The point of is that achieving discipline in a public school is damn near impossible, because teachers (at least in the US) have been stripped of their ability to punish disruptive students, because punishment "is damaging to student's fragile sense of self-esteem" or some other pyschobabble crap like that.
I call bullshit. There are other forms of punishment besides physical beatings. Teachers aren't allowed to hit students anymore, but there's still detention, suspension, expulsion, removal from extracurricular activities, failing a class and having to take it over (possibly delaying graduation), etc.
No, because if you are Democrat, you aren't going to vote for a Republican in order to vote against the blacklisted politician. And if you are a Republican, you are not going to vote for a Democrat. Either way you will make some excuse why it is OK to vote for the pro-DRM candidate ("Well, I gotta vote for Fienstien or otherwise the Republicans will win, and we can't let that!").
Maybe... but not if you get involved before then. Vote the pro-DRM bums out during the primary so your favorite party doesn't nominate them in the first place, and then you can happily vote a party line ticket knowing you won't be voting against free speech.
I don't know about GSM phones, but CDMA phones in the US receive actual GPS signals (the tech is called gpsOne). However, as I understand it, the phone doesn't have the time or CPU power to calculate its own location from those signals, so it just passes them through to the tower (when GPS is enabled), which uses them along with other information to locate you.
It doesn't work when you're off the cellular network, but the whole point of gpsOne is to provide your location for cellular services like emergency calls.
The GPL provides certain rights (such as modifying and distributing the source to an app) and also forbids some activities (such as lifting chunks of code into a non-GPL app) - it's not "protecting your freedom" in any real sense.
Sure it is; it's protecting my freedom to use, distribute, and modify software. It only forbids activities that would limit that freedom.
Protecting copyright is good for everyone. [...] You're pretty pissed when companies violate the GPL, right? You should be equally pissed when someone violates the Windows EULA.
Er, no. The GPL protects my freedom. The Windows EULA takes it away.
For the most part, the GPL is a workaround for problems created by copyright. The fact that the GPL's legal teeth come from copyright itself is just a bit of irony. If it were legal to reverse engineer software and redistribute it with changes, there'd be little need for the GPL, IMO.
But using that type of argument you can turn pretty much anything into a free speech issue. I wish to discuss X, but can't because I can't make copies of it, so it's a free speech issue.
Exactly. The fact is, copyright is always a free speech issue. A law that says "you can't write these words because someone else already wrote them" (copyright) is a limit on free speech, just like a law that says "you can't write these words because they're about a topic we don't like" (hate speech, for example).
There might be various reasons to support one limit over the other, but they're both limits, and anyone who supports either must admit that he only has limited support for free speech. Not usually a big deal, because pretty much everyone supports some kind of limits on free speech - shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is the classic example.
I am wondering if you personally think that stealing Windows is a morally correct thing to do?
The reason stealing is immoral in the first place is that when you steal something, you deprive the rightful owner of the thing you stole. That doesn't happen when you simply make a copy of a disc. It's not immoral, and in fact it's misleading to call it "stealing" at all.
I'm going to attempt a serious answer to this question... as a developer, the thing I miss most when I'm on a non-Windows system is Microsoft Visual Studio - the form designer, the ever-helpful code editor, and the C# language itself. You can download the Express versions for free.
I don't read Chinese, so I can only respond to the email advertisements I get in English, but I've tried them all and *I* sure haven't grown 27.1%... maybe I should hire a translator.
The way it works at the moment is the standard business model: estimate what the customer wants, produce a product and try to sell it and make some profit on your investment.
That's the standard business model for physical products, but it can't be applied to services or data. A CD is a physical product, but copyright prohibits you from using it like you'd use any other physical product - you get the worst of both worlds.
Instead, the market has spoken and I can walk into a music shop and buy any of thousands of high-quality recordings of good music for very litttle money.
That isn't the result of the market, it's the result of government tampering. Thanks to legally mandated artificial scarcity, you can now pay "very little money" for the same music over and over if you lose the media or switch to a new format, and with all the limitations on how you can use what you've paid for, you can hardly even claim to own it.
Given the current system, I can get that recording for $15 or so, so now I need to find 6,000 other people with the same musical taste as me in order to match that price.
Ah, but there have to be 6000 people with the same musical taste as you either way if you want to pay that price. The musicians can either write and record a symphony for free, then try to find their audience later (and risk having wasted their time for nothing if they can't find one), or they can find the audience ahead of time and be guaranteed payment for their work.
Ignoring the freeloader problem for now, who the hell is going to bother doing that?
There is no "freeloader problem". You're not paying for copies of the music, you're paying for the music to be written - much like you might pay to have your road paved, even if it will also benefit your neighbors (who don't want to chip in), simply because living on a nice paved road is important to you. If some people would rather wait for the music to be written and released and then enjoy it for free, they can do that, but they're taking the chance that it won't ever be written at all.
That option is available right now, there is nothing stopping anyone doing it.
Apparently they find it easier to sign up with a record company, and let the record company worry about bribing politicians to keep their faltering business model propped up, suing teenagers, and paying DJs to get their songs on the radio.
It's a bubble - the model is fundamentally unsound, because it's based on treating something (data) like something it isn't (a product that can be sold in discrete units and has to be bought from a single manufacturer), and it can't last forever. Meanwhile, we get infringements on our rights, shackles on our equipment, laws telling us what kind of software we can or can't write, and an industry growing ever more mingled with government, with corruption spreading in both directions.
If you instigate that kind of system, you would end up in a few years with agencies that arrange new music for you at a price on the condition that you don't pass out copies to any one - so we'd be right back where we started.
Not quite. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that we do find ourselves facing that situation in a few years. I buy a song from your agency and give a copy to my neighbor, who gives copies to his relatives, who post it on a torrent site. You might be able to sue me, if you can even figure out I'm the one who first shared it, but my neighbor hasn't signed any contract with you, and neither have his relatives, the torrent site administrator, or the millions of people who participate in the torrent.
So it'd be impossible to enforce those conditions at all unless you can intimidate me into not releasing it in the first place; given the existence of anonymous networks and the frailty of watermarks, I don't think that's likely. And that all presumes that I'd do business with your agency in the first place, instead of moving on to someone else who's happy to provide the service I'm looking for. Do you think all musicians will collude to place such restrictions on their customers?
The next time you want some new music, get together with everyone else who shares your tastes, pool your money, and hire four musicians to produce it. If thousands of individual contributions can fund a political campaign, they can certainly fund an album - more people vote for American Idol than American President, after all. All you need is the infrastructure to get the people who have money together with the people who have talent, and all you need for that is a web site, a database, an escrow service, and some promotion.
State funding is another possibility, but I don't think it's necessary. The free market works fine for most services; I believe it can work just as well when the service is writing/performing music rather than, say, cutting hair or accounting.
Well you can't mean holding the investment in escrow, because then it couldn't be spent to cover the creation costs.
I do mean holding the payment in escrow, or at least part of it for a period of time, according to some schedule to be negotiated between the artist and his customers. Even if he's flat broke at first, he can take out a loan to cover his expenses until he gets paid.
It doesn't even have to be a shoddy product, it can be very good, but maybe I invested because they said it would have some specific feature, but in the process of creation that feature got removed. I get stuck paying for something I didn't want.
If what they deliver doesn't match what they promised, then don't pay. You might be "stuck" if your payment system consists of handing over a sack of cash up front, but don't tell me you couldn't think up a better way to handle the transaction if you gave it 5 minutes' thought.
If they deliver what they promised, but it turns out you didn't want that after all, you're in the same position as someone who orders Peking duck (which isn't cheap) only to find out he doesn't really like the taste of duck. You might be able to negotiate a refund, but I don't think most people would say you deserve one.
So, data encryption is logically impossible? Isn't that the restriction of known data?
No, it's the opposite. Encryption can't keep the waveform of a song secret any better than it can keep the speed of light secret.
The purpose of encryption is to keep data unknown except to you and the intended recipient. You can't prevent someone from sharing the ciphertext; all you can do is keep him from decrypting it without knowing a key that you guard very carefully. If the plaintext (or the key) ever becomes known to someone who doesn't want to play by your rules, game over.
The complexity of the data plays a factor here. The number representing the speed of light is very simple, therefore yes, it is logically impossible to restrict its use. However the source code to Windows XP is much more complex and therefore it is logically possible to restrict its use. So theres a scale factor you're not considering here.
Oh, is there? Maybe you could explain it, because it seems to me you're just waving your hands and saying "this number is longer, so it's totally different".
The source code to Windows XP is bigger than the number representing the speed of light, but that only means you need more storage, more bandwidth, and/or more time to share it and use it. It still obeys the same natural laws. If you've got a way to restrict the use or sharing of the XP source code or any other information once it becomes known to the public, run (don't walk) to the RIAA's door, because they'll probably buy it for a million dollars - and then you can pick up another million from James Randi for proving the existence of magic.
Maybe if you forced everyone to use 300 bps modems and 10 MB hard drives, you could make it impractical for most people to share the XP source code widely... but unless your name is Kim Jong Il, you probably don't have the clout to do that, and even if you did, you might be surprised at what some people consider practical.
Copies of a particular song are unlimited, or as near as makes any difference.
Yup, that's what I meant.
Maybe I should invent a thing where some person listens to it, and writes or talks about it. People could get an idea whether they'd probably like it or not. And isn't it a pity that there isn't something called the radio so I could listen to it before I buy it? Better yet, a radio that shows pictures. Nah, it'll never catch on.
Huh. So, if all this stuff existed, you'd have to rely on someone else to tell you whether or not to buy something? (How would you know you could trust him, and what would you do if his tastes didn't match yours?) Or you'd have to just wait for songs to come on this "radio", which I presume would have unpredictable schedules and only play a small selection of music, so you could hear them and decide whether or not to buy? I don't know if that could work.
But you know, if it were someday possible to download songs over the internet, you could hear any music you wanted, explore links between bands instantly, and listen to them as much as you want before deciding whether it's worth spending money on. I wonder if something like that will ever come to pass.
Also what happens when the end product fails to be produced or isn't what was expected\promised? We paid up front, where is the accountablity if the money's already been spent?
One word: escrow.
This is far too nebulus, how am supposed to get what I want in this kind of system? I can't just fund every artist and hope one one of them turns out something I like. The power of the consumer is choice, how can I choose from things that don't exist yet?
Same way you choose anyone else who provides a service. You go by their reputation or examples of their work, and if they have neither, you demand a price low enough that you won't be disappointed if they turn out to be no good - or just move on and find someone who does have a reputation.
Data is numbers true, but its not random numbers, its aranged. And aranged in way I couln't do myself. Thats why I pay for the aragnement.
Agreed. I'm more than happy to pay someone to arrange numbers in a way that will sound pleasing. I just don't want to pay for something I can do myself.
You're making my case for me. [...] So yes the number representing the speed of light could theoretically be a product, but its logically impossible to restrict its use once it is known, so its not something you could sell.
Now who's making whose case? It's logically impossible to restrict the use of any data once it's known, whether that data is the speed of light or the waveform of a song.
You certainly could try to sell the speed of light as a product, just like record companies (try to) sell music today. Scientists and students who needed to use it could go to the research store and buy a piece of paper with the speed of light printed on it, or maybe even pay online with their credit cards and have the speed of light emailed to them. The companies selling it would have an even harder time keeping people from sharing it than record companies do, since it's smaller than an MP3 file and therefore easier to copy, but I think you'd agree that the ease of copying doesn't really matter, right?
So in effect they are foced to be non-profit because their medium is easily copied.
Incorrect. Are barbers or mechanics "forced to be non-profit"? Of course not. Their profit is included in the price they charge for cutting hair or fixing cars, just like a musician's profit would be included in the price he charges for writing or performing music.
And why would anyone pay me to make a product if they can just get it for free when its done?
Because they know that if no one pays, it won't get written at all. Again--I can't make this clear enough, apparently--they aren't paying for a copy of the software. They're paying for the privilege of living in a world where that software exists. If they don't care enough about this software to pay you to write it, then they may be able to get it for free once it's written... or they may never have access to it at all. If they do care enough, then they'll pay because they want you to write it.
And creating songs doesn't require labor or equipment? Or software for that matter since they share a data medium.
Of course it does - once. Making copies doesn't require any more labor or equipment than consumers are willing to put up themselves (bandwidth and media).
Just because it doesn't take continual effort to replicate makes it worthless? That is what you are saying, because if only the labor is worth paying for then the final product has no value. That is nonsense because the consumer isn't interested in the labor, they are interested in the final product.
No, that is not what I'm saying. That's a strawman.
The consumer is interested in the labor because that's what determines the quality of the song. A song that Radiohead spends months writing will probably be better than one Britney Spears spends half an hour "writing". Radiohead's musical labor is worth more than Britney's (in the eyes of Radiohead fans, at least).
The "final product" you seem concerned with, however, isn't a song - it's a copy of a song. And I don't think people really care about those. They can make their own copies if you give them the information they need to do so.
Numbers aren't products because anyone can access them, they're concepts anyone can grasp so they have no commercial value. However data or music have value because not everyone can create them.
I hate to break it to you, but a piece of data is a number. Just as one byte represents a number from 0-255, and four bytes represent a number from 0 to 2^32 - 1, the 5 million bytes a song takes up also represent a (much bigger) number. If I gave you a mathematical equation whose solution was that number, you could solve the equation and listen to the song by feeding the solution into an MP3 player. The number, the MP3 file, and the song are all equivalent.
Also, what do you mean, "not everyone can create them"? Do you think just anyone can "create" the number representing the speed of light? It took a lot of research to come up with that number... well, not to come up with the number itself exactly, but to realize that that particular number represented the speed of light. So, is it a product or not?
So these buisnesses are forced to becomone non-profit ventures.
Nope. The artist can charge whatever he wants - the "cost of production" from the perspective of an outsider isn't just the artist's living expenses, it includes his profit as well. He sets the price because he's the one performing the service. If he thinks he can write a song in three months, incurring $2500 in living expenses, then he can charge $10,000 for the act of writing that song if he wants - and if his audience is willing to pay it.
Like I said, a copyist won't just sell the work of one person and isn't going to be just selling the work alone but potentially services that go with it. Considering the absolutly tiny overhead cost of a copyist he is almost gaurenteed to make more than the creators as long as he is marginally clever.
How could he make more than the creators? The creators have already been paid for their work, remember, and if they want to make some extra money on the side, they can enter the copying business and compete with these copyists on the same footing.
They don't need to recoup their initial costs in the price of copies, as long as they make sure they've already been paid for their initial costs by the time they finish producing the original work.
If it turns out that running a copying business, making tiny profits by printing books and burning DVDs from a variety of authors (and selling whatever other services might be associated), is more profitable than being an author, then I really don't see a problem with that. They're two separate lines of work, and there's no reason to think all artists would jump ship and become copyists. Running a car dealership might be more profitable than running a gas station (or vice versa), but we don't worry about all the gas stations shutting down and becoming dealerships that sell cars for which there is no gas.
What about the new guy trying to pay back his initial investment? How can he demand a fair price for his work when he can't demonstrate any current work?
Surely he has something to demonstrate. Why would he jump right into being a professional artist if he's never written anything before in his life?
Initial investment on a software product will NEVER cover the operating costs of the company (I work in software, I know this).
Sounds like you need to ask your investors for enough to cover those costs, then.
By this coin car factory workers are service employees, money goes in cars come out. Why should they demand we pay for the cars?
Um.. because each car requires its own materials and labor. Making two cars costs (about) twice as much as making one car, because you need twice as much steel and twice as much time to put it together. You need the manufacturer to provide those materials and labor for you if you want a car, and the manufacturer can set a price.
Making two copies of the same song, on the other hand, costs about the same as making one copy or a thousand copies, and the artist doesn't need to be involved in any of the copying.
JUst because you can easily copy a product doesn't mean you get to say its not a product, you're only trying to justify getting something for nothing.
Heh. OK, is the number 1 a product? How about the number 1,234,567,890? How about the largest known prime number or the age of the universe? How long does a number have to be, or how much effort must be invested in its discovery, before you'll call it a product?
YOU ARE RE-DEFINING COPYRIGHT LAW. Perhaps in a more limited way, but you're setting up a system to record and protect the orignal ideas of a certain person.
Look, if you want to call a law solely focused on preventing fraud "copyright", I can't stop you. You can call it Frank Sinatra if you want.
But unlike actual copyright law as it exists today, this law wouldn't impose punishments for making or distributing copies of anything. There is no "right" required to "copy", there is no "protection" for "original ideas", there's only an obligation not to falsely claim that a person wrote something that they didn't - just like you can't build a car from scratch in your back yard and sell it as a Toyota.
It's more similar to trademark law than copyright, really. Trademarks let you know that the car you're buying really came from the designers, engineers, and manufacturers you've come to know as "Toyota". Attribution lets you know that the CD you're buying really came from the musicians you
Hmm. Maybe I should open a restaurant on that principle. [...] But if you don't want to pay, you can eat for free anyway.
Ah, what a great idea that would be, if not for a little problem known as "the obvious differences between data and physical property such as food". There is only so much steak to go around, but songs are limitless.
Your system is basically pass the hat round, and we'll see what the song/movie turns out like. Do you really think that will work? What if it turns out to be crap - can I have a refund?
What if the CD you pick up at Best Buy tomorrow turns out to be crap - can you have a refund? (Answer: no.) What if the haircut you get doesn't turn out to be what you expected? What if your maid misses a spot? You can try to get a refund, but your best bet is just to avoid giving them any more of your money.
But to seriously answer your question, there are ways to resolve most problems like this before they start. A good description of what the artist intends to release will reduce confusion up front. Put the money in escrow to begin with, so the artist can't just take it and run. Release it according to some predetermined schedule, which may include a chance for the contributors to vote on whether they like what he's turning out and want him to continue.
No but most people will see that a new movie is released and head down to the burned DVD shop and grab their cheap copy there.
And that's fine, right? Remember, everyone in the production of that movie has already been paid - if they hadn't been paid, they wouldn't have put all that work into the movie. If they want to make money by selling copies in addition to what they already charged for creating the movie in the first place, they can make and sell DVDs just like everyone else, and it'll be a fair competition.
Question is of course if people are going to pay 10000$ for a music CD or a book (which of course the leeches wouldn't have copied yet since the only copy of it exists in the writer's property). If only one copy is sold it's easier for that copy to get lost or damaged before it can be duplicated (e.g. because the new owner wants to keep it his status symbol). If you start making copies after the original sold, who'd pay the price for the original if the copy costs less than one thousandth of the original's pricetag?
They're not paying for the original. They're paying for the act of recording the album or writing the book. Once it's written, it's free for everyone to use.
Obviously, a single person isn't likely to spend thousands of dollars funding a new album... which is why you set up a system where all the fans of a certain type of music can each pay a little bit. They're not paying for a product they can keep to themselves; they're paying for the privilege of living in a world where they get to hear whatever new music the artist comes up with. It works for political campaigns, and it can work for artists.
A movie file (say, a DivX movie in an.avi container) is simply a really big number. That number has always existed, but only recently computed (aka, discovered).
Indeed. If you had unlimited time and storage, you could generate every possible file of a given length (say 350MB), throw out the ones that aren't valid DivX files, and watch them all, and you would see every episode of every TV show that has ever been made, ever will be made, and ever won't be made. You'd see George W. Bush winning Jeopardy and Stephen Hawking throwing a 90-yard pass to win the Super Bowl. You'd see yourself, sitting at your computer right now, with Zombie Hitler standing inches behind you ready to eat your brains. All those files are just numbers, and they all exist right now - we just don't know where to find them yet.
It's like if you had an amazingly huge back yard, and there were treasure chests buried in it.. somewhere.. but you didn't know where. The artist is a dowser who comes by and offers to find them for you. He's doing you a great service by pointing out the locations of the treasure chests, and you should pay him for that, but he doesn't own them and he deserves no say over how you spend the gold coins therein.
In fact, it's not even really your back yard; it's public land and everyone has an equal claim to ownership. And they're not just any old gold coins, but magical coins such that you can take as many out of the chest as you want and it'll never become empty. It would be ridiculous for anyone to impose limits on who may take them or distribute them.
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The point of is that achieving discipline in a public school is damn near impossible, because teachers (at least in the US) have been stripped of their ability to punish disruptive students, because punishment "is damaging to student's fragile sense of self-esteem" or some other pyschobabble crap like that.
I call bullshit. There are other forms of punishment besides physical beatings. Teachers aren't allowed to hit students anymore, but there's still detention, suspension, expulsion, removal from extracurricular activities, failing a class and having to take it over (possibly delaying graduation), etc.
It used to be that teachers could do likewise. We called it expulsion. Fear of expulsion caused parents to make the kids behave.
"Used to be"? I don't know where you live, but around here, expulsion is alive and well.
No.. in fact, TiVo doesn't even have an 8x FF mode. It has 2x, 20x, and 60x.
Work with lazy and dumb students who disrupt class, yet can not be kicked out or even (except in Texas) spanked.
Can't even be spanked? OMG, the horrors! I don't know what I'd do if I weren't allowed to hit people at work!
No, because if you are Democrat, you aren't going to vote for a Republican in order to vote against the blacklisted politician. And if you are a Republican, you are not going to vote for a Democrat. Either way you will make some excuse why it is OK to vote for the pro-DRM candidate ("Well, I gotta vote for Fienstien or otherwise the Republicans will win, and we can't let that!").
Maybe... but not if you get involved before then. Vote the pro-DRM bums out during the primary so your favorite party doesn't nominate them in the first place, and then you can happily vote a party line ticket knowing you won't be voting against free speech.
I don't know about GSM phones, but CDMA phones in the US receive actual GPS signals (the tech is called gpsOne). However, as I understand it, the phone doesn't have the time or CPU power to calculate its own location from those signals, so it just passes them through to the tower (when GPS is enabled), which uses them along with other information to locate you.
It doesn't work when you're off the cellular network, but the whole point of gpsOne is to provide your location for cellular services like emergency calls.
The GPL provides certain rights (such as modifying and distributing the source to an app) and also forbids some activities (such as lifting chunks of code into a non-GPL app) - it's not "protecting your freedom" in any real sense.
Sure it is; it's protecting my freedom to use, distribute, and modify software. It only forbids activities that would limit that freedom.
Protecting copyright is good for everyone. [...] You're pretty pissed when companies violate the GPL, right? You should be equally pissed when someone violates the Windows EULA.
Er, no. The GPL protects my freedom. The Windows EULA takes it away.
For the most part, the GPL is a workaround for problems created by copyright. The fact that the GPL's legal teeth come from copyright itself is just a bit of irony. If it were legal to reverse engineer software and redistribute it with changes, there'd be little need for the GPL, IMO.
But using that type of argument you can turn pretty much anything into a free speech issue. I wish to discuss X, but can't because I can't make copies of it, so it's a free speech issue.
Exactly. The fact is, copyright is always a free speech issue. A law that says "you can't write these words because someone else already wrote them" (copyright) is a limit on free speech, just like a law that says "you can't write these words because they're about a topic we don't like" (hate speech, for example).
There might be various reasons to support one limit over the other, but they're both limits, and anyone who supports either must admit that he only has limited support for free speech. Not usually a big deal, because pretty much everyone supports some kind of limits on free speech - shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is the classic example.
I am wondering if you personally think that stealing Windows is a morally correct thing to do?
The reason stealing is immoral in the first place is that when you steal something, you deprive the rightful owner of the thing you stole. That doesn't happen when you simply make a copy of a disc. It's not immoral, and in fact it's misleading to call it "stealing" at all.
I'm going to attempt a serious answer to this question... as a developer, the thing I miss most when I'm on a non-Windows system is Microsoft Visual Studio - the form designer, the ever-helpful code editor, and the C# language itself. You can download the Express versions for free.
I don't read Chinese, so I can only respond to the email advertisements I get in English, but I've tried them all and *I* sure haven't grown 27.1%... maybe I should hire a translator.
The way it works at the moment is the standard business model: estimate what the customer wants, produce a product and try to sell it and make some profit on your investment.
That's the standard business model for physical products, but it can't be applied to services or data. A CD is a physical product, but copyright prohibits you from using it like you'd use any other physical product - you get the worst of both worlds.
Instead, the market has spoken and I can walk into a music shop and buy any of thousands of high-quality recordings of good music for very litttle money.
That isn't the result of the market, it's the result of government tampering. Thanks to legally mandated artificial scarcity, you can now pay "very little money" for the same music over and over if you lose the media or switch to a new format, and with all the limitations on how you can use what you've paid for, you can hardly even claim to own it.
Given the current system, I can get that recording for $15 or so, so now I need to find 6,000 other people with the same musical taste as me in order to match that price.
Ah, but there have to be 6000 people with the same musical taste as you either way if you want to pay that price. The musicians can either write and record a symphony for free, then try to find their audience later (and risk having wasted their time for nothing if they can't find one), or they can find the audience ahead of time and be guaranteed payment for their work.
Ignoring the freeloader problem for now, who the hell is going to bother doing that?
There is no "freeloader problem". You're not paying for copies of the music, you're paying for the music to be written - much like you might pay to have your road paved, even if it will also benefit your neighbors (who don't want to chip in), simply because living on a nice paved road is important to you. If some people would rather wait for the music to be written and released and then enjoy it for free, they can do that, but they're taking the chance that it won't ever be written at all.
That option is available right now, there is nothing stopping anyone doing it.
Apparently they find it easier to sign up with a record company, and let the record company worry about bribing politicians to keep their faltering business model propped up, suing teenagers, and paying DJs to get their songs on the radio.
It's a bubble - the model is fundamentally unsound, because it's based on treating something (data) like something it isn't (a product that can be sold in discrete units and has to be bought from a single manufacturer), and it can't last forever. Meanwhile, we get infringements on our rights, shackles on our equipment, laws telling us what kind of software we can or can't write, and an industry growing ever more mingled with government, with corruption spreading in both directions.
If you instigate that kind of system, you would end up in a few years with agencies that arrange new music for you at a price on the condition that you don't pass out copies to any one - so we'd be right back where we started.
Not quite. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that we do find ourselves facing that situation in a few years. I buy a song from your agency and give a copy to my neighbor, who gives copies to his relatives, who post it on a torrent site. You might be able to sue me, if you can even figure out I'm the one who first shared it, but my neighbor hasn't signed any contract with you, and neither have his relatives, the torrent site administrator, or the millions of people who participate in the torrent.
So it'd be impossible to enforce those conditions at all unless you can intimidate me into not releasing it in the first place; given the existence of anonymous networks and the frailty of watermarks, I don't think that's likely. And that all presumes that I'd do business with your agency in the first place, instead of moving on to someone else who's happy to provide the service I'm looking for. Do you think all musicians will collude to place such restrictions on their customers?
The next time you want some new music, get together with everyone else who shares your tastes, pool your money, and hire four musicians to produce it. If thousands of individual contributions can fund a political campaign, they can certainly fund an album - more people vote for American Idol than American President, after all. All you need is the infrastructure to get the people who have money together with the people who have talent, and all you need for that is a web site, a database, an escrow service, and some promotion.
State funding is another possibility, but I don't think it's necessary. The free market works fine for most services; I believe it can work just as well when the service is writing/performing music rather than, say, cutting hair or accounting.
Easy... just pay musicians to write music, not to make copies of it. Once it's written, and they've been paid, listen to it all you want.
Well you can't mean holding the investment in escrow, because then it couldn't be spent to cover the creation costs.
I do mean holding the payment in escrow, or at least part of it for a period of time, according to some schedule to be negotiated between the artist and his customers. Even if he's flat broke at first, he can take out a loan to cover his expenses until he gets paid.
It doesn't even have to be a shoddy product, it can be very good, but maybe I invested because they said it would have some specific feature, but in the process of creation that feature got removed. I get stuck paying for something I didn't want.
If what they deliver doesn't match what they promised, then don't pay. You might be "stuck" if your payment system consists of handing over a sack of cash up front, but don't tell me you couldn't think up a better way to handle the transaction if you gave it 5 minutes' thought.
If they deliver what they promised, but it turns out you didn't want that after all, you're in the same position as someone who orders Peking duck (which isn't cheap) only to find out he doesn't really like the taste of duck. You might be able to negotiate a refund, but I don't think most people would say you deserve one.
So, data encryption is logically impossible? Isn't that the restriction of known data?
No, it's the opposite. Encryption can't keep the waveform of a song secret any better than it can keep the speed of light secret.
The purpose of encryption is to keep data unknown except to you and the intended recipient. You can't prevent someone from sharing the ciphertext; all you can do is keep him from decrypting it without knowing a key that you guard very carefully. If the plaintext (or the key) ever becomes known to someone who doesn't want to play by your rules, game over.
The complexity of the data plays a factor here. The number representing the speed of light is very simple, therefore yes, it is logically impossible to restrict its use. However the source code to Windows XP is much more complex and therefore it is logically possible to restrict its use. So theres a scale factor you're not considering here.
Oh, is there? Maybe you could explain it, because it seems to me you're just waving your hands and saying "this number is longer, so it's totally different".
The source code to Windows XP is bigger than the number representing the speed of light, but that only means you need more storage, more bandwidth, and/or more time to share it and use it. It still obeys the same natural laws. If you've got a way to restrict the use or sharing of the XP source code or any other information once it becomes known to the public, run (don't walk) to the RIAA's door, because they'll probably buy it for a million dollars - and then you can pick up another million from James Randi for proving the existence of magic.
Maybe if you forced everyone to use 300 bps modems and 10 MB hard drives, you could make it impractical for most people to share the XP source code widely... but unless your name is Kim Jong Il, you probably don't have the clout to do that, and even if you did, you might be surprised at what some people consider practical.
Copies of a particular song are unlimited, or as near as makes any difference.
Yup, that's what I meant.
Maybe I should invent a thing where some person listens to it, and writes or talks about it. People could get an idea whether they'd probably like it or not. And isn't it a pity that there isn't something called the radio so I could listen to it before I buy it? Better yet, a radio that shows pictures. Nah, it'll never catch on.
Huh. So, if all this stuff existed, you'd have to rely on someone else to tell you whether or not to buy something? (How would you know you could trust him, and what would you do if his tastes didn't match yours?) Or you'd have to just wait for songs to come on this "radio", which I presume would have unpredictable schedules and only play a small selection of music, so you could hear them and decide whether or not to buy? I don't know if that could work.
But you know, if it were someday possible to download songs over the internet, you could hear any music you wanted, explore links between bands instantly, and listen to them as much as you want before deciding whether it's worth spending money on. I wonder if something like that will ever come to pass.
Also what happens when the end product fails to be produced or isn't what was expected\promised? We paid up front, where is the accountablity if the money's already been spent?
One word: escrow.
This is far too nebulus, how am supposed to get what I want in this kind of system? I can't just fund every artist and hope one one of them turns out something I like. The power of the consumer is choice, how can I choose from things that don't exist yet?
Same way you choose anyone else who provides a service. You go by their reputation or examples of their work, and if they have neither, you demand a price low enough that you won't be disappointed if they turn out to be no good - or just move on and find someone who does have a reputation.
Data is numbers true, but its not random numbers, its aranged. And aranged in way I couln't do myself. Thats why I pay for the aragnement.
Agreed. I'm more than happy to pay someone to arrange numbers in a way that will sound pleasing. I just don't want to pay for something I can do myself.
You're making my case for me. [...] So yes the number representing the speed of light could theoretically be a product, but its logically impossible to restrict its use once it is known, so its not something you could sell.
Now who's making whose case? It's logically impossible to restrict the use of any data once it's known, whether that data is the speed of light or the waveform of a song.
You certainly could try to sell the speed of light as a product, just like record companies (try to) sell music today. Scientists and students who needed to use it could go to the research store and buy a piece of paper with the speed of light printed on it, or maybe even pay online with their credit cards and have the speed of light emailed to them. The companies selling it would have an even harder time keeping people from sharing it than record companies do, since it's smaller than an MP3 file and therefore easier to copy, but I think you'd agree that the ease of copying doesn't really matter, right?
So in effect they are foced to be non-profit because their medium is easily copied.
Incorrect. Are barbers or mechanics "forced to be non-profit"? Of course not. Their profit is included in the price they charge for cutting hair or fixing cars, just like a musician's profit would be included in the price he charges for writing or performing music.
And why would anyone pay me to make a product if they can just get it for free when its done?
Because they know that if no one pays, it won't get written at all. Again--I can't make this clear enough, apparently--they aren't paying for a copy of the software. They're paying for the privilege of living in a world where that software exists. If they don't care enough about this software to pay you to write it, then they may be able to get it for free once it's written... or they may never have access to it at all. If they do care enough, then they'll pay because they want you to write it.
And creating songs doesn't require labor or equipment? Or software for that matter since they share a data medium.
Of course it does - once. Making copies doesn't require any more labor or equipment than consumers are willing to put up themselves (bandwidth and media).
Just because it doesn't take continual effort to replicate makes it worthless? That is what you are saying, because if only the labor is worth paying for then the final product has no value. That is nonsense because the consumer isn't interested in the labor, they are interested in the final product.
No, that is not what I'm saying. That's a strawman.
The consumer is interested in the labor because that's what determines the quality of the song. A song that Radiohead spends months writing will probably be better than one Britney Spears spends half an hour "writing". Radiohead's musical labor is worth more than Britney's (in the eyes of Radiohead fans, at least).
The "final product" you seem concerned with, however, isn't a song - it's a copy of a song. And I don't think people really care about those. They can make their own copies if you give them the information they need to do so.
Numbers aren't products because anyone can access them, they're concepts anyone can grasp so they have no commercial value. However data or music have value because not everyone can create them.
I hate to break it to you, but a piece of data is a number. Just as one byte represents a number from 0-255, and four bytes represent a number from 0 to 2^32 - 1, the 5 million bytes a song takes up also represent a (much bigger) number. If I gave you a mathematical equation whose solution was that number, you could solve the equation and listen to the song by feeding the solution into an MP3 player. The number, the MP3 file, and the song are all equivalent.
Also, what do you mean, "not everyone can create them"? Do you think just anyone can "create" the number representing the speed of light? It took a lot of research to come up with that number... well, not to come up with the number itself exactly, but to realize that that particular number represented the speed of light. So, is it a product or not?
So these buisnesses are forced to becomone non-profit ventures.
Nope. The artist can charge whatever he wants - the "cost of production" from the perspective of an outsider isn't just the artist's living expenses, it includes his profit as well. He sets the price because he's the one performing the service. If he thinks he can write a song in three months, incurring $2500 in living expenses, then he can charge $10,000 for the act of writing that song if he wants - and if his audience is willing to pay it.
Like I said, a copyist won't just sell the work of one person and isn't going to be just selling the work alone but potentially services that go with it. Considering the absolutly tiny overhead cost of a copyist he is almost gaurenteed to make more than the creators as long as he is marginally clever.
How could he make more than the creators? The creators have already been paid for their work, remember, and if they want to make some extra money on the side, they can enter the copying business and compete with these copyists on the same footing.
They don't need to recoup their initial costs in the price of copies, as long as they make sure they've already been paid for their initial costs by the time they finish producing the original work.
If it turns out that running a copying business, making tiny profits by printing books and burning DVDs from a variety of authors (and selling whatever other services might be associated), is more profitable than being an author, then I really don't see a problem with that. They're two separate lines of work, and there's no reason to think all artists would jump ship and become copyists. Running a car dealership might be more profitable than running a gas station (or vice versa), but we don't worry about all the gas stations shutting down and becoming dealerships that sell cars for which there is no gas.
What about the new guy trying to pay back his initial investment? How can he demand a fair price for his work when he can't demonstrate any current work?
Surely he has something to demonstrate. Why would he jump right into being a professional artist if he's never written anything before in his life?
Initial investment on a software product will NEVER cover the operating costs of the company (I work in software, I know this).
Sounds like you need to ask your investors for enough to cover those costs, then.
By this coin car factory workers are service employees, money goes in cars come out. Why should they demand we pay for the cars?
Um.. because each car requires its own materials and labor. Making two cars costs (about) twice as much as making one car, because you need twice as much steel and twice as much time to put it together. You need the manufacturer to provide those materials and labor for you if you want a car, and the manufacturer can set a price.
Making two copies of the same song, on the other hand, costs about the same as making one copy or a thousand copies, and the artist doesn't need to be involved in any of the copying.
JUst because you can easily copy a product doesn't mean you get to say its not a product, you're only trying to justify getting something for nothing.
Heh. OK, is the number 1 a product? How about the number 1,234,567,890? How about the largest known prime number or the age of the universe? How long does a number have to be, or how much effort must be invested in its discovery, before you'll call it a product?
YOU ARE RE-DEFINING COPYRIGHT LAW. Perhaps in a more limited way, but you're setting up a system to record and protect the orignal ideas of a certain person.
Look, if you want to call a law solely focused on preventing fraud "copyright", I can't stop you. You can call it Frank Sinatra if you want.
But unlike actual copyright law as it exists today, this law wouldn't impose punishments for making or distributing copies of anything. There is no "right" required to "copy", there is no "protection" for "original ideas", there's only an obligation not to falsely claim that a person wrote something that they didn't - just like you can't build a car from scratch in your back yard and sell it as a Toyota.
It's more similar to trademark law than copyright, really. Trademarks let you know that the car you're buying really came from the designers, engineers, and manufacturers you've come to know as "Toyota". Attribution lets you know that the CD you're buying really came from the musicians you
Hmm. Maybe I should open a restaurant on that principle. [...] But if you don't want to pay, you can eat for free anyway.
Ah, what a great idea that would be, if not for a little problem known as "the obvious differences between data and physical property such as food". There is only so much steak to go around, but songs are limitless.
Your system is basically pass the hat round, and we'll see what the song/movie turns out like. Do you really think that will work? What if it turns out to be crap - can I have a refund?
What if the CD you pick up at Best Buy tomorrow turns out to be crap - can you have a refund? (Answer: no.) What if the haircut you get doesn't turn out to be what you expected? What if your maid misses a spot? You can try to get a refund, but your best bet is just to avoid giving them any more of your money.
But to seriously answer your question, there are ways to resolve most problems like this before they start. A good description of what the artist intends to release will reduce confusion up front. Put the money in escrow to begin with, so the artist can't just take it and run. Release it according to some predetermined schedule, which may include a chance for the contributors to vote on whether they like what he's turning out and want him to continue.
No but most people will see that a new movie is released and head down to the burned DVD shop and grab their cheap copy there.
And that's fine, right? Remember, everyone in the production of that movie has already been paid - if they hadn't been paid, they wouldn't have put all that work into the movie. If they want to make money by selling copies in addition to what they already charged for creating the movie in the first place, they can make and sell DVDs just like everyone else, and it'll be a fair competition.
Question is of course if people are going to pay 10000$ for a music CD or a book (which of course the leeches wouldn't have copied yet since the only copy of it exists in the writer's property). If only one copy is sold it's easier for that copy to get lost or damaged before it can be duplicated (e.g. because the new owner wants to keep it his status symbol). If you start making copies after the original sold, who'd pay the price for the original if the copy costs less than one thousandth of the original's pricetag?
They're not paying for the original. They're paying for the act of recording the album or writing the book. Once it's written, it's free for everyone to use.
Obviously, a single person isn't likely to spend thousands of dollars funding a new album... which is why you set up a system where all the fans of a certain type of music can each pay a little bit. They're not paying for a product they can keep to themselves; they're paying for the privilege of living in a world where they get to hear whatever new music the artist comes up with. It works for political campaigns, and it can work for artists.
A movie file (say, a DivX movie in an .avi container) is simply a really big number. That number has always existed, but only recently computed (aka, discovered).
Indeed. If you had unlimited time and storage, you could generate every possible file of a given length (say 350MB), throw out the ones that aren't valid DivX files, and watch them all, and you would see every episode of every TV show that has ever been made, ever will be made, and ever won't be made. You'd see George W. Bush winning Jeopardy and Stephen Hawking throwing a 90-yard pass to win the Super Bowl. You'd see yourself, sitting at your computer right now, with Zombie Hitler standing inches behind you ready to eat your brains. All those files are just numbers, and they all exist right now - we just don't know where to find them yet.
It's like if you had an amazingly huge back yard, and there were treasure chests buried in it.. somewhere.. but you didn't know where. The artist is a dowser who comes by and offers to find them for you. He's doing you a great service by pointing out the locations of the treasure chests, and you should pay him for that, but he doesn't own them and he deserves no say over how you spend the gold coins therein.
In fact, it's not even really your back yard; it's public land and everyone has an equal claim to ownership. And they're not just any old gold coins, but magical coins such that you can take as many out of the chest as you want and it'll never become empty. It would be ridiculous for anyone to impose limits on who may take them or distribute them.