But you have to realize that this will severely affect R&D if it's your own fault that you failed to improve past what you just innovated.
I'm sorry, that is the patent lie: companies will innovate because if they don't they'll fail in the market. In all of history it is only the incumbents who lobby for protection. The new innovators (potentially tomorrow's incumbents) innovate because they want to bring a product to market. Progress is always made on the innovations that came before.
I'm not arguing for or against patents and I'm not arguing to lengthen or shorten the time they are in effect. What I'm trying to do is get you to understand the repercussions of doing any of the above.
I wasn't going to respond until I read this line. Coupled with your other statement I can't read this any other way then an endorsement of the patent system.
and responsible IP laws are a good thing.
ah, there it is. Not sure why you hid your bias in the middle there...
Until autonomous vehicles prove superior safety and insurers and/or legislators recognize the new state of affairs
Far more likely is that we will still pay insurance to allow the vehicle on the public road. The sale will include a disclaimer of liability and an agreement from the purchaser that they will buy insurance to drive it on the public road. We will all sign it, and continue to buy insurance. The combined interest of the car manufacturer and the insurance company won't let this go any other way.
X per month is simple and a good idea for most customers, X per gigabyte is simple and a good idea for most ISPs.
ISPs like "x-per-month" because they can claim to sell you 100gb knowing you will only use 10gb. On a per-gig charge you would only pay for what you use.
Bandwidth should be charged more like electricity: you pay for what you use when you use it. It's not like the unused time can be saved for the busy period.
Of course, all of this is predicated on actual competition to keep the 'per-gig' charge from being obscene...
Ultimately the 'last-mile' should be socialised (like roads) and then you have choice of providers to connect to. As with roads there is a natural monopoly (or at best oligopoly) in laying wires to homes and businesses. We will never have true competition as long as the retailers own the last mile.
I'm not sure it's possible to come up with an alternative pricing system that doesn't end up as an even more unfair black box model where you only find out how much you've spent when the bill comes.
The true cost of moving bits on the 'net has dropped dramatically over the last decade. It should cost pennies per gig, and in a pay-per-gig model that reflected the true cost of this service it wouldn't matter much if you used 100gig or 200gig. Furthermore, there is no reason why you could not track your usage in real-time for people who wanted to know where they were at. Finally you could limit your maximum possible cost by limiting your speed.
Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend
on
LimeWire Lives Again
·
· Score: 1
because you would need more money controlling and monitoring traffic (effectively) than any money you profit off of media
Tho I agree with your post the problem is that they won't be spending their own money to monitor the 'net. They have already co-opted law enforcement to go after digital pirates and they want the ISPs to bear the cost of monitoring.
So ultimately all these costs of monitoring and enforcement are then born by us, but the profits remain theirs.
I was in agreement with this, but I'm no longer as convinced this is a problem that needs to be solved.
With my cell-phone camera I can already take a picture of my vote for proof to someone else so the problem (if there is one) would already exist today; or would be becoming an issue as more and more people have the ability.
If it does become a problem then we would simply needs to alter the proof function to allow for the user to ask for one of three responses w/o anyone else knowing which way they asked the question:
1. The vote they actually cast
2. Always Yes
3. Always No
At least with a traditional methodology, everything is reviewed for feasibility and risks before you invest too much time driving down the wrong path.
With many (most?) software projects over budget, late and n% (where n is between 5%-115%) software projects outright failing I don't see how that can be true.
Ultimately I think I'm largely in agreement with many people here who assert that software development is actually very difficult to do successfully; I'd just add that it's also very easy to do poorly, pays reasonably well and it is difficult for non-technical people (like hiring managers) to evaluate who will actually do it well. This combination makes success an unlikely outcome.
I don't think we'll ever have completely automated cars.
Fully automated cars are inevitable.
We can debate how they will come about/be implemented (1), how long it will take(2), how they will work(3), if there will be insurance requirements and who would pay it(4), but their arrival is guaranteed.
...by human error or by a malfunctioning computer.
Cars today are already almost 100% computerized. The controls you touch tell a processor what servos to enact.
...will make it feel like playing a slot machine.
I'm not planning on letting M$ build these things...but even if Sync eventually Borgs it's way into car control (instead of feature control) I just won't buy that one...
Ultimately most driving is monotonous work that requires constant attention. Humans suck at that sort of activity; machines excel at that sort of activity.
My guesses
(1) Incremental: First increment is here: cars that park themselves, lane departure warnings, etc. Next increments like "Sixth Day" where on the highway it was automated and in the city there was manual control. Farm equipment will be an early adopter; trucks and buses will lead on the road.
(2) Well, partly automated is here, and I suggested that the children being born today would be the last full generation that drove themselves. The next generation will be the crossover. Of course I said this two years ago and that is starting to look pessimistic.
(3) Sensors. Lots of Sensors. As a child I thought we would need a "wire" in the road to tell the car where it was but that seems silly now.
(4) Insurance will continue much as it does today, there will be an annual fee paid by the driver based on the risk of their vehicle; don't worry, the insurance and car companies aren't going to kill their golden goose.
It is worth remembering though that the open source movement depends on copyright laws.
How does BSD depend on copyright?
I'd still suggest that at most the Publishing/Distribution industries need some sort of monopoly protection. And they are simply discovering that the service they offer has been replaced by the Internet.
The sooner the notion of creating artificial scarcity goes away the better off we will all* be.
*ok, except the now mostly redundant distribution companies... but they'll get over it.
Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real. This is because some of the people playing illegally copied games are doing so instead of buying a legitimate copy for themselves.
I'm sorry, that is false. You're missing an essential component of the equation. And I can't include people who would not have paid 100% as there is no mechanism for paying anything other than 100%: in the absence of an illegal copy those people would have done without and are therefore 0% loss. Ferrari isn't losing any sales to me.
The correct calculation would be: Delta (not loss!) = "Nbr of People who bought for some illegal copy related reason" - "Nbr of people who would have paid 100%, but illegally copied it instead"
This number could be positive (ie; 'illegal' sharing causes an increase in sales) as can be seen here.
From how I've always seen the numbers, there is (always?) a positive correlation between sharing and sales. While there will be argument about causation I would suggest that (at least) in the above example there is clear cause and effect.
Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
Once that is resolved the rest of the discussion becomes somewhat moot.
This is why need to scrap the entire tax code and replace it a federal sales tax.
I'd suggest The One Tax should be Property Tax.
Anything that is artificially expensive generates a black market for the same thing at it's "true" cost.
For example, income tax creates a black-market for labour: People start to do work for cash to avoid paying the taxes.
Here in Canada we have significant alcohol and tobacco taxes which creates significant smuggling from the US.
Furthermore, anything which you add a tax to you discourage (obviously anything you subsidize you encourage...)
So since we live in a consumer-based economy, the last thing you want to do is discourage people from buying things.
And if you tax income/revenue then you start to have corporations that move their revenue to the lowest rated region.
This "black market" effect is one reason we so many kinds of taxes: the more you raise one type, the more of that activity moves under ground, the less tax revenue you generate. It has always been a balancing act; trying to find a tax rate where most people don't bother to work in the underground economy and choose instead to contribute to the tax base.
But none of this applies to physical property, aka: Land.
Everyone needs somewhere to live, work etc.
Every contributing member of our society needs land on which to exist. This is true whether person or corporation.
While corporations might look to minimize their physical presence, it is really difficult to effectively do business in another country if you have no physical presence there.
So that means that everybody pays.
Another possible fringe benefits might include more virtual-type offices, reducing travel (reducing energy consumption, pollution, congestion, etc)
David Mitchell badly misunderstands the news business which is scary as they seem to let him write for major news organizations.
The news has always been free.
The subscription cost (often barely) covered the printing and distribution costs. The Internet is the printer and distributor now, so this is essentially free. That is to say, we don't pay the paper any longer, we pay the ISP. The ads paid for news in the paper era, and Google's income and market cap lead me to believe that there is some potential for ad revenue on the internet.
I question Mr. Mitchel's intellectual honesty in this matter. He suggests that if the pay-walls don't work we'll be left with amateur bloggers writing 'shit'. That is one massive false dichotomy and reveals his true paper-age view of the world. More of my time is spent on blogs than at traditional media outlets [/. !! ].
Will there continue to be a shake-up in the news business? Absolutely. More papers will die off, more editors, copy-guys etc will lose their jobs. That doesn't mean all we will be left with is amateur bloggers writing shit [there's enough of that here on/. , this post included:) ] . There will just be less papers reprinting the exact same article (sure there's pure mooches, but who really goes there? really?).
The Internet is a disruptive force (I believe mostly for the better) that allows for more efficient dissemination of information. In other words, the news should get cheaper as it costs less to obtain it. Since the news was already free I can actually foresee a day when readers get paid to read a site - as in news will be cheaper than free. My justification for this? Commercial over-the-air radio pays it's listeners via contests, prizes and give-aways. Google now pays companies to use it's maps. Etc. etc. eTc.
Free isn't a business model, but it has always been and will always be part of many effective and profitable business models. Stop getting hung up on the 'free' part and see the whole.
Who do you blame...the media for its influence, or the people that allow themselves to be influenced by it?
If the media were not influential it would be replaced by media that was.
Those that sit atop the Kingdom got there because they best understood the current game and won it.
Humans are social creatures, and ultimately a pack animal. I'm beginning to believe that the natural order for humans is in fact some sort of feudal system that has leaders ruling the pack. How the leaders are chosen varies over time but ultimately the Leaders rule the pack.
I say this in the context that it may be inherent in humans to be influenced (by those in [power|control|influential-position]).
Further, the more you are a free-thinker, anti/non-social or otherwise a non-conformist the less you are likely to accept this natural order and not only cry out against the injustice of the powerful but wonder why the rest of the people around you don't. And I suspect that most/.ers fall into some variation of this category.
If you're good enough, people will make donations.
I don't think that "give it away and pray" is a good business model.
I don't think most people will pay if given the option to get it for free.
That doesn't mean that "free" can't be a part of a business model. The local Starbucks is regularly offering free samples, broadcast television is free to watch etc. This does mean that you are giving something away in order to add value to something else, or convince people to value something else which you do then sell.
This is where open-source has been profitable: sure the source code is free, but support costs money. I'm sure there are other ways and business models that will be invented, as an example Kickstarter which is really the opposite of give-it-away-away-and-pray: get funding commitments before you start work.
You have a false dichotomy here.
It seems you are of the incorrect belief that in a world without copyright we won't have any way to compensate the creators. Once you correct that false impression you may then find your way to the understanding that what we have today is a massive market distortion (aka: intellectual monopoly laws). Those that are getting rich from these laws are naturally fighting tooth and nail to ensure that their lottery winnings don't go away: they might have to work for a living like the rest of us. There's no hookers and blow on a middle-class salary.
Further, economics predicts that once we remove the monopoly (rights) we will have greater (not less) choice in the market, at a lower price - and as long as there is competition they will each make ordinary incomes and profits. And this is both healthy and is actually a reasonable assumption for numerous reasons. These are currently two of my favorite:
(1) Monopolies allow monopoly rents: name one monopoly that was also competitive? Example: Are the phone companies more or less competitive where there is no competition?
(2) At any instant in time, there is a fixed amount of money that can be spent on a given class of goods and services. (yes, this amount changes over time for various reasons, but at any instant of time it is fixed). This means that if U2 earns $100million that removes $100million from the pie. This sum could support hundreds of artists at ranges of middle and upper-class lifestyles. Example: While the recording industry is dying off, the music industry is healthy and growing. People have a relatively consistent budget for music (shifting it seems slowly upwards over time) but they don't spend it on shiny plastic discs any more. This means that artists can, and do, get paid without selling plastic discs.
I'll end this with a quote from one of the past lottery winners:
people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!... So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
--Mick Jagger
when the cost of production approaches or reaches zero. You no longer get optimal resource allocation.
As I have understood the terms, you have optimal resource allocation when the marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue. So I'm not sure I understand how p2p sharing is anything other than what economics predicts? I'm also not sure how this is less than optimal resource allocation? It might not make those who profit from artificial scarcity happy, but that doesn't mean it's not an optimal allocation of resources.
And it has long been known how you can fix that.
I'm not sure what there is to "fix" here. We invented a monetary and economic system to deal with the fact that physical goods are scarce. Had we had an infinite supply of physical goods we never would have needed to invent this system. That we applied artificial constraints to an infinite good is something of an accident of history.
The second way is to artificially give things like music and movies the attributes necessary to make them work like more tangible goods in the free market.
Of course that is like legislating that water not be wet. Sure, you can pass a law, but you have no means to enforce it. And that is actually the bigger disadvantage to me as a person (rather than the obvious poor allocation of resources you have listed). In order for a copyright law to be effective I need to give up my personal liberties as we move ever towards a police state. The more the law clamps down on those who share legally protected ideas, the more it moves underground, the more the state needs to clamp down until we arrive at one of two situations: a fairly complete police state with minimal freedom (including minimum of copying of protected works) which includes the full set of legal abuses that one would expect from a police state. Or we arrive at the conclusion that we can't control copies of ideas without losing our personal freedoms and give up trying to do so.
Most people are fundamentally not honest
This isn't an honesty question. It's an economic one to start, and a liberty question at the end. That we would give up our personal freedoms for corporate profit is disturbing.
we are talking about the... victimization of individuals of limited... means who have committed no moral crime
mankind has burned witches before and sadly we'll burn 'em again. All most of us can hope for is that we're not identified as one until this blows over.
Sorry to respond to your sig, but it caught my eye.
No issue; it's there as a comment, so eye-catching is part of the intention!
The Fed just bought over $1T in mortgage-backed securities.
So I'm just curious on the details of this: did they get the asset (ie the house) or did they just absorb the debt, leaving the property owned by a private company? There is certainly a lot of privatization of profit and socializing of debt these days and I honestly don't know how they are running this one. ...but if they did get the property when they bought the debt, does that mean any and all American(s) can make use of that house for free now?
Having an asset that is "owned by the government" and "public domain" are not quite the same thing... I guess this (continues to) illustrate that real and imaginary property are not the same.
Thanks for your comments tho, they did make me think some more on this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, that is the patent lie: companies will innovate because if they don't they'll fail in the market. In all of history it is only the incumbents who lobby for protection. The new innovators (potentially tomorrow's incumbents) innovate because they want to bring a product to market. Progress is always made on the innovations that came before.
I wasn't going to respond until I read this line. Coupled with your other statement I can't read this any other way then an endorsement of the patent system.
ah, there it is. Not sure why you hid your bias in the middle there...
Far more likely is that we will still pay insurance to allow the vehicle on the public road. The sale will include a disclaimer of liability and an agreement from the purchaser that they will buy insurance to drive it on the public road. We will all sign it, and continue to buy insurance. The combined interest of the car manufacturer and the insurance company won't let this go any other way.
ISPs like "x-per-month" because they can claim to sell you 100gb knowing you will only use 10gb. On a per-gig charge you would only pay for what you use.
Bandwidth should be charged more like electricity: you pay for what you use when you use it. It's not like the unused time can be saved for the busy period.
Of course, all of this is predicated on actual competition to keep the 'per-gig' charge from being obscene...
Ultimately the 'last-mile' should be socialised (like roads) and then you have choice of providers to connect to. As with roads there is a natural monopoly (or at best oligopoly) in laying wires to homes and businesses. We will never have true competition as long as the retailers own the last mile.
The true cost of moving bits on the 'net has dropped dramatically over the last decade. It should cost pennies per gig, and in a pay-per-gig model that reflected the true cost of this service it wouldn't matter much if you used 100gig or 200gig. Furthermore, there is no reason why you could not track your usage in real-time for people who wanted to know where they were at. Finally you could limit your maximum possible cost by limiting your speed.
That depends on who's driving
Tho I agree with your post the problem is that they won't be spending their own money to monitor the 'net. They have already co-opted law enforcement to go after digital pirates and they want the ISPs to bear the cost of monitoring.
So ultimately all these costs of monitoring and enforcement are then born by us, but the profits remain theirs.
I was in agreement with this, but I'm no longer as convinced this is a problem that needs to be solved.
With my cell-phone camera I can already take a picture of my vote for proof to someone else so the problem (if there is one) would already exist today; or would be becoming an issue as more and more people have the ability.
If it does become a problem then we would simply needs to alter the proof function to allow for the user to ask for one of three responses w/o anyone else knowing which way they asked the question:
1. The vote they actually cast
2. Always Yes
3. Always No
With many (most?) software projects over budget, late and n% (where n is between 5%-115%) software projects outright failing I don't see how that can be true.
Ultimately I think I'm largely in agreement with many people here who assert that software development is actually very difficult to do successfully; I'd just add that it's also very easy to do poorly, pays reasonably well and it is difficult for non-technical people (like hiring managers) to evaluate who will actually do it well. This combination makes success an unlikely outcome.
Fully automated cars are inevitable.
We can debate how they will come about/be implemented (1), how long it will take(2), how they will work(3), if there will be insurance requirements and who would pay it(4), but their arrival is guaranteed.
Cars today are already almost 100% computerized. The controls you touch tell a processor what servos to enact.
I'm not planning on letting M$ build these things...but even if Sync eventually Borgs it's way into car control (instead of feature control) I just won't buy that one ...
Ultimately most driving is monotonous work that requires constant attention. Humans suck at that sort of activity; machines excel at that sort of activity.
My guesses
(1) Incremental: First increment is here: cars that park themselves, lane departure warnings, etc. Next increments like "Sixth Day" where on the highway it was automated and in the city there was manual control. Farm equipment will be an early adopter; trucks and buses will lead on the road.
(2) Well, partly automated is here, and I suggested that the children being born today would be the last full generation that drove themselves. The next generation will be the crossover. Of course I said this two years ago and that is starting to look pessimistic.
(3) Sensors. Lots of Sensors. As a child I thought we would need a "wire" in the road to tell the car where it was but that seems silly now.
(4) Insurance will continue much as it does today, there will be an annual fee paid by the driver based on the risk of their vehicle; don't worry, the insurance and car companies aren't going to kill their golden goose.
How does BSD depend on copyright?
I'd still suggest that at most the Publishing/Distribution industries need some sort of monopoly protection. And they are simply discovering that the service they offer has been replaced by the Internet.
The sooner the notion of creating artificial scarcity goes away the better off we will all* be.
*ok, except the now mostly redundant distribution companies... but they'll get over it.
I'm sorry, that is false. You're missing an essential component of the equation. And I can't include people who would not have paid 100% as there is no mechanism for paying anything other than 100%: in the absence of an illegal copy those people would have done without and are therefore 0% loss. Ferrari isn't losing any sales to me.
The correct calculation would be: Delta (not loss!) = "Nbr of People who bought for some illegal copy related reason" - "Nbr of people who would have paid 100%, but illegally copied it instead"
This number could be positive (ie; 'illegal' sharing causes an increase in sales) as can be seen here.
From how I've always seen the numbers, there is (always?) a positive correlation between sharing and sales. While there will be argument about causation I would suggest that (at least) in the above example there is clear cause and effect.
Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
Once that is resolved the rest of the discussion becomes somewhat moot.
ok "t connor s", I can see you have some kind of bias against The Machines, but the rest of us are still pretty happy with the progress we're making.
I'd suggest The One Tax should be Property Tax.
Anything that is artificially expensive generates a black market for the same thing at it's "true" cost.
For example, income tax creates a black-market for labour: People start to do work for cash to avoid paying the taxes.
Here in Canada we have significant alcohol and tobacco taxes which creates significant smuggling from the US.
Furthermore, anything which you add a tax to you discourage (obviously anything you subsidize you encourage...)
So since we live in a consumer-based economy, the last thing you want to do is discourage people from buying things.
And if you tax income/revenue then you start to have corporations that move their revenue to the lowest rated region.
This "black market" effect is one reason we so many kinds of taxes: the more you raise one type, the more of that activity moves under ground, the less tax revenue you generate. It has always been a balancing act; trying to find a tax rate where most people don't bother to work in the underground economy and choose instead to contribute to the tax base.
But none of this applies to physical property, aka: Land.
Everyone needs somewhere to live, work etc.
Every contributing member of our society needs land on which to exist. This is true whether person or corporation.
While corporations might look to minimize their physical presence, it is really difficult to effectively do business in another country if you have no physical presence there.
So that means that everybody pays.
Another possible fringe benefits might include more virtual-type offices, reducing travel (reducing energy consumption, pollution, congestion, etc)
"Calculator"? You mean this?
I'm going to have to go ahead and ask you not to talk to our customers.
--sincerely,
IBM
post non-AC and I'll answer.
The country is sick, and you want to blame the snot coming out your nose?
Lobbyists aren't the problem: they're a symptom.
David Mitchell badly misunderstands the news business which is scary as they seem to let him write for major news organizations.
The news has always been free.
The subscription cost (often barely) covered the printing and distribution costs. The Internet is the printer and distributor now, so this is essentially free. That is to say, we don't pay the paper any longer, we pay the ISP. The ads paid for news in the paper era, and Google's income and market cap lead me to believe that there is some potential for ad revenue on the internet.
I question Mr. Mitchel's intellectual honesty in this matter. He suggests that if the pay-walls don't work we'll be left with amateur bloggers writing 'shit'. That is one massive false dichotomy and reveals his true paper-age view of the world. More of my time is spent on blogs than at traditional media outlets [ /. !! ]. /. , this post included :) ] . There will just be less papers reprinting the exact same article (sure there's pure mooches, but who really goes there? really?).
Will there continue to be a shake-up in the news business? Absolutely. More papers will die off, more editors, copy-guys etc will lose their jobs. That doesn't mean all we will be left with is amateur bloggers writing shit [there's enough of that here on
The Internet is a disruptive force (I believe mostly for the better) that allows for more efficient dissemination of information. In other words, the news should get cheaper as it costs less to obtain it. Since the news was already free I can actually foresee a day when readers get paid to read a site - as in news will be cheaper than free. My justification for this? Commercial over-the-air radio pays it's listeners via contests, prizes and give-aways. Google now pays companies to use it's maps. Etc. etc. eTc.
Free isn't a business model, but it has always been and will always be part of many effective and profitable business models. Stop getting hung up on the 'free' part and see the whole.
If the media were not influential it would be replaced by media that was.
Those that sit atop the Kingdom got there because they best understood the current game and won it.
Humans are social creatures, and ultimately a pack animal. I'm beginning to believe that the natural order for humans is in fact some sort of feudal system that has leaders ruling the pack. How the leaders are chosen varies over time but ultimately the Leaders rule the pack.
I say this in the context that it may be inherent in humans to be influenced (by those in [power|control|influential-position]). /.ers fall into some variation of this category.
Further, the more you are a free-thinker, anti/non-social or otherwise a non-conformist the less you are likely to accept this natural order and not only cry out against the injustice of the powerful but wonder why the rest of the people around you don't. And I suspect that most
I don't think that "give it away and pray" is a good business model.
I don't think most people will pay if given the option to get it for free.
That doesn't mean that "free" can't be a part of a business model. The local Starbucks is regularly offering free samples, broadcast television is free to watch etc. This does mean that you are giving something away in order to add value to something else, or convince people to value something else which you do then sell.
This is where open-source has been profitable: sure the source code is free, but support costs money. I'm sure there are other ways and business models that will be invented, as an example Kickstarter which is really the opposite of give-it-away-away-and-pray: get funding commitments before you start work.
You have a false dichotomy here.
It seems you are of the incorrect belief that in a world without copyright we won't have any way to compensate the creators. Once you correct that false impression you may then find your way to the understanding that what we have today is a massive market distortion (aka: intellectual monopoly laws). Those that are getting rich from these laws are naturally fighting tooth and nail to ensure that their lottery winnings don't go away: they might have to work for a living like the rest of us. There's no hookers and blow on a middle-class salary.
Further, economics predicts that once we remove the monopoly (rights) we will have greater (not less) choice in the market, at a lower price - and as long as there is competition they will each make ordinary incomes and profits. And this is both healthy and is actually a reasonable assumption for numerous reasons. These are currently two of my favorite:
(1) Monopolies allow monopoly rents: name one monopoly that was also competitive? Example: Are the phone companies more or less competitive where there is no competition?
(2) At any instant in time, there is a fixed amount of money that can be spent on a given class of goods and services. (yes, this amount changes over time for various reasons, but at any instant of time it is fixed). This means that if U2 earns $100million that removes $100million from the pie. This sum could support hundreds of artists at ranges of middle and upper-class lifestyles. Example: While the recording industry is dying off, the music industry is healthy and growing. People have a relatively consistent budget for music (shifting it seems slowly upwards over time) but they don't spend it on shiny plastic discs any more. This means that artists can, and do, get paid without selling plastic discs.
I'll end this with a quote from one of the past lottery winners:
people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone! ... So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
--Mick Jagger
As I have understood the terms, you have optimal resource allocation when the marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue. So I'm not sure I understand how p2p sharing is anything other than what economics predicts? I'm also not sure how this is less than optimal resource allocation? It might not make those who profit from artificial scarcity happy, but that doesn't mean it's not an optimal allocation of resources.
I'm not sure what there is to "fix" here. We invented a monetary and economic system to deal with the fact that physical goods are scarce. Had we had an infinite supply of physical goods we never would have needed to invent this system. That we applied artificial constraints to an infinite good is something of an accident of history.
Of course that is like legislating that water not be wet. Sure, you can pass a law, but you have no means to enforce it. And that is actually the bigger disadvantage to me as a person (rather than the obvious poor allocation of resources you have listed). In order for a copyright law to be effective I need to give up my personal liberties as we move ever towards a police state. The more the law clamps down on those who share legally protected ideas, the more it moves underground, the more the state needs to clamp down until we arrive at one of two situations: a fairly complete police state with minimal freedom (including minimum of copying of protected works) which includes the full set of legal abuses that one would expect from a police state. Or we arrive at the conclusion that we can't control copies of ideas without losing our personal freedoms and give up trying to do so.
This isn't an honesty question. It's an economic one to start, and a liberty question at the end. That we would give up our personal freedoms for corporate profit is disturbing.
mankind has burned witches before and sadly we'll burn 'em again. All most of us can hope for is that we're not identified as one until this blows over.
at least they were kind enough to submit the incomplete post to /. before elimination.
No issue; it's there as a comment, so eye-catching is part of the intention!
So I'm just curious on the details of this: did they get the asset (ie the house) or did they just absorb the debt, leaving the property owned by a private company? There is certainly a lot of privatization of profit and socializing of debt these days and I honestly don't know how they are running this one.
...but if they did get the property when they bought the debt, does that mean any and all American(s) can make use of that house for free now? ... I guess this (continues to) illustrate that real and imaginary property are not the same.
Having an asset that is "owned by the government" and "public domain" are not quite the same thing
Thanks for your comments tho, they did make me think some more on this.