I know someone who put himself through school to get a phd in optical design and spent every waking moment writing a better piece of optical design software. His software did 95% of what the major players in the optical design market did for 10% of the price. He published version 1.0 and before he knew it there were pirate copies showing up all over the place. Version 1.01 came along with a DONGOL to protect his Intellectual Property. The software is well into version 10, years later and it still comes with a DONGOL. So, he set out to make money by undercutting the "major players", and then got upset when he got undercut by someone else in turn? Forgive me if I don't see the big deal.
(BTW, you misspelled "dongle".)
Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. Not if you have patents and copyrights, you don't! You can work hard for a little bit up front, then sit back and keep squeezing money out of the work you've already done.
Seriously, what you're saying is pretty much what I've said in every copyright thread, but somehow your conclusion is 180 degrees off. If you want people to keep working, then abolish patents and copyrights: make them work for their income instead of charging rent on work they did in years past.
The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Of course they do, but some of them seem to want more than that. They want the fruits of everyone else's labor too, just because those others used some of the same ideas.
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor. Don't tell that to us, tell it to the people who want to milk their copyrights and patents instead of working!
CD > MP3 > CD is much worse than just original CD. Yes, but the GP was responding to this: "It's important not to burn those MP3s back to CD because now you've done two conversions (CD->MP3->CD) and added more entropy to the data in so doing."... which is bullshit. CD->MP3->CD is no worse than CD->MP3.
(BTW, saying "epic fail" makes you look like an idiot in general, but even more so in this case since you're the one who missed the point.)
Jeez, why so emotional over the fact that vinyl sounds better to some people? Because they don't just say "this sounds better to me", they say "this is better technology", a claim which is at odds with reality, and some people have an emotional response to bullshit.
25mb of data just isn't the same as essentially infinite data on vinyl. Analog is infinitely variable- digital is not. Analog isn't "infinitely variable", it's just limited by factors that are harder to measure. Instead of nice, solid numbers like "16 bits per sample" and "44,100 samples per second", you have to look at materials, noise levels added by every analog component in the system, etc. But just because those limiting factors are hard to measure doesn't mean they don't exist.
Why is it that people go crazy insisting that HD is infinitely better than DVD (and it is basically just double the resolution in both directions) yet saying that increasing audio resolution by over 400% is unnoticable? Because the human senses of hearing and vision both have limits, and the quality of CD audio is already around that limit, while the quality of DVD video is not.
I used Tortoise for quite awhile, when I was on Windows, but every now and then, I'd have to grab the commandline svn client for something stupid, like being able to rename multiple files on the local machine and have it show up as one commit (the next one, to be precise). Can't you do that with Tortoise? Just use the context menu to rename them in your working copy, then commit once you've renamed all of them.
What I was saying is the US probably should be lagging behind other nations in growth and demand because the price-per-connection (due to the increased distance in many places) makes fiber lines very expensive to run and maintain. This is a common red herring. If the problem were "increased distance" or population density, then urban areas like NYC would have high-speed broadband that's as fast as what you can find in Europe or Asia, and slow broadband would only be a problem in rural areas. But instead, it's a problem across the board. Even in densely populated parts of the US, broadband sucks.
I often forget about BREW since it only shows up on CDMA devices, which are most associated with the rather closed-minded Verizon, and the oft-illegally-operated Sprint. [...] However, I would draw this out as an apparently culture divide between the companies who chose the technologies they chose. [...] So while there are definitely scary examples, let's remember that the iPhone is A) An apple product and B) a GSM device by nature. I think you're reading too much into the fact that the iPhone uses GSM. Remember, Apple pitched the iPhone to Verizon first, and only went to AT&T after Verizon turned it down. They didn't choose GSM because of some philosophy of openness; if Verizon had given the thumbs-up, the iPhone would be a CDMA device today.
Despite Apple's preference for controlled platforms, they are not about platform lock-in. This is an easy mistake to make and a difficult difference to distinguish. Apple benefits from limiting technological differences in their platforms for the sake of providing better support, through improved predictability. And I suppose it's just a coincidence that they also benefit from the increased sales that come along with a "controlled" platform where competition isn't allowed?
They could maintain that control by saying "If you turn off secure application mode, we can't support your problems any further than helping you reset your phone." They could also maintain that control by saying "If you install OS X on non-Apple hardware, we can't support your problems any further than telling you where to buy a Mac", or "If you buy FairPlay-wrapped songs from other music stores, we can't support your problems any further than helping you reset your iPod", but instead, they simply don't allow those situations to arise. Call it a "controlled platform" if you like, but it smells just like platform lock-in.
Apple could easily take the route of S60v3, and allow the conscientious user to disable the security requirement. They could, but is there any reason to believe they will? Has Apple ever passed up an opportunity to take advantage of platform lock-in?
And as a truly responsible geek, you really should go out and look at the pre-existing signed application schemes before you continue this nonsensical panic. Even if you only look at the ones I've referenced here today (Nokia's S60v3+ and Sony Ericsson's UIQ3.x) Well, let's add Qualcomm's BREW to that list as an example of why the "panic" is appropriate.
Ask any of the tens of millions of customers affected by BREW in the US about the last time they installed a free app on their phone, and if you're lucky, they'll describe a trial version of a game that disabled itself after 15 minutes. If not, they'll just laugh at the absurd concept of putting software on their phone without paying a monthly subscription or a hefty up-front charge.
I half-think you're just trolling because it's blindingly obvious that this analogy doesn't apply to IP, but whatever, I'll humor you. I think you're missing its application because you're stuck on the idea that "IP" is a product that's mass produced and sold in discrete units.
If you want to understand the model I'm proposing, you'll have to wrap your head around the idea that there is no product -- this model is concerned with the labor that the artist or author performs, which obviously is only performed once for each new work. That labor is the "hard part": any trained monkey can make copies, but only an actual artist can make the original. Therefore it makes sense for copies to be as cheap as possible, and to associate the real financial rewards with the scarce, skilled labor that produces the original.
It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made. Incorrect, sir! You are able to aggregate payments from the many to you. For an example of how that works, look at any political candidate's web site: thousands of people make small contributions that add up to millions of dollars (and they're not even getting anything in return!). Or look at sellaband.com, which does something similar to what I've proposed: many individuals contribute small amounts to help bands reach a financial goal.
Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.
But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous. Copyright is dumb in many more circumstances: look at old TV shows like WKRP in Cincinnati that have to be re-released with entirely new soundtracks, because the license for the old music has run out. Look at the works and adaptations that aren't being made because someone is sitting on the rights and refuses to license them. Look at works like the MST3K movie that are impossible to find because they've gone out of print and the rights holders refuse to authorize additional printings. Look at the legal battles that parody artists, samplers, and fanfic writers have to face, even when they come out victorious. Look at the constant stream of technical and legal restrictions that are being placed on hardware and software just to protect some company's ability to make a buck by selling us numbers. Look at the retroactive extensions that are passed like clockwork, ensuring that nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
At some point, throwing out copyright becomes the most sensible way to deal with the problems it causes, and I contend we've already passed that point.
But it's not, because you need the development funded. If I wanted to go make a movie, I won't be asking people to pay for the privilege of watching a movie, I'll be asking them to pay to watch a movie a year down the line. Or asking them to pay to watch a current movie in the hopes that I'll make another one. But again, that's paying for future hopes, not the actual thing in front of them. Yes, but so what? People do that all the time, whether it's individuals hiring someone to build a house or a swimming pool, or businesses hiring engineers to work on new product lines that won't be released for months. When you buy a service, quite often you're paying for "future hopes" instead of an actual thing in front of you.
Of course I could go to a bank and get a loan based on expected future revenue from my movie, but I imagine most lending institutions would laugh in your face if you told them you'd pay them back with the proceeds from something that consumers optionally pay for. Well, of course. There is no "expected future revenue"; without copyright, you have no legal cudgel to make anyone pay you for copies, but that's OK because you're not in the business of making copies, you're in the business of making movies, and you've already been paid for that by the time the movie is done.
What IS the business model you've proposed? I still don't see how it works. Is it just direct contributions/donations to the developers/artists? More or less. It's not really a "donation", because you're paying for a service -- a donation is money that you spend without expecting anything in return.
The model is simply that the artist sets a price for his labor (the act of creating a new work), performs that labor once he's found enough people who are willing to pay for it (consumers or anyone else who benefits from a new work's creation), and then moves on to the next project (without milking any more money from the one he just finished).
Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded. Well, I don't think that's true. Demand for that labor is obviously already there; it isn't going to vanish overnight.
But in any case, I contend that whatever loss of new works might occur would be balanced out by the freedom with which everyone would be able to use the new works that are created (not to mention the ones that already exist). In other words, a movie I can watch freely, share with my friends, re-edit and sample for other projects, etc. is worth more than a movie that costs $15 which I'm not allowed to do anything with except watch it.
Wow, you really do a lot of credit to the the right of free speech, applying it to stealing movies. Actually, he's right... it's your interpretation of his words that's wrong. Free speech applies not to the act of downloading, but to the act of sharing.
Copyright is a restriction on speech: it says that if I buy a book, there are certain facts about it that I'm not allowed to share with you or anyone else. There's a sequence of words written in the book, which anyone can look at and verify for himself, but I'm not allowed to tell you what they are. If you called me up and said "Hey Mr2001, what's the first word in that book?", I might be able to tell you, but if you kept calling back and asking about each following word, at some point it would be illegal for me to answer a simple, factual question about an item that I own. If that isn't a free speech issue, then nothing is.
In the US, today, the government can legally decide that you might be a terrorist (you know, like you support Ron Paul, for instance, who is very terrifying to them). Heh. He might be a little more terrifying if he had some chance of winning the GOP nomination (to say nothing of the general election). He has some highly motivated followers, but those don't add up to a majority of votes.
Okay, fine, if you want to be pedantic: replace "non-physical" with "non-physical non-service" creations. My question still stands. Maybe you should rephrase it, because I'm not sure what you're asking. Where does this "monetary risk" come from, and why would you not include it in the price you're charging for your labor?
A barber has costs too, but they're included in the price he charges. If he charges me $15 for a haircut, some of that goes into his pocket to compensate him for his time, and some of it goes to keeping the lights and heat on in his shop, buying equipment, etc. He doesn't need any special legal treatment to make his business model work. Why would it be any different if his service were writing books instead of cutting hair?
But building a road is not a creative endeavor, so it's not the same thing. The quality of creative works are gauged by how many people enjoyed them. The quality of roads are gauged by smoothness and durability (and companies that are known for making good-quality roads can charge more). Sure, but prices aren't directly linked to "quality", whether you're talking about products or labor. That's not how a market economy works.
So, if popularity doesn't matter, should media creators be compensated at a flat rate? If so, I'm going to start a solo career with my casio keyboard and I'd like the same as what Justin Timberlake is getting, please. Media creators, like anyone else, should be compensated at whatever rate they can negotiate with the people who are paying them. If you can convince someone to pay you as much as Justin Timberlake is paid, then by all means, do it!
Your statement implies the existence of some entity who controls the market for musical labor and can simply declare that your labor has the same value as someone else's, but that's not how it works (outside of Soviet Russia, where value declares YOU!!). The value of your labor is whatever you can manage to sell it for.
They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. With what, their time machines? How else are they going to consume media that hasn't been produced yet?
If you want to consume media, it has to be produced first. In order for that to happen, you have to find someone who has the skills to produce it and convince him to do that work (most likely by offering him money). If no one pays him, there won't be any media to consume. That looks like a pretty direct incentive to me.
How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many. I agree, but what do any of those have to do with the business model I've proposed? I don't recall saying that anyone should ever work for free with the expectation that they'll get paid for it later. Just like any other service, if you expect to get paid for your work, you'd better know where the money's coming from before you start working.
If you think that all non-physical creations have no inherent value and should not be salesworthy, how do you expect that anyone will create anything that has any amount of monetary risk? Labor still has value. You don't need to create a salable object in order to get paid: every time I go to the barber, I leave with less in my physical possession than when I came in, but the barber still provides a valuable service and gets paid for it.
It makes total sense -- you'd obviously like to compensate authors for the popularity of their works, right? Copyright is intended to do that. I'd like to compensate authors for the time and effort they put into their work - just like anyone else.
Popularity has very little to do with it. By analogy, a road worker gets paid for the time he spends repairing the highway. Assuming the same amount of work is involved, he doesn't have any inherent right to get paid twice as much for working on a road that carries 20,000 cars a day as one that only carries 10,000. The value of his labor today does not depend on the number of people who might benefit from it in the future.
Popularity does matter, but only in the sense that it's easier to fund the production of a work which appeals to more people. That is, in order to sell your labor, you have to find someone who wants to pay you for it.
What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? Anyone who thinks it's worth paying for the creation of that work. For a movie, that might include consumers (who benefit from getting another movie to watch), theater operators (who can make money by providing a comfortable, social environment in which to watch movies), video player manufacturers (who can sell hardware at a profit, but only if there's content to watch with it), and perhaps others. Everyone who benefits from the existence of more works has an incentive to pay for their production.
[I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.]
So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? The post you're responding to didn't say they "don't have any value"; those are your words, not his. He only said he wouldn't pay to see them at the cinema, which means their value in his view is less than the price of a movie ticket (and the associated costs of driving there, parking, dealing with crowds, etc.).
Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way. Indeed, but there's nothing contradictory about that. Perhaps he values those freely available movies at $0.00, and values the ones he downloads at, say, $1.00, which is still lower than the cost of buying a ticket or renting a DVD.
The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. I agree that it isn't a grey area, but I contend I have exactly the same inherent right to watch movies or TV shows as I do to calculate the circumference of a circle or the amount of time it takes for light to reach the earth from the sun.
That is, it took a lot of human effort to calculate pi and the speed of light, but that doesn't mean the people who discovered those numbers somehow "own" them. I'm not taking anything away from them when I use them myself; I couldn't deny anyone else the use of those numbers even if I wanted to. They have no inherent right to prevent me from using any number, whether that number is a physical constant or an MPEG-encoded representation of a movie.
You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. That's partially right, in the sense that those movies and TV shows wouldn't be around for anyone to watch if the effort hadn't been put in to make them. But now that they have, the information that makes up those shows doesn't belong to anyone. It's not mine, yours, theirs, or anyone else's. The very concept of owning a number is absurd.
If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Tough on them is more like it. They can choose to release the DVD late, but I can choose to get a number representing the movie from someone else instead. If they want me to buy that number on a piece of plastic from them, instead of getting it for free online, they're going to have to cater to me - not vice versa. They're not the only ones who can tell me what that number is.
I thought I made that clear in my last response. Demand for a service is measured by the number of people willing to pay for the service, and the amount they're willing to pay. You can measure demand for an artist or author's services exactly the same way you'd measure demand for an accountant or architect's services.
Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? You're looking at it backwards. How did those movies get made? Someone must have put up the money to fund them, right? That means, in the minds of whoever funded the production, that both movies are worth $100 million. If they weren't, then they wouldn't have gotten made in the first place.
Anything very expensive wouldn't get made. Lord of the Rings movies, Mass Effect, etc. Copyright lets you amortize the cost of an expensive production over huge numbers of people, who only have to pay a little bit. But in the copyright business model, the cost of the production is unrelated to the number of people who end up paying. So you really have no idea whether the "little bit" they pay is going to cover production - maybe you'll break even, maybe you'll get rich, or maybe you'll lose a few million. You just have to pick a per-copy price and pray that you picked the right one. If you set a low price to give your consumers the feeling that they "only have to pay a little bit", you run the risk of setting it too low and losing money.
In a get-paid-for-working business model, however, you know ahead of time whether your production will turn a profit. If the per-person price looks higher, that's only because it's the true price.
Anything risky wouldn't get made. Now you've collected some money from people who want you to make something, you'd better make sure they're happy with the end result. Forget about edgy third albums. Forget about experimental forms of directing. Whoa now. There's no need to forget about that stuff, as long as it's what your fans want.
Indeed - consumer demand should never enter the equation. And given that "effort" is the metric to be used in determining compensation, I would speculate that your scheme would give us lots of glorious 12-hour movies featuring starvation victims shoveling manure into a furnace [etc.] Only if people were willing to pay for it. And if people are willing to pay filmmakers to produce this stuff, then by definition, there's demand for it, right?
It's a mistake to say demand doesn't enter into the business model I've proposed. This model simply looks at demand for what the artist actually does -- the act of creating a new work -- rather than the demand for round pieces of plastic that may or may not be produced later.
Paying someone directly for working is useful in certain cases but you can't pay everyone who wants to create something. You don't have to "pay everyone who wants to create something", just like you don't have to pay every barber who wants to cut your hair. What you do instead is find a barber who you think will do a good job, and then you pay him to cut your hair. It's up to him to convince you that he's the right one.
And we could just switch to FOSS movies, TV and computer programs anyways. It has to be true - I read it on Slashdot! No need. Here's a novel idea: how about paying people to create movies, TV, and computer programs?
You know, paying them directly for working, for doing what they enjoy and are good at. Not for making copies, which is something any trained monkey with a DVD burner can do.
Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us. Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face, and no sense at all in a world where copying is a trivial matter that anyone can perform for himself, with no skill or investment needed. Authors and consumers alike would benefit from a more sensible business model.
Just to play devils advocate: If we consider publishing nude photos of yourself to be pornography, why would we consider it not pornography when a young person does it? The issue isn't whether or not it's pornography, but whether it merits all the outrage that usually accompanies "child pornography".
"Child pornography" is generally considered bad because in order to make it, you have to have a minor in front of your camera who's posing erotically or having sex. Since the law presumes that minors are incapable of knowing whether or not they want to pose erotically or have sex, this means that producing these photos or videos involves an act that's equivalent to rape: putting a minor in that situation without her (legally recognized) consent.
In the case of a minor posting her own pictures, however, there's no third party who could be accused of putting the minor in that situation against her will. It isn't even conceivably similar to rape, because the "victim" is making all the decisions on her own - if that's analogous to rape, then so is underage masturbation, and every teenager in the world is a sex offender.
Interesting. So you mean to tell me that I'm going to be more likely to do evil? No. I'm saying that the people who are more likely to do evil are also more likely to have better weapons and/or training than the people to whom evil is done. The guy whose goal in life is to commit armed robbery probably has more experience at using a gun in robbery situations than the potential victim who encounters him in a dark alley.
I've been in your shoes, fighting, campaigning, trying to "change the world" to "disarm society" and other crap [...] Please excuse me while I refuse to believe in your illusion that my paying for cops is or "social services" will make me safer. It hasn't, and it won't. Not now, not ever, and I harbor no delusions. Whoa there. Calm down, buddy, you're ranting at ghosts.
I didn't say anything about disarming society -- I have no problem with responsible gun ownership -- and it was the other poster who first brought up the fact that higher standards of living translate into lower crime rates. I'm just pointing out the obvious logical problems with the original claim that crime rates can only be lowered by arming the populace, and the later implication (once the original claim was abandoned) that crime should primarily be dealt with by arming the populace.
But I have no delusions that "society" will help me. I, on the other hand, have no delusions that a gun in my pocket will turn me into an action hero, or that putting a gun into the hands of every drunken wife-beater in town will somehow make me (or their wives) safer.
[making the population more homogeneous (which I presume means "deport the brown people")] Actually, it means "deport the people who are in the minority". And the people who are in the minority in the US are...?
Thanks for proving my point.
I'm sure everyone would like to live in Norway where every citizen gets a check every month from the national oil revenue, but not everyone is fortunate enough to live on a piece of land blessed with rich resources. There's lots of countries where there's lots of people who aren't well-off for one reason or another; you can't wave a wand and make everyone well-off. So, the obvious answer is that people need to be able to protect themselves. I think you mean "the simplistic, selfish, testosterone-fueled answer". The humanitarian, progressive answer is to focus on the long-term goal of improving standard of living.
Your mention of Norway is, as you and I both know, a red herring. Most countries with lower crime rates due to higher standards of living don't achieve those standards by selling their natural resources and splitting the profits among their populace. They just have policies that help everyone rather than mainly helping those who are already well-off. No, you can't do it overnight, but neither can you give everyone a gun and the training and inclination to use it responsibly overnight.
There's no reason to fear getting shot, however; simply don't commit violent crimes, and you probably won't get shot. Some nut may shoot you anyway, but even if he didn't have a gun, a nutcase would still find some other way to harm people. On the contrary, there's plenty of reason. I'm not afraid of random nuts or people protecting themselves from a violent crime I'm actually committing. I am, however, afraid of people with hot tempers who would otherwise have nothing more than a fist to attack me with, and people who incorrectly think I'm trying to harm them. And if you think that means I should just carry a gun myself, consider that those aggressive, paranoid people are likely to own more guns and spend more time practicing than I ever could anyway.
A land where everyone has to carry guns to protect themselves from each other is great for gun enthusiasts, survivalists, and wannabe warlords. Not so great for everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
(BTW, you misspelled "dongle".) Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. Not if you have patents and copyrights, you don't! You can work hard for a little bit up front, then sit back and keep squeezing money out of the work you've already done.
Seriously, what you're saying is pretty much what I've said in every copyright thread, but somehow your conclusion is 180 degrees off. If you want people to keep working, then abolish patents and copyrights: make them work for their income instead of charging rent on work they did in years past. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Of course they do, but some of them seem to want more than that. They want the fruits of everyone else's labor too, just because those others used some of the same ideas. So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor. Don't tell that to us, tell it to the people who want to milk their copyrights and patents instead of working!
(BTW, saying "epic fail" makes you look like an idiot in general, but even more so in this case since you're the one who missed the point.)
Ask any of the tens of millions of customers affected by BREW in the US about the last time they installed a free app on their phone, and if you're lucky, they'll describe a trial version of a game that disabled itself after 15 minutes. If not, they'll just laugh at the absurd concept of putting software on their phone without paying a monthly subscription or a hefty up-front charge.
If you want to understand the model I'm proposing, you'll have to wrap your head around the idea that there is no product -- this model is concerned with the labor that the artist or author performs, which obviously is only performed once for each new work. That labor is the "hard part": any trained monkey can make copies, but only an actual artist can make the original. Therefore it makes sense for copies to be as cheap as possible, and to associate the real financial rewards with the scarce, skilled labor that produces the original. It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made. Incorrect, sir! You are able to aggregate payments from the many to you. For an example of how that works, look at any political candidate's web site: thousands of people make small contributions that add up to millions of dollars (and they're not even getting anything in return!). Or look at sellaband.com, which does something similar to what I've proposed: many individuals contribute small amounts to help bands reach a financial goal. Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.
But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous. Copyright is dumb in many more circumstances: look at old TV shows like WKRP in Cincinnati that have to be re-released with entirely new soundtracks, because the license for the old music has run out. Look at the works and adaptations that aren't being made because someone is sitting on the rights and refuses to license them. Look at works like the MST3K movie that are impossible to find because they've gone out of print and the rights holders refuse to authorize additional printings. Look at the legal battles that parody artists, samplers, and fanfic writers have to face, even when they come out victorious. Look at the constant stream of technical and legal restrictions that are being placed on hardware and software just to protect some company's ability to make a buck by selling us numbers. Look at the retroactive extensions that are passed like clockwork, ensuring that nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
At some point, throwing out copyright becomes the most sensible way to deal with the problems it causes, and I contend we've already passed that point.
The model is simply that the artist sets a price for his labor (the act of creating a new work), performs that labor once he's found enough people who are willing to pay for it (consumers or anyone else who benefits from a new work's creation), and then moves on to the next project (without milking any more money from the one he just finished). Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded. Well, I don't think that's true. Demand for that labor is obviously already there; it isn't going to vanish overnight.
But in any case, I contend that whatever loss of new works might occur would be balanced out by the freedom with which everyone would be able to use the new works that are created (not to mention the ones that already exist). In other words, a movie I can watch freely, share with my friends, re-edit and sample for other projects, etc. is worth more than a movie that costs $15 which I'm not allowed to do anything with except watch it.
Copyright is a restriction on speech: it says that if I buy a book, there are certain facts about it that I'm not allowed to share with you or anyone else. There's a sequence of words written in the book, which anyone can look at and verify for himself, but I'm not allowed to tell you what they are. If you called me up and said "Hey Mr2001, what's the first word in that book?", I might be able to tell you, but if you kept calling back and asking about each following word, at some point it would be illegal for me to answer a simple, factual question about an item that I own. If that isn't a free speech issue, then nothing is.
A barber has costs too, but they're included in the price he charges. If he charges me $15 for a haircut, some of that goes into his pocket to compensate him for his time, and some of it goes to keeping the lights and heat on in his shop, buying equipment, etc. He doesn't need any special legal treatment to make his business model work. Why would it be any different if his service were writing books instead of cutting hair?
Your statement implies the existence of some entity who controls the market for musical labor and can simply declare that your labor has the same value as someone else's, but that's not how it works (outside of Soviet Russia, where value declares YOU!!). The value of your labor is whatever you can manage to sell it for. They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. With what, their time machines? How else are they going to consume media that hasn't been produced yet?
If you want to consume media, it has to be produced first. In order for that to happen, you have to find someone who has the skills to produce it and convince him to do that work (most likely by offering him money). If no one pays him, there won't be any media to consume. That looks like a pretty direct incentive to me. How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many. I agree, but what do any of those have to do with the business model I've proposed? I don't recall saying that anyone should ever work for free with the expectation that they'll get paid for it later. Just like any other service, if you expect to get paid for your work, you'd better know where the money's coming from before you start working.
Popularity has very little to do with it. By analogy, a road worker gets paid for the time he spends repairing the highway. Assuming the same amount of work is involved, he doesn't have any inherent right to get paid twice as much for working on a road that carries 20,000 cars a day as one that only carries 10,000. The value of his labor today does not depend on the number of people who might benefit from it in the future.
Popularity does matter, but only in the sense that it's easier to fund the production of a work which appeals to more people. That is, in order to sell your labor, you have to find someone who wants to pay you for it. What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? Anyone who thinks it's worth paying for the creation of that work. For a movie, that might include consumers (who benefit from getting another movie to watch), theater operators (who can make money by providing a comfortable, social environment in which to watch movies), video player manufacturers (who can sell hardware at a profit, but only if there's content to watch with it), and perhaps others. Everyone who benefits from the existence of more works has an incentive to pay for their production.
So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? The post you're responding to didn't say they "don't have any value"; those are your words, not his. He only said he wouldn't pay to see them at the cinema, which means their value in his view is less than the price of a movie ticket (and the associated costs of driving there, parking, dealing with crowds, etc.). Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way. Indeed, but there's nothing contradictory about that. Perhaps he values those freely available movies at $0.00, and values the ones he downloads at, say, $1.00, which is still lower than the cost of buying a ticket or renting a DVD.
That is, it took a lot of human effort to calculate pi and the speed of light, but that doesn't mean the people who discovered those numbers somehow "own" them. I'm not taking anything away from them when I use them myself; I couldn't deny anyone else the use of those numbers even if I wanted to. They have no inherent right to prevent me from using any number, whether that number is a physical constant or an MPEG-encoded representation of a movie. You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. That's partially right, in the sense that those movies and TV shows wouldn't be around for anyone to watch if the effort hadn't been put in to make them. But now that they have, the information that makes up those shows doesn't belong to anyone. It's not mine, yours, theirs, or anyone else's. The very concept of owning a number is absurd. If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Tough on them is more like it. They can choose to release the DVD late, but I can choose to get a number representing the movie from someone else instead. If they want me to buy that number on a piece of plastic from them, instead of getting it for free online, they're going to have to cater to me - not vice versa. They're not the only ones who can tell me what that number is.
I thought I made that clear in my last response. Demand for a service is measured by the number of people willing to pay for the service, and the amount they're willing to pay. You can measure demand for an artist or author's services exactly the same way you'd measure demand for an accountant or architect's services.
In a get-paid-for-working business model, however, you know ahead of time whether your production will turn a profit. If the per-person price looks higher, that's only because it's the true price. Anything risky wouldn't get made. Now you've collected some money from people who want you to make something, you'd better make sure they're happy with the end result. Forget about edgy third albums. Forget about experimental forms of directing. Whoa now. There's no need to forget about that stuff, as long as it's what your fans want.
It's a mistake to say demand doesn't enter into the business model I've proposed. This model simply looks at demand for what the artist actually does -- the act of creating a new work -- rather than the demand for round pieces of plastic that may or may not be produced later.
You know, paying them directly for working, for doing what they enjoy and are good at. Not for making copies, which is something any trained monkey with a DVD burner can do.
Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us. Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face, and no sense at all in a world where copying is a trivial matter that anyone can perform for himself, with no skill or investment needed. Authors and consumers alike would benefit from a more sensible business model.
"Child pornography" is generally considered bad because in order to make it, you have to have a minor in front of your camera who's posing erotically or having sex. Since the law presumes that minors are incapable of knowing whether or not they want to pose erotically or have sex, this means that producing these photos or videos involves an act that's equivalent to rape: putting a minor in that situation without her (legally recognized) consent.
In the case of a minor posting her own pictures, however, there's no third party who could be accused of putting the minor in that situation against her will. It isn't even conceivably similar to rape, because the "victim" is making all the decisions on her own - if that's analogous to rape, then so is underage masturbation, and every teenager in the world is a sex offender.
I didn't say anything about disarming society -- I have no problem with responsible gun ownership -- and it was the other poster who first brought up the fact that higher standards of living translate into lower crime rates. I'm just pointing out the obvious logical problems with the original claim that crime rates can only be lowered by arming the populace, and the later implication (once the original claim was abandoned) that crime should primarily be dealt with by arming the populace. But I have no delusions that "society" will help me. I, on the other hand, have no delusions that a gun in my pocket will turn me into an action hero, or that putting a gun into the hands of every drunken wife-beater in town will somehow make me (or their wives) safer.
Actually, it means "deport the people who are in the minority". And the people who are in the minority in the US are...?
Thanks for proving my point. I'm sure everyone would like to live in Norway where every citizen gets a check every month from the national oil revenue, but not everyone is fortunate enough to live on a piece of land blessed with rich resources. There's lots of countries where there's lots of people who aren't well-off for one reason or another; you can't wave a wand and make everyone well-off. So, the obvious answer is that people need to be able to protect themselves. I think you mean "the simplistic, selfish, testosterone-fueled answer". The humanitarian, progressive answer is to focus on the long-term goal of improving standard of living.
Your mention of Norway is, as you and I both know, a red herring. Most countries with lower crime rates due to higher standards of living don't achieve those standards by selling their natural resources and splitting the profits among their populace. They just have policies that help everyone rather than mainly helping those who are already well-off. No, you can't do it overnight, but neither can you give everyone a gun and the training and inclination to use it responsibly overnight. There's no reason to fear getting shot, however; simply don't commit violent crimes, and you probably won't get shot. Some nut may shoot you anyway, but even if he didn't have a gun, a nutcase would still find some other way to harm people. On the contrary, there's plenty of reason. I'm not afraid of random nuts or people protecting themselves from a violent crime I'm actually committing. I am, however, afraid of people with hot tempers who would otherwise have nothing more than a fist to attack me with, and people who incorrectly think I'm trying to harm them. And if you think that means I should just carry a gun myself, consider that those aggressive, paranoid people are likely to own more guns and spend more time practicing than I ever could anyway.
A land where everyone has to carry guns to protect themselves from each other is great for gun enthusiasts, survivalists, and wannabe warlords. Not so great for everyone else.