I think that's because of the way people tend to consume books. It's rare for someone to want to read the same book again every day, or every week, so it's no big deal if you have to give it up for a while... you borrow a book, read it, return it, and then maybe you'll do it again months or years later. A similar model wouldn't be nearly as effective for quenching the demand for music or software.
The question is, will [the ability to produce artistic works] be correctly valued in a world without IP? Answer: no, because nobody will be able to capture that value, hence it becomes a public good, hence there is underinvestment in it.
Er.. it's just a service. You can capture its value the same way a barber captures the value of his labor: by finding someone willing to pay him for doing it.
Yes, if (say) IBM needs knowledge of how to optimize its business process, then it will pay for that knowledge - and nobody else would be interested anyway, as the knowledge is only useful to IBM. But suppose you develop a new faster computer chip. Then who will pay for it? IBM? No, because the knowledge will be available to their competitors. The consumers directly? Not unless they have chip fabs in their back yard.
First off, you've got it backwards. I wouldn't develop a new chip and then try to find a buyer, I'd shop my chip-designing talent around and find someone who'd pay me to design a new chip. And who'd be willing to pay for it? Anyone who stands to benefit from advancing the state of computers: computer manufacturers, chip fabricators, and consumers.
(Could the consumers band together and pay for this kind of research? Possible but unlikely: too much temptation to free ride. Put it this way: it is as possible as any other form of public good being provided without compulsion. There are ways to do this, but it is not as simple as getting a private good provided.)
I suppose it might not be as simple as the current copyright regime. But given that copyright involves granting private citizens the ability to suppress others' speech, I'm willing to put up with a little more complexity.
Loaning isn't exactly sharing. When you share knowledge with someone, he has it forever, and you don't lose it: he gets a copy of your knowledge. When you loan him a DVD, he only has it until you ask for it back, and during that time you don't have it: you're moving it from one place to another.
When you realize this is simply about getting shit for free you'll finally understand the anti-copyright movement.
I'm sure for some people, it really is only about getting shit for free, but that's a stupid generalization. You might as well say "when you realize this is simply about creating one good thing and milking it for the rest of your life you'll finally understand the pro-copyright movement" - also arguably true of some copyright supporters, but not the majority.
There are plenty of people, including myself, who just believe copyright boils down to letting one person veto another's speech on the basis that he'd prefer to sell that speech himself (or alternately, that since he uttered it first, he has some moral right to decide who may or may not utter it later), and that that isn't a legitimate reason to restrict speech.
While it's an interesting idea - if ideas don't have any economic value, then why would the ability to produce them?
Because the ability to produce them is scarce, even though the ideas themselves aren't scarce once they've been produced initially.
Think of it this way: the speed of light is a useful value to know, but although it has utility value (you want to know it because you can do stuff with it), it has zero economic value (because it has no marginal cost of distribution; a rational buyer wouldn't be willing to pay for it). However, the effort of the scientists who discovered it did have economic value, because not everyone can discover the speed of light. There were a limited number of scientists who could do it, and their time had value because they only had a limited amount of it to spend in pursuit of such things.
The only way that the ability would be prized is if there is some restriction on the supply of the ideas.
Nope. All you need is a restriction on the supply of the ability.
(Also, it's important to distinguish between the supply of all ideas that ever will be produced, and the supply of one idea that already has been produced. The former is restricted inherently, due to the fact that not everyone can or will come up with every possible idea. The latter is not restricted, except by copyright and patent laws, because sharing an idea costs nothing and doesn't deplete any resources.)
The GP is right on the money. Even in a world where selling copies of artistic works is impossible, the ability to produce those works would still be in demand, so the producers could still make money at it. They'd just have to do it by charging for their time directly, like a barber or an accountant, rather than by performing the labor for free and selling copies of the resulting work afterward. It'd basically mean turning the marketing machine upside down, because the goal would now be to get people to contribute to the creation of a work, instead of getting them to buy a product.
The funny thing was that they never managed to show video of him saying it or quoted exactly what he said. They only talked about the GOP capitalizing on it and played clips of various Republicans criticizing him. Curiously enough there was no mention of the negative response from Democrats over the remark.
I haven't really been watching the coverage of that non-story.. have any of the networks mentioned that he'd told the same joke at several previous appearances, and there was no outrage until he skipped over the word "us" this one time?
Most people, if they don't like Howard Stern, simply don't listen to him. Only the most delicate little flowers would decide not to buy a satellite radio on the basis that Howard Stern has a show on satellite radio (and as others have pointed out, Stern is on Sirius anyway, not XM).
That's like deciding to boycott TV entirely because you don't like Carlos Mencia. In both cases you could avoid the show, or maybe even block the whole channel, but avoiding the whole technology because of one show is a hysterical overreaction.
The mainstream news media carries a definitive liberal bias. It always surprises me how strongly things are spun to favor Democrats.
I always get jealous when I see claims like this, because you clearly have access to news media that I don't. Why is it that everyone with cable has to get Fox News, but only paranoid conservatives get these pro-liberal channels they're always talking about?
Yes. Every story about lasers gets tagged "sharks" (haw haw, someone remembered a 9-year-old joke from Austin Powers) and some days every story gets tagged "fud"--and then "notfud" in response because no one remembers that "!fud" is the correct way to cancel a tag. At this point, tags are mostly useless.. you can't even browse stories by tag.
The moment I ask what the price is and they tell me, and I accept, I have a debt.
Nope, that's not how it works. A debt is payment for something that you've already received. Until you've accepted ownership of the product, you're just negotiating a sale, but in your scenario you don't have the ticket until the very last step. If he gives you the ticket first, then maybe there's a debt.
However, he might argue that the presence of a conspicuous "EXACT CHANGE ONLY" sign means that paying with exact change was an implied condition of the sale, which is perfectly legal. Therefore, by offering to buy a ticket when you didn't have exact change, you simply obtained the ticket under false pretenses, and there was no valid sale.
Fair enough, but although the GP claimed the point was moot, it isn't. You can buy OS X with Apple hardware, then sell the hardware and run OS X on a PC.
Once you've transferred the operating system to a PC, you can sell the Mac with no OS to someone who wants to run Linux or XP on it (or his own copy of OS X, say from an older Mac he's throwing away). Easily worth the trouble if you like OS X but you want to run it on an $1100 HP laptop instead of a $2000 MacBook Pro.
The pretty coloured notes in my pocket have a promise on them that they are legal tender in this land, failure to accept them is against the law.
Not exactly. The promise says they're legal tender for all debts. If you owe the power company $25, then they have to accept a $50 note. But if you haven't bought something yet, there is no debt, and they can simply decide not to sell it to you.
You can not force me to, by proxy, endorse something I do no endorse by forcing me to allow them to use my work.
You wouldn't be endorsing it. That's just ridiculous.
If the local Nazi party has a parade and they're driving Ford trucks, does that mean Ford endorses them? If they're wearing clothes from the Gap, does that mean the Gap endorses them? Of course not. They're just using something they bought, and no reasonable person would hold those companies responsible for what someone does with their products.
On the other hand, if they put a message in their ad saying "AgNO3 endorses the Nazi party!" then that's fraud and/or libel and you can sue their asses.
Er, no.. the fundamental purpose of copyright law is to enrich the public domain by providing an incentive to authors to create new works, which will eventually make their way into the public domain, where anyone--yes, even Chevrolet--can use them as they wish. Granting control over distribution can be part of that incentive, but it doesn't need to be; the fundamental purpose would be served just fine if Radiohead were legally required to sell the right to use their song in a truck ad, because $1 million is still a pretty big incentive.
Our legislators may have lost track of that fundamental purpose, but that doesn't mean we should forget it too.
Intellectual property is the only form of property that is *not* dependent on government. That is, I only own my house because I have a government document that says it's mine. Nobody, however, can take my ideas from me unless I willingly part with them.
But see, when people talk about "intellectual property rights" (i.e. copyright), they don't mean you should be able to keep people from pulling ideas out of your head against your will. That's impossible. They mean you should be able to keep people from using or sharing your ideas once you've willingly divulged them, and that is dependent on government, because you have no ability on your own to prevent other people from sharing information with each other.
[...] you might as well just set up a website with a standard store and sell the files and a donation button so people can "tip" you [...] Your band can literally be the test case for musicians using micropayments as a means of making a living as so many people claim is possible.
Not quite. It can be a test case for one possible method:
Write song.
Put song up for sale on web site.
Wait for sales and donations.
Hope sales and donations cover the cost of writing the song.
But that method essentially relies on altruism, if we assume that people prefer to torrent the songs for free instead of buying them from the web site. (Of course, iTunes Music Store relies on altruism too, if we make that same assumption - the easily defeated DRM does nothing to stop P2P sharing.)
Here's a different method that doesn't rely on altruism:
Write and record a song.
Put 30 second clip on web site as a free download, along with the announcement, "We will release the full song to the public once we've gotten $X worth of donations."
Wait for $X to arrive.
Put full song on web site as a free download.
And another method, this time one that saves the artist the trouble of writing the song if no one wants to buy it:
Put a description on the web site of a song that has yet to be written, along with the announcement, "We need $X to write and record this song. It'll take us Y months once we have the cash."
If you think the Dems are better than the Repubs, wait til they get into power - leftist parties are generally harder on civil rights than rightists
Generally, schmenerally. It's virtually impossible for the Democrats to be "harder on civil rights" than these particular Republicans, and that's what matters.
If the suffrage was restricted to people with more of a stake in the fortune of the nation, we would have a better record for retaining our liberties. viz. the 19th century, for example.
And how do you propose to measure "stake in the fortune of the nation"... land ownership? Net worth? Skin color? Gender? That's the 19th century for you. Plenty of liberty and protection for the people with money; very little for everyone else who has to work in their sweatshops and coal mines.
Wrong. The Supreme Court held (in Dowling v. United States) that illegal copies are not stolen goods because copyright infringement doesn't "easily equate" to theft. There are laws specifically dealing with stolen goods--in that particular case, it was carrying stolen goods across state lines--and they don't apply to illegally copied material, even when it's in physical form.
You've got it all wrong. The conference is a symptom of the regulation, not a cause.
Do you think that if game media, or game developers, or gamers in general ignore this conference, then legislators will just decide not to regulate games? Of course not! They'll regulate it without any input from gamers. The fact is, whether or not games should be regulated, they will be regulated unless we put up a fight - and the way to do that is not to stick our fingers in our ears and pretend it'll all go away if we ignore it.
They'll have to die off and be supplanted by us younger bucks [...] and now we're all around thirty years old and will soon be constitutionally eligible to occupy high government offices.
I'm an impatient fscker and I hate waiting for the old ass-hats to retire but they're so closed-minded that it seems that's what it will take to get all the cowards out of authoritarian positions.
[...]
So try to change more and faster. [...] Demand auditable balloting systems (Death to Diebold!). Agitate for ranged or ranked voting (instead of this retarded plurality system). Increase accountability, integrity, and honesty in representation.
You forgot something:
Demand that the age restrictions for holding elected office, and/or for voting, be lowered or eliminated.
If more "younger bucks" who've grown up with video games could legally hold an elected office, and more gamers were eligible to vote for them, that'd solve half the problem right there.
Instead, the system is fundamentally weighted against every issue that young people care about more than older people. Teenagers can't vote because it's illegal; young adults don't vote because they've spent their entire lives not being able to vote and not having anyone to vote for. They don't have anyone to vote for because candidates don't pay attention to the issues that matter to people who can't vote. Even the young people who want to be the candidates who take on these issues can't do it, because there are age limits on just about every office that matters.
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I think that's because of the way people tend to consume books. It's rare for someone to want to read the same book again every day, or every week, so it's no big deal if you have to give it up for a while... you borrow a book, read it, return it, and then maybe you'll do it again months or years later. A similar model wouldn't be nearly as effective for quenching the demand for music or software.
Er.. it's just a service. You can capture its value the same way a barber captures the value of his labor: by finding someone willing to pay him for doing it.
First off, you've got it backwards. I wouldn't develop a new chip and then try to find a buyer, I'd shop my chip-designing talent around and find someone who'd pay me to design a new chip. And who'd be willing to pay for it? Anyone who stands to benefit from advancing the state of computers: computer manufacturers, chip fabricators, and consumers.
I suppose it might not be as simple as the current copyright regime. But given that copyright involves granting private citizens the ability to suppress others' speech, I'm willing to put up with a little more complexity.
Loaning isn't exactly sharing. When you share knowledge with someone, he has it forever, and you don't lose it: he gets a copy of your knowledge. When you loan him a DVD, he only has it until you ask for it back, and during that time you don't have it: you're moving it from one place to another.
I'm sure for some people, it really is only about getting shit for free, but that's a stupid generalization. You might as well say "when you realize this is simply about creating one good thing and milking it for the rest of your life you'll finally understand the pro-copyright movement" - also arguably true of some copyright supporters, but not the majority.
There are plenty of people, including myself, who just believe copyright boils down to letting one person veto another's speech on the basis that he'd prefer to sell that speech himself (or alternately, that since he uttered it first, he has some moral right to decide who may or may not utter it later), and that that isn't a legitimate reason to restrict speech.
Because the ability to produce them is scarce, even though the ideas themselves aren't scarce once they've been produced initially.
Think of it this way: the speed of light is a useful value to know, but although it has utility value (you want to know it because you can do stuff with it), it has zero economic value (because it has no marginal cost of distribution; a rational buyer wouldn't be willing to pay for it). However, the effort of the scientists who discovered it did have economic value, because not everyone can discover the speed of light. There were a limited number of scientists who could do it, and their time had value because they only had a limited amount of it to spend in pursuit of such things.
Nope. All you need is a restriction on the supply of the ability.
(Also, it's important to distinguish between the supply of all ideas that ever will be produced, and the supply of one idea that already has been produced. The former is restricted inherently, due to the fact that not everyone can or will come up with every possible idea. The latter is not restricted, except by copyright and patent laws, because sharing an idea costs nothing and doesn't deplete any resources.)
The GP is right on the money. Even in a world where selling copies of artistic works is impossible, the ability to produce those works would still be in demand, so the producers could still make money at it. They'd just have to do it by charging for their time directly, like a barber or an accountant, rather than by performing the labor for free and selling copies of the resulting work afterward. It'd basically mean turning the marketing machine upside down, because the goal would now be to get people to contribute to the creation of a work, instead of getting them to buy a product.
I haven't really been watching the coverage of that non-story.. have any of the networks mentioned that he'd told the same joke at several previous appearances, and there was no outrage until he skipped over the word "us" this one time?
Most people, if they don't like Howard Stern, simply don't listen to him. Only the most delicate little flowers would decide not to buy a satellite radio on the basis that Howard Stern has a show on satellite radio (and as others have pointed out, Stern is on Sirius anyway, not XM).
That's like deciding to boycott TV entirely because you don't like Carlos Mencia. In both cases you could avoid the show, or maybe even block the whole channel, but avoiding the whole technology because of one show is a hysterical overreaction.
I always get jealous when I see claims like this, because you clearly have access to news media that I don't. Why is it that everyone with cable has to get Fox News, but only paranoid conservatives get these pro-liberal channels they're always talking about?
Huh, I thought Smartmatic's pre-programmed pro-liberal "glitches" were just there to offset the pre-programmed pro-neocon "glitches" from Diebold.
Yes. Every story about lasers gets tagged "sharks" (haw haw, someone remembered a 9-year-old joke from Austin Powers) and some days every story gets tagged "fud"--and then "notfud" in response because no one remembers that "!fud" is the correct way to cancel a tag. At this point, tags are mostly useless.. you can't even browse stories by tag.
Dated hardware is better than none at all, which is what they'll have without municipal broadband if private companies don't offer service there.
Nope, that's not how it works. A debt is payment for something that you've already received. Until you've accepted ownership of the product, you're just negotiating a sale, but in your scenario you don't have the ticket until the very last step. If he gives you the ticket first, then maybe there's a debt.
However, he might argue that the presence of a conspicuous "EXACT CHANGE ONLY" sign means that paying with exact change was an implied condition of the sale, which is perfectly legal. Therefore, by offering to buy a ticket when you didn't have exact change, you simply obtained the ticket under false pretenses, and there was no valid sale.
Fair enough, but although the GP claimed the point was moot, it isn't. You can buy OS X with Apple hardware, then sell the hardware and run OS X on a PC.
Once you've transferred the operating system to a PC, you can sell the Mac with no OS to someone who wants to run Linux or XP on it (or his own copy of OS X, say from an older Mac he's throwing away). Easily worth the trouble if you like OS X but you want to run it on an $1100 HP laptop instead of a $2000 MacBook Pro.
Sure there is. You can buy a Mac, then take the included copy of OS X and install it on a PC.
Not exactly. The promise says they're legal tender for all debts. If you owe the power company $25, then they have to accept a $50 note. But if you haven't bought something yet, there is no debt, and they can simply decide not to sell it to you.
You wouldn't be endorsing it. That's just ridiculous.
If the local Nazi party has a parade and they're driving Ford trucks, does that mean Ford endorses them? If they're wearing clothes from the Gap, does that mean the Gap endorses them? Of course not. They're just using something they bought, and no reasonable person would hold those companies responsible for what someone does with their products.
On the other hand, if they put a message in their ad saying "AgNO3 endorses the Nazi party!" then that's fraud and/or libel and you can sue their asses.
Er, no.. the fundamental purpose of copyright law is to enrich the public domain by providing an incentive to authors to create new works, which will eventually make their way into the public domain, where anyone--yes, even Chevrolet--can use them as they wish. Granting control over distribution can be part of that incentive, but it doesn't need to be; the fundamental purpose would be served just fine if Radiohead were legally required to sell the right to use their song in a truck ad, because $1 million is still a pretty big incentive.
Our legislators may have lost track of that fundamental purpose, but that doesn't mean we should forget it too.
But see, when people talk about "intellectual property rights" (i.e. copyright), they don't mean you should be able to keep people from pulling ideas out of your head against your will. That's impossible. They mean you should be able to keep people from using or sharing your ideas once you've willingly divulged them, and that is dependent on government, because you have no ability on your own to prevent other people from sharing information with each other.
Not quite. It can be a test case for one possible method:
But that method essentially relies on altruism, if we assume that people prefer to torrent the songs for free instead of buying them from the web site. (Of course, iTunes Music Store relies on altruism too, if we make that same assumption - the easily defeated DRM does nothing to stop P2P sharing.)
Here's a different method that doesn't rely on altruism:
And another method, this time one that saves the artist the trouble of writing the song if no one wants to buy it:
Generally, schmenerally. It's virtually impossible for the Democrats to be "harder on civil rights" than these particular Republicans, and that's what matters.
And how do you propose to measure "stake in the fortune of the nation"... land ownership? Net worth? Skin color? Gender? That's the 19th century for you. Plenty of liberty and protection for the people with money; very little for everyone else who has to work in their sweatshops and coal mines.
Wrong. The Supreme Court held (in Dowling v. United States) that illegal copies are not stolen goods because copyright infringement doesn't "easily equate" to theft. There are laws specifically dealing with stolen goods--in that particular case, it was carrying stolen goods across state lines--and they don't apply to illegally copied material, even when it's in physical form.
You've got it all wrong. The conference is a symptom of the regulation, not a cause.
Do you think that if game media, or game developers, or gamers in general ignore this conference, then legislators will just decide not to regulate games? Of course not! They'll regulate it without any input from gamers. The fact is, whether or not games should be regulated, they will be regulated unless we put up a fight - and the way to do that is not to stick our fingers in our ears and pretend it'll all go away if we ignore it.
You forgot something:
Demand that the age restrictions for holding elected office, and/or for voting, be lowered or eliminated.
If more "younger bucks" who've grown up with video games could legally hold an elected office, and more gamers were eligible to vote for them, that'd solve half the problem right there.
Instead, the system is fundamentally weighted against every issue that young people care about more than older people. Teenagers can't vote because it's illegal; young adults don't vote because they've spent their entire lives not being able to vote and not having anyone to vote for. They don't have anyone to vote for because candidates don't pay attention to the issues that matter to people who can't vote. Even the young people who want to be the candidates who take on these issues can't do it, because there are age limits on just about every office that matters.
You can flip through a strategy guide in the store to see how useless it is before you buy it.