So an investment model, but one where the end results of the investment are proffitted on primarily by me, the copyist, who does virtually no work for greater profit. Good system, the artist get paid for his labor and possibly pays back his innitial costs, I get paid more for doing far less work using the fruits of his labor.
Huh? What on earth makes you think you'll make more money by selling copies of a book or movie than the producer made by writing it? How much do you think people will be willing to pay for a file or a plastic disc when they can easily make their own copies for no more than the cost of media?
The original author can charge whatever he wants, because he's the only one who can provide the service he's offering, but copyists have to compete with other copyists, the internet, and the DVD burner.
the only reason you're arguing this is because music is a medium that is easy to duplicate, soft drinks are not. Yet why should muscians be punished because their end product is easily dupilicated (yet not easily created)
Punished? No.
The thing is, a movie, a book, a song, or any other piece of data is not a "product". It's a number, and as such, calling it "easily duplicated" is an understatement. It is fundamentally uncontrollable, uncontainable, and unownable.
A musician or movie producer doesn't have a manufacturing job, he has a service job: essentially, arranging data into a form that people like. Money goes in, data comes out.
Now consider plumbing, another service job. When you have a problem with your toilet, you call the plumber, he comes by and fixes it, you pay him for his time, and then he leaves. You don't have to pay him again.
Is he being "punished" for the nature of his work by only getting paid once? Would it be more fair if he came out and fixed the toilet for free, and then you had to pay him a few bucks every time you flushed it from then on? Of course not - flushing the toilet is something you can do on your own, so it hardly makes sense for you to pay him for that instead of the service you can't do on your own. In fact, that business model couldn't work without invasive technological or legal means to make sure that every flush is accounted for, which is more complicated (and less reliable) than just letting the plumber collect payment at the time of service. But that's exactly what you're suggesting is needed for artists.
I could claim my version is an earlier revision he didn't release but I got hold of, If he has no ownership of the words I can do as I will with them. It's his word against mine.
Something tells me your word wouldn't hold up in court. "Seriously, Your Honor, Harry Potter was a Nazi in the original manuscript. I found it in Rowling's garbage can a few years ago. No, I can't prove that; don't you trust me?" That's one step above "My dog ate my homework.";)
With a copyright the law is on his side, the case is cut and dry, I committed fraud because the copyritten material is different than what I published. [...] Again a non-copyrighten system punishes the artist.
You don't need copyright to make fraud claims possible, all you need is a voluntary registration system so you can know who published what and when, and a law that allows authors to remove their name from works when it can't be proved that they wrote them. Punishing people for lying to their customers has nothing to do with punishing people for making copies.
Think about it. If the author can't prove that the story was different when he wrote it, how is he (or anyone) going to prove that he even wrote it in the first place and thus holds the copyright? You seem to think any kooky story about the origin of a work will hold up in court; if that's the case, how can any unregistered copyrights hold up at all, if any random nut can file a lawsuit saying he wrote Harry Potter?
While we're at it lets take inventors out of the production buiness. They don
There are three conditions that must be met for something to fall within the definition of property. 1) the owner must be able to use it; 2) the owner must be able to lend it out and recover it again; 3) the owner must be able to transfer it away or otherwise dispose of it.
That may be a legal definition of property (judging by your sig), but I doubt it's the definition the original poster was using. I personally think defining property as something you have exclusive control over the use of is fine for this discussion.
But if it's cheaper to buy from a leech, how much of that money is really available for the people who can write them?
You seem to be missing the point. A leech doesn't write new works. If I want to see a new movie, I'm going to give my money to someone who can produce a new movie; I'm not going to buy an old movie at the burned DVD shop down the road and expect it to magically become new.
It's simple: Consumers want to see new works written and are willing to spend money to further that goal. The only way new works will get written is if the producers are paid to write them, or if the producers choose to write them for free. Therefore, money will flow from consumers to producers, unless the producers who are willing to work for free can produce enough to satisfy demand.
Remember, "leeches" can only make copies of something that's been written. They can't compete with an artist who actually produces new works, unless that artist chooses to enter the copying market himself. If, however, he stays in the business of writing new works, and charges for his effort and time rather than for files or plastic discs, he only has to worry about competing with other artists who can write better works or charge less for their effort.
Yes but who are you going to charge for the process of creating that work?
If you can finance a political campaign by collecting small amounts of money from thousands of individuals over the internet, you can finance an album that way too - music is a bit more popular than voting.
A very rich person who wants something done maybe but publishers would be better off to go the leech route instead of hiring someone to create a work.
Not really. What happens when everyone has already read all the old books and heard all the old albums? Shakespeare's works are free for anyone to publish, but Shakespeare doesn't outsell Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. Consumer demand for new works guarantees that there'll always be money for people who can write them.
But would it be so easy to tell the difference if the fanfiction books were right next to the canon works on bookstore shelves?
It would be if the titles didn't use the word "Farscape", or if they clearly indicated that they were unofficial. If you're just worried about readers being confused--which, IMO, is the only legitimate reason to limit the use of terms or characters written by someone else--then you only need to worry about the packaging and marketing, not the content of the books.
Here you can find a list of a few ranked voting systems, including Borda, Condorcet methods, and even IRV. I believe most election reformers would consider them superior to plurality voting ("today's risible mess"). None of those systems are "perfect", but some are clearly better than others according to objective criteria.
What would Farscape look like if any schmo could publish material about it?
I dunno.. what would America look like if any schmo could publish material about it?
It'd look just the same as it always did. Fan fiction can't change Farscape any more than Uncyclopedia can change the United States by writing a goofy article about it. People are smart enough to know the difference between actual episodes of the Farscape TV show, and unofficial material written by fans that happens to use the same characters, don't you think?
Lets say I own a webserver and take all those free music and videos and host them for public download at no cost. But, being a clever entrepenuer I add in services to make money for myself, I set up a fast saver with a better connection and sell "premium" fast downloading at a minimal cost.
That sounds fine to me. You're providing the service of letting people download bits from your server, and if you can convince people to pay you for access, then go for it!
When you remove copyright protection it means ANYONE can sell your work even if you choose not you.
Obviously.
The artists get stuck with paying for the instruments the recording equiment and have to spend all the time create the music, so there is no way for them to compete with me, I'll be able to profit much more efficiently from their work than they will.
You seem to be assuming that the artist wrote and recorded his songs for free, expecting that he'd only get paid if people bought copies from him (for much more than the actual cost of such copies). Why would he do that? Why would he assume he could charge a premium for copies of the songs when it's obvious that anyone can make a copy of a CD or MP3 file for next to nothing?
If he were smart, he would've found a customer base to pay him for the act of writing and recording, i.e. his labor, beforehand. Then it wouldn't matter who sold copies, because the musician wouldn't need to make a huge profit on them - he's already been paid.
Or perhaps he would've decided that the songs are free advertising for his live shows, and calculated that he could earn enough by selling concert tickets to compensate him for all the time he put into writing and recording the songs in the first place. Of course, it's a little riskier that way.
It can even get more fun, lets say I decide to market and sell a book you wrote, but I don't like the ending, I'll just re-write it and leave your name on it. Its free so I can do whatever I want to it and sell it and I have no obligation to tell anyone I changed it.
Not necessarily... that's fraud, not just copyright infringement. Just because you'd be allowed to sell (modified) copies of the book doesn't mean you'd also be allowed to lie to your customers about its authorship.
If you allow anyone to copy exisiting products at will you create a force in the market that makes creating new products LESS profitable than copying them.
Indeed. The moral is: it's time for artists to get out of the copying business and charge for their actual work, just like everyone else.
It's unusual, but not unreasonable to say you own yourself.
Certainly you have as much of a right to decide what someone does with your body as you do to decide what they do with your car, right? They can't drag you out of your house and keep you in their garage, just like they can't drag your car out of your driveway. They can't punch you in the face, just like they can't break your car's windshield.
You, on the other hand, have the right--the exclusive right--to move your body wherever you want (as long as the owner of that place allows it), to alter your body, to authorize or refuse medical treatment, etc. That exclusive control is what ownership is all about.
So the creator would have to compete with the leeches on price directly but the leech has no development costs to cover. As a result the leech has a competitive advantage over the creator.
Why did the creator do all that work for free, hoping to sell copies later, when it's obvious that any "leech" can sell copies at an equal or lower price? That doesn't sound like a sensible business plan at all.
A market for data simply cannot exist without some restriction on just going out and copying it.
OK... so what? Why would you need a market for data? Data isn't scarce.
Data is sequences of numbers; no one expects there to be a market for the speed of light, or the first few digits of pi, or the wingspan of a 747. Those are just numbers that anyone can look up and use whenever they want - they aren't "owned" by the scientists who measured the speed of light or the engineers who designed the 747.
Telling your friend "hey, if you multiply 3.14159265 by the squared radius of a circle, you'll get the circle's area" is fundamentally no different from telling him "hey, if you save [these 350 million bytes] into an AVI file and play it, you'll see this week's Sopranos". You aren't using up pi or The Sopranos by doing so, and I would argue you don't owe a thing to the guy who first calculated pi or HBO, respectively - the data they produced is a fact now, and you can't own a fact even if your own hard work went into discovering it. That work was done in the past, and if they didn't arrange to get paid for it at the time, that's their own problem.
What's scarce is the talent, time, and effort an artist puts forth to produce data. And we can have a market for that without any laws against copying - just like we have a market for the talent, time, and effort put forth by hairdressers, mechanics, and actors. If a barber wants to get paid twice, he has to give two haircuts and charge for each one; some artists seem to think they deserve special treatment, that they should get paid again and again by each person who sees what they've made, even though they only created it once.
Any evidence that persons presenting with diarrhea or pneumonia in African medical clinics are *not* counted as AIDS cases without an HIV test
I fail to see what this has to do with the causation of AIDS. It is, at best, evidence that some doctors are misdiagnosing.
Any evidence of a primate developing AIDS or SIDS (the simian kind, not cribdeath) after exposure to or infection by HIV or any related virus
Well, humans are primates, of course. Here's some evidence from the NIH:
Postulate #3 has been fulfilled in tragic incidents involving three laboratory workers with no other risk factors who have developed AIDS or severe immunosuppression after accidental exposure to concentrated, cloned HIV in the laboratory. In all three cases, HIV was isolated from the infected individual, sequenced and shown to be the infecting strain of virus. In another tragic incident, transmission of HIV from a Florida dentist to six patients has been documented by genetic analyses of virus isolated from both the dentist and the patients. The dentist and three of the patients developed AIDS and died, and at least one of the other patients has developed AIDS.
If you're seriously looking for evidence to support the connection between HIV and AIDS, read the rest of that link.. there's plenty, with cites.
Why the response to the mere suggestion that we be skeptical that HIV is a neccessary and sufficient cause for the development of AIDS, or that we do even some basic research to find if there are chemical or environmental factors, cofactors or causes is greeted with such hysteria.
Probably mostly for the same reason people get "hysterical" about creationists, moon landing hoaxists, Holocaust deniers, cold fusion, etc.: dealing with the same kooks time and time again gets tiresome. Of course, creationists and Holocaust deniers aren't trying to take resources away from medical programs that could save lives.
AIDS diagnosis as it is practiced today assumes HIV-AIDS causation.
Which makes sense, because the evidence as it is observed today indicates HIV-AIDS causation. See the sibling of your post for details. There's no more reason to believe AIDS is caused by anything besides HIV than there is to believe the moon landing was faked.
But, under Arrow's impossibility theorem, no voting system is perfectly "fair"
Correct. That doesn't mean, however, that all voting systems are equal. IRV fails most objectively defined criteria for voting systems.
If no perfect system is possible, that's sad, but no reason not to go for a system that's better than today's risible mess.
The fallacy of this statement is a false dichotomy: we don't have to choose between "today's risible mess" and IRV. There are many systems better than plurality voting, some of which are measurably worse than others, and switching to a system we know is inferior would be nearly as foolish as sticking with today's risible mess.
At the same time we should switch to instant-runoff voting,
I was with you until this. Instant runoff voting is a deceptively bad way to count ballots. It's easy to explain to a layman, but it has severe problems if you look beneath the surface. For example, it fails the monotonicity criterion, which means that sometimes, ranking a candidate higher in an IRV election can cause him to lose, when ranking him lower would cause him to win.
There are also problems with the amount of data needed to transmit IRV ballots for central counting; it's easier to physically ship all the ballots to a central location for counting, or perform several rounds of counting at regional stations with a recount after each candidate is eliminated, than it is to count the ballots locally and decide the winner by combining all the local counts.
IMO ranked ballots are a great idea, but IRV is about the worst possible implementation of ranked voting. A Condorcet system like the one used by Debian would be more predictable, easier to count, and would do a better job of satisfying voter preferences by choosing compromise candidates.
You might ask the same thing about postal addresses. The White House's address could be written "USA, D.C., Washington, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600", but people seem to like it the other way around.
Don't you read Variety? Jack Valenti is "the entertainment industry's bionic emissary"... if his mighty robotic fists didn't kill you, his laser eyes surely would!
Media and bandwidth. Do they come free? Are they part of the expected ecosystem?
They're provided by the consumer. If I want to download songs or movies, I pay my ISP to provide bandwidth to me, and I buy my own hard disks, CD-Rs, etc. The ISP pays or signs peering agreements with some other company, and so on, to provide bandwidth all the way from me to wherever I'm getting the file from. The actual data is free once that's paid for.
Even basic utilities such as water cost to supply, surely data also costs?
Water has to be collected, purified, and stored, and more importantly, there's only so much to go around. Your water bill covers those costs as well as the cost of the pipes to bring it to your house. But with data, the only cost is storage at each end (which is willingly provided by P2P users) and maintenance of the pipes in between (which is covered by monthly ISP fees).
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the current business model [...] but to suggest it can be free hints at a lack of grasp of basic economics.
I don't think anyone is suggesting downloading files should be, or will be, 100% free of any and all costs. Obviously you have to buy a computer and connect to the internet before you can download anything.
Tell me... If the government asked you to give up something that was legally yours (say, protection from random wiretappings) when there are "severe doubts" about whether it threatens critical infrastructure or lives?
Let me give you a counter-example: the end of slavery. Slave owners had certain legal rights over their "property", and those rights were taken away essentially because they posed a threat to the lives and human rights of their slaves.
And of course, it was exactly the right thing to do. Those rights weren't legitimate in the first place, even though they were tacitly supported by the Constitution. We now realize what a horrible mistake it was to allow one person to "own" another person. How much longer before we realize what a mistake it is to give one person veto power over another person's freedom to speak or publish?
Although you missed the most important monopoly of all in this case: copyright. There's nothing inherent in "capitalism" that says the person who comes up with a particular string of bits first is entitled to sue anyone else who makes a copy without permission. Capitalist notions of property don't apply to numbers, sounds, patterns, or ideas.
Copyright is a case of the government interfering with capitalism for the benefit of certain businesses. In a pure capitalist system, anyone could print a book with any words in it, or sell a CD with any music on it, without needing permission from any third party; authors and musicians could still make money, but they'd do it by charging up front for the act of creating, rather than for copies.
There is no cost whatsoever to atmospheric oxygen.
Just like there's no cost whatsoever to copying a file (other than media and bandwidth).
All the cost is incurred up front, just once: in the act of recording a song, producing a movie, etc. But if someone decides to perform that act for no charge--perhaps in the vain hope that someone will come along later and give them money for a copy they could easily make for free--then that's their problem, not ours, and their lack of a sound business model doesn't entitle them to limit our freedom of speech by telling us what information we can or can't distribute to others.
And if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions.
Sure, but there are ways to make a living from your creations other than limiting other people's freedom. I'd say there is something wrong with trying to prevent other people from copying certain strings of bits just because you'd prefer them to buy copies from you.
Really? I don't know about you, but I think pirates are pretty cool. Long John Silver, Captain Hook, etc. There's a successful MMORPG devoted to pretending you're a pirate. Plus, they're the ninja's arch-rivals.
Yes, I "pirate" software, music, movies, and TV shows, and I do it proudly. My family asks me to help them download Lost every week, and I tell them "It's about time you learned to pirate TV shows on your own."
Hoist the main sail, scupper the scuttlebutt, and hand over yer digital booty! YARRRRRRR! I'm a mighty pirate, and if ye don't like it, ye can polish me pegleg!
Voicemail's not free for everyone. [...] Why shouldn't my phone do it, regardless of what the providers offer?
Many phones do have built-in answering machines, even antique non-smartphones like the LG VX4000. They record into the same memory used for voice memos.
Slashdot Mirror
So an investment model, but one where the end results of the investment are proffitted on primarily by me, the copyist, who does virtually no work for greater profit. Good system, the artist get paid for his labor and possibly pays back his innitial costs, I get paid more for doing far less work using the fruits of his labor.
;)
Huh? What on earth makes you think you'll make more money by selling copies of a book or movie than the producer made by writing it? How much do you think people will be willing to pay for a file or a plastic disc when they can easily make their own copies for no more than the cost of media?
The original author can charge whatever he wants, because he's the only one who can provide the service he's offering, but copyists have to compete with other copyists, the internet, and the DVD burner.
the only reason you're arguing this is because music is a medium that is easy to duplicate, soft drinks are not. Yet why should muscians be punished because their end product is easily dupilicated (yet not easily created)
Punished? No.
The thing is, a movie, a book, a song, or any other piece of data is not a "product". It's a number, and as such, calling it "easily duplicated" is an understatement. It is fundamentally uncontrollable, uncontainable, and unownable.
A musician or movie producer doesn't have a manufacturing job, he has a service job: essentially, arranging data into a form that people like. Money goes in, data comes out.
Now consider plumbing, another service job. When you have a problem with your toilet, you call the plumber, he comes by and fixes it, you pay him for his time, and then he leaves. You don't have to pay him again.
Is he being "punished" for the nature of his work by only getting paid once? Would it be more fair if he came out and fixed the toilet for free, and then you had to pay him a few bucks every time you flushed it from then on? Of course not - flushing the toilet is something you can do on your own, so it hardly makes sense for you to pay him for that instead of the service you can't do on your own. In fact, that business model couldn't work without invasive technological or legal means to make sure that every flush is accounted for, which is more complicated (and less reliable) than just letting the plumber collect payment at the time of service. But that's exactly what you're suggesting is needed for artists.
I could claim my version is an earlier revision he didn't release but I got hold of, If he has no ownership of the words I can do as I will with them. It's his word against mine.
Something tells me your word wouldn't hold up in court. "Seriously, Your Honor, Harry Potter was a Nazi in the original manuscript. I found it in Rowling's garbage can a few years ago. No, I can't prove that; don't you trust me?" That's one step above "My dog ate my homework."
With a copyright the law is on his side, the case is cut and dry, I committed fraud because the copyritten material is different than what I published. [...] Again a non-copyrighten system punishes the artist.
You don't need copyright to make fraud claims possible, all you need is a voluntary registration system so you can know who published what and when, and a law that allows authors to remove their name from works when it can't be proved that they wrote them. Punishing people for lying to their customers has nothing to do with punishing people for making copies.
Think about it. If the author can't prove that the story was different when he wrote it, how is he (or anyone) going to prove that he even wrote it in the first place and thus holds the copyright? You seem to think any kooky story about the origin of a work will hold up in court; if that's the case, how can any unregistered copyrights hold up at all, if any random nut can file a lawsuit saying he wrote Harry Potter?
While we're at it lets take inventors out of the production buiness. They don
There are three conditions that must be met for something to fall within the definition of property. 1) the owner must be able to use it; 2) the owner must be able to lend it out and recover it again; 3) the owner must be able to transfer it away or otherwise dispose of it.
That may be a legal definition of property (judging by your sig), but I doubt it's the definition the original poster was using. I personally think defining property as something you have exclusive control over the use of is fine for this discussion.
But if it's cheaper to buy from a leech, how much of that money is really available for the people who can write them?
You seem to be missing the point. A leech doesn't write new works. If I want to see a new movie, I'm going to give my money to someone who can produce a new movie; I'm not going to buy an old movie at the burned DVD shop down the road and expect it to magically become new.
It's simple: Consumers want to see new works written and are willing to spend money to further that goal. The only way new works will get written is if the producers are paid to write them, or if the producers choose to write them for free. Therefore, money will flow from consumers to producers, unless the producers who are willing to work for free can produce enough to satisfy demand.
Remember, "leeches" can only make copies of something that's been written. They can't compete with an artist who actually produces new works, unless that artist chooses to enter the copying market himself. If, however, he stays in the business of writing new works, and charges for his effort and time rather than for files or plastic discs, he only has to worry about competing with other artists who can write better works or charge less for their effort.
Yes but who are you going to charge for the process of creating that work?
If you can finance a political campaign by collecting small amounts of money from thousands of individuals over the internet, you can finance an album that way too - music is a bit more popular than voting.
A very rich person who wants something done maybe but publishers would be better off to go the leech route instead of hiring someone to create a work.
Not really. What happens when everyone has already read all the old books and heard all the old albums? Shakespeare's works are free for anyone to publish, but Shakespeare doesn't outsell Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. Consumer demand for new works guarantees that there'll always be money for people who can write them.
But would it be so easy to tell the difference if the fanfiction books were right next to the canon works on bookstore shelves?
It would be if the titles didn't use the word "Farscape", or if they clearly indicated that they were unofficial. If you're just worried about readers being confused--which, IMO, is the only legitimate reason to limit the use of terms or characters written by someone else--then you only need to worry about the packaging and marketing, not the content of the books.
Here you can find a list of a few ranked voting systems, including Borda, Condorcet methods, and even IRV. I believe most election reformers would consider them superior to plurality voting ("today's risible mess"). None of those systems are "perfect", but some are clearly better than others according to objective criteria.
What would Farscape look like if any schmo could publish material about it?
I dunno.. what would America look like if any schmo could publish material about it?
It'd look just the same as it always did. Fan fiction can't change Farscape any more than Uncyclopedia can change the United States by writing a goofy article about it. People are smart enough to know the difference between actual episodes of the Farscape TV show, and unofficial material written by fans that happens to use the same characters, don't you think?
Lets say I own a webserver and take all those free music and videos and host them for public download at no cost. But, being a clever entrepenuer I add in services to make money for myself, I set up a fast saver with a better connection and sell "premium" fast downloading at a minimal cost.
That sounds fine to me. You're providing the service of letting people download bits from your server, and if you can convince people to pay you for access, then go for it!
When you remove copyright protection it means ANYONE can sell your work even if you choose not you.
Obviously.
The artists get stuck with paying for the instruments the recording equiment and have to spend all the time create the music, so there is no way for them to compete with me, I'll be able to profit much more efficiently from their work than they will.
You seem to be assuming that the artist wrote and recorded his songs for free, expecting that he'd only get paid if people bought copies from him (for much more than the actual cost of such copies). Why would he do that? Why would he assume he could charge a premium for copies of the songs when it's obvious that anyone can make a copy of a CD or MP3 file for next to nothing?
If he were smart, he would've found a customer base to pay him for the act of writing and recording, i.e. his labor, beforehand. Then it wouldn't matter who sold copies, because the musician wouldn't need to make a huge profit on them - he's already been paid.
Or perhaps he would've decided that the songs are free advertising for his live shows, and calculated that he could earn enough by selling concert tickets to compensate him for all the time he put into writing and recording the songs in the first place. Of course, it's a little riskier that way.
It can even get more fun, lets say I decide to market and sell a book you wrote, but I don't like the ending, I'll just re-write it and leave your name on it. Its free so I can do whatever I want to it and sell it and I have no obligation to tell anyone I changed it.
Not necessarily... that's fraud, not just copyright infringement. Just because you'd be allowed to sell (modified) copies of the book doesn't mean you'd also be allowed to lie to your customers about its authorship.
If you allow anyone to copy exisiting products at will you create a force in the market that makes creating new products LESS profitable than copying them.
Indeed. The moral is: it's time for artists to get out of the copying business and charge for their actual work, just like everyone else.
People aren't property.
It's unusual, but not unreasonable to say you own yourself.
Certainly you have as much of a right to decide what someone does with your body as you do to decide what they do with your car, right? They can't drag you out of your house and keep you in their garage, just like they can't drag your car out of your driveway. They can't punch you in the face, just like they can't break your car's windshield.
You, on the other hand, have the right--the exclusive right--to move your body wherever you want (as long as the owner of that place allows it), to alter your body, to authorize or refuse medical treatment, etc. That exclusive control is what ownership is all about.
So the creator would have to compete with the leeches on price directly but the leech has no development costs to cover. As a result the leech has a competitive advantage over the creator.
Why did the creator do all that work for free, hoping to sell copies later, when it's obvious that any "leech" can sell copies at an equal or lower price? That doesn't sound like a sensible business plan at all.
A market for data simply cannot exist without some restriction on just going out and copying it.
OK... so what? Why would you need a market for data? Data isn't scarce.
Data is sequences of numbers; no one expects there to be a market for the speed of light, or the first few digits of pi, or the wingspan of a 747. Those are just numbers that anyone can look up and use whenever they want - they aren't "owned" by the scientists who measured the speed of light or the engineers who designed the 747.
Telling your friend "hey, if you multiply 3.14159265 by the squared radius of a circle, you'll get the circle's area" is fundamentally no different from telling him "hey, if you save [these 350 million bytes] into an AVI file and play it, you'll see this week's Sopranos". You aren't using up pi or The Sopranos by doing so, and I would argue you don't owe a thing to the guy who first calculated pi or HBO, respectively - the data they produced is a fact now, and you can't own a fact even if your own hard work went into discovering it. That work was done in the past, and if they didn't arrange to get paid for it at the time, that's their own problem.
What's scarce is the talent, time, and effort an artist puts forth to produce data. And we can have a market for that without any laws against copying - just like we have a market for the talent, time, and effort put forth by hairdressers, mechanics, and actors. If a barber wants to get paid twice, he has to give two haircuts and charge for each one; some artists seem to think they deserve special treatment, that they should get paid again and again by each person who sees what they've made, even though they only created it once.
Both of those misconceptions have been shown, clinically, time and time again, to be demonstrably false.
Then surely you'd have no problem linking to proof of this claim. Preferably one that hasn't been refuted already.
I fail to see what this has to do with the causation of AIDS. It is, at best, evidence that some doctors are misdiagnosing.
Any evidence of a primate developing AIDS or SIDS (the simian kind, not cribdeath) after exposure to or infection by HIV or any related virus
Well, humans are primates, of course. Here's some evidence from the NIH:
If you're seriously looking for evidence to support the connection between HIV and AIDS, read the rest of that link.. there's plenty, with cites.
Why the response to the mere suggestion that we be skeptical that HIV is a neccessary and sufficient cause for the development of AIDS, or that we do even some basic research to find if there are chemical or environmental factors, cofactors or causes is greeted with such hysteria.
Probably mostly for the same reason people get "hysterical" about creationists, moon landing hoaxists, Holocaust deniers, cold fusion, etc.: dealing with the same kooks time and time again gets tiresome. Of course, creationists and Holocaust deniers aren't trying to take resources away from medical programs that could save lives.
AIDS diagnosis as it is practiced today assumes HIV-AIDS causation.
Which makes sense, because the evidence as it is observed today indicates HIV-AIDS causation. See the sibling of your post for details. There's no more reason to believe AIDS is caused by anything besides HIV than there is to believe the moon landing was faked.
But, under Arrow's impossibility theorem, no voting system is perfectly "fair"
Correct. That doesn't mean, however, that all voting systems are equal. IRV fails most objectively defined criteria for voting systems.
If no perfect system is possible, that's sad, but no reason not to go for a system that's better than today's risible mess.
The fallacy of this statement is a false dichotomy: we don't have to choose between "today's risible mess" and IRV. There are many systems better than plurality voting, some of which are measurably worse than others, and switching to a system we know is inferior would be nearly as foolish as sticking with today's risible mess.
At the same time we should switch to instant-runoff voting,
I was with you until this. Instant runoff voting is a deceptively bad way to count ballots. It's easy to explain to a layman, but it has severe problems if you look beneath the surface. For example, it fails the monotonicity criterion, which means that sometimes, ranking a candidate higher in an IRV election can cause him to lose, when ranking him lower would cause him to win.
There are also problems with the amount of data needed to transmit IRV ballots for central counting; it's easier to physically ship all the ballots to a central location for counting, or perform several rounds of counting at regional stations with a recount after each candidate is eliminated, than it is to count the ballots locally and decide the winner by combining all the local counts.
IMO ranked ballots are a great idea, but IRV is about the worst possible implementation of ranked voting. A Condorcet system like the one used by Debian would be more predictable, easier to count, and would do a better job of satisfying voter preferences by choosing compromise candidates.
You might ask the same thing about postal addresses. The White House's address could be written "USA, D.C., Washington, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600", but people seem to like it the other way around.
Don't you read Variety? Jack Valenti is "the entertainment industry's bionic emissary"... if his mighty robotic fists didn't kill you, his laser eyes surely would!
I think you misspelled "confusing or nuclear". HTH.
Media and bandwidth. Do they come free? Are they part of the expected ecosystem?
They're provided by the consumer. If I want to download songs or movies, I pay my ISP to provide bandwidth to me, and I buy my own hard disks, CD-Rs, etc. The ISP pays or signs peering agreements with some other company, and so on, to provide bandwidth all the way from me to wherever I'm getting the file from. The actual data is free once that's paid for.
Even basic utilities such as water cost to supply, surely data also costs?
Water has to be collected, purified, and stored, and more importantly, there's only so much to go around. Your water bill covers those costs as well as the cost of the pipes to bring it to your house. But with data, the only cost is storage at each end (which is willingly provided by P2P users) and maintenance of the pipes in between (which is covered by monthly ISP fees).
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the current business model [...] but to suggest it can be free hints at a lack of grasp of basic economics.
I don't think anyone is suggesting downloading files should be, or will be, 100% free of any and all costs. Obviously you have to buy a computer and connect to the internet before you can download anything.
Tell me... If the government asked you to give up something that was legally yours (say, protection from random wiretappings) when there are "severe doubts" about whether it threatens critical infrastructure or lives?
Let me give you a counter-example: the end of slavery. Slave owners had certain legal rights over their "property", and those rights were taken away essentially because they posed a threat to the lives and human rights of their slaves.
And of course, it was exactly the right thing to do. Those rights weren't legitimate in the first place, even though they were tacitly supported by the Constitution. We now realize what a horrible mistake it was to allow one person to "own" another person. How much longer before we realize what a mistake it is to give one person veto power over another person's freedom to speak or publish?
Although you missed the most important monopoly of all in this case: copyright. There's nothing inherent in "capitalism" that says the person who comes up with a particular string of bits first is entitled to sue anyone else who makes a copy without permission. Capitalist notions of property don't apply to numbers, sounds, patterns, or ideas.
Copyright is a case of the government interfering with capitalism for the benefit of certain businesses. In a pure capitalist system, anyone could print a book with any words in it, or sell a CD with any music on it, without needing permission from any third party; authors and musicians could still make money, but they'd do it by charging up front for the act of creating, rather than for copies.
There is no cost whatsoever to atmospheric oxygen.
Just like there's no cost whatsoever to copying a file (other than media and bandwidth).
All the cost is incurred up front, just once: in the act of recording a song, producing a movie, etc. But if someone decides to perform that act for no charge--perhaps in the vain hope that someone will come along later and give them money for a copy they could easily make for free--then that's their problem, not ours, and their lack of a sound business model doesn't entitle them to limit our freedom of speech by telling us what information we can or can't distribute to others.
And if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions.
Sure, but there are ways to make a living from your creations other than limiting other people's freedom. I'd say there is something wrong with trying to prevent other people from copying certain strings of bits just because you'd prefer them to buy copies from you.
Really? I don't know about you, but I think pirates are pretty cool. Long John Silver, Captain Hook, etc. There's a successful MMORPG devoted to pretending you're a pirate. Plus, they're the ninja's arch-rivals.
Yes, I "pirate" software, music, movies, and TV shows, and I do it proudly. My family asks me to help them download Lost every week, and I tell them "It's about time you learned to pirate TV shows on your own."
Hoist the main sail, scupper the scuttlebutt, and hand over yer digital booty! YARRRRRRR! I'm a mighty pirate, and if ye don't like it, ye can polish me pegleg!
Voicemail's not free for everyone. [...] Why shouldn't my phone do it, regardless of what the providers offer?
Many phones do have built-in answering machines, even antique non-smartphones like the LG VX4000. They record into the same memory used for voice memos.