The trouble is that copyright has to be abolished, or at least seriously scaled back, because it has become unenforceable.
You raise interesting practical objections to the GP's proposal, but they could be obviated with some sort of elected body that tries to make 'good calls' about which projects are likely to be worthwhile, popular, etc.
I pay money every month to my local authority for local services and have to trust they will put it to good use. Sometimes this works well - a run down part of the city was, I think, attractively spruced up (some disagree); other times less so (our refuse collectors are unreliable). Every few years, I get a say on who is appointed to carry on running things.
A culture tax could work in a similar way. We appoint a body of people to select artists who will receive a slice of the money collected - eg through an ISP levy. These artists are commissioned to produce new works. No money is paid to anyone for actual use of the works, once they have been created. (Existing copyrights would have their durations tapered off, and noncommmerical copying made legal.)
Of course, anyone can still produce art and fund it however they like. Most music is self-funded initially anyway, and this works fairly well. As artists rise to popularity, it would be in the funding body's interest to commission them if they want to be re-elected.
My comment was in response to the whole thread, not just the one immediately above. And I think the GGP was explaining why it was unlikely that FFMpeg would pursue such a course of "jackassery". So fortunately, though the topic is indeed convoluted bollocks, this entire discussion is moot.
IIUC licenses such as the GPL were created in order to provide a less restrictive legal basis for copying code than the default one you get if you don't copyright at all. In a world without copyright such licenses wouldn't be necessary, as in essence all they say is: "if you use this code within your code, you've got to let other people use your code too".
I acknowledge the meaning of "professional" as you are using it, but I simply meant someone who earns their living as a musician. I am well aware that many musicians who take their work seriously, probably most of the ones whose music I love, earn very little from it - and we all know that a lot who are paid well produce little of lasting worth. This is why generally musicians don't seem overly bothered about the digital revolution, as it presents little threat to their non-existent livelihood. In fact many are probably seeing their income go up now that they can reach their audiences more directly.
One thing the people you mention have grasped is that in order to keep earning, they must keep producing. I am a fan of Issa too, and Kristin Hersh is another who seems to be making a healthy living from her website. The dream of making a chart-topping album and living off it for the rest of your life was always an unhealthy one, and inextricably bound up with that superstar lifestyle.
In short, I think we probably agree even if our terminology is different.
But getting people to pay for CDs was a way of recouping studio costs, and the cost of sustaining the artist while they were creating the music - plus a little towards the relatively low (economic) cost of mass-producing CDs. Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create, or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music (linked form the original version on Ben Goldacre's blog)
I actually feel guilty for buying physical product, though, when most of the cost won't even go to the artist, and all it will do is sit on a shelf. (Here's an ancient blog post of mine about this.) I'd rather make a direct donation to the artist, but many artist sites still don't have provision for this.
Nicely done, except that music doesn't - and movies most certainly don't - have "an inherent cost of production of zero". Sharing cannot be wrong, and kicking the old media gatekeepers out of the arena cannot happen hard enough or fast enough, but there needs to be some way to share the cost as well as the benefit of the things we love to download for free.
It's a shame you had to mar the good points you made with an uninformed comment about CSS and Javascript. Done properly, they are both powerful and, yes, elegant tools.
I don't see any mod points on my post, and I don't deserve any - I didn't bother following Jurily's link, and portable FF was quite far from my mind (though I am aware of it, so take away another one). But if I worked in a place like you describe, I wouldn't last long. How do you stand it? Or is working around the admins' policies part of the fun?
Then give the administrator a kick up the arse! (S)He's there to serve the users, and to maintain security. By insisting on IE6, they're doing neither.
This all seems sensible, but on past form it seems very likely that Apple will do everything in their power to break Palm's hack.
On the subject of iTMS avoidance, it's not so hard. I have iTunes on my laptop, because two of my family members have iPods, but I just keep saying "no" every time it offers to direct me to the store. You have to sign up before it will allow access anyway, and I have no intention of doing that.
Any reason you won't use Firefox? I've never seen any of these display errors people complain of. At least not on my desktop. I have to turn js off for Opera on my phone.
Joking aside, I would imagine that Google's fear of incidents like these - and their inability to recover from them - are exactly the kind of thing that has kept Gmail in beta. That they're considering making it an official release is good news for those of us (I'm one) who rely on it - presumably they now consider their contingencies to have been well tested. Whether there will be a corresponding increase in their claims for its reliability, though, remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that copyright has to be abolished, or at least seriously scaled back, because it has become unenforceable.
You raise interesting practical objections to the GP's proposal, but they could be obviated with some sort of elected body that tries to make 'good calls' about which projects are likely to be worthwhile, popular, etc.
I pay money every month to my local authority for local services and have to trust they will put it to good use. Sometimes this works well - a run down part of the city was, I think, attractively spruced up (some disagree); other times less so (our refuse collectors are unreliable). Every few years, I get a say on who is appointed to carry on running things.
A culture tax could work in a similar way. We appoint a body of people to select artists who will receive a slice of the money collected - eg through an ISP levy. These artists are commissioned to produce new works. No money is paid to anyone for actual use of the works, once they have been created. (Existing copyrights would have their durations tapered off, and noncommmerical copying made legal.)
Of course, anyone can still produce art and fund it however they like. Most music is self-funded initially anyway, and this works fairly well. As artists rise to popularity, it would be in the funding body's interest to commission them if they want to be re-elected.
Eh?
My comment was in response to the whole thread, not just the one immediately above. And I think the GGP was explaining why it was unlikely that FFMpeg would pursue such a course of "jackassery". So fortunately, though the topic is indeed convoluted bollocks, this entire discussion is moot.
IIUC licenses such as the GPL were created in order to provide a less restrictive legal basis for copying code than the default one you get if you don't copyright at all. In a world without copyright such licenses wouldn't be necessary, as in essence all they say is: "if you use this code within your code, you've got to let other people use your code too".
What a load of convoluted bollocks this is. I'm glad I'm just debugging code.
I acknowledge the meaning of "professional" as you are using it, but I simply meant someone who earns their living as a musician. I am well aware that many musicians who take their work seriously, probably most of the ones whose music I love, earn very little from it - and we all know that a lot who are paid well produce little of lasting worth. This is why generally musicians don't seem overly bothered about the digital revolution, as it presents little threat to their non-existent livelihood. In fact many are probably seeing their income go up now that they can reach their audiences more directly.
One thing the people you mention have grasped is that in order to keep earning, they must keep producing. I am a fan of Issa too, and Kristin Hersh is another who seems to be making a healthy living from her website. The dream of making a chart-topping album and living off it for the rest of your life was always an unhealthy one, and inextricably bound up with that superstar lifestyle.
In short, I think we probably agree even if our terminology is different.
But getting people to pay for CDs was a way of recouping studio costs, and the cost of sustaining the artist while they were creating the music - plus a little towards the relatively low (economic) cost of mass-producing CDs. Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create, or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.
Why indeed, except that some of us do:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music (linked form the original version on Ben Goldacre's blog)
I actually feel guilty for buying physical product, though, when most of the cost won't even go to the artist, and all it will do is sit on a shelf. (Here's an ancient blog post of mine about this.) I'd rather make a direct donation to the artist, but many artist sites still don't have provision for this.
Nicely done, except that music doesn't - and movies most certainly don't - have "an inherent cost of production of zero". Sharing cannot be wrong, and kicking the old media gatekeepers out of the arena cannot happen hard enough or fast enough, but there needs to be some way to share the cost as well as the benefit of the things we love to download for free.
What you don't realise, though, is that a pound coin actually weighs a pound.
It was an instance of buggery, not fallacio.
It's a shame you had to mar the good points you made with an uninformed comment about CSS and Javascript. Done properly, they are both powerful and, yes, elegant tools.
I don't see any mod points on my post, and I don't deserve any - I didn't bother following Jurily's link, and portable FF was quite far from my mind (though I am aware of it, so take away another one). But if I worked in a place like you describe, I wouldn't last long. How do you stand it? Or is working around the admins' policies part of the fun?
Then give the administrator a kick up the arse! (S)He's there to serve the users, and to maintain security. By insisting on IE6, they're doing neither.
I've never known FF to install itself outside of %ProgramFiles%. Did you mean %ProgramFiles%/Microsoft?
This all seems sensible, but on past form it seems very likely that Apple will do everything in their power to break Palm's hack.
On the subject of iTMS avoidance, it's not so hard. I have iTunes on my laptop, because two of my family members have iPods, but I just keep saying "no" every time it offers to direct me to the store. You have to sign up before it will allow access anyway, and I have no intention of doing that.
What is that whooshing sound I hear?
You're not doing it right. Labels are far superior to folders.
Any reason you won't use Firefox? I've never seen any of these display errors people complain of. At least not on my desktop. I have to turn js off for Opera on my phone.
Slashdot should be rewritten in RoR
'cause that will speed it up
Joking aside, I would imagine that Google's fear of incidents like these - and their inability to recover from them - are exactly the kind of thing that has kept Gmail in beta. That they're considering making it an official release is good news for those of us (I'm one) who rely on it - presumably they now consider their contingencies to have been well tested. Whether there will be a corresponding increase in their claims for its reliability, though, remains to be seen.
You could always set up a separate gmail account specifically for your specific-fetish porn.
Move every 'Beta'.
Follow every (data) stream?
RTFM-dump?
Fork your git branch ... ...
Rewrite AdBlock plus for Chromium
???
Non-Profit !
FTFY