I don't think it's nearly as common as you think. I know several Asian software engineers that don't speak much English, and you'd think that would be an industry with a relatively high rate. I'm sure the average is pretty low, even in a professional job.
It'll certainly prevent them from pirating the localized Chinese (etc) versions. If it costs Adobe more to translate, test, distribute, etc. their localized products than they make by doing it, then they'll have to leave that business. Not good for people that don't speak English. (Or another Western language.)
I'm with you that musicians would still be around without the RIAA. (Not so sure about movies - film technology isn't the only thing that makes some movies expensive.)
But you seem to say that we shouldn't be worried even if the artists themselves don't make any money. That's crazed. For one thing, you'll get a lot more art if people can AFFORD TO EAT while being an artist, and a lot of that will be really good art.
If people produce good art, I'd really, really like them to figure out some way to get paid for it. That'll probably still happen without the DMCA and friends, but it probably won't happen without copyright laws. Because they can sell live performances, at least a lot of musicians would still be able to make a living if copyright didn't exist. (Not as good a living, on average, but a living.) That's not really true of writers, photographers, and a lot of other artists. Not to mention programmers.
I guess we shouldn't pay teachers anything, because the really good ones would still work for free?
What do you suggest that book, magazine, and poetry writers do? Photographers? Analysts that gather useful information and sell it? Programmers, for those of you that believe that people should be able to sell software? Without copyright, how do these people eat?
So, what you're saying is that if a band wants the services of a record label, they have to sign a contract with that label, agreeing to certain things. That's your definition of being "forced"?
What's your solution - the record company shouldn't be allowed to make bands sign any kind of contract? Or the government should regulate these contracts to make sure that, in your opinion, they're fair? How about this for a solution - you shouldn't sign a contract you don't understand, or don't think is fair. In other words, you should be accountable for your actions. Oh wait, that is how things work now...
Right - an employee of a software company basically agrees to give the copyright of everything he produces on company time to the company, as a condition of getting hired. Seems reasonable to me, do you think it should be illegal? Nothing is forcing the employee to do this - he can work for himself and retain his copyright, or he can work out a different agreement with his employer. It's all voluntary.
Geez, so don't buy Mariah Carey. I'm sure plently of people like her, and so they'll buy her stuff, if it doesn't suck. If people like the bands from the big-name labels, they'll buy them, otherwise they won't.
No band is forced by the government to join a big record label! Or any record label at all. If they want to make their music freely available on their web site, they're more than welcome to. But most bands think that they'll reach more people with their music, and make more money, by signing with a label, so they choose that route. Nobody is censoring any band. That's why the soviet analogy is compeletely irrelevent.
Well, whether this is true or not, today (and for the past 200+ years), copyright goes to the author, not the publisher. So your argument hasn't been relevent for the past 200 years.
You're saying that if we set the length of copyright to 5 years, then artists and publishers will push to make it 10 years. By that logic, if we remove copyright, then artists and publishers will push to bring it back. What's the difference?
Lessig has it completely right. We need copyrights that are neither too long or too short. At either extreme, you're stifling innovation. It seems pretty obvious to me that having reasonable copyright laws provides more incentive than having no copyright laws.
Well, not piracy on this store's part, but certainly a large amount of piracy on its customers' part. If my old college friends knew of a store like this, they'd steal everything they could get their hands on. ("steal" as in use without paying full price for.) This is the kind of thing that software companies designe their license agreements for, and I can't say I blame them. It's awfully naive to say that this guy wasn't enabling piracy, intentionally or not, which is exactly what this guy's company was designed to stop, it sounds like.
Well the other option was to not buy the lifetime subscription in anticipation of a better future unit coming out in less then 2 years (life time fee of $200 vs. yearly of $100; or monthly fee for 20 months...7/8ths of a year at least).
TiVo recently increased the lifetime service to $250 (at the same time as dropping the cost of the 30-hour box by $100), and dropped the yearly option. Now it's either $10/month or $250/lifetime.
That said, it's not just a matter of writing code, but instead trying to figure out what this 'new interface' is.
Well, there's the rub, eh? People have been pondering what comes next for over a decade, and I don't think anyone's come up with anything that's truely better. That doesn't mean that people should stop trying, but we shouldn't set our expectations too high. Maybe there's nothing that's that much better than what we've got now.
Back in pioneer days, the father of the family kept a loaded musket by the doors, and somehow none of the kids picked it up and shot their siblings/friends. Even when the parents were away.
Well, I don't know much about guns, but I imagine that a musket is much harder for a three year old to operate than a modern gun.
This falls apart if you use version control, doesn't it? When you try to see what changed in a particular version, you get a ton of irrelevent format differences. And it can sometimes cause huge problems when you try to merge.
Limited use only in large bills isn't helpful, since counterfeiting often involves bleaching smaller currency (eg $1.00 bills) and creating $50 or $100 bills.
Of course, a bigger bill without the chip would be awfully suspicious...
Sorry, I have a hard time seeing this as anything but pure BS, or maybe hopelessly naive idealism.
Protesters in India, or the American South, demonstrated publicly and at great risk to themselves, with the only purpose of changing how society worked. They wanted a better society.
Joe Napster downloads songs for free in his basement. He doesn't know or care that "his culture is being bought and sold", whatever that means. He was happy to by Limp Bizkit's last CD from a record company - he never gave it a second thought - but now he's downloading it because it's free. End of story.
Trying to compare the two is bordering on offensive.
Gee, how about a tax credit for payment to artists and scientists?
That sounds workable. All artists become government-supported? Is there a board that somehow "qualifies" a million artists? Or can I decide whether or not I'm an artist, and get the money?
(I assume that you mean some sort of salary or welfare-type system for artists. A tax credit won't really help - if your works are being copied for free, you won't be paying much in the way of taxes to get a credit on.)
Sorry, I completely didn't understand your post. What exactly are the other implications besides copyright that you're talking about? What new laws will help reward artists?
I don't like illegal copying, but I also don't like the new measures being proposed to stop it. I don't see a good way out of this conflict. I don't see any good way for artists to get paid for their work if copyright goes away, at least in the common case. Britney Spears will make a fine living from her concerts, but how will most musicians, writers, coders, etc. make a living? The "electronic tip jar" hasn't worked very well, as we've seen.
Even if the recording and entertainment industries manage to buy all the legislation they want, they're still faced with the daunting task of stopping the civil disobedience they've created.
"Civil disobedience"? Let's be honest here, people copy songs and movies because they like free stuff, not because of any larger societal implications. You're really comparing a music-swapping college kid to Gandhi? That kind of hyperbole isn't going to help your argument.
I agree. That would be one of the severe trade-offs that I mentioned in my message. But we would've gained a lot - the vast majority of criminals can't encrypt their phone conversations. May even Al Qaeda can't, or can't do it as much, because it's hard to sneak these phones into the U.S. Again, I'm not saying it's worth it, but I'm saying that these kinds of bans (or regulation) have good points and bad points.
Nobody on Slashdot seems to have any appreciation of subtle distinctions. Like, if it's impossible to guarantee 100.00% that something will not happen, then it's useless to ban it (you say). E.g. it's useless to ban or restrict encrypted phones, because a motivated enough criminal could build one themselves, or could hide a phone conversation in a bunch of porn images or whatever. This kind of thinking completely misses the point that being able to do this is a far cry from being able to buy an encrypting phone from your local Radio Shack. It may not eliminate it, but it sure would reduce it and make it a lot harder to do.
Again, I'm not saying that banning or restricting any of these things is a good thing - there are certainly severe trade-offs that this would cause. But, what I'm saying is, you can't dismiss it out of hand as being stupid or pointless.
There is a moral distinction that can be made between a lot of these things. What are the legitimate and what are the illegitimate uses of the tool? How common is the legitimate need for the tool? How devastating is the illegitimate usage?
For example, airplanes are very necessary in our current society, and are difficult (though not impossible) to use illegitimately. Knives are easy to use illegitimately, but are so used by so many people in their daily lives that they cannot realisticly be regulated. Guns and dynamite are less needed by the average person in their daily lives, but are still often used for legitimate purposes, so they are regulated but not banned.
Restricting encryption won't foil a determined terrorist, but it would raise the bar - they'd need more effort to obtain encryption software, at least when they were in this country, and maybe (as a result) in others too. I don't know if this is workable, or worth the disadvantags that it would bring. But, I don't dismiss it out of hand, just because you can use a knife for good or evil. That's too simplistic an analogy.
The new technology for client-side Java programs is Java Web Start (aka JNLP). It lets you add Java programs to your Web pages, but they're launched as applications in a separate window, not as embedded applets. But they still use the applet security model, so they're still safe to run.
This fixes a lot of the problems that occur when you try to use applets to create real, useful programs (as opposed to little decorations, etc.) Many of these problems are caused by the conflicting requirements of trying to combine the Web world and the Java world in the same window.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's nearly as common as you think. I know several Asian software engineers that don't speak much English, and you'd think that would be an industry with a relatively high rate. I'm sure the average is pretty low, even in a professional job.
It'll certainly prevent them from pirating the localized Chinese (etc) versions. If it costs Adobe more to translate, test, distribute, etc. their localized products than they make by doing it, then they'll have to leave that business. Not good for people that don't speak English. (Or another Western language.)
I'm with you that musicians would still be around without the RIAA. (Not so sure about movies - film technology isn't the only thing that makes some movies expensive.)
But you seem to say that we shouldn't be worried even if the artists themselves don't make any money. That's crazed. For one thing, you'll get a lot more art if people can AFFORD TO EAT while being an artist, and a lot of that will be really good art.
If people produce good art, I'd really, really like them to figure out some way to get paid for it. That'll probably still happen without the DMCA and friends, but it probably won't happen without copyright laws. Because they can sell live performances, at least a lot of musicians would still be able to make a living if copyright didn't exist. (Not as good a living, on average, but a living.) That's not really true of writers, photographers, and a lot of other artists. Not to mention programmers.
I guess we shouldn't pay teachers anything, because the really good ones would still work for free?
What do you suggest that book, magazine, and poetry writers do? Photographers? Analysts that gather useful information and sell it? Programmers, for those of you that believe that people should be able to sell software? Without copyright, how do these people eat?
So, what you're saying is that if a band wants the services of a record label, they have to sign a contract with that label, agreeing to certain things. That's your definition of being "forced"?
What's your solution - the record company shouldn't be allowed to make bands sign any kind of contract? Or the government should regulate these contracts to make sure that, in your opinion, they're fair? How about this for a solution - you shouldn't sign a contract you don't understand, or don't think is fair. In other words, you should be accountable for your actions. Oh wait, that is how things work now...
Right - an employee of a software company basically agrees to give the copyright of everything he produces on company time to the company, as a condition of getting hired. Seems reasonable to me, do you think it should be illegal? Nothing is forcing the employee to do this - he can work for himself and retain his copyright, or he can work out a different agreement with his employer. It's all voluntary.
Geez, so don't buy Mariah Carey. I'm sure plently of people like her, and so they'll buy her stuff, if it doesn't suck. If people like the bands from the big-name labels, they'll buy them, otherwise they won't.
No band is forced by the government to join a big record label! Or any record label at all. If they want to make their music freely available on their web site, they're more than welcome to. But most bands think that they'll reach more people with their music, and make more money, by signing with a label, so they choose that route. Nobody is censoring any band. That's why the soviet analogy is compeletely irrelevent.
Well, whether this is true or not, today (and for the past 200+ years), copyright goes to the author, not the publisher. So your argument hasn't been relevent for the past 200 years.
You're saying that if we set the length of copyright to 5 years, then artists and publishers will push to make it 10 years. By that logic, if we remove copyright, then artists and publishers will push to bring it back. What's the difference?
Lessig has it completely right. We need copyrights that are neither too long or too short. At either extreme, you're stifling innovation. It seems pretty obvious to me that having reasonable copyright laws provides more incentive than having no copyright laws.
Unusuall yes, piracy no.
Well, not piracy on this store's part, but certainly a large amount of piracy on its customers' part. If my old college friends knew of a store like this, they'd steal everything they could get their hands on. ("steal" as in use without paying full price for.) This is the kind of thing that software companies designe their license agreements for, and I can't say I blame them. It's awfully naive to say that this guy wasn't enabling piracy, intentionally or not, which is exactly what this guy's company was designed to stop, it sounds like.
Well the other option was to not buy the lifetime subscription in anticipation of a better future unit coming out in less then 2 years (life time fee of $200 vs. yearly of $100; or monthly fee for 20 months...7/8ths of a year at least).
TiVo recently increased the lifetime service to $250 (at the same time as dropping the cost of the 30-hour box by $100), and dropped the yearly option. Now it's either $10/month or $250/lifetime.
That said, it's not just a matter of writing code, but instead trying to figure out what this 'new interface' is.
Well, there's the rub, eh? People have been pondering what comes next for over a decade, and I don't think anyone's come up with anything that's truely better. That doesn't mean that people should stop trying, but we shouldn't set our expectations too high. Maybe there's nothing that's that much better than what we've got now.
Back in pioneer days, the father of the family kept a loaded musket by the doors, and somehow none of the kids picked it up and shot their siblings/friends. Even when the parents were away.
Well, I don't know much about guns, but I imagine that a musket is much harder for a three year old to operate than a modern gun.
This falls apart if you use version control, doesn't it? When you try to see what changed in a particular version, you get a ton of irrelevent format differences. And it can sometimes cause huge problems when you try to merge.
Limited use only in large bills isn't helpful, since counterfeiting often involves bleaching smaller currency (eg $1.00 bills) and creating $50 or $100 bills.
Of course, a bigger bill without the chip would be awfully suspicious...
Sorry, I have a hard time seeing this as anything but pure BS, or maybe hopelessly naive idealism.
Protesters in India, or the American South, demonstrated publicly and at great risk to themselves, with the only purpose of changing how society worked. They wanted a better society.
Joe Napster downloads songs for free in his basement. He doesn't know or care that "his culture is being bought and sold", whatever that means. He was happy to by Limp Bizkit's last CD from a record company - he never gave it a second thought - but now he's downloading it because it's free. End of story.
Trying to compare the two is bordering on offensive.
Gee, how about a tax credit for payment to artists and scientists?
That sounds workable. All artists become government-supported? Is there a board that somehow "qualifies" a million artists? Or can I decide whether or not I'm an artist, and get the money?
(I assume that you mean some sort of salary or welfare-type system for artists. A tax credit won't really help - if your works are being copied for free, you won't be paying much in the way of taxes to get a credit on.)
(Also, why scientists?)
Sorry, I completely didn't understand your post. What exactly are the other implications besides copyright that you're talking about? What new laws will help reward artists?
I don't like illegal copying, but I also don't like the new measures being proposed to stop it. I don't see a good way out of this conflict. I don't see any good way for artists to get paid for their work if copyright goes away, at least in the common case. Britney Spears will make a fine living from her concerts, but how will most musicians, writers, coders, etc. make a living? The "electronic tip jar" hasn't worked very well, as we've seen.
Even if the recording and entertainment industries manage to buy all the legislation they want, they're still faced with the daunting task of stopping the civil disobedience they've created.
"Civil disobedience"? Let's be honest here, people copy songs and movies because they like free stuff, not because of any larger societal implications. You're really comparing a music-swapping college kid to Gandhi? That kind of hyperbole isn't going to help your argument.
This did change, a while ago. The TiVo service used to be recommended, now it's required. See this message to the TiVo Forum.
I agree. That would be one of the severe trade-offs that I mentioned in my message. But we would've gained a lot - the vast majority of criminals can't encrypt their phone conversations. May even Al Qaeda can't, or can't do it as much, because it's hard to sneak these phones into the U.S. Again, I'm not saying it's worth it, but I'm saying that these kinds of bans (or regulation) have good points and bad points.
Again, I'm not saying that banning or restricting any of these things is a good thing - there are certainly severe trade-offs that this would cause. But, what I'm saying is, you can't dismiss it out of hand as being stupid or pointless.
For example, airplanes are very necessary in our current society, and are difficult (though not impossible) to use illegitimately. Knives are easy to use illegitimately, but are so used by so many people in their daily lives that they cannot realisticly be regulated. Guns and dynamite are less needed by the average person in their daily lives, but are still often used for legitimate purposes, so they are regulated but not banned.
Restricting encryption won't foil a determined terrorist, but it would raise the bar - they'd need more effort to obtain encryption software, at least when they were in this country, and maybe (as a result) in others too. I don't know if this is workable, or worth the disadvantags that it would bring. But, I don't dismiss it out of hand, just because you can use a knife for good or evil. That's too simplistic an analogy.
I don't get it. Is that like an interview?
This fixes a lot of the problems that occur when you try to use applets to create real, useful programs (as opposed to little decorations, etc.) Many of these problems are caused by the conflicting requirements of trying to combine the Web world and the Java world in the same window.