I really don't get Americans. The only way you can throw away your vote is by voting for a party whose policies you don't support.
There's no "I voted for the guy who's kept the torture camps open, but, at least I didn't vote for the other guy who was worse." Dude, you still voted for a guy who keeps torture camps open.
Maybe it's a language divide. Here in America, "throw away your vote" means to cast a vote in a way that (1) doesn't further your interests or (2) works against your interests.
For example, let's say I'm opposed to torture, and I'm voting in a race between a pro-torture candidate and an anti-torture candidate. If I cast my vote in such a way that it makes the pro-torture candidate more likely to win (the outcome I don't want!), Americans would say I'm "throwing my vote away". What do you call it in your country?
Not sure I'm reading you properly, but this system allows you to verify your vote was COUNTED, nothing more. You can't show or prove to anyone HOW you voted, just that you did and that your vote is in the tally AS CAST.
Er, unless I'm missing something, it's still possible to prove to someone how you voted. You just need to take a picture of your ballot, showing that the code "JX" is in the bubble next to "John Smith" -- this is pretty easy if you're voting absentee, or if you aren't frisked and metal-detected on your way into the voting booth. When the local thug comes around to verify your vote, you show him the picture and your ballot ID, and then he goes online to make sure that your ballot ID and your "JX" vote are in the system.
The bottom line is you didn't pay for those speeds for any guaranteed amount of time.
I don't expect guaranteed speeds, because I realize the reality of overselling means that a full 12 Mbps won't be available at all times. But what I do expect is that I won't be punished for using whatever bandwidth is available. I paid for "up to 12 Mbps" and I expect to be able to use "up to 12 Mbps" if it's there.
If too many people are using too much of the bandwidth they're paying for, it's time for Comcast to upgrade their network.
What do cell phone companies do when their phones get too popular? Do they kick out customers who make too many calls? No, they build more towers. Cellular airtime is oversold just like cable bandwidth; the capacity is built out to handle average use, not maximum use. But cell phone companies understand that it's their responsibility to build more capacity when "average use" goes up. Why doesn't Comcast?
Technology may change, bandwidth may get so cheap it doesn't matter, but right now, guaranteeing 100% throughput at residential service prices simply wont work.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. There's a huge gap between "guaranteeing 100% throughput" and "throttling anyone who uses more than 70% throughput for 15 minutes".
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote."
That's a problem with instant runoff voting (IRV), but not all preferential systems. IRV is actually a terrible voting method; people like it because it's easy to visualize how it works and because it's well-known, not because it's mathematically sound.
The problem you describe doesn't exist with Condorcet methods like Schultze and Ranked Pairs. In those systems, the preferences expressed on your ballot are all considered simultaneously. Casting your ballot as "Ideal, Tolerable, Horrid" rather than "Tolerable, Ideal, Horrid" won't throw the election to Horrid, because there are no vote counts to take away from Tolerable and no runoff rounds for Tolerable to get knocked out of. Your ballot is actually interpreted as an unordered set of pairwise preferences, "Ideal > Tolerable; Ideal > Horrid; Tolerable > Horrid", and if a majority of voters likes Tolerable better than Horrid, Horrid cannot win.
So, while it may seem like voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away, it isn't. You can think of it as voting against both parties, and if enough people agree with you a new party may rise to dominance.
... at the expense of one of the major parties. The two-party system stays intact, and all the problems that come with it stick around. In a few years, you'll be griping about that party just like you griped about the last one, because they will have expanded to fill the space occupied by the party they pushed out.
Furthermore, in the short term (i.e. the next couple decades), voting for a third party candidate harms your interests. It's worse than throwing your vote away.
Suppose you really like the Libertarians, who have low support in the polls, but your second choice is the Republicans, who have high support. You decide to take this advice and vote for the Libertarians. You know one vote won't cause the Libertarians to win, so the only outcomes are: (1) the Republicans win or (2) the Democrats win. Your preferred outcome is #1, but you haven't done anything to make it happen; someone on the other side who wants to vote for the Greens but votes for the Democrats instead is more likely to get their preferred outcome (#2).
So suppose you see the folly in casting one individual third-party vote, and instead you go on Slashdot to convince your fellow would-be Libertarians to cast their votes for a third party. Now you have a big happy bloc of voters who are voting Libertarian instead of their second choice, which we'll suppose is also the Republicans. But unless this bloc is big enough to win the election, you're all screwed, because the Democrats will win -- exactly the outcome you didn't want!
In other words, a third party vote only works "if enough people agree with you". If not, you're actively working against your own interests. You'd need some kind of pact that would only be triggered when enough people signed on to guarantee a win, kind of like the National Popular Vote laws are only triggered when enough states sign on to control the electoral college. Easier said than done when we're talking about voters who are free to do whatever they want, rather than states whose actions are bound by law.
And even that pact wouldn't change the two-party system, it'd just let you replace one of the two parties.
If you want meaningful reform, the best option is to change the voting method and break the two-party system. Doesn't have to be something fancy like preferential voting; approval voting would do just as well, and it works with the same ballots we already use. In the meantime, find the major party that suits you best, and work from the inside to get them to nominate candidates you can support.
You suggest that Advil is a product, while The Terminator is not. I disagree.
Let me clarify that: a bottle of Advil is a product, and so is a DVD of The Terminator. They are physical items that can only be in one place at a time and cost something to manufacture. But ibuprofen (a chemical structure and the process for making it) and The Terminator (a sequence of images synchronized with sound, and the story described therein) are ideas, not products.
The initial development costs for both are exorbitant. You've got years of work before the first Advil is ever produced, and you've got years of work before the first screening of The Terminator.
Agreed. There is valuable labor involved in developing the ideas of ibuprofen and The Terminator; that labor is performed once and then never needs to be performed again.
After that first run, however, both products become very cheap and easy to make. Their production costs approach, but do not actually become, $0. [...] Either way, it costs something to produce additional products.
Agreed. There is a marginal cost to produce each additional bottle of Advil or DVD of The Terminator.
With both products, I couldn't care much less about the labor involved. [...] The labor is necessary to produce both products, but is not what I as a consumer am interested in paying for.
I think you're splitting hairs here. I say you do care about the labor involved, because if not for that labor, you wouldn't have ibuprofen or The Terminator. You'd have some other drug and some other movie. You might not consciously think about the work James Cameron did when you're watching Arnold travel through time, but his labor is what makes it possible for you to do that.
Now, on the other hand, I really don't care about the labor or materials involved in making a DVD of The Terminator, because the moment James Cameron worked his magic and made that sequence of images available to the public, it became possible for me to make that DVD myself. (Well, ignoring the fact that DVDs didn't exist until much later.)
By your logic - labor is a means to an end - there are no actual products at all. Because both Advil and The Terminator are piles of labor applied to some real production costs to produce an end result that people want to pay for.
No, I still believe products exist. When you hand money over in exchange for becoming the owner of something, that thing is a product. "Product" implies physicality and scarcity. The difference between product and labor is the difference between paying you to sell me something and paying you to do something.
(You might ask, is "selling me something" a form of labor? I don't think it is, because selling a product is more than just the physical act of handing it over to a customer. I don't pay someone to put an object in a bag with a receipt and then put that bag in my hand; I pay them in exchange for me becoming the owner of that object, which can happen without them even lifting a finger.)
As for the therapist thing... You are obviously paying your therapist for services/labor. I don't know why you would suggest it is a product. Especially since you seem to think that everything is just labor.
I'm not suggesting it's a product. Quite the opposite: I'm suggesting that "eventual lack of fear" is a product to exactly the same extent that "The Terminator" (not a DVD) or "Advil" (not a bottle of pills) is a product, i.e. not at all.
As far as there being competing publishers of Stephen King's works... I doubt if people would care that much. There are currently books that have fallen into the public domain and pretty much anyone can publish them. If you go to your local bookstore, however, you aren't going to see 10 different copies of the same th
As things become more expensive, less people want to pay. As less people want to pay, things become more expensive.
The second sentence here is what I'm still wondering about.
Why would anything become more expensive? If I'm thinking about spending a year of my life writing a book, I might ask for, say, $50,000. That number doesn't depend on how many people want to pay for it: it only depends on how I personally value my time.
If fewer people want to pay, that just means the thermometer graph separating me from my goal will fill up more slowly, but each contributor can still choose how much they want to spend. And if several months pass and I'm still not at my goal, it might be time for me to reconsider -- maybe I'd really be willing to take $30,000, or maybe writing isn't for me after all.
It's not anything to do with demand; we still like entertainment, it's just that someone's got to take the bullet and pay.
Ah, but that's where demand comes in.
If no one bites that bullet and pays, pretty soon people will notice that it's been a while since any new books came out, and their demand for new books will lead them to start paying. Choosing not to pay is one thing when you have many other sources of entertainment, but at some point everyone wants to see something new. It's the same thing that drives people to see 2009's big action flick for $10 instead of 1999's big action flick at the dollar theater.
There's an equilibrium between people paying and people not paying. If too many people pay, then they start to feel ripped off (thinking other people can pay for them). If too few people pay, then more people start paying.
Agreed...
What I'm saying is that this equilibrium lies too far towards the "not pay" end to keep the diversity to which we are accustomed.
... but (1) this is speculation, and (2) even if it ends up being the case, I think it's a fair price to pay for having a system that's much easier to enforce and provides clear benefits to both producer and consumer.
Copyright encourages overproduction at the expense of a lot of failed investments, the inability for consumers to enjoy most works created during their lifetimes or their parents' lifetimes, and senseless limits on both technological and artistic progress. The number of works we see in the market today (essentially subsidized by copyright) isn't any more natural than the amount of (subsidized) corn we Americans see in our diet, and we shouldn't judge a new system based on whether it maintains that number.
That's not the problem. The problem is that entertainment is expensive, and is becoming ever moreso, thanks to the "free" option. Any system (new or old) has to address this, otherwise it won't work.
I don't follow. Can you explain this some more?
No one would have to pay more than they want to pay. If you see the project has a goal of $1 million and has currently collected $500k, you can contribute anything from $0 to $500,000. The only difference is how quickly you're moving the project toward its goal.
That's true; unprofitable movies wouldn't be made. But, on the same token, a lot of profitable and potentially very good movies may not be made, simply because of lack of confidence.
I'd call that a failure on the producer's part. If you can't convince people your idea is worth funding, then either your idea sucks (and it shouldn't be funded) or you suck at promoting it (and you should hire someone who's better at promotion).
Look at our current system. The movie is made and released, yet so many people (claim to) download it to try it before they buy it, and that's just so they don't waste $10!
Sure, that behavior (people choosing not to pay just because they don't have to) wouldn't change. What would change is that those people wouldn't be "cheating" the system: everyone who chooses not to pay is casting a vote that says "I don't care whether or not this gets made", whereas those who choose to pay are directly increasing the chance that it will be made.
Now, now. You said the installer was encrypted, not "some part of Mac OS X". I already know about the encrypted applications; those are decrypted when they run. How is Psystar violating the DMCA by running the installer?
But we aren't really paying for their work, we're paying for the end product we eventually get. The labor involved in acting is pretty much useless to me without the special effects, editing, makeup, and whatever else.
Sure - but that stuff is all labor too.
Think about another industry where you end up with an "end product" but you're really paying for labor. Tax accounting, for example. When you go to get your taxes done, you leave with a stack of tax forms, but what you're actually paying for is the accountant's labor. It might cost you $100 to get that first stack of forms, but you can ask them to print you a second stack for free! That's the clue that you're really paying for the labor, not the forms.
In the end, I'm paying for a movie - which is a product as much as anything else. Again, maybe not something physical and inherently limited like a hammer or a pill... But it is still a product.
Well, that's one way to think about it. You could also say that you're "paying for a fixed car" when you go to the mechanic, or "paying for a painted house" when you call a house painter... but it's not the most helpful way to think about it.
The first copy of a movie costs millions of dollars. The second copy costs approximately nothing. Again, that's the clue that you're really paying for labor, not a product.
This [Advil vs. generic ibuprofen] doesn't work with creative works because there isn't really any competition or reality to base things on.
Sure there is - you're just looking in the wrong place.
The competition wouldn't be between Stephen King and "Kephen Sting". There is only one Stephen King. The competition would be between rival publishers of Stephen King's works.
Stephen King's labor as an author is analogous to the research that went into developing ibuprofen in the first place. The publishers are analogous to companies that manufacture ibuprofen pills. Some publishers could charge more because they're well known (like Advil, or Random House) or because they put out a higher quality product (Advil is tastier than generic ibuprofen; some copies have better bindings or typesetting).
You pay a therapist for a customized treatment. For individual attention. For listening to you, understanding what you're saying, applying their knowledge and expertise, and coming up with a fix that works specifically for you.
Likewise, you pay an author/musician/filmmaker for applying their experience and talent and coming up with a work that speaks to you (and probably millions of other people, but not everyone). That labor is what makes the finished work valuable. What you don't pay them for is putting a copy of the finished work on a disc; you can do that yourself.
You aren't paying for eventual lack of fear, you're paying for individualized treatment and their unique expertise.
Do you not see the contradiction here? How can you say you're paying a filmmaker for a movie, but you're not paying a therapist for eventual lack of fear? In both cases, their labor is a means to an end - you want to enjoy a movie, and you want to go outside without fear. That end is what convinces you to part with your money, but the means are what you're actually paying for (because the labor is what the filmmaker/therapist is incurring a cost to provide).
It might do the trick for established authors, like Stephen King or J.K.Rowlings, but it can't be a model for new entries to a market. If you could get money for a book/piece of music/etc. that you haven't even written yet, I think there would be 6 billion people on this planet having a go at that. Free money for only the promise that you might produce something in the future.
Think about what you're saying. Does it make sense for any other industry?
"It might do the trick for established hairstylists, like Jonathan Antin, but it can't be a model for new entries to a market. If you could get money for a haircut that you haven't even given yet, I think there would be 6 billion people on this planet having a go at that. Free money for only the promise that you might cut some hair in the future."
Ridiculous, huh? Let's look at the problems one by one.
1. Obviously it does work as a model for new entries to a market. Every market has established players that can command a high price, and new players have to charge less to make up for their lack of prestige. You can't just buy a pair of scissors and expect to make as much as Jonathan Antin, but you can certainly start a corner barber shop.
2. You don't necessarily collect the money up front. Every time I've gotten a haircut, I've paid for it afterward. But the moment I sat down in the chair, I entered an implicit contract to pay for it, and that's all the barber needs. In the case of a large book or movie project where the producer would need money to pay for travel, equipment and such during production, the contributions could be put into escrow and released as needed, with the balance released once the project is finished.
3. Sure, 6 billion people would jump at the chance for "free money for only the promise that you might produce something", but that's not at all what I've described. Most of those people wouldn't jump at the chance to take money for the promise that they will produce something -- a particular something, within a specified time frame -- and they'll have to give refunds and/or be sued if they don't produce it.
The problem with transitioning to the commission-based system is that it doesn't solve the issue of price. The free alternative is still there, and it's still tempting, even when it exists only in potential. Paying customers still have to pay for non-paying consumers.
That's not really a problem. Paying customers, by definition, feel they're getting enough of a benefit to justify the price they're paying.
The commissions still have to make a similar amount of money to the amount a successful copyright can make today
I don't know about that. Remember, the current "copyright lottery" system results in a lot of losses. Howard the Duck cost $30 million to make but only grossed $16 million, so in order for the studio to stay in business, some other movie had to turn at least a $14 million profit.
That aspect would not exist in the system I've described. Unprofitable movies simply wouldn't be made: the producer of Howard the Duck would see that people were only willing to spend $16 million, and then he'd either scrap the project (refunding the money) or find a way to produce it for less than $16 million. And that means he could get by with a slimmer profit margin on his other movies, because he wouldn't need to make up the loss.
1) what if the movie is scrapped for lack of interest? do you get your $10 back?
Yes, of course. You're paying for a service. If the service isn't provided, what would you be paying for?
2) what if the movie runs over budget? since you already have all the money, you really have no incentive to continue making it
You either release the movie as it is, and risk being sued for not holding up your end of the deal, or you finish it and pay the difference out of your own pocket.
This is already what happens in other industries. For example, there are places that charge a flat rate to repair a game console or TiVo. If I pay $50 to have my TiVo fixed, and it ends up needing a new part that costs $60, they're losing $10 -- but presumably they're making it up on all the other repairs they do that cost much less.
3) what about things like the Matrix, which two of my friends have spent about $100 each on (saw multiple times) when it came out in theaters?
That's a part of the copyright lottery that would no longer exist. Movie producers would be paid for the work they did, not for the number of times people saw the completed film.
But the flip side of that is the question you didn't ask: "what about things like Howard the Duck, which cost $30 million to make and only grossed $16 million?"
A movie like Howard the Duck wouldn't have been made in the first place, because the producer would immediately see that people weren't willing to pay $30 million for it.
4) potentially biggest problem: the Producers issue. if you're paid up-front, what's there to force you to produce anything of quality?
The threat of a lawsuit from the people who paid for it, if you don't deliver the quality you led them to expect. Again, the same thing already happens in other industries: if I pay someone $500 to paint my house, and I come back and see they've diluted $5 worth of paint over the whole house and the color underneath is showing through, I can sue them for doing a shoddy job.
spend $15k on making the movie and keep the rest for yourself, and since you can't control how much you get in donations there can't be laws against this sort of thing...
There's nothing inherently wrong with spending $15,000 on a movie and pocketing several million, as long as you aren't defrauding anyone. The price you ask for your labor doesn't have to have any relation to the amount of time or money you spend. You just have to be able to convince people to pay you that much, and then you have to deliver what you promised.
There is always a steady thrum of discontent and complaining in the Mac community around upgrade time - except for this last one - because Apple don't differentiate between an upgrade and a fresh install, it's just one fixed price.
Perhaps if they were a software company, they'd do what Microsoft does and distinguish between upgrades and full installs.
Over a typical 5 year life cycle for your average Mac - with 4 successive OS X upgrades - that would be $1536-$2560 extra cost. I promise you that there would be uproar.
I don't know about that. Mac users love spending money, don't they? They're already paying $2500 or more for a desktop tower because of the gaping hole in Apple's lineup. If they could get a tower that met their needs for $1000 instead, that would leave $1500 to spend on software.
What you're suggesting is that Apple should basically abandon their hardware business and just charge more for OSX to make up for the loss in profits. I guess that's a valid idea, and in the same way, I could advise Microsoft to get out of the operating system business and focus more on the Zune.
That might even make sense if the Zune were as popular as OS X, and if people were dying for a way to use their Zunes with non-Windows operating systems, the way people are dying for a way to run OS X on non-Apple hardware.
It's not clear to me why they should abandon an existing and successful business model in favor of one that's pretty speculative and has failed in the past.
But the thing is, the reason why it failed in the past is obvious. They made a very basic mistake: they took the thing that made their hardware popular, and sold it separately at a price that resulted in much less profit than they were getting when it was bundled with the hardware. Solution: raise the price.
If they charged a large enough amount to make OSX profitable on its own, how well would it even compete with Windows?
People are already paying that much for the OS X experience today. The only difference is they'd be able to get that experience on more hardware, including stuff like netbooks and sub-$2500 towers that Apple has refused to offer.
And then they have to worry about piracy, and unfortunately they'd probably start treating their customers like criminals. Why should that be appealing to them?
They already do that. See the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Apple and OSx86, and the lawsuit against Psystar. Their war against running OS X on non-Apple hardware isn't much different from a war against pirates.
The letter of the law does not, case precedent does.
Do you have a citation?
It's a bit more complex than that since it specifies who can make changes to it for compatibility and it is questionable if Pystar meets those criteria.
As far as I can tell, this comes down to whether the software is owned by the end user at the time the adaptation is made. Section 117 doesn't put any restrictions on who may make the adaptation, but it does say you can't transfer the adaptation to another owner without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright law explicitly allows them to make a copy into RAM if that copy is based on a non-infringing one, but it does not allow them to make a copy to the hard disk, and a subsequent load of a modified one into RAM is the argument, Apple is making.
The law doesn't make any distinction between RAM and hard disks. It allows the owner to make a copy or adaptation as long as it's "created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine" and used in no other manner.
The copy in RAM obviously meets those criteria, since the CPU can only run code that's in memory. So the question is, is copying an OS to the hard drive an "essential step" in using it? I'd say so, since all you can do by booting off the disc is run the installer; the majority of the programs on that disc can't be used without installing the OS first.
The group of people who would pay a high price for OS X will just buy a Mac. They're not going to waste their time building a machine and then putting OS X on it.
That's true, but they might still prefer to buy a Mac clone with a licensed, pre-installed copy of OS X.
They make a tidy profit on the hardware component of each Mac they sell. To compensate for that loss of revenue they would have to set a very high OEM price: maybe 3-5 times. They couldn't do that for the OS X retail version, there would be a riot.
Why do you say that? People already happily pay those high margins to own a Mac, and a large part of the Mac experience is OS X. I don't think they'd have a hard time getting people to pay high prices for OS X.
I think it is fairly established opinion on/. that basic science research is worth the money, but that corporations will not fund it at a sufficient level
I'm not talking about basic science research, I'm talking about the same research that goes on today, driven by consumer demand. The only difference is those consumers (or groups representing them, etc.) would be paying directly for research instead of bundling the research costs together with the manufacturing costs.
so government-funded research is necessary.
If that's the case, well, what's wrong with that? As long as research is being done and researchers are being paid for it, that seems fine to me. And the advantage is that drugs will be cheaper due to competition among manufacturers.
I understand it is a nice ideal, but I don't get all of these people saying industries need a new business model without suggesting one.
Here's my suggested business model for music:
Start up a web site that connects artists with potential funders. Lay it out sort of like a social networking site (or Sellaband), with a focus on making it easy for users to discover artists they like. Then let the artists describe the projects they want to work on and the amount they want to charge. Give each artist's page an eye-catching thermometer graph so everyone can see how close they are to meeting their goal. Once the goal is met, the artist begins work and eventually releases the album for free; if he fails to keep up his end of the deal, he doesn't get paid (this may require voting or arbitration if the work is completed but the funders believe it doesn't meet the standards they were promised).
Unfortunately, it's hard for a model like this to take off when copyright is still around, because artists are drawn to the copyright lottery the same way gamblers are drawn to the real lottery. They'd rather take a chance at winning big than get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.
Apple learned it's lesson in the 90's when it licensed MacOS. While the hope was that the licensees would expand MacOS market share, it instead only whittled away at Apple's own market share. I was an example myself - I have a PowerComputing system lying around somewhere - and it was a sale that would have gone to Apple were they not in existence.
So, in other words, Apple wasn't charging enough for MacOS licenses, and they guessed wrong about how willing customers would be to keep buying Apple branded hardware.
Why does this doom future OS licensing? Why can't they just charge enough for the OS X license so that they'll stay profitable if it turns out people only want the software?
Unless you disagree with patents, I don't get the logic that just because you can copy mp3s easily it means the music industry needs to stop selling them. Otherwise you should argue big pharma should never sue generics that start selling before the patents are up- but we all know that would make medicine more costly as R+D earns less of a payoff.
Well, I do disagree with patents. They were originally beneficial for convincing inventors to share the details of their inventions, but these days it seems they do more to stifle innovation than to encourage it, because so many patents are granted for obvious things that really don't need any explanation. Patents have morphed from something used to safely share knowledge to something used to stake a claim on a process and extract rents.
I also disagree that separating research from manufacturing would drive costs up. I believe it would make medicine less costly, since there would be more competition in manufacturing.
Just because media is all "R+D" and almost zero manufacturing does not mean it should cost nothing.
The mistake you're making is assuming that R&D and manufacturing/distribution have to be (1) done by the same company and (2) paid for at the same time, by the same people.
I see them as two separate endeavors. I'm no good at recording songs, but I am pretty good at burning CDs. Why shouldn't I be able to compete in the business of burning CDs, and leave the business of recording songs up to someone else? Likewise, if I think I can do a better job of manufacturing Viagra than Pfizer, why shouldn't I be able to compete in that business, and let them stick to research? If that research is valuable, then people will be willing to pay for it even if they aren't getting pills in return.
Right. The copy of OS X on the disc. That's not much good without the right to actually run the the software. That is dictated by the terms of the license.
Sigh.
There is no such thing as a "right to actually run the software". Copyright doesn't restrict whether or not your CPU is allowed to interpret a program, just like it doesn't restrict whether or not you're allowed to read a book you buy.
The only impact copyright has on running software is that running software usually requires making intermediate copies (in RAM and on disk). However, 17 USC 117 explicitly allows you to make those copies as long as you own the original.
You don't have any rights under 17 USC 117, unless you are already authorized to run the software.
Again, there is no such requirement. You're making this up and ignoring the text of the law. Read it again: it applies to "the owner of a copy of a computer program". You become the owner of a copy as soon as you buy it.
When making money from movies becomes difficult if not impossible, they'll just stop making them.
Luckily, piracy doesn't make it impossible to make money from movies. At worst, it only makes it impossible to make money by selling copies of movies that have already been made.
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I really don't get Americans. The only way you can throw away your vote is by voting for a party whose policies you don't support.
There's no "I voted for the guy who's kept the torture camps open, but, at least I didn't vote for the other guy who was worse." Dude, you still voted for a guy who keeps torture camps open.
Maybe it's a language divide. Here in America, "throw away your vote" means to cast a vote in a way that (1) doesn't further your interests or (2) works against your interests.
For example, let's say I'm opposed to torture, and I'm voting in a race between a pro-torture candidate and an anti-torture candidate. If I cast my vote in such a way that it makes the pro-torture candidate more likely to win (the outcome I don't want!), Americans would say I'm "throwing my vote away". What do you call it in your country?
Not sure I'm reading you properly, but this system allows you to verify your vote was COUNTED, nothing more. You can't show or prove to anyone HOW you voted, just that you did and that your vote is in the tally AS CAST.
Er, unless I'm missing something, it's still possible to prove to someone how you voted. You just need to take a picture of your ballot, showing that the code "JX" is in the bubble next to "John Smith" -- this is pretty easy if you're voting absentee, or if you aren't frisked and metal-detected on your way into the voting booth. When the local thug comes around to verify your vote, you show him the picture and your ballot ID, and then he goes online to make sure that your ballot ID and your "JX" vote are in the system.
The bottom line is you didn't pay for those speeds for any guaranteed amount of time.
I don't expect guaranteed speeds, because I realize the reality of overselling means that a full 12 Mbps won't be available at all times. But what I do expect is that I won't be punished for using whatever bandwidth is available. I paid for "up to 12 Mbps" and I expect to be able to use "up to 12 Mbps" if it's there.
If too many people are using too much of the bandwidth they're paying for, it's time for Comcast to upgrade their network.
What do cell phone companies do when their phones get too popular? Do they kick out customers who make too many calls? No, they build more towers. Cellular airtime is oversold just like cable bandwidth; the capacity is built out to handle average use, not maximum use. But cell phone companies understand that it's their responsibility to build more capacity when "average use" goes up. Why doesn't Comcast?
Technology may change, bandwidth may get so cheap it doesn't matter, but right now, guaranteeing 100% throughput at residential service prices simply wont work.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. There's a huge gap between "guaranteeing 100% throughput" and "throttling anyone who uses more than 70% throughput for 15 minutes".
Actually, preferential voting (where you rank canidates) still keeps one big problem from our current system: the possibility of "throwing away your vote."
That's a problem with instant runoff voting (IRV), but not all preferential systems. IRV is actually a terrible voting method; people like it because it's easy to visualize how it works and because it's well-known, not because it's mathematically sound.
The problem you describe doesn't exist with Condorcet methods like Schultze and Ranked Pairs. In those systems, the preferences expressed on your ballot are all considered simultaneously. Casting your ballot as "Ideal, Tolerable, Horrid" rather than "Tolerable, Ideal, Horrid" won't throw the election to Horrid, because there are no vote counts to take away from Tolerable and no runoff rounds for Tolerable to get knocked out of. Your ballot is actually interpreted as an unordered set of pairwise preferences, "Ideal > Tolerable; Ideal > Horrid; Tolerable > Horrid", and if a majority of voters likes Tolerable better than Horrid, Horrid cannot win.
So, while it may seem like voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away, it isn't. You can think of it as voting against both parties, and if enough people agree with you a new party may rise to dominance.
... at the expense of one of the major parties. The two-party system stays intact, and all the problems that come with it stick around. In a few years, you'll be griping about that party just like you griped about the last one, because they will have expanded to fill the space occupied by the party they pushed out.
Furthermore, in the short term (i.e. the next couple decades), voting for a third party candidate harms your interests. It's worse than throwing your vote away.
Suppose you really like the Libertarians, who have low support in the polls, but your second choice is the Republicans, who have high support. You decide to take this advice and vote for the Libertarians. You know one vote won't cause the Libertarians to win, so the only outcomes are: (1) the Republicans win or (2) the Democrats win. Your preferred outcome is #1, but you haven't done anything to make it happen; someone on the other side who wants to vote for the Greens but votes for the Democrats instead is more likely to get their preferred outcome (#2).
So suppose you see the folly in casting one individual third-party vote, and instead you go on Slashdot to convince your fellow would-be Libertarians to cast their votes for a third party. Now you have a big happy bloc of voters who are voting Libertarian instead of their second choice, which we'll suppose is also the Republicans. But unless this bloc is big enough to win the election, you're all screwed, because the Democrats will win -- exactly the outcome you didn't want!
In other words, a third party vote only works "if enough people agree with you". If not, you're actively working against your own interests. You'd need some kind of pact that would only be triggered when enough people signed on to guarantee a win, kind of like the National Popular Vote laws are only triggered when enough states sign on to control the electoral college. Easier said than done when we're talking about voters who are free to do whatever they want, rather than states whose actions are bound by law.
And even that pact wouldn't change the two-party system, it'd just let you replace one of the two parties.
If you want meaningful reform, the best option is to change the voting method and break the two-party system. Doesn't have to be something fancy like preferential voting; approval voting would do just as well, and it works with the same ballots we already use. In the meantime, find the major party that suits you best, and work from the inside to get them to nominate candidates you can support.
You suggest that Advil is a product, while The Terminator is not. I disagree.
Let me clarify that: a bottle of Advil is a product, and so is a DVD of The Terminator. They are physical items that can only be in one place at a time and cost something to manufacture. But ibuprofen (a chemical structure and the process for making it) and The Terminator (a sequence of images synchronized with sound, and the story described therein) are ideas, not products.
The initial development costs for both are exorbitant. You've got years of work before the first Advil is ever produced, and you've got years of work before the first screening of The Terminator.
Agreed. There is valuable labor involved in developing the ideas of ibuprofen and The Terminator; that labor is performed once and then never needs to be performed again.
After that first run, however, both products become very cheap and easy to make. Their production costs approach, but do not actually become, $0. [...] Either way, it costs something to produce additional products.
Agreed. There is a marginal cost to produce each additional bottle of Advil or DVD of The Terminator.
With both products, I couldn't care much less about the labor involved. [...] The labor is necessary to produce both products, but is not what I as a consumer am interested in paying for.
I think you're splitting hairs here. I say you do care about the labor involved, because if not for that labor, you wouldn't have ibuprofen or The Terminator. You'd have some other drug and some other movie. You might not consciously think about the work James Cameron did when you're watching Arnold travel through time, but his labor is what makes it possible for you to do that.
Now, on the other hand, I really don't care about the labor or materials involved in making a DVD of The Terminator, because the moment James Cameron worked his magic and made that sequence of images available to the public, it became possible for me to make that DVD myself. (Well, ignoring the fact that DVDs didn't exist until much later.)
By your logic - labor is a means to an end - there are no actual products at all. Because both Advil and The Terminator are piles of labor applied to some real production costs to produce an end result that people want to pay for.
No, I still believe products exist. When you hand money over in exchange for becoming the owner of something, that thing is a product. "Product" implies physicality and scarcity. The difference between product and labor is the difference between paying you to sell me something and paying you to do something.
(You might ask, is "selling me something" a form of labor? I don't think it is, because selling a product is more than just the physical act of handing it over to a customer. I don't pay someone to put an object in a bag with a receipt and then put that bag in my hand; I pay them in exchange for me becoming the owner of that object, which can happen without them even lifting a finger.)
As for the therapist thing... You are obviously paying your therapist for services/labor. I don't know why you would suggest it is a product. Especially since you seem to think that everything is just labor.
I'm not suggesting it's a product. Quite the opposite: I'm suggesting that "eventual lack of fear" is a product to exactly the same extent that "The Terminator" (not a DVD) or "Advil" (not a bottle of pills) is a product, i.e. not at all.
As far as there being competing publishers of Stephen King's works... I doubt if people would care that much. There are currently books that have fallen into the public domain and pretty much anyone can publish them. If you go to your local bookstore, however, you aren't going to see 10 different copies of the same th
As things become more expensive, less people want to pay. As less people want to pay, things become more expensive.
The second sentence here is what I'm still wondering about.
Why would anything become more expensive? If I'm thinking about spending a year of my life writing a book, I might ask for, say, $50,000. That number doesn't depend on how many people want to pay for it: it only depends on how I personally value my time.
If fewer people want to pay, that just means the thermometer graph separating me from my goal will fill up more slowly, but each contributor can still choose how much they want to spend. And if several months pass and I'm still not at my goal, it might be time for me to reconsider -- maybe I'd really be willing to take $30,000, or maybe writing isn't for me after all.
It's not anything to do with demand; we still like entertainment, it's just that someone's got to take the bullet and pay.
Ah, but that's where demand comes in.
If no one bites that bullet and pays, pretty soon people will notice that it's been a while since any new books came out, and their demand for new books will lead them to start paying. Choosing not to pay is one thing when you have many other sources of entertainment, but at some point everyone wants to see something new. It's the same thing that drives people to see 2009's big action flick for $10 instead of 1999's big action flick at the dollar theater.
There's an equilibrium between people paying and people not paying. If too many people pay, then they start to feel ripped off (thinking other people can pay for them). If too few people pay, then more people start paying.
Agreed...
What I'm saying is that this equilibrium lies too far towards the "not pay" end to keep the diversity to which we are accustomed.
... but (1) this is speculation, and (2) even if it ends up being the case, I think it's a fair price to pay for having a system that's much easier to enforce and provides clear benefits to both producer and consumer.
Copyright encourages overproduction at the expense of a lot of failed investments, the inability for consumers to enjoy most works created during their lifetimes or their parents' lifetimes, and senseless limits on both technological and artistic progress. The number of works we see in the market today (essentially subsidized by copyright) isn't any more natural than the amount of (subsidized) corn we Americans see in our diet, and we shouldn't judge a new system based on whether it maintains that number.
That's not the problem. The problem is that entertainment is expensive, and is becoming ever moreso, thanks to the "free" option. Any system (new or old) has to address this, otherwise it won't work.
I don't follow. Can you explain this some more?
No one would have to pay more than they want to pay. If you see the project has a goal of $1 million and has currently collected $500k, you can contribute anything from $0 to $500,000. The only difference is how quickly you're moving the project toward its goal.
That's true; unprofitable movies wouldn't be made. But, on the same token, a lot of profitable and potentially very good movies may not be made, simply because of lack of confidence.
I'd call that a failure on the producer's part. If you can't convince people your idea is worth funding, then either your idea sucks (and it shouldn't be funded) or you suck at promoting it (and you should hire someone who's better at promotion).
Look at our current system. The movie is made and released, yet so many people (claim to) download it to try it before they buy it, and that's just so they don't waste $10!
Sure, that behavior (people choosing not to pay just because they don't have to) wouldn't change. What would change is that those people wouldn't be "cheating" the system: everyone who chooses not to pay is casting a vote that says "I don't care whether or not this gets made", whereas those who choose to pay are directly increasing the chance that it will be made.
Now, now. You said the installer was encrypted, not "some part of Mac OS X". I already know about the encrypted applications; those are decrypted when they run. How is Psystar violating the DMCA by running the installer?
But we aren't really paying for their work, we're paying for the end product we eventually get. The labor involved in acting is pretty much useless to me without the special effects, editing, makeup, and whatever else.
Sure - but that stuff is all labor too.
Think about another industry where you end up with an "end product" but you're really paying for labor. Tax accounting, for example. When you go to get your taxes done, you leave with a stack of tax forms, but what you're actually paying for is the accountant's labor. It might cost you $100 to get that first stack of forms, but you can ask them to print you a second stack for free! That's the clue that you're really paying for the labor, not the forms.
In the end, I'm paying for a movie - which is a product as much as anything else. Again, maybe not something physical and inherently limited like a hammer or a pill... But it is still a product.
Well, that's one way to think about it. You could also say that you're "paying for a fixed car" when you go to the mechanic, or "paying for a painted house" when you call a house painter... but it's not the most helpful way to think about it.
The first copy of a movie costs millions of dollars. The second copy costs approximately nothing. Again, that's the clue that you're really paying for labor, not a product.
This [Advil vs. generic ibuprofen] doesn't work with creative works because there isn't really any competition or reality to base things on.
Sure there is - you're just looking in the wrong place.
The competition wouldn't be between Stephen King and "Kephen Sting". There is only one Stephen King. The competition would be between rival publishers of Stephen King's works.
Stephen King's labor as an author is analogous to the research that went into developing ibuprofen in the first place. The publishers are analogous to companies that manufacture ibuprofen pills. Some publishers could charge more because they're well known (like Advil, or Random House) or because they put out a higher quality product (Advil is tastier than generic ibuprofen; some copies have better bindings or typesetting).
You pay a therapist for a customized treatment. For individual attention. For listening to you, understanding what you're saying, applying their knowledge and expertise, and coming up with a fix that works specifically for you.
Likewise, you pay an author/musician/filmmaker for applying their experience and talent and coming up with a work that speaks to you (and probably millions of other people, but not everyone). That labor is what makes the finished work valuable. What you don't pay them for is putting a copy of the finished work on a disc; you can do that yourself.
You aren't paying for eventual lack of fear, you're paying for individualized treatment and their unique expertise.
Do you not see the contradiction here? How can you say you're paying a filmmaker for a movie, but you're not paying a therapist for eventual lack of fear? In both cases, their labor is a means to an end - you want to enjoy a movie, and you want to go outside without fear. That end is what convinces you to part with your money, but the means are what you're actually paying for (because the labor is what the filmmaker/therapist is incurring a cost to provide).
It might do the trick for established authors, like Stephen King or J.K.Rowlings, but it can't be a model for new entries to a market. If you could get money for a book/piece of music/etc. that you haven't even written yet, I think there would be 6 billion people on this planet having a go at that. Free money for only the promise that you might produce something in the future.
Think about what you're saying. Does it make sense for any other industry?
"It might do the trick for established hairstylists, like Jonathan Antin, but it can't be a model for new entries to a market. If you could get money for a haircut that you haven't even given yet, I think there would be 6 billion people on this planet having a go at that. Free money for only the promise that you might cut some hair in the future."
Ridiculous, huh? Let's look at the problems one by one.
1. Obviously it does work as a model for new entries to a market. Every market has established players that can command a high price, and new players have to charge less to make up for their lack of prestige. You can't just buy a pair of scissors and expect to make as much as Jonathan Antin, but you can certainly start a corner barber shop.
2. You don't necessarily collect the money up front. Every time I've gotten a haircut, I've paid for it afterward. But the moment I sat down in the chair, I entered an implicit contract to pay for it, and that's all the barber needs. In the case of a large book or movie project where the producer would need money to pay for travel, equipment and such during production, the contributions could be put into escrow and released as needed, with the balance released once the project is finished.
3. Sure, 6 billion people would jump at the chance for "free money for only the promise that you might produce something", but that's not at all what I've described. Most of those people wouldn't jump at the chance to take money for the promise that they will produce something -- a particular something, within a specified time frame -- and they'll have to give refunds and/or be sued if they don't produce it.
The problem with transitioning to the commission-based system is that it doesn't solve the issue of price. The free alternative is still there, and it's still tempting, even when it exists only in potential. Paying customers still have to pay for non-paying consumers.
That's not really a problem. Paying customers, by definition, feel they're getting enough of a benefit to justify the price they're paying.
The commissions still have to make a similar amount of money to the amount a successful copyright can make today
I don't know about that. Remember, the current "copyright lottery" system results in a lot of losses. Howard the Duck cost $30 million to make but only grossed $16 million, so in order for the studio to stay in business, some other movie had to turn at least a $14 million profit.
That aspect would not exist in the system I've described. Unprofitable movies simply wouldn't be made: the producer of Howard the Duck would see that people were only willing to spend $16 million, and then he'd either scrap the project (refunding the money) or find a way to produce it for less than $16 million. And that means he could get by with a slimmer profit margin on his other movies, because he wouldn't need to make up the loss.
1) what if the movie is scrapped for lack of interest? do you get your $10 back?
Yes, of course. You're paying for a service. If the service isn't provided, what would you be paying for?
2) what if the movie runs over budget? since you already have all the money, you really have no incentive to continue making it
You either release the movie as it is, and risk being sued for not holding up your end of the deal, or you finish it and pay the difference out of your own pocket.
This is already what happens in other industries. For example, there are places that charge a flat rate to repair a game console or TiVo. If I pay $50 to have my TiVo fixed, and it ends up needing a new part that costs $60, they're losing $10 -- but presumably they're making it up on all the other repairs they do that cost much less.
3) what about things like the Matrix, which two of my friends have spent about $100 each on (saw multiple times) when it came out in theaters?
That's a part of the copyright lottery that would no longer exist. Movie producers would be paid for the work they did, not for the number of times people saw the completed film.
But the flip side of that is the question you didn't ask: "what about things like Howard the Duck, which cost $30 million to make and only grossed $16 million?"
A movie like Howard the Duck wouldn't have been made in the first place, because the producer would immediately see that people weren't willing to pay $30 million for it.
4) potentially biggest problem: the Producers issue. if you're paid up-front, what's there to force you to produce anything of quality?
The threat of a lawsuit from the people who paid for it, if you don't deliver the quality you led them to expect. Again, the same thing already happens in other industries: if I pay someone $500 to paint my house, and I come back and see they've diluted $5 worth of paint over the whole house and the color underneath is showing through, I can sue them for doing a shoddy job.
spend $15k on making the movie and keep the rest for yourself, and since you can't control how much you get in donations there can't be laws against this sort of thing...
There's nothing inherently wrong with spending $15,000 on a movie and pocketing several million, as long as you aren't defrauding anyone. The price you ask for your labor doesn't have to have any relation to the amount of time or money you spend. You just have to be able to convince people to pay you that much, and then you have to deliver what you promised.
Then they lack the right under Title 17, United States Code, section 1201, to decrypt the installer.
Is it actually encrypted? I'm not seeing any hits on Google about that.
There is always a steady thrum of discontent and complaining in the Mac community around upgrade time - except for this last one - because Apple don't differentiate between an upgrade and a fresh install, it's just one fixed price.
Perhaps if they were a software company, they'd do what Microsoft does and distinguish between upgrades and full installs.
Over a typical 5 year life cycle for your average Mac - with 4 successive OS X upgrades - that would be $1536-$2560 extra cost. I promise you that there would be uproar.
I don't know about that. Mac users love spending money, don't they? They're already paying $2500 or more for a desktop tower because of the gaping hole in Apple's lineup. If they could get a tower that met their needs for $1000 instead, that would leave $1500 to spend on software.
What you're suggesting is that Apple should basically abandon their hardware business and just charge more for OSX to make up for the loss in profits. I guess that's a valid idea, and in the same way, I could advise Microsoft to get out of the operating system business and focus more on the Zune.
That might even make sense if the Zune were as popular as OS X, and if people were dying for a way to use their Zunes with non-Windows operating systems, the way people are dying for a way to run OS X on non-Apple hardware.
It's not clear to me why they should abandon an existing and successful business model in favor of one that's pretty speculative and has failed in the past.
But the thing is, the reason why it failed in the past is obvious. They made a very basic mistake: they took the thing that made their hardware popular, and sold it separately at a price that resulted in much less profit than they were getting when it was bundled with the hardware. Solution: raise the price.
If they charged a large enough amount to make OSX profitable on its own, how well would it even compete with Windows?
People are already paying that much for the OS X experience today. The only difference is they'd be able to get that experience on more hardware, including stuff like netbooks and sub-$2500 towers that Apple has refused to offer.
And then they have to worry about piracy, and unfortunately they'd probably start treating their customers like criminals. Why should that be appealing to them?
They already do that. See the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Apple and OSx86, and the lawsuit against Psystar. Their war against running OS X on non-Apple hardware isn't much different from a war against pirates.
The letter of the law does not, case precedent does.
Do you have a citation?
It's a bit more complex than that since it specifies who can make changes to it for compatibility and it is questionable if Pystar meets those criteria.
As far as I can tell, this comes down to whether the software is owned by the end user at the time the adaptation is made. Section 117 doesn't put any restrictions on who may make the adaptation, but it does say you can't transfer the adaptation to another owner without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright law explicitly allows them to make a copy into RAM if that copy is based on a non-infringing one, but it does not allow them to make a copy to the hard disk, and a subsequent load of a modified one into RAM is the argument, Apple is making.
The law doesn't make any distinction between RAM and hard disks. It allows the owner to make a copy or adaptation as long as it's "created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine" and used in no other manner.
The copy in RAM obviously meets those criteria, since the CPU can only run code that's in memory. So the question is, is copying an OS to the hard drive an "essential step" in using it? I'd say so, since all you can do by booting off the disc is run the installer; the majority of the programs on that disc can't be used without installing the OS first.
The group of people who would pay a high price for OS X will just buy a Mac. They're not going to waste their time building a machine and then putting OS X on it.
That's true, but they might still prefer to buy a Mac clone with a licensed, pre-installed copy of OS X.
They make a tidy profit on the hardware component of each Mac they sell. To compensate for that loss of revenue they would have to set a very high OEM price: maybe 3-5 times. They couldn't do that for the OS X retail version, there would be a riot.
Why do you say that? People already happily pay those high margins to own a Mac, and a large part of the Mac experience is OS X. I don't think they'd have a hard time getting people to pay high prices for OS X.
I think it is fairly established opinion on /. that basic science research is worth the money, but that corporations will not fund it at a sufficient level
I'm not talking about basic science research, I'm talking about the same research that goes on today, driven by consumer demand. The only difference is those consumers (or groups representing them, etc.) would be paying directly for research instead of bundling the research costs together with the manufacturing costs.
so government-funded research is necessary.
If that's the case, well, what's wrong with that? As long as research is being done and researchers are being paid for it, that seems fine to me. And the advantage is that drugs will be cheaper due to competition among manufacturers.
I understand it is a nice ideal, but I don't get all of these people saying industries need a new business model without suggesting one.
Here's my suggested business model for music:
Start up a web site that connects artists with potential funders. Lay it out sort of like a social networking site (or Sellaband), with a focus on making it easy for users to discover artists they like. Then let the artists describe the projects they want to work on and the amount they want to charge. Give each artist's page an eye-catching thermometer graph so everyone can see how close they are to meeting their goal. Once the goal is met, the artist begins work and eventually releases the album for free; if he fails to keep up his end of the deal, he doesn't get paid (this may require voting or arbitration if the work is completed but the funders believe it doesn't meet the standards they were promised).
Unfortunately, it's hard for a model like this to take off when copyright is still around, because artists are drawn to the copyright lottery the same way gamblers are drawn to the real lottery. They'd rather take a chance at winning big than get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.
Apple learned it's lesson in the 90's when it licensed MacOS. While the hope was that the licensees would expand MacOS market share, it instead only whittled away at Apple's own market share. I was an example myself - I have a PowerComputing system lying around somewhere - and it was a sale that would have gone to Apple were they not in existence.
So, in other words, Apple wasn't charging enough for MacOS licenses, and they guessed wrong about how willing customers would be to keep buying Apple branded hardware.
Why does this doom future OS licensing? Why can't they just charge enough for the OS X license so that they'll stay profitable if it turns out people only want the software?
Unless you disagree with patents, I don't get the logic that just because you can copy mp3s easily it means the music industry needs to stop selling them. Otherwise you should argue big pharma should never sue generics that start selling before the patents are up- but we all know that would make medicine more costly as R+D earns less of a payoff.
Well, I do disagree with patents. They were originally beneficial for convincing inventors to share the details of their inventions, but these days it seems they do more to stifle innovation than to encourage it, because so many patents are granted for obvious things that really don't need any explanation. Patents have morphed from something used to safely share knowledge to something used to stake a claim on a process and extract rents.
I also disagree that separating research from manufacturing would drive costs up. I believe it would make medicine less costly, since there would be more competition in manufacturing.
Just because media is all "R+D" and almost zero manufacturing does not mean it should cost nothing.
The mistake you're making is assuming that R&D and manufacturing/distribution have to be (1) done by the same company and (2) paid for at the same time, by the same people.
I see them as two separate endeavors. I'm no good at recording songs, but I am pretty good at burning CDs. Why shouldn't I be able to compete in the business of burning CDs, and leave the business of recording songs up to someone else? Likewise, if I think I can do a better job of manufacturing Viagra than Pfizer, why shouldn't I be able to compete in that business, and let them stick to research? If that research is valuable, then people will be willing to pay for it even if they aren't getting pills in return.
Right. The copy of OS X on the disc. That's not much good without the right to actually run the the software. That is dictated by the terms of the license.
Sigh.
There is no such thing as a "right to actually run the software". Copyright doesn't restrict whether or not your CPU is allowed to interpret a program, just like it doesn't restrict whether or not you're allowed to read a book you buy.
The only impact copyright has on running software is that running software usually requires making intermediate copies (in RAM and on disk). However, 17 USC 117 explicitly allows you to make those copies as long as you own the original.
You don't have any rights under 17 USC 117, unless you are already authorized to run the software.
Again, there is no such requirement. You're making this up and ignoring the text of the law. Read it again: it applies to "the owner of a copy of a computer program". You become the owner of a copy as soon as you buy it.
When making money from movies becomes difficult if not impossible, they'll just stop making them.
Luckily, piracy doesn't make it impossible to make money from movies. At worst, it only makes it impossible to make money by selling copies of movies that have already been made.