Patents are even more important in today’s information economy then they were in past centuries. To see why, let’s broaden the debate to include all intellectual property (“IP”). If there were no copyright laws, do you think AMC would spend $3 million on each episode of Breaking Bad? If anybody could just copy it and give the content away on the Internet why would they? Without copyright laws there would be no Mad Men, New York Times, or Call of Duty.
You can't use copyright to legitimize patent law. They're two different things. First of all, copyright law is much more limited in scope than patents are. For example: you can go after someone if they started redistributing your podcast (maybe with inserting their own commercials and pocketing the money), but you can't sue all podcasters using copyright law.
And secondly, you can't use justifications for Intellectual Property law A as justifications for Intellectual Property law B. If that worked, then do this quick mental experiment:
Step 1. Dream up a new intellectual property law
Step 2. If copyright law justifies patent law, then you should be able to use copyright law to justify your new intellectual property law.
Step 3. You have now justified your new intellectual property law - whatever the heck it is. You've now shown that all conceivable intellectual property laws are justified (no matter what they are, you just need to dream it up).
Claiming that the EFF is some sort of enforcer working for large companies to beat up small ones is an idea that can only have come from heavy use of hallucinogenic drugs. Which ones does your team take?
Regarding the EFF, I think our point was just that with our limited resources, our primary focus is addressing the larger entities that are podcasting. To that extent, the EFF can be seen to be weighing in on the side of large media conglomerates such as CBS and NBC. More generally, I think it’s a bit anomalous that patents often get such a bad rap by individuals, such as some engineers in Silicon Valley, or groups like the EFF, which purport to stand for David (vs Goliath). Patents are a great tool for the little guy. If you want to start a company, build it around some patented technology (like Google did). The patents, or even pending applications, will help you raise money, ward off competition, and give you a fighting chance. They’re the ultimate equalizer.
What a turd. This guy is trying to take-on the mantle of being "the little guy" against the big guys because he knows that people like to support the underdog. Sorry, Jim Logan, we're not that stupid. We're not going to do a knee-jerk support of the underdog when the underdog is wrong. Besides, it's pretty clear that the real underdogs here are the podcasters, which Jim Logan (who's obviously a millionaire) is beating up. The only thing that this tells me is that people who stand to make millions of dollars off of bad patents can rationalize their crap to themselves.
Unfortunately, the effort to equally represent women in science usually ends up devaluing the other, more important work that they do... raising a good family. Society has a greater need for mothers than scientists.
I wonder if part of the anger that your post seems to have triggered among mods is that you specifically said that children need mothers. It seems to be a point of strictly enforced dogma in politically correct discourse these days to say that children doesn't really need women in their lives (see the debate surrounding gay marriage). If you say that it's best for a child to have female mother, then you are generally considered a terrible person. At least that's what I've seen.
I don't think that's quite it. The original quote sounds very conservative (as in "women should be at home raising the kids, not doing science [with the justification that 'raising kids is important']"). I think the downvoting was caused by more liberal people who don't want to limit women's role to "raising kids". There might be some people who want to minimize women's importance in raising kids because they feel it would benefit adoptive gay (male) parents, but that seems like a minority position.
I'd also say that it's far more common to devalue fathers roles in children's lives than mother's roles. This is the major reason so many divorce courts favor the mother as the primary caretaker. Among people I know personally, the only cases where the father has custody of the children is when the mother is really messed up (e.g. an alcoholic).
Oh, and its easy to lose your bitcoins. Gee, just like "paper" money. Whoops I ran my hundred dollar bill through the washer a few times. And now it's indistinguishable from lint. Or, hey, my house just burnt down, and I lost my life savings ('cause fuck banks).
Yes, well, people tend to have a lot more money in bitcoin than in physical dollars. I don't think I ever have more than $80 in physical money at any moment in time. The rest is in the bank. And if your house burns down, burning your money, you were stupid to have much money stored in your house. I'd be a little paranoid if I had more than a few thousand dollars in cash in my house. Yet, I've heard of people losing $80,000 and a million dollars worth of bitcoins in harddrive crashes. (And harddrive crashes happen a lot more often than houses burning down.) If someone lost $80,000 cash because their house burned down, my first question would be, "Why the f*** would you keep $80,000 cash in your house?" If your attitude is "f*** banks, I'm keeping my life savings in my house" then you've got a major flaw in your thinking. Essentially, all you've done is give examples of people being really stupid with physical money, and then saying, "Yeah, but bitcoin is safer than if you did this stupid thing!"
Yeah, if your goal from the very start is to buy a book so that you could put it online for other pirates. Most people aren't putting that much forethought into their crimes. And once you bought a book (with your own credit card), and then decide afterwards that you want to put it out there for pirates, suddenly, you realize that it's not such a good idea.
Nobody ever lost a dime to noncommercial infringement
I'd like to see a source for that claim. Here's a counterpoint: I have a friend who used to buy the software he uses. Then he discovered piracy. Now, he never pays for software and thinks anyone who does is stupid. You can't tell me that piracy didn't lead to lost sales.
It seems to me that if an author/creator spends time creating something, he's probably suffering financially during that time (because he/she is creating something rather than working a day job with that same time). If he/she is supporting a family during that time, they are suffering during that time as well. This is why copyright should extend beyond the life of the author - so that the family can benefit from the labor and financial hardship they endured.
Also, if a company pays an author an advance to write a book (in return for exclusive publishing rights), and that author dies shortly after publishing the book, the elimination of copyright would mean that the publisher no longer has exclusive publishing rights (i.e. any other publishing company can now publish the book). They are partners in the creation of the work, yet they suddenly lose a valuable asset (exclusive publishing rights) that they invested in simply because the author died?
It is a lower price, for a version of a product with a huge defect -- namely, that the sale is illegitimate.
Keep in mind that different products have different values attached to those peripheral value-addeds. For example, you can't claim that music is "defective" because it was taken through piracy - since there's no such thing as "music maintenance", "upgrades", or "the ability to speak candidly with the vendor". Some software products fall into the same category. Also, don't think that piracy stops pirates from "speaking candidly with the vendor and request new features/enhancements". I've seen pirates caught on webforums complaining about bugs in games that haven't even been released to the public yet. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.139753-Arkham-Asylum-Pirates-Get-a-Gimpy-Batman
I think my point still stands, since you never attempted to even dispute the fact that the price paid by the pirate is not the same thing as the price they would've paid had piracy not been an option (when you were attempting to claim that the value of a product is only what the buyer (i.e. pirate) paid for it).
Effectively, you're claiming that, if a pirate gets something for X dollars (where X dollars could be as low as $0), then that shows that's all they were willing to pay, and therefore, it is the value of the product. That's obviously flawed and wrong.
Obviously, the buyers weren't willing to pay the price the maker wanted to sell the software at. Therefore, those sales by definition were not worth the retail price.
No, you're wrong because if people are offered two different prices for the same product, they'll choose the cheaper price. Let me give you an example: let's say you want to buy a product. It costs $500 (retail). You want this product so bad that you're willing to pay $800. Then, someone comes along and offers it to you for $100. You buy it for $100. What does this prove? Does it prive that "the buyers (you) weren't willing to pay the price the maker wanted to sell the software at" (i.e. $500)? No. It means you picked the cheaper of the two options. It does not prove that you weren't willing to buy it for $500. It does not prove that " those sales by definition were not worth the retail price."
By definition, they're worth what the buyer was willing to pay the pirate for the procureent.
It's worth pointing out that what the buyer paid the pirate for the software and what the buyer would be willing to pay the pirate are two different things. For example, the buyer might've paid $100 for the software, but was willing to pay $1,000.
As long as we're talking about "market value", it should be pointed out that *everything* is valued at what the buyer was willing to pay for the product. For example, let's say that a car is being sold by a car dealership for $10,000. If a car thief came along and stole the car, what's the car's value? According to your definition, it's worth whatever the thief would've paid for it. If the thief was poor and only willing to pay $2,000 for the car, would that mean that the thief should old be charged in court for the theft of a $2,000 car? Economics is fun, isn't it?
I will admit that, because software can be easily duplicated, the car and software example doesn't quite match up.
> "since they did build devices and did attempt to market them."
The "devices" they created existed decades before Jim Logan came along to patent it: "The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership."
You claim that patent law helps inventors and companies protect their intellectual work. Using that general observation, you then claim(simply because it is a "patent" and patents are, in general, helpful) that your particular patent is therefore helpful to the world. One can imagine scenarios where a particularly unique or non-obvious idea could be helpful to the world if companies could come along, view the patent, decide to license the technology, giving them a leg-up in their field. In other words, the money they spent to secure licensing outweighed the money they spent for the license, and they wouldn't have thought of the idea themselves.
However, your idea is obvious. Your idea was not known to the general public, yet it was reinvented over and over.
This suggests that your idea should never have been protected in the first place.
My question is: do you actually believe that your patent has helped the world and the money you receive from actual hardworking people is deserved, or do you know that your patent is extractive and you don't care about fairness because you stand to earn so much free money (in other words, is this a cynical money grab that you think is okay because the government failed in it's responsibility to protect the public from bad patents)?
> "According to NPR last week, you basically invented books-on-tape, including distribution of same."
They didn't say that. And those things existed long before Jim Logan applied for a patent.
"The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership." http://blindreaders.info/audiobks.html
Magazined on tape existed before Jim Logan came along. Here's some prior art back in the 1970s - two decades before Jim Logan applied for a patent. If magazines on audio is an example of using his patent, then prior art invalidates his patent.
"The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership." http://blindreaders.info/audiobks.html
I'm pretty sure you've got the cause and effect backwards. Newspapers are dying because ad-revenue is down. Why is is down? Because people are buying fewer papers and getting their news online and because (even though they move their paper online to follow their customers) internet ads pay less than newspaper ads. Cutting their staff is a symptom of declining revenue. Now I guess we watch all the people with ad-blockers complain about the decline of the quality of the news.
> I thought the same at first read. However [wikipedia.org].
I still agree that the term "self-fulfilling prophecy" in this context is just plain wrong. Yes, if you're capable of advancing *faster* than "twice the transistors every 18 months" then it's self-fulfilling in that you can throttle-down the rate of increase. The problem comes in when you can't keep up with that 2x every 18 months rate. It's not self-fulfilling because you might not be capable of keeping up with that. Because of that second situation, you can't call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. As lots of people have pointed out: there's plenty of industries which can't keep up with an exponential rate of growth *no matter how much R&D they put into the product* because of other limits - e.g. car manufacturers can't double the fuel efficiency every X years or increase the speed of cars or aircraft (due to a variety of reasons such as physical limits, air resistance, and driver control).
Indeed. And if we allow police to have guns, there's no telling what they'll do with them. I'm sure they'll create gulags and prison camps for the American public. We must not allow police to have guns!/sarcasm.
MT also campaigned agains family planning and contraception.
Which, as someone who isn't a medical professional, I have no special problem with. I disagree with it philosophically, but I defend her right to say it.
There's a difference between "defending someone's right to say something" and arguing that they are a model human being. I'm sure you can think of a few examples of nasty things that people have said in the past (e.g. Fred Phelps or the KKK) where you might say "they have a right to say it" but you'd never hold them up as exemplars. Here's the thing: you can defend someone's right to say something, and still think they're an asshole for saying it and believing it.
...keeping people in poverty and away from real medical care.
You should point the finger at the governments that turned a blind eye to the suffering of their own people, not MT's attempts to provide the most basic of medical care to an otherwise totally neglected population.
Pointing out that some governments acted worse than Mother Teresa doesn't elevate Mother Teresa into a model human being. That's a cheap tactic, actually. If I went and robbed my neighbor and people blamed me for doing it, it would be a poor arguing tactic to start pointing out other people (serial murderers, etc) who are worse than me that "everybody should be pointing the finger at".
Mother Teresa certainly gave up a lot to help the poor, but her sacrifices were marred by the fact that she did have a particular love for the "sanctifying" effects of suffering ("“There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,”") and that she did things like discriminate against homosexuals who wanted to be helped. For whatever reason, there's a particular strain of Catholicism that seems to value suffering - as if God will show exceptional mercy and reward for people the more that they suffer in this world. When you believe that the afterlife is eternal, and this life is temporary and short by comparison, it can open up a whole series of perverse beliefs and behaviors.
"Buying a car sucks," Scott Painter says. "It's something that most consumers fear."
Back in the '90s, Painter started a company to try to change this. "The name of the company was Cars Direct," he says. "The mission was to sell cars directly."
Painter wanted his company to build virtual dealerships that would let people go online and buy cars. But after talking with a few car execs, he realized nobody would even consider his idea.
Painter was stopped by a web of state laws that make it very, very difficult to change the way cars are sold.
...
Car dealers argue that the laws are necessary to protect dealers' investment, and to protect the jobs of people who work at car dealerships.
"If you just take our organization alone, we employ over 2,000 people," says Tammy Darvish, who runs a group of auto dealerships and sits on the board of the National Automobile Dealers Association. "That's 2,000 families throughout greater Washington that are dependent on us continuing our business operations."
There are plenty other businesses employ lots of people but don't have so much protection from state laws.
That may partly be due to the fact that car dealers have a lot political power. Dealers contribute a big share of state sales tax revenues — as much as 20 percent in some states — and they tend to be big local employers. That makes state and local legislators listen.
Scott Painter now runs a company called true car...that tries to ease the process of buying a car. He's now trying to work with dealers not around them.
"There is no argument by which franchise law goes away," he says. "That is purely a fantasy conversation.
Companies like Tesla, Auto Nation, Costco and even many dealers are pushing to innovate from within the system as it is. All the people I talked to for this story — Tammy Darvish, lawyers for the auto industry, and Scott Painter himself — aid a friendlier, more rational car buying experience would come eventually. But it won't come without your local car dealer.
A few months back, NPR's Planet Money did an episode on the car dealership business and how entrenched they are with the government. It goes back for decades. It's worth a listen.
Total firearm-related death rate: 10.2
Homicides: 3.2
Suicides: 6.3
Unintentional: 0.2
Undetermined: 0.1
The graph in the comic shows the US "gun related murders" on a logrithmic scale a little under 4. Based on that, it's clear that his graph is including gun homicides and not gun suicides.
Good luck getting a positive comment about DRM or a negative comment about piracy on Slashdot.
Most everyone here is quick to point out the problems of DRM. Honest users don't like DRM because it's going to affect their ability to use the stuff they bought. Pirates don't like DRM, either. (Oftentimes the DRM gets broke which doesn't bother the pirates, but sometimes it slows them down to blocks them entirely.)
Based on this, there's a tendency for people to be dishonest about DRM - the same way you'd be dishonestly harsh about some kid who stole your girlfriend.
I'm generally accepting about DRMs existence - in part because it seems like the younger generation thinks they should have a right to pirate everything. The worse piracy gets, the more I support the creation and use of DRM - both to support the creators and to support the continued survival of the industry that creates our entertainment and our software.
I generally favor the removal of DRM after a set period of time. This gives creators access to the initial sales spike. After a year or so, removing the DRM can be done for the benefit of the customer.
Some of the myths promoted by the anti-DRM, pro-piracy crowd (which overlap but aren't necessarily synonymous):
- DRM always gets broken. Not true. It's true that the more popular a piece of software is, the more likely it is to get cracked. The PS3 DRM system held up quite well for years (and GeoHot's crack only worked for previous versions of the OS; he now says the PS3 is too hard to crack). Microsoft's DRM allowed them to ban a million XBox users - they can still use their XBoxes, but have to buy a new one if they want to play online. Both of those count as positive (and different strategies) for combating piracy through DRM. I also had some software I wrote under DRM. It was eventually cracked (after 10 months) and showed up on pirate sites. Still, that gave me 10 months of pirate-free sales, which is where most of the sales were anyway.
- Piracy increases sales. In case you're wondering: no, I didn't see any increase in sales after 10 months due to "pirates paying for the software they pirated". I actually saw a slight drop in sales, though I'm doubtful about blaming that on piracy. My experience makes me doubt that pirates pay for media after they've pirated it.
- DRM is only about control. The subtext of this is "if it was about getting consumers to buy their stuff instead of pirate it, it might be legitimate, but it's all about control and they have no right to control me. Therefore, by pirating I'm subverting their vile attempts to control me!" What nonsense. I will admit that this kind of thinking fulfills a psychological need among pirates to legitimize their piracy. I've worked with publishers and game developers and I know they hate seeing their products pirated, and the kind of fear that creates when you've invested tons of time and money and you need to get paid or else you'll go bankrupt. (I've heard even some of the smallest game-developer companies ask the question, "How do you prevent piracy?" Do you really believe some small-time company is out to control people?) Creating stuff is a gamble - a big gamble. All business ventures are gambles. It's like walking into a casino and dropping a big part of your life savings. It sucks when you think that pirates are (effectively) putting their hand on the roulette wheel and making it difficult for you to win on the gamble you're taking.
- People should create stuff because that's what they love to do, not worry about piracy. What nonsense. Creators invest tons of time and money into their product. We're not going to live under a bridge just so you can have free stuff. I'd recommend you try that argument with doctors, teachers, and everyone else in the modern economy. We've got bills to pay, and I'm not going to make myself into a sacrificial lamb so you can have great stuff. Maybe if you'd come over to my house and mow my lawn for
it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
With that kind of thinking, I'm surprised you aren't advocating the abolition of payment for all jobs. Doctors, teachers, taxi drivers - they should all work for free according to this argument, right?
The established studios are scared to death of this, so are fighting tooth and nail to prevent it and preserve their old, outdated business model. Just like happened with the VCR and movie rental stores. They fought those tooth and nail too, claiming they'd be the doom of the movie industry [slashdot.org]. Instead they turned into the lifeblood of the industry (tape/disc sales and rentals have long since surpassed movie theaters for revenue).
I don't think movie studios fought movie rental stores or video discs. They fought re-recordable media like the VCR because it was *re-recordable*. It turns out that there wasn't the large scale copying that they feared would undermine the industry. There's a variety of reasons that things worked out that way (maybe it has to do with the fact that you had to get a copy of the movie in the first place in order to make a copy, and the fact that VCR copies always look worse than the original - neither of these problems plague BitTorrent). Additionally, VCR/VideoDiscs allow for the existence of rental stores. BitTorrent doesn't provide them anything at all. They're already streaming movies via NetFlix and Amazon video-on-demand.
Cory Doctorow says a lot of stupid things. I especially like when he argued that "Nobody woke up one day and decided they'd like to have less rights with the digital content they buy" (in other words: copyright is dumb because it doesn't serve the customer's interest). Meanwhile, he believes that free piracy should be legal, he also believes that nobody should be allowed to sell his copyrighted material (beyond the first sale). Excuse me for pointing out the obvious contradiction, but (1) despite what he's always heard, the customer is not always right and (2) if copyright restricts selling copyrighted material (example: I can't sell the same copy of digital media over and over on ebay or amazon or on the street corner) that constitutes a restriction that I (as the consumer) don't want. More bluntly: I didn't wake up one day and say, "I'd like Cory Doctorow to restrict my ability to keep reselling copyrighted material over and over." He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.
BTW, a few years ago, the technology to copy Nintendo DS disks came out and started to become common in places like Spain. Nintendo saw their sales drop in half in about a year. So, yeah, there's definitely cases of piracy hurting an industry. Even worse for Cory's point, I've seen him argue elsewhere that piracy helps middle-level musicians (by getting their music out there), but harms the big-players (like Metallica) because they're already known and don't benefit much from the extra publicity. I disagree with his point (and think it probably applies better to a society where there is some piracy, but where society hasn't entirely switched over to being fully pirate-based), It's obvious that his claim that big-names get hurt by piracy directly contradicts his argument here that "nobody ever lost a dime from piracy". Like I said: He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't use copyright to legitimize patent law. They're two different things. First of all, copyright law is much more limited in scope than patents are. For example: you can go after someone if they started redistributing your podcast (maybe with inserting their own commercials and pocketing the money), but you can't sue all podcasters using copyright law.
And secondly, you can't use justifications for Intellectual Property law A as justifications for Intellectual Property law B. If that worked, then do this quick mental experiment:
Step 1. Dream up a new intellectual property law
Step 2. If copyright law justifies patent law, then you should be able to use copyright law to justify your new intellectual property law.
Step 3. You have now justified your new intellectual property law - whatever the heck it is. You've now shown that all conceivable intellectual property laws are justified (no matter what they are, you just need to dream it up).
What a turd. This guy is trying to take-on the mantle of being "the little guy" against the big guys because he knows that people like to support the underdog. Sorry, Jim Logan, we're not that stupid. We're not going to do a knee-jerk support of the underdog when the underdog is wrong. Besides, it's pretty clear that the real underdogs here are the podcasters, which Jim Logan (who's obviously a millionaire) is beating up. The only thing that this tells me is that people who stand to make millions of dollars off of bad patents can rationalize their crap to themselves.
I don't think that's quite it. The original quote sounds very conservative (as in "women should be at home raising the kids, not doing science [with the justification that 'raising kids is important']"). I think the downvoting was caused by more liberal people who don't want to limit women's role to "raising kids". There might be some people who want to minimize women's importance in raising kids because they feel it would benefit adoptive gay (male) parents, but that seems like a minority position.
I'd also say that it's far more common to devalue fathers roles in children's lives than mother's roles. This is the major reason so many divorce courts favor the mother as the primary caretaker. Among people I know personally, the only cases where the father has custody of the children is when the mother is really messed up (e.g. an alcoholic).
Yes, well, people tend to have a lot more money in bitcoin than in physical dollars. I don't think I ever have more than $80 in physical money at any moment in time. The rest is in the bank. And if your house burns down, burning your money, you were stupid to have much money stored in your house. I'd be a little paranoid if I had more than a few thousand dollars in cash in my house. Yet, I've heard of people losing $80,000 and a million dollars worth of bitcoins in harddrive crashes. (And harddrive crashes happen a lot more often than houses burning down.) If someone lost $80,000 cash because their house burned down, my first question would be, "Why the f*** would you keep $80,000 cash in your house?" If your attitude is "f*** banks, I'm keeping my life savings in my house" then you've got a major flaw in your thinking. Essentially, all you've done is give examples of people being really stupid with physical money, and then saying, "Yeah, but bitcoin is safer than if you did this stupid thing!"
Yeah, because a pirate wants to buy multiple copies of the same book now.
Yeah, if your goal from the very start is to buy a book so that you could put it online for other pirates. Most people aren't putting that much forethought into their crimes. And once you bought a book (with your own credit card), and then decide afterwards that you want to put it out there for pirates, suddenly, you realize that it's not such a good idea.
I'd like to see a source for that claim. Here's a counterpoint: I have a friend who used to buy the software he uses. Then he discovered piracy. Now, he never pays for software and thinks anyone who does is stupid. You can't tell me that piracy didn't lead to lost sales.
It seems to me that if an author/creator spends time creating something, he's probably suffering financially during that time (because he/she is creating something rather than working a day job with that same time). If he/she is supporting a family during that time, they are suffering during that time as well. This is why copyright should extend beyond the life of the author - so that the family can benefit from the labor and financial hardship they endured.
Also, if a company pays an author an advance to write a book (in return for exclusive publishing rights), and that author dies shortly after publishing the book, the elimination of copyright would mean that the publisher no longer has exclusive publishing rights (i.e. any other publishing company can now publish the book). They are partners in the creation of the work, yet they suddenly lose a valuable asset (exclusive publishing rights) that they invested in simply because the author died?
Keep in mind that different products have different values attached to those peripheral value-addeds. For example, you can't claim that music is "defective" because it was taken through piracy - since there's no such thing as "music maintenance", "upgrades", or "the ability to speak candidly with the vendor". Some software products fall into the same category. Also, don't think that piracy stops pirates from "speaking candidly with the vendor and request new features/enhancements". I've seen pirates caught on webforums complaining about bugs in games that haven't even been released to the public yet. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.139753-Arkham-Asylum-Pirates-Get-a-Gimpy-Batman
I think my point still stands, since you never attempted to even dispute the fact that the price paid by the pirate is not the same thing as the price they would've paid had piracy not been an option (when you were attempting to claim that the value of a product is only what the buyer (i.e. pirate) paid for it).
Effectively, you're claiming that, if a pirate gets something for X dollars (where X dollars could be as low as $0), then that shows that's all they were willing to pay, and therefore, it is the value of the product. That's obviously flawed and wrong.
I can't believe you got voted up.
No, you're wrong because if people are offered two different prices for the same product, they'll choose the cheaper price. Let me give you an example: let's say you want to buy a product. It costs $500 (retail). You want this product so bad that you're willing to pay $800. Then, someone comes along and offers it to you for $100. You buy it for $100. What does this prove? Does it prive that "the buyers (you) weren't willing to pay the price the maker wanted to sell the software at" (i.e. $500)? No. It means you picked the cheaper of the two options. It does not prove that you weren't willing to buy it for $500. It does not prove that " those sales by definition were not worth the retail price."
It's worth pointing out that what the buyer paid the pirate for the software and what the buyer would be willing to pay the pirate are two different things. For example, the buyer might've paid $100 for the software, but was willing to pay $1,000.
As long as we're talking about "market value", it should be pointed out that *everything* is valued at what the buyer was willing to pay for the product. For example, let's say that a car is being sold by a car dealership for $10,000. If a car thief came along and stole the car, what's the car's value? According to your definition, it's worth whatever the thief would've paid for it. If the thief was poor and only willing to pay $2,000 for the car, would that mean that the thief should old be charged in court for the theft of a $2,000 car? Economics is fun, isn't it?
I will admit that, because software can be easily duplicated, the car and software example doesn't quite match up.
> "since they did build devices and did attempt to market them."
The "devices" they created existed decades before Jim Logan came along to patent it: "The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership."
You claim that patent law helps inventors and companies protect their intellectual work. Using that general observation, you then claim(simply because it is a "patent" and patents are, in general, helpful) that your particular patent is therefore helpful to the world. One can imagine scenarios where a particularly unique or non-obvious idea could be helpful to the world if companies could come along, view the patent, decide to license the technology, giving them a leg-up in their field. In other words, the money they spent to secure licensing outweighed the money they spent for the license, and they wouldn't have thought of the idea themselves.
However, your idea is obvious. Your idea was not known to the general public, yet it was reinvented over and over.
This suggests that your idea should never have been protected in the first place.
My question is: do you actually believe that your patent has helped the world and the money you receive from actual hardworking people is deserved, or do you know that your patent is extractive and you don't care about fairness because you stand to earn so much free money (in other words, is this a cynical money grab that you think is okay because the government failed in it's responsibility to protect the public from bad patents)?
> "According to NPR last week, you basically invented books-on-tape, including distribution of same."
They didn't say that. And those things existed long before Jim Logan applied for a patent.
"The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership." http://blindreaders.info/audiobks.html
Magazined on tape existed before Jim Logan came along. Here's some prior art back in the 1970s - two decades before Jim Logan applied for a patent. If magazines on audio is an example of using his patent, then prior art invalidates his patent.
"The National Talking Express is a monthly stereo tape magazine for the blind and visually impaired. It was launched in 1979 and was the first tape magazine in the UK to go stereo. It has a national and international membership." http://blindreaders.info/audiobks.html
I'm pretty sure you've got the cause and effect backwards. Newspapers are dying because ad-revenue is down. Why is is down? Because people are buying fewer papers and getting their news online and because (even though they move their paper online to follow their customers) internet ads pay less than newspaper ads. Cutting their staff is a symptom of declining revenue. Now I guess we watch all the people with ad-blockers complain about the decline of the quality of the news.
> I thought the same at first read. However [wikipedia.org].
I still agree that the term "self-fulfilling prophecy" in this context is just plain wrong. Yes, if you're capable of advancing *faster* than "twice the transistors every 18 months" then it's self-fulfilling in that you can throttle-down the rate of increase. The problem comes in when you can't keep up with that 2x every 18 months rate. It's not self-fulfilling because you might not be capable of keeping up with that. Because of that second situation, you can't call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. As lots of people have pointed out: there's plenty of industries which can't keep up with an exponential rate of growth *no matter how much R&D they put into the product* because of other limits - e.g. car manufacturers can't double the fuel efficiency every X years or increase the speed of cars or aircraft (due to a variety of reasons such as physical limits, air resistance, and driver control).
Indeed. And if we allow police to have guns, there's no telling what they'll do with them. I'm sure they'll create gulags and prison camps for the American public. We must not allow police to have guns! /sarcasm.
See also: slippery slope argument.
There's a difference between "defending someone's right to say something" and arguing that they are a model human being. I'm sure you can think of a few examples of nasty things that people have said in the past (e.g. Fred Phelps or the KKK) where you might say "they have a right to say it" but you'd never hold them up as exemplars. Here's the thing: you can defend someone's right to say something, and still think they're an asshole for saying it and believing it.
Pointing out that some governments acted worse than Mother Teresa doesn't elevate Mother Teresa into a model human being. That's a cheap tactic, actually. If I went and robbed my neighbor and people blamed me for doing it, it would be a poor arguing tactic to start pointing out other people (serial murderers, etc) who are worse than me that "everybody should be pointing the finger at".
Mother Teresa certainly gave up a lot to help the poor, but her sacrifices were marred by the fact that she did have a particular love for the "sanctifying" effects of suffering ("“There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,”") and that she did things like discriminate against homosexuals who wanted to be helped. For whatever reason, there's a particular strain of Catholicism that seems to value suffering - as if God will show exceptional mercy and reward for people the more that they suffer in this world. When you believe that the afterlife is eternal, and this life is temporary and short by comparison, it can open up a whole series of perverse beliefs and behaviors.
"Why Buying A Car Never Changes"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buying-a-car-never-changes
An excerpt:
A few months back, NPR's Planet Money did an episode on the car dealership business and how entrenched they are with the government. It goes back for decades. It's worth a listen.
"Episode 435: Why Buying A Car Is So Awful"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why-buying-a-car-is-so-awful
According to this page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate ), the gun-related deaths in the US are:
Total firearm-related death rate: 10.2
Homicides: 3.2
Suicides: 6.3
Unintentional: 0.2
Undetermined: 0.1
The graph in the comic shows the US "gun related murders" on a logrithmic scale a little under 4. Based on that, it's clear that his graph is including gun homicides and not gun suicides.
Good luck getting a positive comment about DRM or a negative comment about piracy on Slashdot.
Most everyone here is quick to point out the problems of DRM. Honest users don't like DRM because it's going to affect their ability to use the stuff they bought. Pirates don't like DRM, either. (Oftentimes the DRM gets broke which doesn't bother the pirates, but sometimes it slows them down to blocks them entirely.)
Based on this, there's a tendency for people to be dishonest about DRM - the same way you'd be dishonestly harsh about some kid who stole your girlfriend.
I'm generally accepting about DRMs existence - in part because it seems like the younger generation thinks they should have a right to pirate everything. The worse piracy gets, the more I support the creation and use of DRM - both to support the creators and to support the continued survival of the industry that creates our entertainment and our software.
I generally favor the removal of DRM after a set period of time. This gives creators access to the initial sales spike. After a year or so, removing the DRM can be done for the benefit of the customer.
Some of the myths promoted by the anti-DRM, pro-piracy crowd (which overlap but aren't necessarily synonymous):
- DRM always gets broken. Not true. It's true that the more popular a piece of software is, the more likely it is to get cracked. The PS3 DRM system held up quite well for years (and GeoHot's crack only worked for previous versions of the OS; he now says the PS3 is too hard to crack). Microsoft's DRM allowed them to ban a million XBox users - they can still use their XBoxes, but have to buy a new one if they want to play online. Both of those count as positive (and different strategies) for combating piracy through DRM. I also had some software I wrote under DRM. It was eventually cracked (after 10 months) and showed up on pirate sites. Still, that gave me 10 months of pirate-free sales, which is where most of the sales were anyway.
- Piracy increases sales. In case you're wondering: no, I didn't see any increase in sales after 10 months due to "pirates paying for the software they pirated". I actually saw a slight drop in sales, though I'm doubtful about blaming that on piracy. My experience makes me doubt that pirates pay for media after they've pirated it.
- DRM is only about control. The subtext of this is "if it was about getting consumers to buy their stuff instead of pirate it, it might be legitimate, but it's all about control and they have no right to control me. Therefore, by pirating I'm subverting their vile attempts to control me!" What nonsense. I will admit that this kind of thinking fulfills a psychological need among pirates to legitimize their piracy. I've worked with publishers and game developers and I know they hate seeing their products pirated, and the kind of fear that creates when you've invested tons of time and money and you need to get paid or else you'll go bankrupt. (I've heard even some of the smallest game-developer companies ask the question, "How do you prevent piracy?" Do you really believe some small-time company is out to control people?) Creating stuff is a gamble - a big gamble. All business ventures are gambles. It's like walking into a casino and dropping a big part of your life savings. It sucks when you think that pirates are (effectively) putting their hand on the roulette wheel and making it difficult for you to win on the gamble you're taking.
- People should create stuff because that's what they love to do, not worry about piracy. What nonsense. Creators invest tons of time and money into their product. We're not going to live under a bridge just so you can have free stuff. I'd recommend you try that argument with doctors, teachers, and everyone else in the modern economy. We've got bills to pay, and I'm not going to make myself into a sacrificial lamb so you can have great stuff. Maybe if you'd come over to my house and mow my lawn for
With that kind of thinking, I'm surprised you aren't advocating the abolition of payment for all jobs. Doctors, teachers, taxi drivers - they should all work for free according to this argument, right?
I don't think movie studios fought movie rental stores or video discs. They fought re-recordable media like the VCR because it was *re-recordable*. It turns out that there wasn't the large scale copying that they feared would undermine the industry. There's a variety of reasons that things worked out that way (maybe it has to do with the fact that you had to get a copy of the movie in the first place in order to make a copy, and the fact that VCR copies always look worse than the original - neither of these problems plague BitTorrent). Additionally, VCR/VideoDiscs allow for the existence of rental stores. BitTorrent doesn't provide them anything at all. They're already streaming movies via NetFlix and Amazon video-on-demand.
So, no, I don't think BitTorrent is comparable.
Cory Doctorow says a lot of stupid things. I especially like when he argued that "Nobody woke up one day and decided they'd like to have less rights with the digital content they buy" (in other words: copyright is dumb because it doesn't serve the customer's interest). Meanwhile, he believes that free piracy should be legal, he also believes that nobody should be allowed to sell his copyrighted material (beyond the first sale). Excuse me for pointing out the obvious contradiction, but (1) despite what he's always heard, the customer is not always right and (2) if copyright restricts selling copyrighted material (example: I can't sell the same copy of digital media over and over on ebay or amazon or on the street corner) that constitutes a restriction that I (as the consumer) don't want. More bluntly: I didn't wake up one day and say, "I'd like Cory Doctorow to restrict my ability to keep reselling copyrighted material over and over." He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.
BTW, a few years ago, the technology to copy Nintendo DS disks came out and started to become common in places like Spain. Nintendo saw their sales drop in half in about a year. So, yeah, there's definitely cases of piracy hurting an industry. Even worse for Cory's point, I've seen him argue elsewhere that piracy helps middle-level musicians (by getting their music out there), but harms the big-players (like Metallica) because they're already known and don't benefit much from the extra publicity. I disagree with his point (and think it probably applies better to a society where there is some piracy, but where society hasn't entirely switched over to being fully pirate-based), It's obvious that his claim that big-names get hurt by piracy directly contradicts his argument here that "nobody ever lost a dime from piracy". Like I said: He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.