I'm afraid I'm going to have to object to this. File transfer and human speech are distinct operations in my book. I suspect most people would agree.
I suspect they wouldn't. If I can tell you something in person or on the phone, but I can't tell it to you over the internet, I think most people would quite rightly consider that a restriction of freedom of speech (or at least freedom of press).
I think there are two different issues here... one, you don't own copyright to a news clip, so you probably don't actually have the right to post it to YouTube.
If my use of it counts as fair use, e.g. if I'm critiquing their coverage, then I certainly do have the right to share it. And yet bloggers are still faced with takedown notices for obvious instances of fair use. HorsesAss.org just had to deal with something like this, where they posted a short clip from TVW (basically a statewide C-SPAN) and ended up having to host it themselves because TVW complained to YouTube.
If you're going to start considering everything that people want to do but aren't allowed to as a "negative effect" then I'm sure you'll find many examples. I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to obey speed limits. We as a society have decided that these things are important for the common good.
Yes, those are negative effects, and it's important that they be balanced out by sufficient positives. The negatives of copyright, however, are not, and there's little evidence that copyright really is important for the common good. The ability of moneyed interests to influence legislation is not proof that the legislation is good for society.
In addition, it's unclear that without copyright laws, the copyrighted content that the people want to share would even exist. Do you think Pixar would spend fifty million dollars creating their next movie if they couldn't charge licensing fees to make back their investment?
The landscape would indeed be different without copyright, but it's a fallacy to conclude that "different" means "worse".
Even if we agree that, say, Toy Story wouldn't have existed if not for copyright... what does that tell us? Who knows how many works we're missing out on because of copyright? I wouldn't mind giving up a handful of blockbusters if it meant gaining tens of thousands of additional lower-budget works.
Without the ability to peer into an alternate universe, we can't know for certain which works would or wouldn't exist in a world without copyright. We don't know whether we'd have access to more works or fewer, or if they'd be better or worse. We do, however, know that we'd all have more freedom without copyright, and that artists in general would still be able to earn a living.
"Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits."
Sound familiar? You can't throw it out there, then claim somebody else brought it in as a strawman.
Yes, I said that and I stand by it. The GP's silly scenarios about singing in the car and at birthday parties were, indeed, strawmen, because that wasn't the sort of thing I was referring to -- we all know no one has to worry about being arrested in their back yard for singing Happy Birthday.
Average folks do have to restrict what they say to each other, though. If I want to send you a copy of a song, but I can't because of copyright law, that's a restriction on my communications. If I want to explain to you how to decrypt a movie (or give you a program that does it), but I can't because of the DMCA, that's another one. (No pedantic hair-splitting over "communicate" vs. "say", please. Sending you a file over the internet is equivalent to calling you on the phone and reading a bunch of numbers; it's just more convenient.)
"Web hosts have to police their users' content"
Yeah, since when. Do you think Cmdr. Taco reads all the posts that go up on slashdot? That people at YouTube look at each new video?
You know they don't. They do take-downs when the actual copyright owners ask them to. So the owners of the content have to police the websites themselves.
YouTube may not have to look at each new video, but they do have to spend time responding to takedown notices and counter-notices, or developing and administering a system to handle them. You don't think those videos just magically disappear when someone complains, at no cost to anyone involved, do you?
The sites also become less useful as a result. If I want to share a news clip, maybe I'll choose to host it myself instead of putting it on YouTube, because I'm wary that someone portrayed in the clip might file a takedown notice, which will waste my time even if I manage to counter it. Or maybe I'll download a clip to watch later instead of just adding it to my YouTube favorites, because I know there's a chance that the clip won't be available next time I want to watch it. Presumably, YouTube wants people to use their site, so this is another negative from their perspective.
Yeah, well, that's really the whole point, isn't it. The end users have purchased a license to the content that lets them use the content. If someone else wants to use it, they need to buy a license.
Right. Like I said, that's one of the negative effects that copyright has on people other than the copyright holders: if they want to share something, but they're forbidden from doing so, that's hardly a good thing for them.
MS only hope is developer lock-in with.NET, to ensure that Windows has a future because of all the 3rd party software that is written for it means businesses cannot live without it, or cannot get the same software on Linux.
"Lock-in with.NET"? You realize it's an ECMA standard, right? You don't need Windows, or any other Microsoft products, to write and run.NET applications.
(Cue the usual FUD about how any day now, Microsoft is going to magically shut down the Mono project... somehow...)
they could both come out on top in the cat/mouse game and if challenged by a court might be cutting close enough to the line between what part of the transmission is required to be carried by a common carrier and what portion is guaranteed the burdens of protection inherint in the common carrier system.
ISPs aren't considered common carriers anyway, so this is moot.
There is a common opinion in slashdot that EULAs are bullshit, and a common opinion that the GPL is not bullshit, and many here seem to hold both beliefs at once.
Why is one more valid than the other?
The GPL grants you additional rights, which you don't have by default, in exchange for agreeing to its terms. Normally, you have no right to redistribute someone else's copyrighted software; the GPL grants you a license to distribute it, as long as you also include the source code, a copy of the license, etc.
On the other hand, an EULA attempts to take away rights that you already have by default. You don't need permission to install and run a piece of software that you bought, or to make backups: you have those rights by default (see 17 USC 117). An EULA that says "you can install and run this software as long as ___" is trying to offer you a right you already have in exchange for agreeing to terms you don't want.
Since an established conglomerate could offer lower prices for the same services, the free market would push out of the market smaller developers. That's not a good thing.
What's so bad about it? If the same service is getting done, at a lower cost, that seems like a pretty good thing.
This is almost the same argument people make against big box retailers, except in those cases, they can at least point to the differences between Best Buy and Pop's Corner Electronics Store: big boxes might have poorly-informed staff, inflexible policies, shallow selections, etc.
In this case, though, you're positing that the conglomerates are providing the same service -- writing the same software and fulfilling the same needs -- but at a lower cost. That sounds like progress to me.
And if the conglomerates ever stop offering competitive prices, or fail to fulfill some consumers' needs (which they surely will, since no company can write all the world's software), that opens up a niche for smaller developers to move into. In that respect, it's much healthier competition than in retail, since you don't need a storefront and millions of dollars of inventory to move into that niche: all you need is a computer and some knowledge.
This trick has been around for a while, hasn't it?
The problem is, you can only filter out the RST packets on your end of the connection. But Sandvine also sends RSTs to the other end of the connection. That means it isn't enough for you to be running this iptables rule - all the peers you connect to have to be running it too.
The idea that the consumer is going to pull-aggregate ahead of time is nonsensical. Can you even point to one industry where this happens, where a huge group of consumers gets together and says "we will pay $X now for this widespread consumer product to be brought to market"?
If you want an example of consumers pooling their money to pay someone to perform a service, look at private road paving and other neighborhood works. If you want an example of thousands or millions of people pooling their money to reach the kind of figures needed to fund high-quality software development, look at political campaigns. If you want an example of many people paying for the production of artistic works, look at Sellaband.
If you want an example of exactly what I'm proposing, sorry, it doesn't exist yet. That doesn't mean, however, that it's impossible or impractical. It just means that in the past, the cost of finding an audience and conducting transactions has been too high (although that's no longer true in the era of social networking sites and one-click payments), and no one has bothered because copyright provides a workable alternative (at the expense of everyone else's freedom, of course, but who cares about that when there's a quick buck to be made?).
It doesn't work that way. The reason people are willing to pay that much in aggregate is because they aren't taking a risk on it. They can buy it right then. It already exists. It's a product that they can pull right off the shelf or order off the Internet.
And yet people "take a risk" on other services all the time. You seem to think software development is a magical service that's different from everything else people pay each other to do, but you haven't come up with an explanation for why that might be.
You are attempting to use those who create physical objects as a blueprint for an industry that creates information instead. It does not fit the situation.
Er, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
Copyright advocates are the ones attempting to use physical objects as a blueprint for information. And you're right, that doesn't fit the situation, because information is not subject to any of the limitations that physical objects are, and so any attempt to fit it into the "property" model of ownership and control is doomed from the start.
What I'm doing is using other services as a blueprint for the act of writing software. That fits the situation quite well: writing software is an application of labor, just like cutting hair, painting houses, balancing accounts, or any of the other thousands of services that people get paid to do every day.
Chest-thumping about 'nobody controls MY car but ME' is a bit silly; authorities already have control over how fast I go in my car, where I can go, I have to have registration, insurance, and cops can pull me over at a whim and detain me.
There's a huge difference between legal control ("if you exceed the speed limit, and we catch you doing it, you'll be fined") and technical control ("your car will refuse to move faster than the speed limit").
All the controls you mentioned are legal ones, but the new one you're lumping in with them is a technical one.
It's the same as why so many people are more concerned by DRM than by copyright laws (even when the DRM simply enforces copyright). One of them lets you use your own judgment, decide for yourself whether the benefit is worth the risk, and deal with corner cases where breaking the law is better than the alternatives. The other takes that choice away from you.
Why not just let kids buy cigarettes? It's their own health at risk. If they want to smoke, they're going to do it anyway: age-restricted prohibition doesn't really work any better than general prohibition.
the consumer has to hope he can find a bunch of like-minded people willing to pay enough money to get software written (given how much software actually costs to get written, the likelihood of this is slim).
Not at all. People are clearly willing to pay that much in aggregate for software development already. The demand exists, and it isn't going away.
If the end product delivered sucks, the group of users have wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a developer.
And if the new addition to your house sucks, you've wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a contractor. Somehow, this hasn't undermined the market for construction work.
And you have not given one single reason why your business model would work for consumable software (games, Microsoft Office in the home, whatever). Nobody is going to pay.
Of course they are. If they want software written, and the only way to get that done is to pay for it, what do you think they're going to do instead?
Large developers would have to charge huge amounts of money up-front in order to cover expenses for work done, more than any of your magical aggregate "groups" will ever fork over.
What makes you think that? People are clearly willing to spend that much money already. The demand exists.
Small developers don't have name recognition, and so nobody will come to them to pay them to make software in their field
So they'll go to the customers instead. You can't expect to just sit on your ass at home and have people knock on your door with briefcases full of cash.
It'd also entirely fuck over content creators like novelists--no publisher would ever be able to effectively sell books to the majority of readers, "special editions" aside, and the idea that an advance could be provided to an author under such a business model. So not only do you lose quantity, you lose quality due to a lack of professional writers! Brilliant!
Er... WTF? Why would it be impossible to sell books, and how is an "advance" even relevant? An advance is a loan against future royalties; it has no place in a business model that isn't based on royalties.
Something tells me you don't understand how the current business model actually works, to be honest.
I'm sorry you got that impression, but I assure you it's wrong.
Those small companies are the same ones that would be unable to manage contracts in your business model due to a lack of name recognition--but they're able to sell Some Sleeper Hit Game without problem.
Are they really? For every company who manages to do that, don't you think there are a handful of others who invest all that time and money into making a game they think will be a Sleeper Hit -- and then it turns out to be a flop?
Getting paid for production means you're guaranteed to make money if you do the work. The copyright-based business model, on the other hand, is a crap shoot.
Horrible, horrible proposition, built on the terribly foolish idea that copyright is "bad." I suppose the idea makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that creators deserve rights over their creations
And I suppose copyright makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that people deserve the right to communicate freely and to use their own property as they see fit. But given the choice between preserving free speech and making it slightly easier to earn a quick buck, I think I'll choose free speech.
Take Joe Blow, an indie games developer. Just a one-man developer. Who the hell is going to come to him and pay him to make a computer game for them? What standing does he have? The answer is "absolutely nothing."
He can promote his services in the same places as anyone else would. If he has no "standing", then he can make his services more attractive by charging a lower rate until he builds more name recognition.
Really, this isn't anything unique to software development. Anyone who starts up any kind of service-based business has to deal with the same thing.
Sure, he could release a bunch of games for free, but the whole "needing to eat" thing breaks that down.
Or he could release just one. Maybe even a short one. Look at how Doom was marketed: you get the first episode for free, and this convinces you to buy the rest of them. It'd work equally well to convince people to fund the production of the remaining episodes.
Again, this isn't unique to software development. Artists do the same thing, building up a portfolio which they can show to potential customers, in order to convince those customers that their future work will be of the same high quality as their past work.
So, the model you propose may work in some industries (mostly industries that can't scale cost-efficiently) but not if the alternative potentially leads to profits that are an order of magnitude or two bigger.
One case is the mass-market software. In economic theory, this is the transaction overhead cost (is that the right term); you can afford it if you have five big customers. You can't afford it if you have five million small customers.
Well, you might not want to deal with five million individual transactions by yourself, but you can contract that out to someone else. Software companies do essentially the same thing already, by selling copies in quantity to distributors and retailers.
This also happens in the real world: the wii, the iphone, the thinkpads; they might be made with one or more particular market segments in mind, but no agreements with the buyers before they were made, which is of real benefit both to the buyers and the sellers.
How does the seller benefit by not knowing who's going to pay him?
That's definitely an interesting idea, I'll grant you that. I still think you'd have creating anything other than small films via this method, but I would be very interested to see someone try this concept.
Sellaband.com is doing something similar with music, although their business model is still a bit different from what I have in mind.
Specifically, they get fans to contribute whatever they feel like contributing (in increments of $10), toward a goal of $50,000. Once the band reaches that goal, the money is used to hire a recording studio and produce an album. Copies of the album are then sent to everyone who contributed, and sold through the web site, with three tracks available for free; some fraction of the revenue goes to the people who contributed to the production.
What I'd do is let artists set their own goal and keep the money for themselves: if someone wants to ask the users to pay him $2500 to produce a single track in his basement with a laptop and an acoustic guitar, more power to him. That would allow artists to get their profit up front instead of selling copies.
However, I also don't see how someone torrenting a complete copy of a movie over the internet is a freedom of speech issue, any more than someone selling stolen property at a pawn shop qualifies under freedom of expression.
Er.. because communicating over the internet is speech, but hauling property around isn't. If you tell me I can't say a certain string of bits, because it encodes a copy of your movie and anyone who hears me would be able to watch the movie without your permission, then you're restricting my speech.
Maybe it's easier if we consider books. If I have a book, I can use my freedom of speech to tell you certain facts about it: the cover is blue and has the words "Moby Dick by Herman Melville" written on it. There's a sticker in the corner saying "20% off". The story is about a man's quest to hunt a whale.
But, if it were still under copyright, I'd be forbidden to tell you certain other facts about it. I could probably get away with saying "the first word printed on page 1, beneath the chapter heading, is 'call'", and "the next word is 'me'", and "the word after that is 'Ishmael'"... but keep that up for long enough and I'd be breaking the law, even though these are factual statements just like the ones above. Copyright makes it illegal to describe your own property in detail to another person.
With regard to your equipment and media use not being my business, the contents of your truck aren't any of my business, unless you've parked it in my driveway and are loading it up with my property, in which case yes, it is.
Well, exactly. Copying isn't like parking a truck in your driveway and loading up your property. You don't lose anything, you're not involved in the act, you can't watch it happening, and you can't tell whether or not it's already happened even if you suspect it has. After someone copies your movie, you're no poorer than you were before.
Property is subject to ownership because it can only be in one place at a time; someone has to decide how it'll be used at any given time, because some uses conflict with others. Information, however, can be everywhere, and it's impossible for one person's use to conflict with anyone else's.
Uh, why would anyone go to a theater, as they have this work freely available all over the internet, on disk, everywhere.
A lot of people still prefer the theater experience, watching a movie on a big screen with 200 other people and gut-shaking surround sound, instead of in their living room on a 10 year old CRT with tinny speakers.
On the other hand, many people would rather watch movies at home. It's up to theater owners to provide more than what people can get at home if they want to stay in business. Some theaters offer loveseats, serve dinner and wine, etc.
How would you suggest I recoup my expenses from making a very expensive movie?
Don't incur those expenses in the first place until you've found people who are willing to pay you to make the movie.
Similarly, if you're a commercial road paver, you'll be better off going around to the people who live on the road before you pave it and getting them to agree to pay for the work and materials, rather than paving it at your own expense and then trying to sell the paved road to them after the fact.
The advantage to you is a guaranteed income: you'll know, before you even set foot on the movie set, exactly how much profit you'll see when the work is done. You won't have to worry about piracy, because you will have been paid already by the time anyone sees the movie. And although it requires a little more work up front to do market research, find customers, and so on, that's already the norm in nearly every other industry (like paving roads).
Who exactly is going to come up with the money to contract a film crew, and actors, to make a movie?
Anyone who thinks they'll benefit from the release of that movie: probably some combination of people looking for entertainment, venue owners looking for something to bring people into their theaters, video equipment manufacturers looking for content that people will want to watch, etc.
I don't have anywhere near the resources to contact all potential movie fans who might want to contribute. I could probably only contact a hundred people, tops, even using the internet (I'm just a nobody, why should anybody get onboard with my movie?).
Connecting filmmakers and audiences is a niche that middlemen can fill fairly easily. Imagine a web site where you can see each artist's past works and new proposals, contribute money, and get recommendations from other fans.
What incentive do any of these people have to help pay for this movie, when they all know that if they sit back and let someone else pay for it, they can get it for free?
If everyone sits back and lets someone else pay for it, then no one will pay, and the movie will never get made -- and everyone knows that.
Their incentive to pay is the same as their desire to see the movie completed. The people who end up paying will most likely be the people who care the most about the movie or benefit the most from its existence.
If I do somehow get thousands of potential donors to pay for my movie, what do I do if they want input into the production process in exchange for their money? How will I reconcile disputes concerning thousands of stakeholders?
That's up to you.
If those customers are coming to you through a middleman, you can probably negotiate with the middleman instead of dealing with thousands of individual customers, and let him worry about counting their votes or whatever. But in any case, you aren't any more obligated to cater to them than anyone else who provides a service. If they want something you're not willing to provide, tell them to take their money elsewhere.
Hmm. What I could do is poney up the million dollars for the movie, and then retain the rights to it for myself.
Funny. But when you say "retain the rights to [this movie]", what that really means is "demand the right to veto everyone else's communications and actions in order to stop them from showing the movie to anyone without my permission".
And that's where I object: what I say to other people over my phone line and internet connection, or burn onto discs and give away, is my business -- not yours. It's awfully presumptuous to think you can just limit my speech for your own benefit, and tell me what I can or can't do with the equipment and media I own, just to make your business run a little smoother. I'm not your employee.
If you can come up with a way to make this business model work without taking rights away from everyone else, then you'll have something worth trying.
Sure, HE gets paid a salary based on the service (programming) he provides. But the way the company he works for gets the money that pays his salary is by selling copies of the software he wrote.
Right - in other words, the company he works for has chosen a copyright-based business model. They've decided to use their own money to pay their employees to write code, and then (hopefully) make it back later by selling individual copies of that code.
But they didn't need to choose that business model. Instead, they could've chosen a service-based model, where they offer to write software for a certain price, instead of selling copies of software that's already been written.
This model involves more coordination between buyers and sellers, because the dollar amounts are much bigger and so you're unlikely to get all the money from a single customer: instead of selling one CD-ROM for $50 to one person, you might sell several months of labor for $100,000 to a group of people pooling their money. But it has advantages. The developers get a guaranteed income without having to worry about piracy or unenforceable copyright laws; the end users get to use and distribute the software for free once it's written.
If the software is written well enough/not complex enough* that it doesn't need support once it's in the customer's hands, how is the company he works for supposed to make the money they need to pay him a salary?
I'm not talking about selling support. That's one additional way for a company to make money from software, but they can still make money just by writing the software in the first place.
Oh please. Most people are not effected by copyright law in the slightest. Sure, someday black helicopters might swoop down every time someone sings "Happy Birthday" at their backyard birthday party, but I personally doubt it. Until that time, please check the histrionics at the door.
I did, they're right there next to your strawman-- oh wait, you brought the strawman in with you.
I gave you three examples of how copyright affects people other than the copyright holders: service providers who have to enforce copyright complaints against their customers (e.g. YouTube taking down videos), manufacturers who have to restrict what their products can do (e.g. DVRs that can't record/transfer certain shows and HDTVs that need to support ridiculous encryption schemes), and end users who are prohibited from sharing content with other people (including public exhibition of something they've purchased).
You responded with silly scenarios about backyard parties and singing in the car. Not only does that fail to address my comment, but it also suggests that you think copyright is all right because it's poorly enforced. I hope I don't have to explain to you what an awful idea it is to have a bunch of laws on the books that are unenforceable or selectively enforced, especially with penalties like these!
There's no market for labor unless someone is willing to pay for it. If anyone who wanted to could enjoy the fruit of my labor for free, who has incentive to pay me?
Why would you perform the labor for free in the first place?
The point of charging for your labor is that people can't enjoy the fruits of labor you haven't performed yet. They can't use your software before you've written it, and you don't have to write it for free. So if someone wants that software, they have to pay you to write it first.
Who, pray tell, do I charge for my labor?
Whoever is willing to pay, i.e. whoever benefits from you having done the labor. That probably means some combination of end users (who benefit from having new software available) and system integrators (who can use your software to make their products more attractive). You wouldn't have just one customer, unless someone were willing to pay your entire asking price out of their own pocket.
I love that passionate, interested people have built things in their spare time that rival what larger behemoth companies couldn't do. But without for-profit software companies, a majority of the labor behind FOSS would be unemployed, and have more pressing concerns than creating new Firefox plugins.
I'm not suggesting that software would only have to be made in people's spare time. You can write software for profit even without copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I'm going to have to object to this. File transfer and human speech are distinct operations in my book. I suspect most people would agree.
I suspect they wouldn't. If I can tell you something in person or on the phone, but I can't tell it to you over the internet, I think most people would quite rightly consider that a restriction of freedom of speech (or at least freedom of press).
I think there are two different issues here... one, you don't own copyright to a news clip, so you probably don't actually have the right to post it to YouTube.
If my use of it counts as fair use, e.g. if I'm critiquing their coverage, then I certainly do have the right to share it. And yet bloggers are still faced with takedown notices for obvious instances of fair use. HorsesAss.org just had to deal with something like this, where they posted a short clip from TVW (basically a statewide C-SPAN) and ended up having to host it themselves because TVW complained to YouTube.
If you're going to start considering everything that people want to do but aren't allowed to as a "negative effect" then I'm sure you'll find many examples. I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to obey speed limits. We as a society have decided that these things are important for the common good.
Yes, those are negative effects, and it's important that they be balanced out by sufficient positives. The negatives of copyright, however, are not, and there's little evidence that copyright really is important for the common good. The ability of moneyed interests to influence legislation is not proof that the legislation is good for society.
In addition, it's unclear that without copyright laws, the copyrighted content that the people want to share would even exist. Do you think Pixar would spend fifty million dollars creating their next movie if they couldn't charge licensing fees to make back their investment?
The landscape would indeed be different without copyright, but it's a fallacy to conclude that "different" means "worse".
Even if we agree that, say, Toy Story wouldn't have existed if not for copyright... what does that tell us? Who knows how many works we're missing out on because of copyright? I wouldn't mind giving up a handful of blockbusters if it meant gaining tens of thousands of additional lower-budget works.
Without the ability to peer into an alternate universe, we can't know for certain which works would or wouldn't exist in a world without copyright. We don't know whether we'd have access to more works or fewer, or if they'd be better or worse. We do, however, know that we'd all have more freedom without copyright, and that artists in general would still be able to earn a living.
"Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits."
Sound familiar? You can't throw it out there, then claim somebody else brought it in as a strawman.
Yes, I said that and I stand by it. The GP's silly scenarios about singing in the car and at birthday parties were, indeed, strawmen, because that wasn't the sort of thing I was referring to -- we all know no one has to worry about being arrested in their back yard for singing Happy Birthday.
Average folks do have to restrict what they say to each other, though. If I want to send you a copy of a song, but I can't because of copyright law, that's a restriction on my communications. If I want to explain to you how to decrypt a movie (or give you a program that does it), but I can't because of the DMCA, that's another one. (No pedantic hair-splitting over "communicate" vs. "say", please. Sending you a file over the internet is equivalent to calling you on the phone and reading a bunch of numbers; it's just more convenient.)
"Web hosts have to police their users' content"
Yeah, since when. Do you think Cmdr. Taco reads all the posts that go up on slashdot? That people at YouTube look at each new video?
You know they don't. They do take-downs when the actual copyright owners ask them to. So the owners of the content have to police the websites themselves.
YouTube may not have to look at each new video, but they do have to spend time responding to takedown notices and counter-notices, or developing and administering a system to handle them. You don't think those videos just magically disappear when someone complains, at no cost to anyone involved, do you?
The sites also become less useful as a result. If I want to share a news clip, maybe I'll choose to host it myself instead of putting it on YouTube, because I'm wary that someone portrayed in the clip might file a takedown notice, which will waste my time even if I manage to counter it. Or maybe I'll download a clip to watch later instead of just adding it to my YouTube favorites, because I know there's a chance that the clip won't be available next time I want to watch it. Presumably, YouTube wants people to use their site, so this is another negative from their perspective.
Yeah, well, that's really the whole point, isn't it. The end users have purchased a license to the content that lets them use the content. If someone else wants to use it, they need to buy a license.
Right. Like I said, that's one of the negative effects that copyright has on people other than the copyright holders: if they want to share something, but they're forbidden from doing so, that's hardly a good thing for them.
MS only hope is developer lock-in with .NET, to ensure that Windows has a future because of all the 3rd party software that is written for it means businesses cannot live without it, or cannot get the same software on Linux.
"Lock-in with .NET"? You realize it's an ECMA standard, right? You don't need Windows, or any other Microsoft products, to write and run .NET applications.
(Cue the usual FUD about how any day now, Microsoft is going to magically shut down the Mono project... somehow...)
they could both come out on top in the cat/mouse game and if challenged by a court might be cutting close enough to the line between what part of the transmission is required to be carried by a common carrier and what portion is guaranteed the burdens of protection inherint in the common carrier system.
ISPs aren't considered common carriers anyway, so this is moot.
There is a common opinion in slashdot that EULAs are bullshit, and a common opinion that the GPL is not bullshit, and many here seem to hold both beliefs at once.
Why is one more valid than the other?
The GPL grants you additional rights, which you don't have by default, in exchange for agreeing to its terms. Normally, you have no right to redistribute someone else's copyrighted software; the GPL grants you a license to distribute it, as long as you also include the source code, a copy of the license, etc.
On the other hand, an EULA attempts to take away rights that you already have by default. You don't need permission to install and run a piece of software that you bought, or to make backups: you have those rights by default (see 17 USC 117). An EULA that says "you can install and run this software as long as ___" is trying to offer you a right you already have in exchange for agreeing to terms you don't want.
I/O redirection uses the same syntax as on Unix.
Since an established conglomerate could offer lower prices for the same services, the free market would push out of the market smaller developers. That's not a good thing.
What's so bad about it? If the same service is getting done, at a lower cost, that seems like a pretty good thing.
This is almost the same argument people make against big box retailers, except in those cases, they can at least point to the differences between Best Buy and Pop's Corner Electronics Store: big boxes might have poorly-informed staff, inflexible policies, shallow selections, etc.
In this case, though, you're positing that the conglomerates are providing the same service -- writing the same software and fulfilling the same needs -- but at a lower cost. That sounds like progress to me.
And if the conglomerates ever stop offering competitive prices, or fail to fulfill some consumers' needs (which they surely will, since no company can write all the world's software), that opens up a niche for smaller developers to move into. In that respect, it's much healthier competition than in retail, since you don't need a storefront and millions of dollars of inventory to move into that niche: all you need is a computer and some knowledge.
This trick has been around for a while, hasn't it?
The problem is, you can only filter out the RST packets on your end of the connection. But Sandvine also sends RSTs to the other end of the connection. That means it isn't enough for you to be running this iptables rule - all the peers you connect to have to be running it too.
The idea that the consumer is going to pull-aggregate ahead of time is nonsensical. Can you even point to one industry where this happens, where a huge group of consumers gets together and says "we will pay $X now for this widespread consumer product to be brought to market"?
If you want an example of consumers pooling their money to pay someone to perform a service, look at private road paving and other neighborhood works. If you want an example of thousands or millions of people pooling their money to reach the kind of figures needed to fund high-quality software development, look at political campaigns. If you want an example of many people paying for the production of artistic works, look at Sellaband.
If you want an example of exactly what I'm proposing, sorry, it doesn't exist yet. That doesn't mean, however, that it's impossible or impractical. It just means that in the past, the cost of finding an audience and conducting transactions has been too high (although that's no longer true in the era of social networking sites and one-click payments), and no one has bothered because copyright provides a workable alternative (at the expense of everyone else's freedom, of course, but who cares about that when there's a quick buck to be made?).
It doesn't work that way. The reason people are willing to pay that much in aggregate is because they aren't taking a risk on it. They can buy it right then. It already exists. It's a product that they can pull right off the shelf or order off the Internet.
And yet people "take a risk" on other services all the time. You seem to think software development is a magical service that's different from everything else people pay each other to do, but you haven't come up with an explanation for why that might be.
You are attempting to use those who create physical objects as a blueprint for an industry that creates information instead. It does not fit the situation.
Er, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
Copyright advocates are the ones attempting to use physical objects as a blueprint for information. And you're right, that doesn't fit the situation, because information is not subject to any of the limitations that physical objects are, and so any attempt to fit it into the "property" model of ownership and control is doomed from the start.
What I'm doing is using other services as a blueprint for the act of writing software. That fits the situation quite well: writing software is an application of labor, just like cutting hair, painting houses, balancing accounts, or any of the other thousands of services that people get paid to do every day.
Chest-thumping about 'nobody controls MY car but ME' is a bit silly; authorities already have control over how fast I go in my car, where I can go, I have to have registration, insurance, and cops can pull me over at a whim and detain me.
There's a huge difference between legal control ("if you exceed the speed limit, and we catch you doing it, you'll be fined") and technical control ("your car will refuse to move faster than the speed limit").
All the controls you mentioned are legal ones, but the new one you're lumping in with them is a technical one.
It's the same as why so many people are more concerned by DRM than by copyright laws (even when the DRM simply enforces copyright). One of them lets you use your own judgment, decide for yourself whether the benefit is worth the risk, and deal with corner cases where breaking the law is better than the alternatives. The other takes that choice away from you.
Wow, they changed it quite a bit for the release version!
Why not just let kids buy cigarettes? It's their own health at risk. If they want to smoke, they're going to do it anyway: age-restricted prohibition doesn't really work any better than general prohibition.
Do you need to be over 18 to get a debit card? Here in the US, I didn't have any trouble opening an account before then.
the consumer has to hope he can find a bunch of like-minded people willing to pay enough money to get software written (given how much software actually costs to get written, the likelihood of this is slim).
Not at all. People are clearly willing to pay that much in aggregate for software development already. The demand exists, and it isn't going away.
If the end product delivered sucks, the group of users have wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a developer.
And if the new addition to your house sucks, you've wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a contractor. Somehow, this hasn't undermined the market for construction work.
And you have not given one single reason why your business model would work for consumable software (games, Microsoft Office in the home, whatever). Nobody is going to pay.
Of course they are. If they want software written, and the only way to get that done is to pay for it, what do you think they're going to do instead?
Large developers would have to charge huge amounts of money up-front in order to cover expenses for work done, more than any of your magical aggregate "groups" will ever fork over.
What makes you think that? People are clearly willing to spend that much money already. The demand exists.
Small developers don't have name recognition, and so nobody will come to them to pay them to make software in their field
So they'll go to the customers instead. You can't expect to just sit on your ass at home and have people knock on your door with briefcases full of cash.
It'd also entirely fuck over content creators like novelists--no publisher would ever be able to effectively sell books to the majority of readers, "special editions" aside, and the idea that an advance could be provided to an author under such a business model. So not only do you lose quantity, you lose quality due to a lack of professional writers! Brilliant!
Er... WTF? Why would it be impossible to sell books, and how is an "advance" even relevant? An advance is a loan against future royalties; it has no place in a business model that isn't based on royalties.
Something tells me you don't understand how the current business model actually works, to be honest.
I'm sorry you got that impression, but I assure you it's wrong.
Those small companies are the same ones that would be unable to manage contracts in your business model due to a lack of name recognition--but they're able to sell Some Sleeper Hit Game without problem.
Are they really? For every company who manages to do that, don't you think there are a handful of others who invest all that time and money into making a game they think will be a Sleeper Hit -- and then it turns out to be a flop?
Getting paid for production means you're guaranteed to make money if you do the work. The copyright-based business model, on the other hand, is a crap shoot.
Horrible, horrible proposition, built on the terribly foolish idea that copyright is "bad." I suppose the idea makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that creators deserve rights over their creations
And I suppose copyright makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that people deserve the right to communicate freely and to use their own property as they see fit. But given the choice between preserving free speech and making it slightly easier to earn a quick buck, I think I'll choose free speech.
Take Joe Blow, an indie games developer. Just a one-man developer. Who the hell is going to come to him and pay him to make a computer game for them? What standing does he have? The answer is "absolutely nothing."
He can promote his services in the same places as anyone else would. If he has no "standing", then he can make his services more attractive by charging a lower rate until he builds more name recognition.
Really, this isn't anything unique to software development. Anyone who starts up any kind of service-based business has to deal with the same thing.
Sure, he could release a bunch of games for free, but the whole "needing to eat" thing breaks that down.
Or he could release just one. Maybe even a short one. Look at how Doom was marketed: you get the first episode for free, and this convinces you to buy the rest of them. It'd work equally well to convince people to fund the production of the remaining episodes.
Again, this isn't unique to software development. Artists do the same thing, building up a portfolio which they can show to potential customers, in order to convince those customers that their future work will be of the same high quality as their past work.
So, the model you propose may work in some industries (mostly industries that can't scale cost-efficiently) but not if the alternative potentially leads to profits that are an order of magnitude or two bigger.
Well, we can solve that by abolishing copyright.
One case is the mass-market software. In economic theory, this is the transaction overhead cost (is that the right term); you can afford it if you have five big customers. You can't afford it if you have five million small customers.
Well, you might not want to deal with five million individual transactions by yourself, but you can contract that out to someone else. Software companies do essentially the same thing already, by selling copies in quantity to distributors and retailers.
This also happens in the real world: the wii, the iphone, the thinkpads; they might be made with one or more particular market segments in mind, but no agreements with the buyers before they were made, which is of real benefit both to the buyers and the sellers.
How does the seller benefit by not knowing who's going to pay him?
That's definitely an interesting idea, I'll grant you that. I still think you'd have creating anything other than small films via this method, but I would be very interested to see someone try this concept.
Sellaband.com is doing something similar with music, although their business model is still a bit different from what I have in mind.
Specifically, they get fans to contribute whatever they feel like contributing (in increments of $10), toward a goal of $50,000. Once the band reaches that goal, the money is used to hire a recording studio and produce an album. Copies of the album are then sent to everyone who contributed, and sold through the web site, with three tracks available for free; some fraction of the revenue goes to the people who contributed to the production.
What I'd do is let artists set their own goal and keep the money for themselves: if someone wants to ask the users to pay him $2500 to produce a single track in his basement with a laptop and an acoustic guitar, more power to him. That would allow artists to get their profit up front instead of selling copies.
However, I also don't see how someone torrenting a complete copy of a movie over the internet is a freedom of speech issue, any more than someone selling stolen property at a pawn shop qualifies under freedom of expression.
Er.. because communicating over the internet is speech, but hauling property around isn't. If you tell me I can't say a certain string of bits, because it encodes a copy of your movie and anyone who hears me would be able to watch the movie without your permission, then you're restricting my speech.
Maybe it's easier if we consider books. If I have a book, I can use my freedom of speech to tell you certain facts about it: the cover is blue and has the words "Moby Dick by Herman Melville" written on it. There's a sticker in the corner saying "20% off". The story is about a man's quest to hunt a whale.
But, if it were still under copyright, I'd be forbidden to tell you certain other facts about it. I could probably get away with saying "the first word printed on page 1, beneath the chapter heading, is 'call'", and "the next word is 'me'", and "the word after that is 'Ishmael'"... but keep that up for long enough and I'd be breaking the law, even though these are factual statements just like the ones above. Copyright makes it illegal to describe your own property in detail to another person.
With regard to your equipment and media use not being my business, the contents of your truck aren't any of my business, unless you've parked it in my driveway and are loading it up with my property, in which case yes, it is.
Well, exactly. Copying isn't like parking a truck in your driveway and loading up your property. You don't lose anything, you're not involved in the act, you can't watch it happening, and you can't tell whether or not it's already happened even if you suspect it has. After someone copies your movie, you're no poorer than you were before.
Property is subject to ownership because it can only be in one place at a time; someone has to decide how it'll be used at any given time, because some uses conflict with others. Information, however, can be everywhere, and it's impossible for one person's use to conflict with anyone else's.
Uh, why would anyone go to a theater, as they have this work freely available all over the internet, on disk, everywhere.
A lot of people still prefer the theater experience, watching a movie on a big screen with 200 other people and gut-shaking surround sound, instead of in their living room on a 10 year old CRT with tinny speakers.
On the other hand, many people would rather watch movies at home. It's up to theater owners to provide more than what people can get at home if they want to stay in business. Some theaters offer loveseats, serve dinner and wine, etc.
How would you suggest I recoup my expenses from making a very expensive movie?
Don't incur those expenses in the first place until you've found people who are willing to pay you to make the movie.
Similarly, if you're a commercial road paver, you'll be better off going around to the people who live on the road before you pave it and getting them to agree to pay for the work and materials, rather than paving it at your own expense and then trying to sell the paved road to them after the fact.
The advantage to you is a guaranteed income: you'll know, before you even set foot on the movie set, exactly how much profit you'll see when the work is done. You won't have to worry about piracy, because you will have been paid already by the time anyone sees the movie. And although it requires a little more work up front to do market research, find customers, and so on, that's already the norm in nearly every other industry (like paving roads).
Who exactly is going to come up with the money to contract a film crew, and actors, to make a movie?
Anyone who thinks they'll benefit from the release of that movie: probably some combination of people looking for entertainment, venue owners looking for something to bring people into their theaters, video equipment manufacturers looking for content that people will want to watch, etc.
I don't have anywhere near the resources to contact all potential movie fans who might want to contribute. I could probably only contact a hundred people, tops, even using the internet (I'm just a nobody, why should anybody get onboard with my movie?).
Connecting filmmakers and audiences is a niche that middlemen can fill fairly easily. Imagine a web site where you can see each artist's past works and new proposals, contribute money, and get recommendations from other fans.
What incentive do any of these people have to help pay for this movie, when they all know that if they sit back and let someone else pay for it, they can get it for free?
If everyone sits back and lets someone else pay for it, then no one will pay, and the movie will never get made -- and everyone knows that.
Their incentive to pay is the same as their desire to see the movie completed. The people who end up paying will most likely be the people who care the most about the movie or benefit the most from its existence.
If I do somehow get thousands of potential donors to pay for my movie, what do I do if they want input into the production process in exchange for their money? How will I reconcile disputes concerning thousands of stakeholders?
That's up to you.
If those customers are coming to you through a middleman, you can probably negotiate with the middleman instead of dealing with thousands of individual customers, and let him worry about counting their votes or whatever. But in any case, you aren't any more obligated to cater to them than anyone else who provides a service. If they want something you're not willing to provide, tell them to take their money elsewhere.
Hmm. What I could do is poney up the million dollars for the movie, and then retain the rights to it for myself.
Funny. But when you say "retain the rights to [this movie]", what that really means is "demand the right to veto everyone else's communications and actions in order to stop them from showing the movie to anyone without my permission".
And that's where I object: what I say to other people over my phone line and internet connection, or burn onto discs and give away, is my business -- not yours. It's awfully presumptuous to think you can just limit my speech for your own benefit, and tell me what I can or can't do with the equipment and media I own, just to make your business run a little smoother. I'm not your employee.
If you can come up with a way to make this business model work without taking rights away from everyone else, then you'll have something worth trying.
Sure, HE gets paid a salary based on the service (programming) he provides. But the way the company he works for gets the money that pays his salary is by selling copies of the software he wrote.
Right - in other words, the company he works for has chosen a copyright-based business model. They've decided to use their own money to pay their employees to write code, and then (hopefully) make it back later by selling individual copies of that code.
But they didn't need to choose that business model. Instead, they could've chosen a service-based model, where they offer to write software for a certain price, instead of selling copies of software that's already been written.
This model involves more coordination between buyers and sellers, because the dollar amounts are much bigger and so you're unlikely to get all the money from a single customer: instead of selling one CD-ROM for $50 to one person, you might sell several months of labor for $100,000 to a group of people pooling their money. But it has advantages. The developers get a guaranteed income without having to worry about piracy or unenforceable copyright laws; the end users get to use and distribute the software for free once it's written.
If the software is written well enough/not complex enough* that it doesn't need support once it's in the customer's hands, how is the company he works for supposed to make the money they need to pay him a salary?
I'm not talking about selling support. That's one additional way for a company to make money from software, but they can still make money just by writing the software in the first place.
Oh please. Most people are not effected by copyright law in the slightest. Sure, someday black helicopters might swoop down every time someone sings "Happy Birthday" at their backyard birthday party, but I personally doubt it. Until that time, please check the histrionics at the door.
I did, they're right there next to your strawman-- oh wait, you brought the strawman in with you.
I gave you three examples of how copyright affects people other than the copyright holders: service providers who have to enforce copyright complaints against their customers (e.g. YouTube taking down videos), manufacturers who have to restrict what their products can do (e.g. DVRs that can't record/transfer certain shows and HDTVs that need to support ridiculous encryption schemes), and end users who are prohibited from sharing content with other people (including public exhibition of something they've purchased).
You responded with silly scenarios about backyard parties and singing in the car. Not only does that fail to address my comment, but it also suggests that you think copyright is all right because it's poorly enforced. I hope I don't have to explain to you what an awful idea it is to have a bunch of laws on the books that are unenforceable or selectively enforced, especially with penalties like these!
There's no market for labor unless someone is willing to pay for it. If anyone who wanted to could enjoy the fruit of my labor for free, who has incentive to pay me?
Why would you perform the labor for free in the first place?
The point of charging for your labor is that people can't enjoy the fruits of labor you haven't performed yet. They can't use your software before you've written it, and you don't have to write it for free. So if someone wants that software, they have to pay you to write it first.
Who, pray tell, do I charge for my labor?
Whoever is willing to pay, i.e. whoever benefits from you having done the labor. That probably means some combination of end users (who benefit from having new software available) and system integrators (who can use your software to make their products more attractive). You wouldn't have just one customer, unless someone were willing to pay your entire asking price out of their own pocket.
I love that passionate, interested people have built things in their spare time that rival what larger behemoth companies couldn't do. But without for-profit software companies, a majority of the labor behind FOSS would be unemployed, and have more pressing concerns than creating new Firefox plugins.
I'm not suggesting that software would only have to be made in people's spare time. You can write software for profit even without copyright.