What the **AA is right about is that "intellectual property" is a critical industry to the US economy (Yes, I know captain C is canadian but anyway...) I don't have numbers, but it is probably the most profitable sector as America continues to fall behind making quality electronics, cars, etc.
It is unfortunate for America that history is marching (pretty quickly) away from the foundation of this sector.
Not piratry, of course, but a creative-commons-only network so that -- for example -- any track you click "love this" on would be downloaded, stored somewhere, and you could build CDs etc right inside the app.
The first one that jumped out was "claiming immunity to copyright laws". They of course never claimed this; they claimed that they weren't breaking any copyright laws. So that's libel, right?
"You want to pay $x per song and own it forever, you can. You want to pay $x per month for unlimited use (but stops when you stop paying), you can. Choice is good."
I'm 100% in favor of people selling what they have to sell on their own terms. And if no one wants to take those terms, they sell nothing or change models. But I get suspicious when people say "let the consumers decide if they want X or Y" and Y is blatantly inferior to X.
When millions of people seem to be choosing crippled, severely restrictive products over comparable ones that are unrestricted and cost less, you have a prima facie case for some sort of market failure, or anti-competitive activity. It could well turn out that the products are not actually a good substitute and the case is dropped.
But no one would choose to have a broadcast flag limiting how & whether they can time/space/format shift the entertainments they purchase. Why do we all just assume the market is working fine, and this is one of those valuable things being put up for sale. The latest rms-bashing piece suffers from this lack of common sense. Your post doesn't necessarily suffer (but you could have made things clear by say '$x' and '$y'. The prices for the two options would vary -- greatly, if the market's working right).
...in case the guy thinks about suing me for libel. John Cornyn being a moron is only one possible explanation of why he says a bunch of false, stupid things. I consider it one of the most likely. But I admit there might be some other reason (e.g. he's a liar, he's a genius pretending to be a moron, etc.)
John Cornyn (R-TX): In MGM v. Grokster, "the Supreme Court reinforced the principle that those who facilitate theft often are just as guilty as the thieves themselves. Every day, literally millions of dollars in copyrighted works are stolen via online services. This theft is no less wrong because it is carried out in cyberspace - rather, potentially worse than common shoplifting, it is putting thousands of Americans out of work"
These guys crack me the hell up. Sorry, but if this is how poorly our #$%^%@ing Legislators understand the law, casual/. readers can be forgiven.
I'm not siding with the view that infringement == theft.. just answering "How many times do you morons have to be told?" with "Lots more. Lots"
It's just that under that scheme, there's no reason for anyone else to buy it either. The market value of the content is dramatically reduced by allowing use without compensation.
Rubbish. If there are ten copies of Da Vinci Code II:Electric Boogaloo and 90 people mulling around trying to read it for free in the store, shelling out $20 for a copy is Very Cost-effective. The value-add is that your access is unrestricted, not affected by other people's attempts to access it. But you have to add value to 'content' to sell it. 'Cause it's digitizable. And a few hours after it begins to exist, it's usually digitized in actuality.
It's impossible to tell how many bugs pieces of software have because they're so complex. In other news, it's impossible to tell which animals are smarter because brains are so complex.
"auditing any source code in order to ensure there are no security vulnerabilities is nigh on impossible"
True, if the auditor is a government, even a large, well-funded government. If the auditor is the entire computing population of the earth, it's easier.
Which gets us full circle: the way you find faults an exceedingly complex device/program is to drop it onto as large a population as possible; put it into service in as many widely-varying situations as you can, and the overall uptime stats will show you which pieces of gosh-this-is-complicated software are most stable. EOF.
No kidding. btw, weren't you in the China thread too?
I really don't get why every other comment about linux is on the topic "what Lx needs to fix/do in order to gain market share". Insightful as these might be, I don't really care about them. I tell people why I use Linux, but I really don't have a dog in the marketshare fight. As long as the powers that be don't tier my Internet, illegalize my hardware, etc. I don't care what OS "predominates".
On the topic at hand, I think the package-installation GUIs that ship with Fedora and SuSE nowadays do a pretty good job of abstracting off the apt-get or yum details. The softare management "standards" from the pure-newb point of view are buttons that say "install" and "remove".
Unless users wants a niche-market package, YaST can get them what they want. And users that *do want niche-market packages are generally going to be the kind of users that don't mind learning how to use rpm options or even compile from source.
If I understood Moglen's analysis of Eldred v Ashcroft correctly, the Supreme Court more or less said there is no Constitutional limit on how "overbearing" copyright laws can get. Anything Congress passes is presumed kosher.
You still have the recourse of finding new legislators to start repealing these bogus "intellectual property" laws. Good luck with that. The trend in 80% of (democratic) governments is to extend the scope and length of copyright coverage even more, and to have these extensions enforceable across international boundaries through WIPO etc.
I'm waiting for a forward-thinking, high-profile country to stand up and say. "Hey, you know what, we thought about it and
-A twenty year copyright term provides enough incentive for the creation of works and the advancement of science and the useful arts
-Recent technology has made it quite easy for an author to recoup a hefty reward for a popular piece of writing/art over the course of twenty years.
It seems absurd to me that as the world gets more interconnected, making it easier for an author to find and sell to hisher market in a short time period, copyright terms are being extended
I actually think jazz would benefit *most from a reduction (serious reduction, e.g. to 3 years) or elimination of copyright. No music has more fruitfully "borrowed" and sampled the works of other musicians & styles.
Picture an improvisor of Bird's skill being legally allowed to revamp, rewrite, record, and release any tune heshe wanted without having to clear rights. It'd be like Dial-a-Song, except probably Dial-a-Dozen-Songs
I'm almost strictly a jazz fan myself, as a mattter of fact.
Politically, though, I think the State should pretty much keep out of the arts. I mean that calling certain types of music creative and trying to encourage just those is not really its function. My view is essentially constitutionalist: copyright should "promote science and the useful arts". The state's duty is to demonstrate -- scientifically -- that whatever copyright it wants to put in place will further that goal.
In this view, it appears the state hast to make a judgment call about which arts are "useful". In this decision it is to do what states usually do: balance the interests of the parties -- including the state. Some arts may be useful to some but useless to others; some may be useless to everyone *but the state (e.g. nationalist propaganda), etc.
"If there was "no copyright to begin with," the world wouldn't suddenly transform into a sunny world of butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom. That's a utopian myth."
Geez, you're right. Curses upon all those people who have been spreading that myth!
Nobody, not even the radical fanatical (whatever labels you want to attach to him) Richard Stallman, suggests copyright prevents butterflies from flitting around. The scientific question is: if there were no copyright protection for creative works, would creative output increase or decrease?
What would happen is that people would create pieces of art for the sake of art. Since TFA is about software, people/businesses would create software for its use-value, rather than its exchange-value.
You may believe that the overall quantity/quality of art & software would plummet, but you would need to back that up. Fact is that art is an input to creativity as well as an output. Copyright limits the amount of art that can be "fed in" to the process. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to expect that without this limit, the same approximate amount of art would come out of the aggregate population.
"I wouldn't want some legislator telling me I can't do what I want with the traffic in my own network"
This is the standard propertarian (as opposed to libertarian) view of the thing. The problem is that those legislators are also the ones who prevented any of your competitors from building a network (on public property, and citizens' property) right next to yours.
The construction of "your" network was subsidized by government, because it is stupid to run a whole line of wire/pipe for every business that wants to provide Net, phone, water, power, etc. You were given a monopoly by the government, and it may want something in exchange.
"Funny, I thought libertarianism was about, well, liberty. Not business"
A lot of the libertarians I hear from/read would be better described as propertarians. Test yourself: if, when you hear about a rights issue, you immediately start asking who owns what, you may be a propertarian. If, instead, you ask who is being forbidden to do what, and whether doing that would violate anyone else's natural rights, it seems more "liberty-oriented" to me.
SBC et al. want to play on the propertarians -- this is why they talk about how Google should not be allowed to use "their" networks for free etc. What buncombe.
Slashdot Mirror
It is unfortunate for America that history is marching (pretty quickly) away from the foundation of this sector.
Not piratry, of course, but a creative-commons-only network so that -- for example -- any track you click "love this" on would be downloaded, stored somewhere, and you could build CDs etc right inside the app.
a baía do pirata dot-com, anyone?
I hear they also have a thing for free software.
The first one that jumped out was "claiming immunity to copyright laws". They of course never claimed this; they claimed that they weren't breaking any copyright laws. So that's libel, right?
I'm 100% in favor of people selling what they have to sell on their own terms. And if no one wants to take those terms, they sell nothing or change models. But I get suspicious when people say "let the consumers decide if they want X or Y" and Y is blatantly inferior to X.
When millions of people seem to be choosing crippled, severely restrictive products over comparable ones that are unrestricted and cost less, you have a prima facie case for some sort of market failure, or anti-competitive activity. It could well turn out that the products are not actually a good substitute and the case is dropped.
But no one would choose to have a broadcast flag limiting how & whether they can time/space/format shift the entertainments they purchase. Why do we all just assume the market is working fine, and this is one of those valuable things being put up for sale. The latest rms-bashing piece suffers from this lack of common sense. Your post doesn't necessarily suffer (but you could have made things clear by say '$x' and '$y'. The prices for the two options would vary -- greatly, if the market's working right).
funniest thing i've seen all day. An I live in Texas
But yeah, it was out of place. Wow, I should get a levelheadedness record.
The governor is on fire
...in case the guy thinks about suing me for libel. John Cornyn being a moron is only one possible explanation of why he says a bunch of false, stupid things. I consider it one of the most likely. But I admit there might be some other reason (e.g. he's a liar, he's a genius pretending to be a moron, etc.)
These guys crack me the hell up. Sorry, but if this is how poorly our #$%^%@ing Legislators understand the law, casual /. readers can be forgiven.
I'm not siding with the view that infringement == theft.. just answering "How many times do you morons have to be told?" with "Lots more. Lots"
Rubbish. If there are ten copies of Da Vinci Code II:Electric Boogaloo and 90 people mulling around trying to read it for free in the store, shelling out $20 for a copy is Very Cost-effective. The value-add is that your access is unrestricted, not affected by other people's attempts to access it. But you have to add value to 'content' to sell it. 'Cause it's digitizable. And a few hours after it begins to exist, it's usually digitized in actuality.
CDBaby
This is a good starting point.
CDBaby
"auditing any source code in order to ensure there are no security vulnerabilities is nigh on impossible"
True, if the auditor is a government, even a large, well-funded government. If the auditor is the entire computing population of the earth, it's easier.
Which gets us full circle: the way you find faults an exceedingly complex device/program is to drop it onto as large a population as possible; put it into service in as many widely-varying situations as you can, and the overall uptime stats will show you which pieces of gosh-this-is-complicated software are most stable. EOF.
I really don't get why every other comment about linux is on the topic "what Lx needs to fix/do in order to gain market share". Insightful as these might be, I don't really care about them. I tell people why I use Linux, but I really don't have a dog in the marketshare fight. As long as the powers that be don't tier my Internet, illegalize my hardware, etc. I don't care what OS "predominates".
On the topic at hand, I think the package-installation GUIs that ship with Fedora and SuSE nowadays do a pretty good job of abstracting off the apt-get or yum details. The softare management "standards" from the pure-newb point of view are buttons that say "install" and "remove".
Unless users wants a niche-market package, YaST can get them what they want. And users that *do want niche-market packages are generally going to be the kind of users that don't mind learning how to use rpm options or even compile from source.
there is not text lameness filter
You still have the recourse of finding new legislators to start repealing these bogus "intellectual property" laws. Good luck with that. The trend in 80% of (democratic) governments is to extend the scope and length of copyright coverage even more, and to have these extensions enforceable across international boundaries through WIPO etc.
-A twenty year copyright term provides enough incentive for the creation of works and the advancement of science and the useful arts
-Recent technology has made it quite easy for an author to recoup a hefty reward for a popular piece of writing/art over the course of twenty years.
It seems absurd to me that as the world gets more interconnected, making it easier for an author to find and sell to hisher market in a short time period, copyright terms are being extended
Picture an improvisor of Bird's skill being legally allowed to revamp, rewrite, record, and release any tune heshe wanted without having to clear rights. It'd be like Dial-a-Song, except probably Dial-a-Dozen-Songs
Politically, though, I think the State should pretty much keep out of the arts. I mean that calling certain types of music creative and trying to encourage just those is not really its function. My view is essentially constitutionalist: copyright should "promote science and the useful arts". The state's duty is to demonstrate -- scientifically -- that whatever copyright it wants to put in place will further that goal.
In this view, it appears the state hast to make a judgment call about which arts are "useful". In this decision it is to do what states usually do: balance the interests of the parties -- including the state. Some arts may be useful to some but useless to others; some may be useless to everyone *but the state (e.g. nationalist propaganda), etc.
Geez, you're right. Curses upon all those people who have been spreading that myth!
Nobody, not even the radical fanatical (whatever labels you want to attach to him) Richard Stallman, suggests copyright prevents butterflies from flitting around. The scientific question is: if there were no copyright protection for creative works, would creative output increase or decrease?
What would happen is that people would create pieces of art for the sake of art. Since TFA is about software, people/businesses would create software for its use-value, rather than its exchange-value.
You may believe that the overall quantity/quality of art & software would plummet, but you would need to back that up. Fact is that art is an input to creativity as well as an output. Copyright limits the amount of art that can be "fed in" to the process. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to expect that without this limit, the same approximate amount of art would come out of the aggregate population.
0% of free software is pirated.
This is the standard propertarian (as opposed to libertarian) view of the thing. The problem is that those legislators are also the ones who prevented any of your competitors from building a network (on public property, and citizens' property) right next to yours.
The construction of "your" network was subsidized by government, because it is stupid to run a whole line of wire/pipe for every business that wants to provide Net, phone, water, power, etc. You were given a monopoly by the government, and it may want something in exchange.
"Science fiction author Doc Searls" ?!?!!?
A lot of the libertarians I hear from/read would be better described as propertarians. Test yourself: if, when you hear about a rights issue, you immediately start asking who owns what, you may be a propertarian. If, instead, you ask who is being forbidden to do what, and whether doing that would violate anyone else's natural rights, it seems more "liberty-oriented" to me.
SBC et al. want to play on the propertarians -- this is why they talk about how Google should not be allowed to use "their" networks for free etc. What buncombe.