Ummm... so the government of China says MS needs to open its source because it stops them from doing firewall stuff for Taiwan?
Taiwan is a separate country not owned by China, so what the hell does China have to say about anything? The headline should be CHINA asks MS to open its source. If the guy from China actually mentioned Taiwan, he was probably talking about how China has been itching to bomb the crap out of them and take it over for decades now.
Eiffel is the only language to teach if you want to teach object oriented methodologies. Period. If you disagree, you don't know what Eiffel is. If you think you know what Eiffel is and still disagree, you're wrong, you don't know about Eiffel, go learn to actually CODE in it and you might discover what object oriented really means. Anyone who tried to tell you that inheritance was like "is-a" relationships doesn't know OO from a hole in the ground and has never used Eiffel.
Dismiss me as snooty or whatever, but just stick it in the back of your mind and in 5 years when you're writing your new applications in Eiffel and wonder what the hell #defines were for and what they ever had to do with porting, remember this post.
How many more years am I going to have to wait around until people start waking up to the real issue of consumer broadband? That issue is that asynchronous connections are going to turn the Internet into a completely passive medium. You can watch, but you can't create. Sure, with a cable modem or DSL I can watch a TV show streaming across the web just fine. But I'd never be able to stream my own, not even to an intermediate server which would handle the larger scale distribution. If you think its paranoia that I think we're being set up to watch the Internet turn into TV, go ask any broadband provider why they cap upload speeds. The reason isn't because THEY have a capped upstream (they buy synchronous bandwidth) or even anything like "we're afraid people will use it for illegal stuff and we'll get blamed", the reason is because if you are serving content, you must be making money right? People wouldn't put up personal web page with multimedia conent and want to run the server from their house unless they were just raking in the cash, right? That's what they're doing. Either charge for it, or don't serve. The Internet that was built on personal web pages and experimentation is dying. Don't say I never warned you.
Considering that the patent office has almost nothing but open jobs for computer-related patent reviewers, who would oppose him? As I've mentioned DOZENS of times before, the only reasons the bad patents (speaking now to the people who don't believe that *ALL* patens are inhernetly evil) get passed is because they're getting through by default - the knowledgeable computing community has decided to not even try.
Am I missing something? According to the actual linked story, the software in question was under the LGPL... doesn't the LGPL let you take the code and include it without source in a closed source product?
I thought LGPL was the non-tyannical version of the GPL that gave people the freedom to choose the license that best suited their product instead of forcing them to conform to an Open Source authoritarian rule.
What would be there to stop people from claiming that Google's really unqiue searching technology was obvious? And how could they prove that? Most inventions are something that when you see it you say "duh, I should have known that" but you could work for years on finding the solution and come up dry. Lots of people don't know that that situation is non-obvious. Also, people who weren't well-versed in things like search technology would have nothing to draw on to argue against and would just say "its not so complicated that it doesn't make sense to me, so it must be obvious!" and things like that...
Soliciting the net for concrete examples of prior art would be a very good idea, but I think not so good for evaluating whether a process is "obvious" or not...
What are you smoking? You don't receive payment based on how many patents you approve! I have no idea where you came up with this, but its a salaried position. The companies have to pay for the research whether or not the patent goes through, so the patent office makes plenty of money even if they turn it down... but unlike on Slashdot you;d actually have to find the previous art and probably fill out 100 forms instead of just looking at it and saying "that's stupid, it's so obvious it should never get a patent"... I'd really like to see what kind of documentation has to be produced to prove that a process was "obvious"... prior art is pretty easy, but obviousness would be harder I imagine...
Well, let's see, there are a ton of computer guys bitching about the patent system. The USPTO has MANY jobs open in the area of computer-oriented patents. No one is taking those jobs. Wouldn't it be kinda a not-stupid move to get some knowledgeable people in there and get them to help with this process? Otherwise we might just end up on the worse side with even crazier laws...
Well, Rob has completely validated that he wants deCSS to be legal so that he can illegally copy DVDs, and he seems to believe that the rest of the Slashdot community feels exactly the same way.
Sorry Rob, but not all of us are thieves like you yearn to be.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the blurb again, note the part about not getting your hopes up.
Slashdot could have posted the article that I submitted last night, when it was current, but I'm sure they'll post it in 2-3 days by someone else as they always do. The REAL story is that Napster announced yesterday that it'll pander to colleges in order to gain their favor and get it un-blocked. They've changed Napster so that it will search through the "Internet 2" network before it searches the Internet itself. In future versions they will enable it to search within the univerisites intranet before even going out to the I2. Indiana University is trying it out now and other universities are watching to see how is handles the bandwidth. The RIAA, not surprisingly, are not loving this news. Perhaps Slashdot is taking recommendations from them on what to post now, who knows?
Esperandi I'd give you a link, but I gave it to Slashdot and they wouldn't post it for you. I'm sure they know best.
Not to start a war, but I attend a Catholic university, and we've got to take religion classes. In those we learned some things about the Bible specifically, namely that no evidence of Jesus' existence exists except for the Bible. And when you get right down to it, don't other religions like the Mormons and I think Buddhists have better grounding in that there is a wide array of evidence of existence of Mohammed and John Smith (I think that was his name).
The biggest gripe I have with Christianity, and it does not invalidate it or anything, is that not all the books of the Bible have been published and that the ones that haven't are being held by the Catholic church, I would think protestants would try to get them released. But I understand why they hold them because I've read about some of their content (stories about Jesus as a child striking playmates dead when he got beat at a game, etc). But, they were found on the same scrolls as the other books, so shouldn't they be released as well?
You're in luck. According to the rules laid down by Aristotle and expanded throughout the years, it is widely known that proving a negative is not possible. Prove that elephants do not exist. You can't do it, even if there are no elephants. The burden on proof is on the OTHER side, the people who claim that elephants or God DOES exist. The closest anyone has come was Kierkegaard I think, he just said you have to take a leap of faith and believe it. If you read his argument, however, you will realize that it takes a leap of faith to accept his reasoning! His reasoning is that since God is beyond the human capacity of reason to figure him out, you have to take a leap of faith. Well, think about it, how do you know that your reason is limited? The only way you can believe that there are things that exist that your mind simply cannot grasp is by taking a leap of faith!
"Those people who are getting money because their fathers or grandfathers did something worthwhile.. are they giving up life in exchange for that money? And I don't just mean the idle children of the rich, but also the idle children of the artists. What are they giving up to obtain that money which others pay for with labor?
Your analogy does not stand, because capitalism allows (nay, requires) a certain elite class that gets its money through means other than work. "
Nope, laissez faire capitalism does not require such things, and inheritance is wrong in a capitalist system. It is also morally wrong. Its easy to judge, if you didn't earn something, its immoral for you to have it. And taking it by force does not qualify as earning.
You say that money is energy and not life. Huh? So you think that the theory that money is energy explains inheritance? I don't see how...
Yes, I believe it is denigrating when you call aritsts whores because that is exactly how you meant it. In your original post, you wanted to say something along the lines of "the artist who accepts money for his work is much lower than the artist who lives in squalor and does not get paid".
"What I find exceedingly vile is that creators of limited talent (to put it charitably) can and do contribute more to our common culture... only because they purposefuly angle their work so it appeals to the same lowest common denominator that constitutes the target audience of the media corporations. "
You've gone from proposing out-and-out slavery of artists to considering yourself supreme judge of taste over the majority of humanity along with deciding that the greatest number of humanity is the lowest common denominator. Who is seeking to erect an elite class? It certainly sounds as if you are. You do not justify your position at all, note, you simply say that since the majority of people like it, they must be the "lowest" common denominator of people. Do you know why that group of people and the audience of the big corporations are the same group? it is not because they have been brainwashed or they are "easy pickings" as you paint them, it is because they chose to buy from those corporations. Why on earth would you support a corporation turning its back on what its customers want? You do realize what comes next, right? As soon as they don't take the customers dollar as their gold standard, they create their OWN standard. *That* is the difference between target marketing and censorship and control.
My belief as posted here on Slashdot is that IP laws should end upon death of the artist as the artist sees fit. If the artist wishes his work destroyed and not expanded upon, so be it. if he wishes to release it to the public domain, it is his free choice. If he signed that choie away to a record company, he has already made his choice. I don't think it should ever fall to inheritance, simply coming from the same genetic soup does not qualify you for benefits from someones talents. Likewise, being born on the same planet and into the same species does not entitle anyone ELSE to those benefits, either.
I guess I'll apologize for calling you a disgusting beast even though your views are quite disgusting to me. I believe that the ability to produce is our most valuable ability and what gives us an advantage over every animal on the planet. I know that if you do not protect the most outstanding creators by allowing them to control their own lives and the products of their lives as they choose, they will choose not to produce. You cannot force someone to have a good idea. Every dictatorship has experienced brain-drain, all their best scientists leaving or stopping from producing, I think history teahces the lesson well as to why to protect IP.
Why on earth do you think that I said they were giving authors power for the sake of giving them power? I didn't. I said they gave the authors protection to foster the progress you're talkin about. Instead, everyone else is twisting it around and saying that they LIMITED the authors power to a certain time frame in order to promote progress, which does not make any sense.
Control promotes progress. The entire explanation is far too lengthy to discuss here, email me privately if you really want to know the entire story. But it breaks down to the fact that people are motivated to create by passion. They are not motivated to duplicate and distribute by passion, and without some form of protection, they are not motivated to duplicate and distribute their works at ALL.
Whatever it is they sell, you obviously couldn't even understand it if you're such a dunce you won't use more modern browsers out of some luddite loser-lover lust for that which no one else uses.
Be careful man, you are one of the extreme minotiry of people alive today. Look at the Open SOurce community. They'd rather say "yeah, we can do anything, everything we do is cool" rather than say "we made a crappy OS that doesn't add anything new, looks like it was written 20 years ago, and if you want it to be easy to use you can go fuck yourself because we hate you". That's just one example thrown in because of the venue, but there are tons of examples of it. My boss goes slack-jawed when I go up to him and tell him how I fucked up. I do it directly, without glossing it over, i tell him exactly what I did, exactly how far behind it put us, everything. I tell him I've learned from it and its not going to happen again. And it doesn't. I've got other coworkers who try to pin things on me saying I put games on their PC and all kinds of other stuff. Well, who do you think gets believed when the lying employees claims are disputed?
But the bottom line is, if you can't get your job or can't impress people without lying, guess what? You're not worth paying and you're not impressive. Live with yourself.
"no-cost product"... WHAT?!?! Did you just say that the life of an artist and their work is absolutely worthless? That the hours they spend producing their music do not qualify as a cost?
I'm amazed at how much contempt for the artist I am discovering in these discussions, it is truly amazing. You would think that if you enjoyed what someone did you'd be willing to pay them for it, but no, one guy proposes slavery, you claim that no payment is necessary because it didn't cost anything to produce. I guess all you should pay to get into a concert is gas money, right?
"It is these activities that the music industry has leveraged to control access to their product."
Control access? So by making Lambourghinis $200k, they are "controlling" my "access" to it? Excuse me, but no. They are producing a high quality product and they have valued it at $200k. If you can't or won't pay it, you don't deserve it. In the case when you buy it, it should not be grudgingly. You should appreciate the opportunity to purcahse such a superb achievement and be glad to pay the price. If you're not both, you don't buy it, it really is that simple.
"Along comes the Internet, which makes their entire scheme null and void. It's not needed, their profit generating activities, once the only way to get music into the hands of millions, are no longer needed. That's not to say there still isn't money to be made and a profit to be had, but when you take away 99% of the cost of something, the profit margin will go down. These companies don't want that. "
How does this have any bearing at all on the current discussion? You think that if you chop down patent and copyright laws that it will only hurt the corporations? Wrong. Any artist that releases his work independently on the net would also be affected. he knows this and will not release it. Anyone who might create the next wave of record comapnies online (provide banner advertisement, expert website design, site hosting, large bandwidth capabilities, streaming webcasts of concerts, taping and webcasting for-pay interviews, etc, etc, etc, the list goes on) also gets screwed. So you're basically writing the Internet into a corner. Instead of being a constructive atmosphere, you choose to represent the Internet as a place where if you want to create, good, we'll steal every single thing you do and rape you dry and we don't give a fuck about your life. BTW, when's the next album out? That might work for Morissey, but it won't work for many others.
"They are using the revenue generated from a stranglehold in one era, to strangle the next. That is NOT good for popular culture (unless you think popular culture should consist of what you are TOLD is popular) "
Groan, get a dictionary. Pop culture is not an individual revolutionary artist and 3 fans. Pop culture is not the people that I listen to or like. Pop culture is the people who make the biggest sales. You just shot a huge load with that statement. You are assuming everyone is stupid enough to be duped by advertisment, you're assuming people are watching those advertisements, you'r eassuming a whole assload of things which boil down to a simple point: You believe people are stupid and that companies only have to spend a few bucks to get them hooked. I believe this is true for a large quantity of human beings. I also believe that those human beings deserve exactly what they get from the big corporations.
The big question here is, what was the last band that failed that the record companies supported? You see, when a band sells a million records, they get the advertisement and such, not the other way around.
"Cave paintings and folk stories were not works of art.
I would say the painters and tellers would disagree. Have you ever seen a good storyteller? Nowadays most go by the moniker "actor". "
Fine, just ingore my point. Youre still very wrong. The painters and storytellers would have asked you what the fuck you're talking about and say they're teaching their kids how to hunt. They'd then stick a nice big spear through your skull when you ask them why they waste time hunting while they could be painting pretty pictures and then letting other people have them without trade. Actors act. They entertain. They don't teach you how to do something usually. And I don't think I'd qualify those guys in hunting videos as "actors".
"And you're saying this isn't art?! " I'm saying that this wasn't art ***THEN***. Ask an elementary school kid if he thinks his teachers lectures are art. I'm betting he won't. Just liek the people back then wouldn't have. Try time-shifting yourself back to when these things went on, back to the point where nature was shit. it whipped you, it beat you, it hurt you. There was no quality of "getting away" in it at all, it was just hunt or die.
There will be a future on the Internet of protected content. You will hate it, you will rail against it, but it will happen. And when it does I want you to remember me saying this and do something for me. Sit back and wait. Wait and watch. See where the abundance of creativity and quality go to. Judge this quality objectively, don't just say "bunch of people like. Must be shit. Grumpy people like this better, this must be better.".
There are quite a few artists like this I would imagine, I don't know any personally, but its just like in every other profession. There are guys who do mechanical work for their neighbors and friends but are too afraid they would fail in the real world to attempt getting a job doing it, I imagine there would be cowardly artists as well.
When you offer your goods up for purchase you are saying "I have used my life to produce this thing. I want this much of your life (money) in return for it." Doing that takes a tremendous backbone. You might be turned down, you might find out that the products of your life aren't worth jack shit to another person.
If you do art for arts sake, well, masturbation is fun but empty.
"If there's anything worse than misunderstanding the laws which protect creativity, it's misinterpreting the creative impulse itself"
Yes, isn't it. perhaps you need to do some reading and discover that you only view those cave paintings as "art" because you don't understand the education lesson they were created to teach, things such as animals to hunt, how to hunt, etc. They may be creative, but they were created for the purpose of education which was their incentive. What passed into their hands? Probably some skins, some steaks, etc. They hadn't gotten advanced enough to require money, everyone was still sustaining their own family with minimal to no trade.
Your view of money disgusts me. Money is LIFE, sir. You obtain money by working, by spending a portion of the most valuable thing you own, your LIFE. And you think that if I give a symbol of my life to a man for his creative work that I denigrate him to a WHORE? You are a disgusting beast. I suppose you would prefer that I give him my pity or maybe ignore him completely? I give him the most valuable thing in the universe to me and it makes him a whore... jesus, I'd hate to see the way the world would have turned out if people believed the way you do, that the best way to punish someone is to give them your life.
"If I live to be 80, I just might be allowed by law to publish my extensions of Asimov's Foundation.... "
It is sad that you believe to create something of value you have to piggy-back on someone elses reputation. A reputation that you did not earn and do not deserve until you have earned it. Derivative works must be herculean in the attempt in order to stand on their own merit and not attempt to steal from the original author.
Personally I am not in favor of extending copyrights and patents, I believe they should be relinquished to the public domain upon death of the author. His family has absolutely no right to his talent or proceeeds from it unless he chose to give it to them. As for "megacorps" (that invent everything you use and buy), there should be a set limit on it and I think 25 years, maybe the original 28, is plenty.
However, what would be more helpful would be encouraging certain industries to release their older works into a sort of free domain... you can distribute the materials and such, but may never sell them under any condition, not even charging for media costs. That way they could continue to produce the atom-based versions and the electron-based versions could be free, the people paying for the atom-based versions would probably still have about the same sale rate because at a certain age of a product, the people buying it are collectors or people who have a particular emotional attachment to the thing, and no longer people buying it for its original intended use.
If I pay an artist, and it insults them, and I know that they thrive on discord and pain of every kind... aren't you proposing slavery for the artist population? Using your disgusting, warped logic, this is the prime and supreme condition for artists.
Personally, I like the idea of having patrons. The artists are free to create without worrying about their needs. Instead, however, you propose making sur ethey can never meet their needs, and you somehow think this will encourage them to produce. I happen to have a higher expectation of the mind of a creative man.
"Yes, a single artist has a monetary incentive to produce useful work. The key word being a SINGLE artist. "
Wrong... you see, the individual is not an evil thing as you try to paint in this rebuttal. The individual is each and every single one of us. Each and every single person in the United States or anywhere where such laws exist have monetary and moral incentive (it is immoral to allow people to have and use your work if they have not earned it, it is also unnatural). Not just one guy sitting in a corner, every single person in the whole country.
Now, you go on to assume things which are blantantly anti-individual and invalid. If I create something amazing and I patent it, that means I can produce that thing for X number of years before you can come along and copy-cat me and ride on MY accomplishment to make yourself money, fame, whatever. If, however, you want to improve on my invention, all you have to do is ask. I can license it to you, I can simply allow you to expand on the patent within bounds (you can't paint it blue and call it your own, etc) without charge, I can do many things.
The person who uses copyrights and patents to stifle progress and prevent people from doing better than they have is immoral and a coward. The person who defends his work from exploitation by those who have not earned it is a hero.
Your examples show your ignorant of patent law, BTW, you can only patent material processes and tangible things. Calculus is not a tangible thing. What about one-click ordering like Amazon you ask? Well, besides that that is prior art and shouldn't have been patented at all, it is a definite mechanical process, not a theory that is patented. Read the patent text and you will see it is painfully spelled out.
Why are we seeing such abuse of patent laws recently? Its very simple, none of the people who understand the issue will get off their lazy asses and apply for a job at the USPTO to review patents such as these. There are quite a few job openings in just this area. They are understaffed and ignorant of the subject area. Until someone elects to do something, it will continue.
"Reading it, you will see that IP law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control. "
Yes, and if upon reading it you employ the education of a high school graduate to translate it from the english language into an idea you will see that the founding fathers very explicitly stated that in order to foster progress in science and the arts, control had to be guaranteed by law to the authors.
If they didn't believe that control by the authors would create incentive, they would not have come up with the idea of copyright at all.
I'm not forgetting the Internet at all. When a musician makes the choice of signing a contract with a record label, the Internet is an option for that artist. However, the music market on the Internet is currently hostile. Any format which supports a secure method of generating royalties for the artist is attacked and eventually cracked. Until there is a secure protection of their copyrights, it would make absolutely no sense to publish their music on the Internet.
As for cave paintings, fireside stories, etc, you show your time. Cave paintings and folk stories were not works of art. They may be considered art now, but when they were created they were works of EDUCATION. They were as our text books and lectures are today, they showed how one hunts, they showed what one hunts, they told of what happens to people when they do bad things in an allegorical fashion. Any anthropologist will tell you that every folk story has a lesson. That lesson is the reason for the story and the reason it was created.
"When I first started to read your post, I thought it was sarcasm, but it seems not to be. Patents and copyrights are ESTABLISHED IN THE CONSTITUTION in order to "ensure a rich public domain." "
You are completely wrong. Patents and copyrights are established to insure that creators have rights over their work. Without those rights, they would not release their works at all, ever. Your view is twisted and completely against the purpose of the original laws. Read it again, and don't look at it through your rose-colored glasses.
By "keeping secret" I mean it protects people from copying the things and distributing it for free, everyone around these parts seems to read such actions as "withholding" and "keepign secret" because they assume that the people who can afford to buy it are some sort of super elite force against justice.
You seem to catch on near the end of your post with this: "They do so by giving a creator an incentive to create, by bestowing exclusive rights to their creation for a certain period. "
and then crash and burn right after. You see, the point is the first thing you said, the second part is sort of a "let people off the hook after awhile" thing. The justification is the protection, NOT the "freedom" afterwards.
The framer's intentions ARE abundantly clear, and you're missing them. They wanted to make sure that people had that incentive you talked about, and they knew that they couldn't protect that freedom froever, though they would have preferred it that way. So they put a limit on it. That limit was not some compromise between the two ends of the spectrum, it was something they felt would be enforceable. They fiured the term limit they put on it would make it so when it was up there wouldn't be much profit to reproducing the original works and such, they never intended it to be a mechanism to allow people to copy things.
Think about it, if the point was solely to ensure that the public would get a rich body of culture, why would they protect the idaes for a certain amount of time at all? You think they thought they could TRICK creators into makign things if they let them profit from them and then the public could steal them? That's socialism, not capitalism, and capitalism is what the founders outlined in every single word they wrote.
I recently read a news story on here where someone explained the philosophy behind patents and copyrights as a guarantee that ideas would eventually be released to the public and not held as secrets. That idea is so extremely and completely wrong that it goes to show how disconnected from reality a lot of patent and copyright fighters are.
Copyrights and patents and such things protect the creators BY keeping them secret. And we, the public, are the creators. Not collectively of course, nothing is ever accomplished collectively, but individually, everyone can create something. If copyrights and patents did not exist the big companies could just package up whatever Elvis Costello creates, advertise the hell out of it, and completely screw him out of any royalties and everything. The point of copyrights and patents are so that when someone comes up with an idea, they can profit from it. Society as a whole (if you care about this kind of irrelevant crap) benefits as well by getting the opportunity to foster creativity by paying for the works produced by the creative individual.
When it comes to record companies and things of that nature, the artist of his own free will signs a contract. If he doesn't agree to certain portions of that contract, such as them going after people making fan sites and such, he doesn't have to sign it. Once he does, he is locked in. If he breaks the contract, he should be jailed. If he bitches about the contract, he should be ignored, he accepted it.
If we had no laws protecting intellectual property, we would see the production of such works fall off dramatically. Not only because the majority of people in the world understand that their creations are not worthless and want to make a profit from them, but also because of time constraints. Think back on human history. We did not get arts of any kind until people had the ability to specialize in one certain area and through trade of money obtain all of the things they needed which they didn't have time to produce themselves. Money made art possible. Money still makes are possible. If you take money out of the hands of artists in the name of "freedom", you are dooming those artists to working away their lives in menial, unsatisfying jobs, rather than letting them profit from their creations without millions of people ripping them off left and right because they can't see the immorality of theft if its done over the Internet.
Esperandi Go ahead, repeal IP laws, then don't be surprised when your favorite artists, poets, and musicians have to stop making their art because they've got to get a job at McDonalds to pay their bills.
What makes ASCII so hot? ASCII is no different from these other standards, it's simply been around a little longer. One day it will be gone. And that day will probably be pretty soon with unicode coming around to replace it.
Project Gutenberg's choice of ASCII was still wise, and the ASCII archive should be preserved. However, Project Gutenberg has actively discouraged presentation of the materials in other formats even in situations in which its exposure to the public, its readability, etc, would all be enhanced. They have gone from defenders of the lowest common denominator to ASCII snobs.
Esperandi 8 bits to a byte is not a rule, and it can be changed, so can ASCII.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... so the government of China says MS needs to open its source because it stops them from doing firewall stuff for Taiwan?
Taiwan is a separate country not owned by China, so what the hell does China have to say about anything? The headline should be CHINA asks MS to open its source. If the guy from China actually mentioned Taiwan, he was probably talking about how China has been itching to bomb the crap out of them and take it over for decades now.
Esperandi
Eiffel is the only language to teach if you want to teach object oriented methodologies. Period. If you disagree, you don't know what Eiffel is. If you think you know what Eiffel is and still disagree, you're wrong, you don't know about Eiffel, go learn to actually CODE in it and you might discover what object oriented really means. Anyone who tried to tell you that inheritance was like "is-a" relationships doesn't know OO from a hole in the ground and has never used Eiffel.
Dismiss me as snooty or whatever, but just stick it in the back of your mind and in 5 years when you're writing your new applications in Eiffel and wonder what the hell #defines were for and what they ever had to do with porting, remember this post.
Esperandi
How many more years am I going to have to wait around until people start waking up to the real issue of consumer broadband? That issue is that asynchronous connections are going to turn the Internet into a completely passive medium. You can watch, but you can't create. Sure, with a cable modem or DSL I can watch a TV show streaming across the web just fine. But I'd never be able to stream my own, not even to an intermediate server which would handle the larger scale distribution. If you think its paranoia that I think we're being set up to watch the Internet turn into TV, go ask any broadband provider why they cap upload speeds. The reason isn't because THEY have a capped upstream (they buy synchronous bandwidth) or even anything like "we're afraid people will use it for illegal stuff and we'll get blamed", the reason is because if you are serving content, you must be making money right? People wouldn't put up personal web page with multimedia conent and want to run the server from their house unless they were just raking in the cash, right? That's what they're doing. Either charge for it, or don't serve. The Internet that was built on personal web pages and experimentation is dying. Don't say I never warned you.
Considering that the patent office has almost nothing but open jobs for computer-related patent reviewers, who would oppose him? As I've mentioned DOZENS of times before, the only reasons the bad patents (speaking now to the people who don't believe that *ALL* patens are inhernetly evil) get passed is because they're getting through by default - the knowledgeable computing community has decided to not even try.
Esperandi
Am I missing something? According to the actual linked story, the software in question was under the LGPL... doesn't the LGPL let you take the code and include it without source in a closed source product?
I thought LGPL was the non-tyannical version of the GPL that gave people the freedom to choose the license that best suited their product instead of forcing them to conform to an Open Source authoritarian rule.
Esperandi
What would be there to stop people from claiming that Google's really unqiue searching technology was obvious? And how could they prove that? Most inventions are something that when you see it you say "duh, I should have known that" but you could work for years on finding the solution and come up dry. Lots of people don't know that that situation is non-obvious. Also, people who weren't well-versed in things like search technology would have nothing to draw on to argue against and would just say "its not so complicated that it doesn't make sense to me, so it must be obvious!" and things like that...
Soliciting the net for concrete examples of prior art would be a very good idea, but I think not so good for evaluating whether a process is "obvious" or not...
Esperandi
What are you smoking? You don't receive payment based on how many patents you approve! I have no idea where you came up with this, but its a salaried position. The companies have to pay for the research whether or not the patent goes through, so the patent office makes plenty of money even if they turn it down... but unlike on Slashdot you;d actually have to find the previous art and probably fill out 100 forms instead of just looking at it and saying "that's stupid, it's so obvious it should never get a patent"... I'd really like to see what kind of documentation has to be produced to prove that a process was "obvious"... prior art is pretty easy, but obviousness would be harder I imagine...
Esperandi
Well, let's see, there are a ton of computer guys bitching about the patent system. The USPTO has MANY jobs open in the area of computer-oriented patents. No one is taking those jobs. Wouldn't it be kinda a not-stupid move to get some knowledgeable people in there and get them to help with this process? Otherwise we might just end up on the worse side with even crazier laws...
Esperandi
Well, Rob has completely validated that he wants deCSS to be legal so that he can illegally copy DVDs, and he seems to believe that the rest of the Slashdot community feels exactly the same way.
Sorry Rob, but not all of us are thieves like you yearn to be.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the blurb again, note the part about not getting your hopes up.
Esperandi
Slashdot could have posted the article that I submitted last night, when it was current, but I'm sure they'll post it in 2-3 days by someone else as they always do. The REAL story is that Napster announced yesterday that it'll pander to colleges in order to gain their favor and get it un-blocked. They've changed Napster so that it will search through the "Internet 2" network before it searches the Internet itself. In future versions they will enable it to search within the univerisites intranet before even going out to the I2. Indiana University is trying it out now and other universities are watching to see how is handles the bandwidth. The RIAA, not surprisingly, are not loving this news. Perhaps Slashdot is taking recommendations from them on what to post now, who knows?
Esperandi
I'd give you a link, but I gave it to Slashdot and they wouldn't post it for you. I'm sure they know best.
Not to start a war, but I attend a Catholic university, and we've got to take religion classes. In those we learned some things about the Bible specifically, namely that no evidence of Jesus' existence exists except for the Bible. And when you get right down to it, don't other religions like the Mormons and I think Buddhists have better grounding in that there is a wide array of evidence of existence of Mohammed and John Smith (I think that was his name).
The biggest gripe I have with Christianity, and it does not invalidate it or anything, is that not all the books of the Bible have been published and that the ones that haven't are being held by the Catholic church, I would think protestants would try to get them released. But I understand why they hold them because I've read about some of their content (stories about Jesus as a child striking playmates dead when he got beat at a game, etc). But, they were found on the same scrolls as the other books, so shouldn't they be released as well?
Esperandi
You're in luck. According to the rules laid down by Aristotle and expanded throughout the years, it is widely known that proving a negative is not possible. Prove that elephants do not exist. You can't do it, even if there are no elephants. The burden on proof is on the OTHER side, the people who claim that elephants or God DOES exist. The closest anyone has come was Kierkegaard I think, he just said you have to take a leap of faith and believe it. If you read his argument, however, you will realize that it takes a leap of faith to accept his reasoning! His reasoning is that since God is beyond the human capacity of reason to figure him out, you have to take a leap of faith. Well, think about it, how do you know that your reason is limited? The only way you can believe that there are things that exist that your mind simply cannot grasp is by taking a leap of faith!
Esperandi
"Those people who are getting money because their fathers or grandfathers did something worthwhile.. are they giving up life in exchange for that money? And I don't just mean the idle children of the rich, but also the idle children of the artists. What are they giving up to obtain that money which others pay for with labor?
Your analogy does not stand, because capitalism allows (nay, requires) a certain elite class that gets its money through means other than work. "
Nope, laissez faire capitalism does not require such things, and inheritance is wrong in a capitalist system. It is also morally wrong. Its easy to judge, if you didn't earn something, its immoral for you to have it. And taking it by force does not qualify as earning.
You say that money is energy and not life. Huh? So you think that the theory that money is energy explains inheritance? I don't see how...
Yes, I believe it is denigrating when you call aritsts whores because that is exactly how you meant it. In your original post, you wanted to say something along the lines of "the artist who accepts money for his work is much lower than the artist who lives in squalor and does not get paid".
"What I find exceedingly vile is that creators of limited talent (to put it charitably) can and do contribute more to our common culture... only because they purposefuly angle their work so it appeals to the same lowest common denominator that constitutes the target audience of the media corporations. "
You've gone from proposing out-and-out slavery of artists to considering yourself supreme judge of taste over the majority of humanity along with deciding that the greatest number of humanity is the lowest common denominator. Who is seeking to erect an elite class? It certainly sounds as if you are. You do not justify your position at all, note, you simply say that since the majority of people like it, they must be the "lowest" common denominator of people. Do you know why that group of people and the audience of the big corporations are the same group? it is not because they have been brainwashed or they are "easy pickings" as you paint them, it is because they chose to buy from those corporations. Why on earth would you support a corporation turning its back on what its customers want? You do realize what comes next, right? As soon as they don't take the customers dollar as their gold standard, they create their OWN standard. *That* is the difference between target marketing and censorship and control.
My belief as posted here on Slashdot is that IP laws should end upon death of the artist as the artist sees fit. If the artist wishes his work destroyed and not expanded upon, so be it. if he wishes to release it to the public domain, it is his free choice. If he signed that choie away to a record company, he has already made his choice. I don't think it should ever fall to inheritance, simply coming from the same genetic soup does not qualify you for benefits from someones talents. Likewise, being born on the same planet and into the same species does not entitle anyone ELSE to those benefits, either.
I guess I'll apologize for calling you a disgusting beast even though your views are quite disgusting to me. I believe that the ability to produce is our most valuable ability and what gives us an advantage over every animal on the planet. I know that if you do not protect the most outstanding creators by allowing them to control their own lives and the products of their lives as they choose, they will choose not to produce. You cannot force someone to have a good idea. Every dictatorship has experienced brain-drain, all their best scientists leaving or stopping from producing, I think history teahces the lesson well as to why to protect IP.
Esperandi
Why on earth do you think that I said they were giving authors power for the sake of giving them power? I didn't. I said they gave the authors protection to foster the progress you're talkin about. Instead, everyone else is twisting it around and saying that they LIMITED the authors power to a certain time frame in order to promote progress, which does not make any sense.
Control promotes progress. The entire explanation is far too lengthy to discuss here, email me privately if you really want to know the entire story. But it breaks down to the fact that people are motivated to create by passion. They are not motivated to duplicate and distribute by passion, and without some form of protection, they are not motivated to duplicate and distribute their works at ALL.
Esperandi
Whatever it is they sell, you obviously couldn't even understand it if you're such a dunce you won't use more modern browsers out of some luddite loser-lover lust for that which no one else uses.
Esperandi
Be careful man, you are one of the extreme minotiry of people alive today. Look at the Open SOurce community. They'd rather say "yeah, we can do anything, everything we do is cool" rather than say "we made a crappy OS that doesn't add anything new, looks like it was written 20 years ago, and if you want it to be easy to use you can go fuck yourself because we hate you". That's just one example thrown in because of the venue, but there are tons of examples of it. My boss goes slack-jawed when I go up to him and tell him how I fucked up. I do it directly, without glossing it over, i tell him exactly what I did, exactly how far behind it put us, everything. I tell him I've learned from it and its not going to happen again. And it doesn't. I've got other coworkers who try to pin things on me saying I put games on their PC and all kinds of other stuff. Well, who do you think gets believed when the lying employees claims are disputed?
But the bottom line is, if you can't get your job or can't impress people without lying, guess what? You're not worth paying and you're not impressive. Live with yourself.
Esperandi
"no-cost product" ... WHAT?!?! Did you just say that the life of an artist and their work is absolutely worthless? That the hours they spend producing their music do not qualify as a cost?
I'm amazed at how much contempt for the artist I am discovering in these discussions, it is truly amazing. You would think that if you enjoyed what someone did you'd be willing to pay them for it, but no, one guy proposes slavery, you claim that no payment is necessary because it didn't cost anything to produce. I guess all you should pay to get into a concert is gas money, right?
"It is these activities that the music industry has leveraged to control access to their product."
Control access? So by making Lambourghinis $200k, they are "controlling" my "access" to it? Excuse me, but no. They are producing a high quality product and they have valued it at $200k. If you can't or won't pay it, you don't deserve it. In the case when you buy it, it should not be grudgingly. You should appreciate the opportunity to purcahse such a superb achievement and be glad to pay the price. If you're not both, you don't buy it, it really is that simple.
"Along comes the Internet, which makes their entire scheme null and void. It's not needed, their profit generating activities, once the only way to get music into the hands of millions, are no longer needed. That's not to say there still isn't money to be made and a profit to be had, but when you take away 99% of the cost of something, the profit margin will go down. These companies don't want that. "
How does this have any bearing at all on the current discussion? You think that if you chop down patent and copyright laws that it will only hurt the corporations? Wrong. Any artist that releases his work independently on the net would also be affected. he knows this and will not release it. Anyone who might create the next wave of record comapnies online (provide banner advertisement, expert website design, site hosting, large bandwidth capabilities, streaming webcasts of concerts, taping and webcasting for-pay interviews, etc, etc, etc, the list goes on) also gets screwed. So you're basically writing the Internet into a corner. Instead of being a constructive atmosphere, you choose to represent the Internet as a place where if you want to create, good, we'll steal every single thing you do and rape you dry and we don't give a fuck about your life. BTW, when's the next album out? That might work for Morissey, but it won't work for many others.
"They are using the revenue generated from a stranglehold in one era, to strangle the next. That is NOT good for popular culture (unless you think popular culture should consist of what you are TOLD is popular) "
Groan, get a dictionary. Pop culture is not an individual revolutionary artist and 3 fans. Pop culture is not the people that I listen to or like. Pop culture is the people who make the biggest sales. You just shot a huge load with that statement. You are assuming everyone is stupid enough to be duped by advertisment, you're assuming people are watching those advertisements, you'r eassuming a whole assload of things which boil down to a simple point: You believe people are stupid and that companies only have to spend a few bucks to get them hooked. I believe this is true for a large quantity of human beings. I also believe that those human beings deserve exactly what they get from the big corporations.
The big question here is, what was the last band that failed that the record companies supported? You see, when a band sells a million records, they get the advertisement and such, not the other way around.
"Cave paintings and folk stories were not works of art.
I would say the painters and tellers would disagree. Have you ever seen a good storyteller? Nowadays most go by the moniker "actor". "
Fine, just ingore my point. Youre still very wrong. The painters and storytellers would have asked you what the fuck you're talking about and say they're teaching their kids how to hunt. They'd then stick a nice big spear through your skull when you ask them why they waste time hunting while they could be painting pretty pictures and then letting other people have them without trade. Actors act. They entertain. They don't teach you how to do something usually. And I don't think I'd qualify those guys in hunting videos as "actors".
"And you're saying this isn't art?! " I'm saying that this wasn't art ***THEN***. Ask an elementary school kid if he thinks his teachers lectures are art. I'm betting he won't. Just liek the people back then wouldn't have. Try time-shifting yourself back to when these things went on, back to the point where nature was shit. it whipped you, it beat you, it hurt you. There was no quality of "getting away" in it at all, it was just hunt or die.
There will be a future on the Internet of protected content. You will hate it, you will rail against it, but it will happen. And when it does I want you to remember me saying this and do something for me. Sit back and wait. Wait and watch. See where the abundance of creativity and quality go to. Judge this quality objectively, don't just say "bunch of people like. Must be shit. Grumpy people like this better, this must be better.".
Esperandi
There are quite a few artists like this I would imagine, I don't know any personally, but its just like in every other profession. There are guys who do mechanical work for their neighbors and friends but are too afraid they would fail in the real world to attempt getting a job doing it, I imagine there would be cowardly artists as well.
When you offer your goods up for purchase you are saying "I have used my life to produce this thing. I want this much of your life (money) in return for it." Doing that takes a tremendous backbone. You might be turned down, you might find out that the products of your life aren't worth jack shit to another person.
If you do art for arts sake, well, masturbation is fun but empty.
Esperandi
"If there's anything worse than misunderstanding the laws which protect creativity, it's misinterpreting the creative impulse itself"
Yes, isn't it. perhaps you need to do some reading and discover that you only view those cave paintings as "art" because you don't understand the education lesson they were created to teach, things such as animals to hunt, how to hunt, etc. They may be creative, but they were created for the purpose of education which was their incentive. What passed into their hands? Probably some skins, some steaks, etc. They hadn't gotten advanced enough to require money, everyone was still sustaining their own family with minimal to no trade.
Your view of money disgusts me. Money is LIFE, sir. You obtain money by working, by spending a portion of the most valuable thing you own, your LIFE. And you think that if I give a symbol of my life to a man for his creative work that I denigrate him to a WHORE? You are a disgusting beast. I suppose you would prefer that I give him my pity or maybe ignore him completely? I give him the most valuable thing in the universe to me and it makes him a whore... jesus, I'd hate to see the way the world would have turned out if people believed the way you do, that the best way to punish someone is to give them your life.
"If I live to be 80, I just might be allowed by law to publish my extensions of Asimov's Foundation.... "
It is sad that you believe to create something of value you have to piggy-back on someone elses reputation. A reputation that you did not earn and do not deserve until you have earned it. Derivative works must be herculean in the attempt in order to stand on their own merit and not attempt to steal from the original author.
Personally I am not in favor of extending copyrights and patents, I believe they should be relinquished to the public domain upon death of the author. His family has absolutely no right to his talent or proceeeds from it unless he chose to give it to them. As for "megacorps" (that invent everything you use and buy), there should be a set limit on it and I think 25 years, maybe the original 28, is plenty.
However, what would be more helpful would be encouraging certain industries to release their older works into a sort of free domain... you can distribute the materials and such, but may never sell them under any condition, not even charging for media costs. That way they could continue to produce the atom-based versions and the electron-based versions could be free, the people paying for the atom-based versions would probably still have about the same sale rate because at a certain age of a product, the people buying it are collectors or people who have a particular emotional attachment to the thing, and no longer people buying it for its original intended use.
If I pay an artist, and it insults them, and I know that they thrive on discord and pain of every kind... aren't you proposing slavery for the artist population? Using your disgusting, warped logic, this is the prime and supreme condition for artists.
Personally, I like the idea of having patrons. The artists are free to create without worrying about their needs. Instead, however, you propose making sur ethey can never meet their needs, and you somehow think this will encourage them to produce. I happen to have a higher expectation of the mind of a creative man.
Esperandi
"Yes, a single artist has a monetary incentive to produce useful work. The key word being a SINGLE artist. "
Wrong... you see, the individual is not an evil thing as you try to paint in this rebuttal. The individual is each and every single one of us. Each and every single person in the United States or anywhere where such laws exist have monetary and moral incentive (it is immoral to allow people to have and use your work if they have not earned it, it is also unnatural). Not just one guy sitting in a corner, every single person in the whole country.
Now, you go on to assume things which are blantantly anti-individual and invalid. If I create something amazing and I patent it, that means I can produce that thing for X number of years before you can come along and copy-cat me and ride on MY accomplishment to make yourself money, fame, whatever. If, however, you want to improve on my invention, all you have to do is ask. I can license it to you, I can simply allow you to expand on the patent within bounds (you can't paint it blue and call it your own, etc) without charge, I can do many things.
The person who uses copyrights and patents to stifle progress and prevent people from doing better than they have is immoral and a coward. The person who defends his work from exploitation by those who have not earned it is a hero.
Your examples show your ignorant of patent law, BTW, you can only patent material processes and tangible things. Calculus is not a tangible thing. What about one-click ordering like Amazon you ask? Well, besides that that is prior art and shouldn't have been patented at all, it is a definite mechanical process, not a theory that is patented. Read the patent text and you will see it is painfully spelled out.
Why are we seeing such abuse of patent laws recently? Its very simple, none of the people who understand the issue will get off their lazy asses and apply for a job at the USPTO to review patents such as these. There are quite a few job openings in just this area. They are understaffed and ignorant of the subject area. Until someone elects to do something, it will continue.
Esperandi
"Reading it, you will see that IP law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control. "
Yes, and if upon reading it you employ the education of a high school graduate to translate it from the english language into an idea you will see that the founding fathers very explicitly stated that in order to foster progress in science and the arts, control had to be guaranteed by law to the authors.
If they didn't believe that control by the authors would create incentive, they would not have come up with the idea of copyright at all.
Esperandi
I'm not forgetting the Internet at all. When a musician makes the choice of signing a contract with a record label, the Internet is an option for that artist. However, the music market on the Internet is currently hostile. Any format which supports a secure method of generating royalties for the artist is attacked and eventually cracked. Until there is a secure protection of their copyrights, it would make absolutely no sense to publish their music on the Internet.
As for cave paintings, fireside stories, etc, you show your time. Cave paintings and folk stories were not works of art. They may be considered art now, but when they were created they were works of EDUCATION. They were as our text books and lectures are today, they showed how one hunts, they showed what one hunts, they told of what happens to people when they do bad things in an allegorical fashion. Any anthropologist will tell you that every folk story has a lesson. That lesson is the reason for the story and the reason it was created.
Esperandi
"When I first started to read your post, I thought it was sarcasm, but it seems not to be. Patents and copyrights are ESTABLISHED IN THE CONSTITUTION in order to "ensure a rich public domain." "
You are completely wrong. Patents and copyrights are established to insure that creators have rights over their work. Without those rights, they would not release their works at all, ever. Your view is twisted and completely against the purpose of the original laws. Read it again, and don't look at it through your rose-colored glasses.
By "keeping secret" I mean it protects people from copying the things and distributing it for free, everyone around these parts seems to read such actions as "withholding" and "keepign secret" because they assume that the people who can afford to buy it are some sort of super elite force against justice.
You seem to catch on near the end of your post with this:
"They do so by giving a creator an incentive to create, by bestowing exclusive rights to their creation for a certain period. "
and then crash and burn right after. You see, the point is the first thing you said, the second part is sort of a "let people off the hook after awhile" thing. The justification is the protection, NOT the "freedom" afterwards.
The framer's intentions ARE abundantly clear, and you're missing them. They wanted to make sure that people had that incentive you talked about, and they knew that they couldn't protect that freedom froever, though they would have preferred it that way. So they put a limit on it. That limit was not some compromise between the two ends of the spectrum, it was something they felt would be enforceable. They fiured the term limit they put on it would make it so when it was up there wouldn't be much profit to reproducing the original works and such, they never intended it to be a mechanism to allow people to copy things.
Think about it, if the point was solely to ensure that the public would get a rich body of culture, why would they protect the idaes for a certain amount of time at all? You think they thought they could TRICK creators into makign things if they let them profit from them and then the public could steal them? That's socialism, not capitalism, and capitalism is what the founders outlined in every single word they wrote.
Esperandi
I recently read a news story on here where someone explained the philosophy behind patents and copyrights as a guarantee that ideas would eventually be released to the public and not held as secrets. That idea is so extremely and completely wrong that it goes to show how disconnected from reality a lot of patent and copyright fighters are.
Copyrights and patents and such things protect the creators BY keeping them secret. And we, the public, are the creators. Not collectively of course, nothing is ever accomplished collectively, but individually, everyone can create something. If copyrights and patents did not exist the big companies could just package up whatever Elvis Costello creates, advertise the hell out of it, and completely screw him out of any royalties and everything. The point of copyrights and patents are so that when someone comes up with an idea, they can profit from it. Society as a whole (if you care about this kind of irrelevant crap) benefits as well by getting the opportunity to foster creativity by paying for the works produced by the creative individual.
When it comes to record companies and things of that nature, the artist of his own free will signs a contract. If he doesn't agree to certain portions of that contract, such as them going after people making fan sites and such, he doesn't have to sign it. Once he does, he is locked in. If he breaks the contract, he should be jailed. If he bitches about the contract, he should be ignored, he accepted it.
If we had no laws protecting intellectual property, we would see the production of such works fall off dramatically. Not only because the majority of people in the world understand that their creations are not worthless and want to make a profit from them, but also because of time constraints. Think back on human history. We did not get arts of any kind until people had the ability to specialize in one certain area and through trade of money obtain all of the things they needed which they didn't have time to produce themselves. Money made art possible. Money still makes are possible. If you take money out of the hands of artists in the name of "freedom", you are dooming those artists to working away their lives in menial, unsatisfying jobs, rather than letting them profit from their creations without millions of people ripping them off left and right because they can't see the immorality of theft if its done over the Internet.
Esperandi
Go ahead, repeal IP laws, then don't be surprised when your favorite artists, poets, and musicians have to stop making their art because they've got to get a job at McDonalds to pay their bills.
What makes ASCII so hot? ASCII is no different from these other standards, it's simply been around a little longer. One day it will be gone. And that day will probably be pretty soon with unicode coming around to replace it.
Project Gutenberg's choice of ASCII was still wise, and the ASCII archive should be preserved. However, Project Gutenberg has actively discouraged presentation of the materials in other formats even in situations in which its exposure to the public, its readability, etc, would all be enhanced. They have gone from defenders of the lowest common denominator to ASCII snobs.
Esperandi
8 bits to a byte is not a rule, and it can be changed, so can ASCII.