producing a bias against closed-source competitors. While I don't agree that this is a legitimate complaint, I can accept the argument that undo preference for open-source software could cause countries to use less capable (free) software over more capable (purchased) software - if an open-source equivalent is inferior to some closed-sourced software. No doubt, open-source advocates would absolutely consider this kind of bias to be evil if those same countries reversed their position and said that they favored closed-source software over open-source competitors.
At this point, I'm considering Slashdot's interpretation of events to be unfair and biased. Why am I getting used to seeing news stories misinterpreted when I visit Slashdot? The fundamental thrust of this article seems to be: companies producing closed-source software are evil, and piracy isn't bad - it's just inaccurately labeled as bad by the same people who hate open-source; i.e. anti-piracy/anti-open-source is merely an attempt by money-grubbing companies to control the market. Both of those "lessons" are flawed.
Ah. When I first read the article summary, I thought, "facts aren't copyrightable? seems reasonable". Then I thought, maybe it isn't so reasonable afterall when I thought "Does that mean all works of non-fiction are now uncopyrightable? Does that mean encyclopedias can't be copyrighted? And if encyclopedias can't be copyrighted, then, logically, anyone can scan a copy of the encyclopedia Britanica and sell it? Doesn't that mean that someone can copy every page in Wikipedia and setup their own competing website? Doesn't that mean that anyone can make copies of textbooks and sell them?" Afterall, all of those things are legal when you're dealing with works that have falled out of copyright. I guess the "creative presentation of them" part might render those things illegal.
As far as I know Sunde has never been accused of pirating anything.
I've seen videos of him admitting that he pirates stuff. I think his quote was something along the lines of "if I want something*, I take it. I don't care what the law says. I just don't care.".
*[ referring to digital media ]
Back around 2001/2002, someone tried doing this exact same thing. They shut down after something like 18 months, and didn't receive that many donations. I'm pretty sure they had less than $100,000 in donations.
I can't remember their name, and I'm doing google searches to track down the information about them, but yeah, they created a donation website where you could pay the musician if you downloaded their music. I want to say they were called "fairplay" or "fairpay" or something like that, but I haven't found any articles about it with google. Will re-post if I can track down information on them.
Eric Flint and Jim Baen have already refuted Mr. Murdoch's contention with hard sales figures for real books. When electronic versions are made available for free, in a non-DRM-protected format, sales of paper editions increased.
I don't think those stories prove much of anything because:
(1) People prefer to read books in print rather than in electronic format. This means that Flint was giving away free copies of an inferior product to sell more copies of a superior (paper) product. This is especially important because the numbers he's giving are from 2000-2002. There were no decent eReaders, which meant people were usually reading it on a CRT (how horrible).
(2) Flint probably didn't have much name-recognition. What helps a small author gain recognition does not necessarily help larger, better known authors.
(3) It's possible that Flint's free electronic versions were reducing sales for other authors. In that sense, by giving away his book for free, he might've been getting a larger slice of the book-sales pie (i.e. all books sold), but reducing the size of the pie (i.e. all books sold) at the same time. For any publishing company selling large numbers of books, giving away books might be more harmful than helpful. In other words, if you have authors A,B,C,D,... etc. If author A gives away his books for free, and increases sales by 1000 copies per year, but sales of all you other authors drop by 25 copies a year, and you have 100 authors, then author A has gained 1000 sales, but reduced sales by your other authors by 2,500, causing a net loss of 1,500 copies. Author A is getting a bigger slice of the pie, but reducing the size of the pie.
Paperback: $7.00
# times you can loan: personal best, oh, about 10
# years you can own: personal best, 34
Resale value: personal best, $27.00
I don't think "personal best" is the metric you should be using for a comparison here. For a fair comparison, you should be talking averages. I could also point out that my "personal best" stock investment netted me a 40% return in six months, but that's that not a good argument for buying stocks since that return is not typical.
Depends on where you're looking. Their "Free Library" sells for less than $9.99. Almost all of them appear to be at least 5 years old, and I saw one that was published over 30 years ago. But, their http://www.webscription.net/ page lists a number of books as well. Out of the eBooks being sold on that page, they had seven different eBooks selling for $15. One selling for $6. A two-book series for $9, and one collection of seven books selling for $35 (normally $62). All seven eBooks selling for $15 are books being published in 2010. The other books are older (the $6 eBook was published in 1996). It appears that Baen sells new eBooks for $15, and charges quite a bit less for older books.
It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
The obvious conclusion is "create DRM that can't be cracked"? (Ah, I kid. I kid.)
Seriously, though. There was a time when no music had DRM. That didn't stop Napster from being extremely popular.
It's not like one protein that catalyzes one reaction can simply mutate into a different protein that catalyzes a different reaction. It's more of an all or nothing thing. It doesn't seem like you would ever see transitional "evolutionary" forms of proteins for that reason.
There are instances of proteins evolving into something that does something different.
"Biologists have shown that independent but similar molecular changes turned a harmless digestive enzyme into a toxin in two unrelated species -- a shrew and a lizard -- giving each a venomous bite." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125532.htm
Generally, what happens in these cases (where a protein evolved into a different protein with a different function) is that the original DNA sequence gets duplicated, and then one of the duplicates starts evolving (and the other copy continues to serve the same original function that it had earlier). One of the things that evolutionary biologists do is look at protein sequences and find similar sequences within the same organism. Very often, there's a tree-like structure showing multiple variations on a single protein within an organism. For example, humans have multiple copies/variations on the hemoglobin gene. They're either inactive or active at different phases in a person's life. Example:
"Fetal hemoglobin, or foetal haemoglobin, (also hemoglobin F or HbF) is the main oxygen transport protein in the fetus during the last seven months of development in the uterus and in the newborn until roughly 6 months old. Functionally, fetal hemoglobin differs most from adult hemoglobin in that it is able to bind oxygen with greater affinity than the adult form, giving the developing fetus better access to oxygen from the mother's bloodstream." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin_F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Types_in_humans
There's also the case of the fish antifreeze that evolved from non-protein-coding DNA:
"Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered an antifreeze-protein gene in cod that has evolved from non-coding or 'junk' DNA." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060404090831.htm
"Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world... Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts."
To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers. They also benefit from the fact that operating systems are complex, tunable, and widely used in business (which has deep pockets). Easy-to-use software written for consumers (rather than companies who need highly-available systems) can't capitalize very well on the tech-support angle.
I know it's no longer accurate, but for the longest geneticists thought humans and chimps were 99% similar genetically.... but there does seem to be a gulf...
If scientists have 99% of the DNA, then presumably they would fill-in the missing 1% of DNA from a similar animal. (If there were any doubts about which cow is most similar, they could do a DNA comparison.) If the closest animal is 99% similar, then they'd be able to reconstruct the original DNA with 99.99% accuracy. The only incorrect segments of DNA would be within the missing 1% of the original Auroch DNA *and* where the closest relative differed from the Auroch version.
Isn't part of it because we don't enforce the same rules on China? Where is the blocking of all the Chinese goods because they don't respect IP laws? If we held all countries to the same standard it probably wouldn't be news. .
What’s surprising, though, is China’s calm response Tuesday to a World Trade Organization report (.pdf) that concluded it was breaching its obligations under the World Trade Organization.
"As we strengthen our work on domestic intellectual property rights, we will continue to promote international exchanges and cooperation in order to encourage the healthy development of trade relations," Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian said in a statement. ... The WTO, acting in a 2007 case brought by the United States, concluded on Monday a number of so-called "deficiencies" of China’s intellectual property enforcement, including the unauthorized trademarked and copyrighted goods being sold openly throughout China. ...
For the first 14 years only Ug could make fire; and even though the other cave people saw Ug rub two sticks together to make it, they weren't allowed. IP is a recent fabrication of the government to grant special protections to the wealthy to keep them wealthy with little effort.
Well, I think your whole narrative here is complete nonsense. Besides, if intellectual property is the road to easy money, then why don't you do it?
In the past, I've thought about the idea that intellectual property is like fire. Over the summer, I was out with some friends when one of them decided he wanted to create a fire from scratch with sticks. We helped gather dry grass, tried to find all the materials, etc. Making a fire from scratch is hard. After a couple hours, he eventually gave up.
A better comparison to Ug would be something like this: a bunch of cavemen get together to hunt an animal. Ug stays behinds and builds a fire. It takes a lot of time and work. Eventually, after spending the day creating fire, the other cavemen return from the hunt. Ug says, "I'll let you use my fire if I can have some of your meat." The other cavemen say, "You fire is infinitely copyable and therefore not valuable. I get it for free!" Ug says, "No. It took me a long time to build the fire. You can build your own fire if you want, but you can't use mine unless you give me some of your meat. Otherwise, I won't build a fire next time. Why should I work all day to build fire, when you get all the benefit of cooked meat?"
That's a closer analogy. Sometimes people don't understand the effort that goes into creating something. Just because it's infinitely copyable doesn't mean you should get it for free.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the US should go light on third-world countries. Yes, the intellectual property produced in this country benefits them (in this case, with cheap entertainment, textbooks, and pharmaceuticals). No, Costa Rica is not paying us back for those benefits. It's basically a free-ride for them. However, it doesn't actually cost us anything directly. It just costs companies a little bit of potential profit - which is small anyway, since Costa Rica is a poor country. So, I'm of the opinion that the US should just lighten up on them and consider the benefits of our intellectual property to be part of a third-world development program.
However, I do want to point out the bad logic going on in the summary and many of the comments. If everyone is allowed to freely share intellectual property, it means that the creator cannot recoup (in money) some of the benefits they've created for the world. The end result is that no one makes any significant effort to produce new intellectual property. Afterall, do you want to spend millions of dollars creating a product that creates a lot of value for the world (perhaps tens of millions of dollars worth of benefit), but the lack of intellectual property laws means that you immediately go bankrupt because you can't even pay-back your development costs?
Claims that "intellectual monopoly protectionism is 'the exact opposite of 'free trade'" is absurd. Besides, I thought most Slashdotters were against the idea of selling pirated material. The statement that "intellectual monopoly protectionism is 'the exact opposite of 'free trade'" suggests that everyone should be able to copy and sell all IP. This means that companies like Walmart or Amazon.com should somehow be allowed to print up copies of books, movies, software, etc - and pay nothing to anybody. Apparently, that's the very definition of "free trade" at Slashdot, as absurd as that sounds.
Open source is another way to stop malware... not every user looks at the source, but enough curious ones will put out the warning should anything not be as its marked.
Out of curiosity, what's to stop this situation:
I build a "custom" version of an opensource application that includes a trojan. Maybe I use the application's original name, or maybe I add a few features/artwork and call it something different? People are just grabbing the exe's, afterall, and not building their own copy from the source.
Yet video game sales worldwide have been exploding since 1999. I don't suppose it could just be shifting priorities of consumers, could it? Nah, it's gotta be the pirates, because as we all know everybody pirates music but nobody pirates video games.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd also point out that if music sales were strong, pirates would say "see, it hurts nobody", but if music sales are weak (like they are now), then it's "well, it must be something other than piracy". There's an element of "never blame the pirates" going on.
As for software applications, it could also be that people are more worried about viruses with software. Afterall, software has far more potential to damage a computer than a bad music download does. (Remember the iWork virus?) I've heard people say that they stopped pirating specifically because they were tired of viruses. I would actually be quite surprised if groups like the Russian mafia weren't getting involved in putting together virus-laden software installers and putting them on pirate websites. That might sound like I'm using some sort of scare tactic, but it's entirely rational for them to use those kinds of tactics.
As far as video games, specifically, it seems that the growth has been in consoles. To my knowledge, the PS3 still doesn't get pirated. And the platform which seems to get pirated the most (the PC) appears to be experiencing a decline in video game sales.
Your definition of "pirated" sounds a lot like "Distributed by an entity authorized by the copyright holder" to me.
Yes, the copyright holder would have to be involved in setting up the sting, but they don't have to actually give anyone anything. For example, they could give pirates a demo application, or a hobbled version of the application (less functionality, or limited to seven days, or something different entirely). I think I remember copyright holders putting recordings of static onto Napster as a way of frustrating downloaders.
But they simply asked for what the market will bear and still made more money off of that album than any single project they did with a label (straight from one of their interviews).
Maybe. I did read that statement in a news article, but it wasn't said by the band, and it was based on speculated numbers. (But, maybe the band said it as well, I don't know.) In any case, Radiohead seems to have distanced themselves from the experiment, which makes me wonder how successful it really was. From April 2008:
Radiohead made it official: the band won't be giving away music like it did with the album In Rainbows.
"I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation," the band's lead singer Thom Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter. "It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time."
Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.
Radiohead has never revealed the promotion's sales figures but there was speculation that the money wasn't very good. Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free as well as charging for premium versions. Reznor said last month that to that point the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.
Reznor was critical of Radiohead during an interview with The Chicago Tribune.
"I think the way (Radiohead) parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said. "But if you look at what they did, it was very much a bait and switch, to get you to pay for a MySpace quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."
...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9932361-7.html
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, looks like you're another Intellectual Property anarchist. Quite frankly, I put you into the same category as regular anarchists - also people who don't make any sense. You might be armed with lots of excuses why anarchy is the best system, but it still won't work.
... nobody gets paid except the distributor. Do you ever just stop and think about how crazy your scheme is?
Without IP, that's perfectly okay.
Sounds great. Lets do that.
So
The fact of the matter is that with IP they're not getting paid much anyway
Nice. I like the "let's make stuff up" method of argument.
Basically any funding method would be better for creators, because it's hard to find one that works as bad as IP.
Actually, I'd describe it more as "IP is the worst form of profiting from your work; except for all the others" -- kind of like the old Churchill Democracy quote.
Sounds like you ought to read up on economics a bit.
Ha. You're funny.
If you're wondering why I'm not giving you more serious consideration and response to your idea, it's because your idea is so stunningly bad that it doesn't even warrant a response. It's like arguing with David Icke. You've already established yourself as being so far from reasonable that it's not even worth someone's time to try to use reason with you. Seriously, how did you even get to this level of unreasonableness?
Nah, you've got it wrong. Would you also say that Bruce Springsteen has a "monopoly" over sales of his concert tickets; monopolies are bad, therefore, everyone should be allowed to create and sell tickets to his concerts? Of course not. IP covers a whole lot of things - it includes trademarks (i.e. the right to exclusive use of a name). Do you think that Honda's "monopoly" over the name "Honda" constitutes some sort of unfair monopoly which degrades the economy? No. Do you think that open-source software has a right to put any restrictions on how people use their software (like whether or not to release the code, or sell it, or rename it)? Without the concept and enforcement of "intellectual property", then everyone should be allowed to to anything with it. What about a company coming along and taking a musician's songs or author's writing, packaging them up in a CD or book and selling them in stores? Without IP, that's perfectly okay. The fact of the matter is that without IP, it's pretty darn hard for creators to get paid for their work because it's all 100% public domain without IP laws. This idea about repealing copyright for a competitive marketplace is bizarrely out of touch with real-world economics, though I can certainly understand why it appeals to the freeloaders on the internet (who have much to gain by taking everything they can grab, but nothing to lose because they produce nothing for anyone to take). I really can't understand why Slashdot, of all places, seems to be so out of touch with economics in the real world.
The problem I have with your comment is that it treats websites as one monolithic group. The reality is more along the lines of:
- Company A shows advertising on their website to gain revenue.
- Company B comes along with "hard sell" tactics
- Users get angry and block all ads.
- Company A says that they've been responsible with advertising, but are getting hurt by ad-blocking.
- Then you come along and say that Company A is to blame for "hard sell" tactics, as if Company A and Company B were the same company, or that Company A has any control whatsoever over what Company B does. Now, not only does Company A lose ad-revenue, but users blame *them* for something they never did ("Ad-blocking is here to stay BECAUSE your foolish greed arrived first.")
My point isn't to "discredit open source development", but rather, to discredit the "everything needs to be open-source; piracy is okay because open-source will give us everything" approach. I'm suggesting both approaches (open-source and closed source with respect for copyright) are valid. Afterall, I did describe open-source as a public good in my first sentence.
Open Source leads to free software for society, which is a public good. It's the equivalent of charity.
Piracy undermines the ability of software developers to create the software that the public wants to use. The long term consequences is to deprive the public of software by undermining the engines that create it.
While it would be nice to believe that open-source would step in to fill the nitch left by piracy-bankrupted companies, I have a hard time believing that open-source, through volunteer effort, would create the variety and quality of software produced by the closed-source software businesses. Can anyone honestly claim that the video game industry would have anywhere near the quality and variety that it does if it was purely an open source effort? Would anything similar to WOW, Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead 2, Modern Warfare, etc, etc exist? I strongly doubt it. Yeah, I know open-source advocates are going to hate this post. If you want to disagree with me, then you should first run this mental test: think of the top one hundred closed-source games and compare their quality and depth to the top one hundred open-source games (preferably ones that aren't clones of closed-source ones).
Let he who is without copyright infringement cast the first takedown notice.
True story: when I was a kid, I shoplifted once and didn't get caught. Out of curiosity, does this mean that if I ever own a store, I can never prosecute anyone for shoplifting?
Could someone please point me to the section of the article which substantiates the claim that open-source is equivalent to piracy?
I've read the entire article, and the only thing I can find is the *article author's interpretation* that the document says encouraging the use of open-source software is in the same category ("Special 301 watchlist") as piracy. For one thing, saying they're in the same category is not the same as saying they are the same - just like shoplifting and murder are in the category of "criminal behavior" but that doesn't mean "they are the same thing".
As far as I can see, the article says that companies are complaining that countries that encourage the use of open-source are interfering with the market forces by producing a bias against closed-source competitors. While I don't agree that this is a legitimate complaint, I can accept the argument that undo preference for open-source software could cause countries to use less capable (free) software over more capable (purchased) software - if an open-source equivalent is inferior to some closed-sourced software. No doubt, open-source advocates would absolutely consider this kind of bias to be evil if those same countries reversed their position and said that they favored closed-source software over open-source competitors.
At this point, I'm considering Slashdot's interpretation of events to be unfair and biased. Why am I getting used to seeing news stories misinterpreted when I visit Slashdot? The fundamental thrust of this article seems to be: companies producing closed-source software are evil, and piracy isn't bad - it's just inaccurately labeled as bad by the same people who hate open-source; i.e. anti-piracy/anti-open-source is merely an attempt by money-grubbing companies to control the market. Both of those "lessons" are flawed.
Ah. When I first read the article summary, I thought, "facts aren't copyrightable? seems reasonable". Then I thought, maybe it isn't so reasonable afterall when I thought "Does that mean all works of non-fiction are now uncopyrightable? Does that mean encyclopedias can't be copyrighted? And if encyclopedias can't be copyrighted, then, logically, anyone can scan a copy of the encyclopedia Britanica and sell it? Doesn't that mean that someone can copy every page in Wikipedia and setup their own competing website? Doesn't that mean that anyone can make copies of textbooks and sell them?" Afterall, all of those things are legal when you're dealing with works that have falled out of copyright. I guess the "creative presentation of them" part might render those things illegal.
As far as I know Sunde has never been accused of pirating anything.
I've seen videos of him admitting that he pirates stuff. I think his quote was something along the lines of "if I want something*, I take it. I don't care what the law says. I just don't care.".
*[ referring to digital media ]
More to the point, the "piracy" term refers to the commercial distribution of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's explicit authorization.
... oh - *that's* why they called themselves the Pirate Bay. Oh wait. I take that back. Even the Pirate Bay disagrees with you.
Back around 2001/2002, someone tried doing this exact same thing. They shut down after something like 18 months, and didn't receive that many donations. I'm pretty sure they had less than $100,000 in donations.
I can't remember their name, and I'm doing google searches to track down the information about them, but yeah, they created a donation website where you could pay the musician if you downloaded their music. I want to say they were called "fairplay" or "fairpay" or something like that, but I haven't found any articles about it with google. Will re-post if I can track down information on them.
Eric Flint and Jim Baen have already refuted Mr. Murdoch's contention with hard sales figures for real books. When electronic versions are made available for free, in a non-DRM-protected format, sales of paper editions increased.
I don't think those stories prove much of anything because:
(1) People prefer to read books in print rather than in electronic format. This means that Flint was giving away free copies of an inferior product to sell more copies of a superior (paper) product. This is especially important because the numbers he's giving are from 2000-2002. There were no decent eReaders, which meant people were usually reading it on a CRT (how horrible).
(2) Flint probably didn't have much name-recognition. What helps a small author gain recognition does not necessarily help larger, better known authors.
(3) It's possible that Flint's free electronic versions were reducing sales for other authors. In that sense, by giving away his book for free, he might've been getting a larger slice of the book-sales pie (i.e. all books sold), but reducing the size of the pie (i.e. all books sold) at the same time. For any publishing company selling large numbers of books, giving away books might be more harmful than helpful. In other words, if you have authors A,B,C,D,... etc. If author A gives away his books for free, and increases sales by 1000 copies per year, but sales of all you other authors drop by 25 copies a year, and you have 100 authors, then author A has gained 1000 sales, but reduced sales by your other authors by 2,500, causing a net loss of 1,500 copies. Author A is getting a bigger slice of the pie, but reducing the size of the pie.
Paperback: $7.00
# times you can loan: personal best, oh, about 10
# years you can own: personal best, 34
Resale value: personal best, $27.00
I don't think "personal best" is the metric you should be using for a comparison here. For a fair comparison, you should be talking averages. I could also point out that my "personal best" stock investment netted me a 40% return in six months, but that's that not a good argument for buying stocks since that return is not typical.
Baen's eBook price is a lot lower than $9.99...
Depends on where you're looking. Their "Free Library" sells for less than $9.99. Almost all of them appear to be at least 5 years old, and I saw one that was published over 30 years ago. But, their http://www.webscription.net/ page lists a number of books as well. Out of the eBooks being sold on that page, they had seven different eBooks selling for $15. One selling for $6. A two-book series for $9, and one collection of seven books selling for $35 (normally $62). All seven eBooks selling for $15 are books being published in 2010. The other books are older (the $6 eBook was published in 1996). It appears that Baen sells new eBooks for $15, and charges quite a bit less for older books.
It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
The obvious conclusion is "create DRM that can't be cracked"? (Ah, I kid. I kid.)
Seriously, though. There was a time when no music had DRM. That didn't stop Napster from being extremely popular.
There are instances of proteins evolving into something that does something different.
"Biologists have shown that independent but similar molecular changes turned a harmless digestive enzyme into a toxin in two unrelated species -- a shrew and a lizard -- giving each a venomous bite."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125532.htm
Generally, what happens in these cases (where a protein evolved into a different protein with a different function) is that the original DNA sequence gets duplicated, and then one of the duplicates starts evolving (and the other copy continues to serve the same original function that it had earlier). One of the things that evolutionary biologists do is look at protein sequences and find similar sequences within the same organism. Very often, there's a tree-like structure showing multiple variations on a single protein within an organism. For example, humans have multiple copies/variations on the hemoglobin gene. They're either inactive or active at different phases in a person's life. Example:
"Fetal hemoglobin, or foetal haemoglobin, (also hemoglobin F or HbF) is the main oxygen transport protein in the fetus during the last seven months of development in the uterus and in the newborn until roughly 6 months old. Functionally, fetal hemoglobin differs most from adult hemoglobin in that it is able to bind oxygen with greater affinity than the adult form, giving the developing fetus better access to oxygen from the mother's bloodstream."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin_F
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Types_in_humans
There's also the case of the fish antifreeze that evolved from non-protein-coding DNA:
"Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered an antifreeze-protein gene in cod that has evolved from non-coding or 'junk' DNA."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060404090831.htm
"Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world... Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts."
To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers. They also benefit from the fact that operating systems are complex, tunable, and widely used in business (which has deep pockets). Easy-to-use software written for consumers (rather than companies who need highly-available systems) can't capitalize very well on the tech-support angle.
I know it's no longer accurate, but for the longest geneticists thought humans and chimps were 99% similar genetically.... but there does seem to be a gulf...
If scientists have 99% of the DNA, then presumably they would fill-in the missing 1% of DNA from a similar animal. (If there were any doubts about which cow is most similar, they could do a DNA comparison.) If the closest animal is 99% similar, then they'd be able to reconstruct the original DNA with 99.99% accuracy. The only incorrect segments of DNA would be within the missing 1% of the original Auroch DNA *and* where the closest relative differed from the Auroch version.
.
For the first 14 years only Ug could make fire; and even though the other cave people saw Ug rub two sticks together to make it, they weren't allowed. IP is a recent fabrication of the government to grant special protections to the wealthy to keep them wealthy with little effort.
Well, I think your whole narrative here is complete nonsense. Besides, if intellectual property is the road to easy money, then why don't you do it?
In the past, I've thought about the idea that intellectual property is like fire. Over the summer, I was out with some friends when one of them decided he wanted to create a fire from scratch with sticks. We helped gather dry grass, tried to find all the materials, etc. Making a fire from scratch is hard. After a couple hours, he eventually gave up.
A better comparison to Ug would be something like this: a bunch of cavemen get together to hunt an animal. Ug stays behinds and builds a fire. It takes a lot of time and work. Eventually, after spending the day creating fire, the other cavemen return from the hunt. Ug says, "I'll let you use my fire if I can have some of your meat." The other cavemen say, "You fire is infinitely copyable and therefore not valuable. I get it for free!" Ug says, "No. It took me a long time to build the fire. You can build your own fire if you want, but you can't use mine unless you give me some of your meat. Otherwise, I won't build a fire next time. Why should I work all day to build fire, when you get all the benefit of cooked meat?"
That's a closer analogy. Sometimes people don't understand the effort that goes into creating something. Just because it's infinitely copyable doesn't mean you should get it for free.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the US should go light on third-world countries. Yes, the intellectual property produced in this country benefits them (in this case, with cheap entertainment, textbooks, and pharmaceuticals). No, Costa Rica is not paying us back for those benefits. It's basically a free-ride for them. However, it doesn't actually cost us anything directly. It just costs companies a little bit of potential profit - which is small anyway, since Costa Rica is a poor country. So, I'm of the opinion that the US should just lighten up on them and consider the benefits of our intellectual property to be part of a third-world development program.
However, I do want to point out the bad logic going on in the summary and many of the comments. If everyone is allowed to freely share intellectual property, it means that the creator cannot recoup (in money) some of the benefits they've created for the world. The end result is that no one makes any significant effort to produce new intellectual property. Afterall, do you want to spend millions of dollars creating a product that creates a lot of value for the world (perhaps tens of millions of dollars worth of benefit), but the lack of intellectual property laws means that you immediately go bankrupt because you can't even pay-back your development costs?
Claims that "intellectual monopoly protectionism is 'the exact opposite of 'free trade'" is absurd. Besides, I thought most Slashdotters were against the idea of selling pirated material. The statement that "intellectual monopoly protectionism is 'the exact opposite of 'free trade'" suggests that everyone should be able to copy and sell all IP. This means that companies like Walmart or Amazon.com should somehow be allowed to print up copies of books, movies, software, etc - and pay nothing to anybody. Apparently, that's the very definition of "free trade" at Slashdot, as absurd as that sounds.
Open source is another way to stop malware... not every user looks at the source, but enough curious ones will put out the warning should anything not be as its marked.
Out of curiosity, what's to stop this situation: I build a "custom" version of an opensource application that includes a trojan. Maybe I use the application's original name, or maybe I add a few features/artwork and call it something different? People are just grabbing the exe's, afterall, and not building their own copy from the source.
Yet video game sales worldwide have been exploding since 1999. I don't suppose it could just be shifting priorities of consumers, could it? Nah, it's gotta be the pirates, because as we all know everybody pirates music but nobody pirates video games.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd also point out that if music sales were strong, pirates would say "see, it hurts nobody", but if music sales are weak (like they are now), then it's "well, it must be something other than piracy". There's an element of "never blame the pirates" going on.
As for software applications, it could also be that people are more worried about viruses with software. Afterall, software has far more potential to damage a computer than a bad music download does. (Remember the iWork virus?) I've heard people say that they stopped pirating specifically because they were tired of viruses. I would actually be quite surprised if groups like the Russian mafia weren't getting involved in putting together virus-laden software installers and putting them on pirate websites. That might sound like I'm using some sort of scare tactic, but it's entirely rational for them to use those kinds of tactics.
As far as video games, specifically, it seems that the growth has been in consoles. To my knowledge, the PS3 still doesn't get pirated. And the platform which seems to get pirated the most (the PC) appears to be experiencing a decline in video game sales.
Your definition of "pirated" sounds a lot like "Distributed by an entity authorized by the copyright holder" to me.
Yes, the copyright holder would have to be involved in setting up the sting, but they don't have to actually give anyone anything. For example, they could give pirates a demo application, or a hobbled version of the application (less functionality, or limited to seven days, or something different entirely). I think I remember copyright holders putting recordings of static onto Napster as a way of frustrating downloaders.
But they simply asked for what the market will bear and still made more money off of that album than any single project they did with a label (straight from one of their interviews).
Maybe. I did read that statement in a news article, but it wasn't said by the band, and it was based on speculated numbers. (But, maybe the band said it as well, I don't know.) In any case, Radiohead seems to have distanced themselves from the experiment, which makes me wonder how successful it really was. From April 2008:
CNet: Radiohead won't repeat 'In Rainbows' giveaway
...
Radiohead made it official: the band won't be giving away music like it did with the album In Rainbows.
"I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation," the band's lead singer Thom Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter. "It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time."
Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.
Radiohead has never revealed the promotion's sales figures but there was speculation that the money wasn't very good. Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free as well as charging for premium versions. Reznor said last month that to that point the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.
Reznor was critical of Radiohead during an interview with The Chicago Tribune.
"I think the way (Radiohead) parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said. "But if you look at what they did, it was very much a bait and switch, to get you to pay for a MySpace quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9932361-7.html