It's the difference between: NASA: We want a shuttle Boeing/etc: Right give us $5billion and we'll go build one for you., NASA: Here's $5 Billion BOeing./etc: Thanks but we had need some more NASA: okay Boeing/etc: Nope still more and if you don't give it to uss you'll have wasted all the moey you threw at us NASA: okay, well while you're doing that we need to change the requirements Boeing/etc: Oh, few more billion please, and did i mention it doesn't work very well so we'll want a few more billion. etc
verses SpaceX: we want to develop manned flight, look here's us launching a satellite. Anyone interested? NASA: cool, hey we want that, need some funding? SpaceX: Sure if you're offering it to us. NASA okay, well if you can deliver a Falcon 9 and meet the design targets for your Dragon we'll give you $500 Million to build them SpaceX: Done, can we have our money now? NASA: Cool you've had a successful launch. We'll pay you for the next launch now then
If you don't see the difference between these two models then I'm somewhat worried. Not that I blame NASA or Boeing or anyone else, it's just what happens when this much money is in play. the only way to fix that is to get the cost down. If anything this distraction of manned flight has taken them away from their initial goal of developing cheap satellite launch capability. Not that I think they mind but still it shows that they had a business plan without NASa that still exists. See Biglow as well for uses of this manned capability they plan to use.
By banning satellite launches on anything but the shuttle to increase the fly rate of the shuttle to meet their projections. By the legal requirements a private company had to meet to launch (that were impossible to meet) that were waived on a NASA launch.
I like your point, and yes I agree. I've often argued that the most important thing humans can do is increase the quality of life. This neatly encompasses the pursuit of art, provides a basis for a moral code and improvements in technology. So by what you said then we should pursue things that make humaniity better just because they make things better. But how do you define better? Do I sleep better at night because Man has walked on the moon(yes). But how do you measure that and who do you trust to make those decisions? To that end for example how much of a cost in terms of reduced quality of life are we prepared to accept now in order that our great grandchildren can have the increased quality of life either from the exploitation of space resources or from just the "Ain't it cool we get to go and play in zero gravity whenever we want" (or even "I'm really annoyed I have to go on that boring history field trip to see the Apollo landing sites") Anyway I guess what I'm saying is there has to be some way to track what we sacrifice now in order to gain later. Money is a convenient way of doing it but certainly not the only one. Political influence seems to be something that was readily traded as part of the space program. I guess it comes down to Darwinian Selection doesn't favour those who invest in things that don't get a return. It's harsh and unfair, but as a species we are still constrained by the laws of physics which evolution is really just an expression of. (Finite resources+Variation+growth = selection of best). It sucks and it'd be great to rise above it, but how do we convince people that (for example) you can't have a new car as we need to use those resources for the space program. Far better to say "You can have that car because of materials and technology from the space program".
I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
That got modded insightful??? I judge from your signature you are Trolling but just in case... The only way we will get in space big time is if there is profit to be made by being up there; Or are you saying you were rather humans were not in space? Would you rather we stayed on this rock until the sun consumes us. If we do not push into space now, then when should we? In anticipation of your next criticism I agree that at the moment investing in space is not the best survival tactic for the near future, Antarctica is sill far more hospitable than LEO; and no matter what happens in the next billion years most of Earth will stay more hospitable than Antarctica; but we have to go there some day so we should as soon as we can and as soon as it is profitable to be there good luck stopping people from going there. Fine you don't like the survival argument, how about we should go there because what else as a species are we for? To sit around and reproduce and watch daytime TV? No we should do things that no other lifeform we know of has done before or could do.
It can't run most educational software nor children's oriented flash websites. I do not see the value in these.
I agree, I see no value in flash websites either.
(quote> the article is looking at these as Mac and PC replacements for outdated equipment.
Did you read the same article as me? I saw an article talking about using them to teach computer science. While HTML5/flash is part of computer science everything you need to know to get the principles of computer science could have been learnt on an Amiga or Zx Spectrum. The platform does not matter as long as it is hackable* and interesting**. *i.e. you have access to the low level bits and when you break them they're easy to fix. ** i.e. it has the capabilities of a low-mid range smart phone, which it does.
You hear it on here all the time. People who think that a company has the legal responsibility to make ever greater profits (ignoring the fact that this forgets which shareholder metric they may have in mind). This is of course rubbish. A company has to follow the will of the shareholders (where 1 share = 1 vote). and the shareholders have certain rights to information and possibly the right to demand a new board. but that's pretty much it.
People think a corporation has to get ever bigger but that is a meme not a law.
Name me how many other iconic first of a kind vehicles are still in operation. Apollo, STS - dead Concorde - as you say, dead. Kitty hawk - dead de Havilland Comet - dead Penny farthing - dead B52 - okay you got me - unless you argued it was the latest in a long line of ever bigger planes building on dozens of previous generations...
The point is you design something, try it out, see where it fails and start again. The space industry tried with Gemini, then apollo then STS then kind of gave up. Now maybe the falcon 9 will be the 737 of space transport or maybe it will turn out that it is the next Comet. It doesn't matter as long as you learn from your mistakes and build a better design. (noting that the 737 has not been a stable design by any means but has seen how many years of service?)
No I am not trolling I am trying to make my point understood and you don't get it. That is a failure of communication not someone trying to be antagonistic. But if you're going to use that as a reason to not listen to the point then so be it.
It solves Mickey Mouse never going out of copyright, given that no no work has entered the public domain for decades because of the ever increasing copyright terms. The Copyright is in that case is probably best owned by either the director or executive producer.
No, you'll never find Plato's Republic or Iliad for sale.
everybody and their dog have already read at least one of this books
You and anybody else, also don't forget that it comes for free on any e-reader.
So in other words the author makes no money. However what little money there is to be made is made by the publisher. I thought the point of copyright was to encourage the creation of artistic works by providing a limited set of protections. If the Author can't make money then the author is very unlikely to create new ones. What we want is a scheme that rewards the author but limits what the large corporations can make off it. Look don't get me wrong I buy the argument that Star wars should be out of copyright by now, George Lucas, J K Rowling, Gene Roddenbury have been more than compensated by society for their work and it's time that society could be enriched further by the right to play with their creations that are now a part of our culture. However for all those millionaires I'm concerned about the guy who's struggling along on his 5th novel barely making a living and hoping to make it big with the next one. The harder you make it for him to survive the less chance our society has of chucking up the next JK. This is a bad thing.
But in the world painted, why on earth would authors enter into an abusive contract?
The same reasons many bands enter into an abusive contracts with large record companies.
It's quite easy to self-publish a printed book too
not if the publisher had editorial input into the original book.
No, it does not. It's always quite different than blogging
I was meaning economically and socially. Okay I self publish a novel. How do I get word out? Same way as I get word of a blog out. Spread it amongst my friends. Try and link to it in relevant forums. Rely on the website I published it through to publicise it however they do that. You're trying to spread mostly through word of mouth and through making a good first impression probably in the first 30 seconds or so of someone reading it. Economically what I'm seeing from self publishing is many either following the amazon style self publish route (which I see as little different to the big publisher route in this context) or trying to get publicity through giving away extracts and then getting them to pay for the whole thing. I don't see that as too different to the blog route where you're all about ad hits and possibly merchandise. Which is all about producing something that stands out and is micro attention-span based, as opposed to most novels which rely on building a world and building characters which takes time and a different level of commitment. Now if you can get self publish to work without publicity or catering to short attention span then I'm fascinated how, but I stand by you either need to get people invested in it up front (which means publicity) which is the dead tree publisher method or you need to grab people's attention fast and for free then build from there which is the blogging method.
The artist, OTOH, has 4 previous books under their belt, with a track record of growing sales figures to show rival publishers.
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario: 2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Now given two assumptions/beliefs on my part: 1) most authors are comfortable but not well off.* 2) There is a severe shortage of good writing. (good authors are hard to find and if we go into the world of TV/film then they are gold dust - how many people's complaints about most modern films come down to problems with the script for example) With those two givens then I would say that at the moment your average writer is underpaid. Would you at least agree that shorter copyright terms would make this situation worse and make more authors underpaid and therefore reduce the amount of quality work that our civilisation produces?
* I think this is evidenced by the fact that it is actors, directors and TV presenters that we see with the flash cars, lavish parties and drug binges not the authors. When was the last time you heard a story about Terry Pratchett being locked up for his anti-social behaviour?
You miss the point others have. My own fault for trying to be (relatively) brief.
In the world painted above, publishers would either lock authors into an abusive contract or the only thing that would matter is publicity. Now in printed books (which I hope will never go away) short term copyright encourages publishers to sit on the rights and control the whole supply chain. All the money handed over at the counter goes to the publisher in that situation not the author. You may get 1/2 a dozen or so big names (Tom Clancy and the like) that make money this way and a thousand one hit wonders, but it would discourage career authors who write dozens of books that are kind of successful. Anne McCaffrey springs to mind as someone with a long successful career but was never a millionaire(that I'm aware of from my limited investigations into this). With short copyrights would she have been able to afford to write like she did? In e-books it's a weird situation. Novel writing becomes like blogging except that to read a blog post is a small investment, to read a novel is a big one. Again publicity and public opinion matter.
If it is possible to make such a mint from self publishing why aren't we saying more authors first gain fame through e-books rather than through normal channels?
I disagree, although I can see why you think that. I am trying to come up with ways in which this change would worsen the situation that currently exists. It's not about absolute as such. But take it to a further extreme if copyright was 20 minutes then the only way to make money would be through distribution channels. The Amazon's and iTunes of this would would be the ones to profit and Authors would see nothing. That is the limit of the scenario I have been trying to propose. Getting back to the original point I was trying, (clearly unsuccessfully), to make. Reducing copyright to a strong degree such as suggested would for me weaken authors rights to the point where the individual author would have next to zero power whereas the publishing company would have all the power. If you like we can ignore book deal contracts focus on the basic relationship. I am starting from the assumption that the publishing company will screw over the authors as best they can. Let's take the scenario where we have an author who is becoming gradually more successful but never really hits the big time. So less of a J K Rowling, more of a Harry Turtledove; Jean Auel, Michael Swanwick etc. In today's world it often takes several books before an author can become successful enough to spend their full time writing. With such short copyright terms their income will have already started to dry up from the first books by the time they sit down to write subsequent ones and negotiate the new contract with the new publisher. They will be more desperate to get a _slightly_ better deal than if they had at least some income from their previous work. With a copyright term that was closer to their writing career then the publisher would be less inclined to play games with holding back distribution to mean they got more of the money. Given that now the life of a writer is not a glamorous one, (I know for a fact even fairly famous writers like Jonathan Stroud earn less than an average engineer like myself), this is not a time to be weakening authors' rights.
I am also assuming that there is a bell curve of quality of author and one of the main jobs of a publisher is to market and grade the books on that curve for me.
A publisher however adds many things to the creative process. They will provide feedback on style, typography, pacing, themes and actually help many new writers produce a decent piece of work and find their style. It's understated how the editorial input they provide often helps. They also provide the publicity and distribution chain which is not to be underestimated. Now you say once an Author has fame they have all the power in the deal. I'm a fan of Ian Banks so the next book he writes I'll just get from Amazon and whoever he publishes under he'll still get my money regardless. True, once I have my preferred authors I'm laughing, but there's maybe 1/2 dozen of them, but (slashdot brevity here) everything else I read is determined by recommendations from others which are very easy to skew with correct marketing. Whether you get your recommendations from friends or internet forums or hanging around in a bookshop it's the actions of the publisher, not the author (more brevity) that have a direct effect on your choice of whether to buy that book. When the power to make a book popular or not rests with the publisher then they already have too much power in the money equation and changes to copyright law need to target that, not the author themselves. Now a lot of this argument rests on the information I have come across that your average author is not a billionaire but at best an averagely well off person. Your average TV celebrity certainly seems to be orders of magnitude richer (which I think is very wrong) so until I find out otherwise I will argue against anything that reduces authors rights during their working lifetime. (actually that said I'd be happy with 25 year copyright, but this is one of those shades of grey things).
Sorry, I have learned on slashdot to be brief, I should explain: For a start off the publisher when they sign the deal for the first book would write in to the contract the rights to the rest of the series of those characters. No problem, says the author on Book 4, I'll not call it book 4 of the adventures of Bert the Hypnotist. I'll call it a new series George the Sorcerer. However if she did this she would be sued for infringement of the original property. So the only way she can move to a different publisher is to either get out of her original contract with the rights to carry on using the characters or to find herself a new audience and create a new world. All they have to do is not let her out of that contract under terms she likes and she finds herself in the situation where she is better making some money off the first publisher than moving on. It's worth pointing out in this situation I'm alluding to here is the story of J. K Rowling and one of the many reasons Harry Potter was so successful. From what I have gathered the contract she originally signed was under far better terms than most first time authors manage. Not because she was successful at the time, just that she was patient, confident and to some extent lucky. This meant in subsequent books and negotiations she did even better still. Another author would almost certainly have been under much greater control from their publishers and the books and films would have suffered for this. One of the reasons the HP films are arguably better than similar book to film translations (Eragon springs to mind, but there are many many other books that had excellent books and average at best films) is that the author retained creative control during the film making process. Without a strong negotiating position it's easy to image the HP films being much much worse; likewise her strong position meant books 4 onwards could be such massive volumes where an editor would have demanded more cutting for mood and pacing.
I tried to partially cover that point: let's suppose all your companies IP was in the hands of one person, he is likely an older gent(CEO/founder), what happens when he dies? You'd lose much of the companies assets so you'd have to spread the IP around so that should he get hit by a bus then the entire company does not go with him. Knowing it was such a high risk strategy they would not be able to do it for precisely the reasons you describe.
I'm glad you mention the back catalogues, from what i can gather they generally pay very very poorly: http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17408 And this is a guy who created, wrote, executive produced and owned the production company of a commercially successful show. I fear the average actor/author/writer would do much worse (than nothing).
Now when you negotiate the contract for your second project you'll probably do better, but the fact remains with very short copyright terms it is in the interest of the publisher to screw the author around. Perhaps then they will move on elsewhere, but with short copyright publicity and reputation gets all the more powerful. These things play into the hands of the big boys not the small guys.
Okay, let's be a nasty person and game the system. I've just had a new author come to me with pretty good kids book. Let's call her K L Moss. Her first book is well received but nothing special. A year later she comes back with book 2. That does significantly better. The first print run sells out immediately(I intentionally did a small one to minimise my risks). I then start a year long publicity campaign on books 1 & 2. Book 1 is now 3 years old. By the time book 3 is ready I decide that it will first have a good year of publicity and excerpts published in small chunks to build up anticipation. Now I'm selling books as fast as I can print them. By the time book 4 is ready copyright has expired on book 1. It's not really worth anyone else printing book 1 as its available on e-readers for free. No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
Under such a short copyright term I can only see ways to screw over authors it sems to me that they will suffer more than the publishers. Also IMO you want profitable publishers so that they can afford to take a risk on new authors. If they become more risk averse that will be bad for authors and the public domain.
A much simpler first step would just to be to say that companies cannot own copyright only people. That copyright then expires on their death. Copyright is not transferable(although the royalties could be). That would then prevent the CEO/founder of the company owning all the copyright.
I say all this in the knowledge that my job is to produce copyrighted/secret code. Under the current system the company owns this code and will forever because they employed me to write it. However that code has a halflife of about 2 years because technology marches on and others innovate along with us. So producing something once will almost certainly not make you set for life. It's worth groking why Ms Moss effectively gets more protection in that regard than I do.
Were painters redundant when photography was invented? Yes, many of the portrait painters were. But those skills of composing a shot, working with people were still needed. New opportunities were created, the photography + painting business ended up as being bigger than what had been the painting business alone.
Maybe you understand it, maybe the GP does too, but are you saying the photon doesn't go through both slits simultaneously? It's fairly well accepted that a particle evaluates every possible path and the resultant path comes down to the derived probability for each possible end result.
How does this work? Short Answer: Read up on QED. Long (and probably incorrect because it's my understanding) Answer: The way I get my head around this is to say consider everything as a field. The electron field, the photon field, the proton field (actually a composite quark field) etc. However "things" only exist in discrete units. A photon on the double slit experiment starts as a quantum unit of energy emitted from an electron, propagates through the photon (em) field before finishing up as another interaction with an electron on the detector. As per QED the photon evaluates every possible path to the end point(easy to conceive if it is a field, but energy exists in quantum units). Where there are two holes there are paths that the wavefunctions can interact with each other and provide the interference pattern. Where there is one path the straightforward case applies where the photon (also consider it as a disturbance in the em-field) only interacts with itself so the rotation of the vector that you consider as you evaluate each possible path only evaluates to a minimum at the straight line case; whereas for two slits the photon rotation vectors have many probabilities about how the disturbances in the em field again interact with the electron in the detector. Actually that's a rubbish explanation but I'm not Richard Feynman,,,
I find it interesting - given you mention the history of patents - that one of the first outcomes of a rigorous patent system was to break up the guilds. Knowledge that had been held secret for centuries was suddenly in the public domain. Give it twenty years or so and everyone could use the secrets of the guild. Now you have the reverse situation where patents are protecting the technology guilds - but at least what they are doing is not secret, and never will be. is that perhaps enough, patents have now become a system to turn trade secrets into public knowledge and they still do that job well. Is that enough and maybe we now need to invent a new system to break up the new guilds?
I do wonder if the simplest fix to the system is to say that a company cannot own a patent, only a person. A company can license a patent from a person, but that is the limit. Now you'd have to also have some law that prevented the company from putting into the employment contract a set of default license terms that screwed the person over. I think you'd also want to limit the number of patents any one person can hold - that would get rid of the frivolous patents if you could only hold 100 patents over the course of your life you really would only submit the really good ones. Again that would be open to abuse when I claim by 12 year old child has 50 patents to his name, but you get the idea...
you missed: 5) Any company whose patent related gross revenue exceeds its non-patent related gross revenue will incur an additional tax You'd also catch them on 4) Patent licensing requires public disclosure of full license costs, terms, and conditions because ACME Corp would have to license from ACME Subsidiary #000001 through ACME Subsidiary #999999. Once they are licensed for $1 a piece they should have a hard time in court when ACME Subsidiary #000003 sues small company for violation arguing that a license fee much larger than $1 was required/fair.
Really, I have a nokia N8 which is a fairly new Nokia phone. I have great fun with the apple fan boys at work when they go on about how wonderful theirs is and I point out that apart from apps there is little to choose between them*. However one of the tests they will never take me up on is the drop test. I've tested (intentionally or otherwise) it against wood, concrete and beer - so far so good up to about 6 foot. I have yet to find an iphone that has survived a drop of more than about 4 foot onto wood... I'm willing to take the test again though...
*okay that's a whole other flame war, let me grab a beer before starting that one...
My understanding was that it was lighter per unit of strength. That is a yard long beam made from platinum capable of supporting 10 pounds(and no more) would be lighter than the same spec made from steel.
Aaaah! Outland revenue. Interesting question, how long after the first permanent space residents appear that we start to have governments on Earth demanding that taxes are paid? I can imagine a phase where the old Earth governments are chasing the miners through space, not for being pirates but for not paying their taxes on what they owe Earth for their work.
After all, what have the Earthlings ever done for us? The water purifiers Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true And the sanitation! Oh yes... sanitation, , you remember what the space station used to be like.
All right, I'll grant you that the purifiers and the sanitation are two things that the Earthlings have done...
And the rockets
(sharply) Well yes obviously the rockets... the rockets go without saying. But apart from the purifiers, the sanitation and the rockets...
Hydroponics... Medicine... Education... Health...
Yes... all right, fair enough...
And the wine...
Yeah. That's something we'd really miss if we broke away from earth
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between:
NASA: We want a shuttle
Boeing/etc: Right give us $5billion and we'll go build one for you.,
NASA: Here's $5 Billion
BOeing./etc: Thanks but we had need some more
NASA: okay
Boeing/etc: Nope still more and if you don't give it to uss you'll have wasted all the moey you threw at us
NASA: okay, well while you're doing that we need to change the requirements
Boeing/etc: Oh, few more billion please, and did i mention it doesn't work very well so we'll want a few more billion.
etc
verses
SpaceX: we want to develop manned flight, look here's us launching a satellite. Anyone interested?
NASA: cool, hey we want that, need some funding?
SpaceX: Sure if you're offering it to us.
NASA okay, well if you can deliver a Falcon 9 and meet the design targets for your Dragon we'll give you $500 Million to build them
SpaceX: Done, can we have our money now?
NASA: Cool you've had a successful launch. We'll pay you for the next launch now then
If you don't see the difference between these two models then I'm somewhat worried. Not that I blame NASA or Boeing or anyone else, it's just what happens when this much money is in play. the only way to fix that is to get the cost down.
If anything this distraction of manned flight has taken them away from their initial goal of developing cheap satellite launch capability. Not that I think they mind but still it shows that they had a business plan without NASa that still exists. See Biglow as well for uses of this manned capability they plan to use.
By banning satellite launches on anything but the shuttle to increase the fly rate of the shuttle to meet their projections.
By the legal requirements a private company had to meet to launch (that were impossible to meet) that were waived on a NASA launch.
I like your point, and yes I agree.
I've often argued that the most important thing humans can do is increase the quality of life. This neatly encompasses the pursuit of art, provides a basis for a moral code and improvements in technology. So by what you said then we should pursue things that make humaniity better just because they make things better. But how do you define better? Do I sleep better at night because Man has walked on the moon(yes). But how do you measure that and who do you trust to make those decisions?
To that end for example how much of a cost in terms of reduced quality of life are we prepared to accept now in order that our great grandchildren can have the increased quality of life either from the exploitation of space resources or from just the "Ain't it cool we get to go and play in zero gravity whenever we want" (or even "I'm really annoyed I have to go on that boring history field trip to see the Apollo landing sites")
Anyway I guess what I'm saying is there has to be some way to track what we sacrifice now in order to gain later. Money is a convenient way of doing it but certainly not the only one. Political influence seems to be something that was readily traded as part of the space program.
I guess it comes down to Darwinian Selection doesn't favour those who invest in things that don't get a return. It's harsh and unfair, but as a species we are still constrained by the laws of physics which evolution is really just an expression of. (Finite resources+Variation+growth = selection of best). It sucks and it'd be great to rise above it, but how do we convince people that (for example) you can't have a new car as we need to use those resources for the space program. Far better to say "You can have that car because of materials and technology from the space program".
I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
That got modded insightful??? I judge from your signature you are Trolling but just in case...
The only way we will get in space big time is if there is profit to be made by being up there; Or are you saying you were rather humans were not in space?
Would you rather we stayed on this rock until the sun consumes us. If we do not push into space now, then when should we?
In anticipation of your next criticism I agree that at the moment investing in space is not the best survival tactic for the near future, Antarctica is sill far more hospitable than LEO; and no matter what happens in the next billion years most of Earth will stay more hospitable than Antarctica; but we have to go there some day so we should as soon as we can and as soon as it is profitable to be there good luck stopping people from going there.
Fine you don't like the survival argument, how about we should go there because what else as a species are we for? To sit around and reproduce and watch daytime TV? No we should do things that no other lifeform we know of has done before or could do.
It can't run most educational software nor children's oriented flash websites. I do not see the value in these.
I agree, I see no value in flash websites either.
(quote> the article is looking at these as Mac and PC replacements for outdated equipment.
Did you read the same article as me? I saw an article talking about using them to teach computer science. While HTML5/flash is part of computer science everything you need to know to get the principles of computer science could have been learnt on an Amiga or Zx Spectrum. The platform does not matter as long as it is hackable* and interesting**.
*i.e. you have access to the low level bits and when you break them they're easy to fix.
** i.e. it has the capabilities of a low-mid range smart phone, which it does.
You hear it on here all the time. People who think that a company has the legal responsibility to make ever greater profits (ignoring the fact that this forgets which shareholder metric they may have in mind). This is of course rubbish. A company has to follow the will of the shareholders (where 1 share = 1 vote). and the shareholders have certain rights to information and possibly the right to demand a new board. but that's pretty much it.
People think a corporation has to get ever bigger but that is a meme not a law.
Name me how many other iconic first of a kind vehicles are still in operation.
Apollo, STS - dead
Concorde - as you say, dead.
Kitty hawk - dead
de Havilland Comet - dead
Penny farthing - dead
B52 - okay you got me - unless you argued it was the latest in a long line of ever bigger planes building on dozens of previous generations...
The point is you design something, try it out, see where it fails and start again.
The space industry tried with Gemini, then apollo then STS then kind of gave up.
Now maybe the falcon 9 will be the 737 of space transport or maybe it will turn out that it is the next Comet. It doesn't matter as long as you learn from your mistakes and build a better design. (noting that the 737 has not been a stable design by any means but has seen how many years of service?)
No I am not trolling I am trying to make my point understood and you don't get it. That is a failure of communication not someone trying to be antagonistic. But if you're going to use that as a reason to not listen to the point then so be it.
It solves Mickey Mouse never going out of copyright, given that no no work has entered the public domain for decades because of the ever increasing copyright terms.
The Copyright is in that case is probably best owned by either the director or executive producer.
No, you'll never find Plato's Republic or Iliad for sale.
everybody and their dog have already read at least one of this books
You and anybody else, also don't forget that it comes for free on any e-reader.
So in other words the author makes no money. However what little money there is to be made is made by the publisher. I thought the point of copyright was to encourage the creation of artistic works by providing a limited set of protections. If the Author can't make money then the author is very unlikely to create new ones. What we want is a scheme that rewards the author but limits what the large corporations can make off it.
Look don't get me wrong I buy the argument that Star wars should be out of copyright by now, George Lucas, J K Rowling, Gene Roddenbury have been more than compensated by society for their work and it's time that society could be enriched further by the right to play with their creations that are now a part of our culture. However for all those millionaires I'm concerned about the guy who's struggling along on his 5th novel barely making a living and hoping to make it big with the next one. The harder you make it for him to survive the less chance our society has of chucking up the next JK. This is a bad thing.
But in the world painted, why on earth would authors enter into an abusive contract?
The same reasons many bands enter into an abusive contracts with large record companies.
It's quite easy to self-publish a printed book too
not if the publisher had editorial input into the original book.
No, it does not. It's always quite different than blogging
I was meaning economically and socially. Okay I self publish a novel. How do I get word out? Same way as I get word of a blog out. Spread it amongst my friends. Try and link to it in relevant forums. Rely on the website I published it through to publicise it however they do that. You're trying to spread mostly through word of mouth and through making a good first impression probably in the first 30 seconds or so of someone reading it.
Economically what I'm seeing from self publishing is many either following the amazon style self publish route (which I see as little different to the big publisher route in this context) or trying to get publicity through giving away extracts and then getting them to pay for the whole thing. I don't see that as too different to the blog route where you're all about ad hits and possibly merchandise. Which is all about producing something that stands out and is micro attention-span based, as opposed to most novels which rely on building a world and building characters which takes time and a different level of commitment.
Now if you can get self publish to work without publicity or catering to short attention span then I'm fascinated how, but I stand by you either need to get people invested in it up front (which means publicity) which is the dead tree publisher method or you need to grab people's attention fast and for free then build from there which is the blogging method.
The artist, OTOH, has 4 previous books under their belt, with a track record of growing sales figures to show rival publishers.
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario:
2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Now given two assumptions/beliefs on my part:
1) most authors are comfortable but not well off.*
2) There is a severe shortage of good writing. (good authors are hard to find and if we go into the world of TV/film then they are gold dust - how many people's complaints about most modern films come down to problems with the script for example)
With those two givens then I would say that at the moment your average writer is underpaid.
Would you at least agree that shorter copyright terms would make this situation worse and make more authors underpaid and therefore reduce the amount of quality work that our civilisation produces?
* I think this is evidenced by the fact that it is actors, directors and TV presenters that we see with the flash cars, lavish parties and drug binges not the authors. When was the last time you heard a story about Terry Pratchett being locked up for his anti-social behaviour?
You miss the point others have. My own fault for trying to be (relatively) brief.
In the world painted above, publishers would either lock authors into an abusive contract or the only thing that would matter is publicity.
Now in printed books (which I hope will never go away) short term copyright encourages publishers to sit on the rights and control the whole supply chain. All the money handed over at the counter goes to the publisher in that situation not the author. You may get 1/2 a dozen or so big names (Tom Clancy and the like) that make money this way and a thousand one hit wonders, but it would discourage career authors who write dozens of books that are kind of successful. Anne McCaffrey springs to mind as someone with a long successful career but was never a millionaire(that I'm aware of from my limited investigations into this). With short copyrights would she have been able to afford to write like she did?
In e-books it's a weird situation. Novel writing becomes like blogging except that to read a blog post is a small investment, to read a novel is a big one. Again publicity and public opinion matter.
If it is possible to make such a mint from self publishing why aren't we saying more authors first gain fame through e-books rather than through normal channels?
I disagree, although I can see why you think that. I am trying to come up with ways in which this change would worsen the situation that currently exists. It's not about absolute as such. But take it to a further extreme if copyright was 20 minutes then the only way to make money would be through distribution channels. The Amazon's and iTunes of this would would be the ones to profit and Authors would see nothing. That is the limit of the scenario I have been trying to propose.
Getting back to the original point I was trying, (clearly unsuccessfully), to make. Reducing copyright to a strong degree such as suggested would for me weaken authors rights to the point where the individual author would have next to zero power whereas the publishing company would have all the power. If you like we can ignore book deal contracts focus on the basic relationship. I am starting from the assumption that the publishing company will screw over the authors as best they can. Let's take the scenario where we have an author who is becoming gradually more successful but never really hits the big time. So less of a J K Rowling, more of a Harry Turtledove; Jean Auel, Michael Swanwick etc. In today's world it often takes several books before an author can become successful enough to spend their full time writing. With such short copyright terms their income will have already started to dry up from the first books by the time they sit down to write subsequent ones and negotiate the new contract with the new publisher. They will be more desperate to get a _slightly_ better deal than if they had at least some income from their previous work. With a copyright term that was closer to their writing career then the publisher would be less inclined to play games with holding back distribution to mean they got more of the money. Given that now the life of a writer is not a glamorous one, (I know for a fact even fairly famous writers like Jonathan Stroud earn less than an average engineer like myself), this is not a time to be weakening authors' rights.
I am also assuming that there is a bell curve of quality of author and one of the main jobs of a publisher is to market and grade the books on that curve for me.
A publisher however adds many things to the creative process. They will provide feedback on style, typography, pacing, themes and actually help many new writers produce a decent piece of work and find their style. It's understated how the editorial input they provide often helps. They also provide the publicity and distribution chain which is not to be underestimated.
Now you say once an Author has fame they have all the power in the deal. I'm a fan of Ian Banks so the next book he writes I'll just get from Amazon and whoever he publishes under he'll still get my money regardless. True, once I have my preferred authors I'm laughing, but there's maybe 1/2 dozen of them, but (slashdot brevity here) everything else I read is determined by recommendations from others which are very easy to skew with correct marketing. Whether you get your recommendations from friends or internet forums or hanging around in a bookshop it's the actions of the publisher, not the author (more brevity) that have a direct effect on your choice of whether to buy that book.
When the power to make a book popular or not rests with the publisher then they already have too much power in the money equation and changes to copyright law need to target that, not the author themselves.
Now a lot of this argument rests on the information I have come across that your average author is not a billionaire but at best an averagely well off person. Your average TV celebrity certainly seems to be orders of magnitude richer (which I think is very wrong) so until I find out otherwise I will argue against anything that reduces authors rights during their working lifetime. (actually that said I'd be happy with 25 year copyright, but this is one of those shades of grey things).
Sorry, I have learned on slashdot to be brief, I should explain:
For a start off the publisher when they sign the deal for the first book would write in to the contract the rights to the rest of the series of those characters.
No problem, says the author on Book 4, I'll not call it book 4 of the adventures of Bert the Hypnotist. I'll call it a new series George the Sorcerer. However if she did this she would be sued for infringement of the original property.
So the only way she can move to a different publisher is to either get out of her original contract with the rights to carry on using the characters or to find herself a new audience and create a new world. All they have to do is not let her out of that contract under terms she likes and she finds herself in the situation where she is better making some money off the first publisher than moving on.
It's worth pointing out in this situation I'm alluding to here is the story of J. K Rowling and one of the many reasons Harry Potter was so successful. From what I have gathered the contract she originally signed was under far better terms than most first time authors manage. Not because she was successful at the time, just that she was patient, confident and to some extent lucky. This meant in subsequent books and negotiations she did even better still. Another author would almost certainly have been under much greater control from their publishers and the books and films would have suffered for this.
One of the reasons the HP films are arguably better than similar book to film translations (Eragon springs to mind, but there are many many other books that had excellent books and average at best films) is that the author retained creative control during the film making process. Without a strong negotiating position it's easy to image the HP films being much much worse; likewise her strong position meant books 4 onwards could be such massive volumes where an editor would have demanded more cutting for mood and pacing.
I tried to partially cover that point: let's suppose all your companies IP was in the hands of one person, he is likely an older gent(CEO/founder), what happens when he dies? You'd lose much of the companies assets so you'd have to spread the IP around so that should he get hit by a bus then the entire company does not go with him.
Knowing it was such a high risk strategy they would not be able to do it for precisely the reasons you describe.
I'm glad you mention the back catalogues, from what i can gather they generally pay very very poorly:
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17408
And this is a guy who created, wrote, executive produced and owned the production company of a commercially successful show. I fear the average actor/author/writer would do much worse (than nothing).
Now when you negotiate the contract for your second project you'll probably do better, but the fact remains with very short copyright terms it is in the interest of the publisher to screw the author around. Perhaps then they will move on elsewhere, but with short copyright publicity and reputation gets all the more powerful. These things play into the hands of the big boys not the small guys.
Okay, let's be a nasty person and game the system.
I've just had a new author come to me with pretty good kids book. Let's call her K L Moss. Her first book is well received but nothing special. A year later she comes back with book 2. That does significantly better. The first print run sells out immediately(I intentionally did a small one to minimise my risks). I then start a year long publicity campaign on books 1 & 2. Book 1 is now 3 years old.
By the time book 3 is ready I decide that it will first have a good year of publicity and excerpts published in small chunks to build up anticipation. Now I'm selling books as fast as I can print them.
By the time book 4 is ready copyright has expired on book 1. It's not really worth anyone else printing book 1 as its available on e-readers for free. No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
Under such a short copyright term I can only see ways to screw over authors it sems to me that they will suffer more than the publishers. Also IMO you want profitable publishers so that they can afford to take a risk on new authors. If they become more risk averse that will be bad for authors and the public domain.
A much simpler first step would just to be to say that companies cannot own copyright only people. That copyright then expires on their death. Copyright is not transferable(although the royalties could be). That would then prevent the CEO/founder of the company owning all the copyright.
I say all this in the knowledge that my job is to produce copyrighted/secret code. Under the current system the company owns this code and will forever because they employed me to write it. However that code has a halflife of about 2 years because technology marches on and others innovate along with us. So producing something once will almost certainly not make you set for life. It's worth groking why Ms Moss effectively gets more protection in that regard than I do.
Were painters redundant when photography was invented?
Yes, many of the portrait painters were. But those skills of composing a shot, working with people were still needed. New opportunities were created, the photography + painting business ended up as being bigger than what had been the painting business alone.
Things change; this is good.
Maybe you understand it, maybe the GP does too, but are you saying the photon doesn't go through both slits simultaneously? It's fairly well accepted that a particle evaluates every possible path and the resultant path comes down to the derived probability for each possible end result.
How does this work?
Short Answer: Read up on QED.
Long (and probably incorrect because it's my understanding) Answer:
The way I get my head around this is to say consider everything as a field. The electron field, the photon field, the proton field (actually a composite quark field) etc.
However "things" only exist in discrete units. A photon on the double slit experiment starts as a quantum unit of energy emitted from an electron, propagates through the photon (em) field before finishing up as another interaction with an electron on the detector. As per QED the photon evaluates every possible path to the end point(easy to conceive if it is a field, but energy exists in quantum units). Where there are two holes there are paths that the wavefunctions can interact with each other and provide the interference pattern. Where there is one path the straightforward case applies where the photon (also consider it as a disturbance in the em-field) only interacts with itself so the rotation of the vector that you consider as you evaluate each possible path only evaluates to a minimum at the straight line case; whereas for two slits the photon rotation vectors have many probabilities about how the disturbances in the em field again interact with the electron in the detector.
Actually that's a rubbish explanation but I'm not Richard Feynman,,,
I find it interesting - given you mention the history of patents - that one of the first outcomes of a rigorous patent system was to break up the guilds. Knowledge that had been held secret for centuries was suddenly in the public domain. Give it twenty years or so and everyone could use the secrets of the guild.
Now you have the reverse situation where patents are protecting the technology guilds - but at least what they are doing is not secret, and never will be. is that perhaps enough, patents have now become a system to turn trade secrets into public knowledge and they still do that job well. Is that enough and maybe we now need to invent a new system to break up the new guilds?
I do wonder if the simplest fix to the system is to say that a company cannot own a patent, only a person.
A company can license a patent from a person, but that is the limit.
Now you'd have to also have some law that prevented the company from putting into the employment contract a set of default license terms that screwed the person over.
I think you'd also want to limit the number of patents any one person can hold - that would get rid of the frivolous patents if you could only hold 100 patents over the course of your life you really would only submit the really good ones. Again that would be open to abuse when I claim by 12 year old child has 50 patents to his name, but you get the idea...
you missed:
5) Any company whose patent related gross revenue exceeds its non-patent related gross revenue will incur an additional tax
You'd also catch them on
4) Patent licensing requires public disclosure of full license costs, terms, and conditions
because
ACME Corp would have to license from ACME Subsidiary #000001 through ACME Subsidiary #999999. Once they are licensed for $1 a piece they should have a hard time in court when ACME Subsidiary #000003 sues small company for violation arguing that a license fee much larger than $1 was required/fair.
Really, I have a nokia N8 which is a fairly new Nokia phone. I have great fun with the apple fan boys at work when they go on about how wonderful theirs is and I point out that apart from apps there is little to choose between them*. However one of the tests they will never take me up on is the drop test.
I've tested (intentionally or otherwise) it against wood, concrete and beer - so far so good up to about 6 foot. I have yet to find an iphone that has survived a drop of more than about 4 foot onto wood...
I'm willing to take the test again though...
*okay that's a whole other flame war, let me grab a beer before starting that one...
My understanding was that it was lighter per unit of strength.
That is a yard long beam made from platinum capable of supporting 10 pounds(and no more) would be lighter than the same spec made from steel.
Aaaah! Outland revenue.
Interesting question, how long after the first permanent space residents appear that we start to have governments on Earth demanding that taxes are paid?
I can imagine a phase where the old Earth governments are chasing the miners through space, not for being pirates but for not paying their taxes on what they owe Earth for their work.
After all, what have the Earthlings ever done for us?
The water purifiers
Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true
And the sanitation!
Oh yes... sanitation, , you remember what the space station used to be like.
All right, I'll grant you that the purifiers and the sanitation are two things that the Earthlings have done...
And the rockets
(sharply) Well yes obviously the rockets... the rockets go without saying. But apart from the purifiers, the sanitation and the rockets...
Hydroponics... Medicine... Education... Health...
Yes... all right, fair enough...
And the wine...
Yeah. That's something we'd really miss if we broke away from earth
Sorry I got carried away there...