Can you explain the advantage of push email to me? I'm a professional user, and I use an Exchange server. I simply do not understand the advantage to push email over, say, IMAP with one-minute polling. IMAP has the further advantage of allowing you to see email subjects first, so you can skip the giant emails with attachments you don't need or can't work with effectively with the crap Office Mobile.
I have never been in a situation where getting an email 30 seconds faster actually made a difference. I understand that it's a cool feature and the iPhone doesn't have it and some other phones do, but I would be hard-pressed to take anyone seriously who considered it a deal-breaker.
What is their target audience with the IPhone, the people that but $600 phones are 99% corporate users. The high end phone market which means phone $400 or above is less than 1% of phone users. [...]Most people don't spend more than $200 on a phone, I just did but it was a blackberry, otherwise I was considering a $350 model, because it had windows mobile on it and office mobile. Oh come on. I'm a professional user (and an owner of a Windows Mobile phone, which I like a lot), but I absolutely abhor Office mobile, and so does everyone else I know.
You can't do jack shit with it aside from preview badly-formatted versions of presentations, spreadsheets, and documents. You can't edit anything on it in the way of fonts or any formatting beyond a basic bulletin board editor (bold/italic/center/left/color/etc.). As soon as you save anything, you destroy the document. Except for sending brief and relatively simple documents to your phone for review (in which case, why not just use HTML or PDF?) or for typing/editing quick notes and the like (in which case any notepad application works perfectly fine) or previewing a VERY SHORT spreadsheet or simple slideshow, Office Mobile is a piece of crap.
I'd happily surrender all editing options if it would simply DISPLAY the files properly (with a pan and scan zoom mode). Excel can't open 90% of the spreadsheets I have, and Word totally destroys the formatting of my pleadings to the point that they're literally unreadable jumbles of text. Powerpoint is a complete joke.
I'll probably buy the iPhone because it doesn't tease the user with a set of tools that don't even deserve "half-assed" status, they're so bad.
Try this line of argument next time you're at a barber or mechanic, and see how far it gets you: "Yeah, I promised to pay for this service, but so what? You've only lost your time, so the contract is invalid. Ha ha!"
Once again, you just don't know what you're talking about. If that were true, no one would ever be able to get paid for any service. We were talking about your fantasy world free of the shackles of IP, not the real world where we have such guarantees. Without IP, you could not enforce your contracts for intellectual labor, period, full stop. You seem to have gotten lost in your delusions.
Now that the discussion has touched upon two topics in which your ignorance is laughably obvious. As opposed to the seven (off the top of my head) you utterly fail to comprehend? (Supply-side economics, legal philosophy, intellectual property, university funding [tuition doesn't cut it, genius], election donations, contracts, and free speech). My ignorance of programming was never determined--you never demonstrated a novel construction to support your funding model (only new material, only the first time). You can change one function and resell your software to someone else. An artist can't change a single word and get a new copyright. The art of equivalence escapes you.
Yes, you win. *rolleyes* Now, I didn't introduce new material, so I guess this doesn't count as a reply.
No, it's not. Those digits aren't YOUR speech. You have no conceivable need to reproduce verbatim chunks of identifiable content. The requirement of writing original papers for publication is also a restriction on free speech, if that's how you look at it.
Look, if you promise to pay me to mow your lawn, it doesn't matter whether a "mowed lawn" is a product either of us can sell. You still have to pay me if I perform the service, and it's no different with any other labor.
Wrong! You can't stipulate to an illegal act, and you can't enforce a contract with no consideration. Try again, Dexter.
Again, the law disagrees with you.
No, you just don't understand that you can't enforce a contract just because you signed it, no matter what you signed. Your abolishment of IP also means that you didn't actually suffer any damages as a result. There is no legal canon for "time spent thinking" without IP. You've got nothing recoverable in that contract.
All right. Now what happens next? Just like in any other market, salaries for teaching would rise until they're attracted back.
No, they wouldn't. There's no money to provide higher salaries. You've eliminated the source of funding and there is no other source to take its place. This country doesn't produce very much--most money available to be thrown around for loans and venture capital comes directly from IP.
although I'm eagerly awaiting your bizarre explanation of how no one would be able to deliver Chinese food, work a retail cash register, or answer phones in a world with no copyright.
Because we don't need six million Chinese delivery drivers. If we needed more physical labor workers, we'd have them, generally speaking. Everyone already working those jobs would continue to do so. Don't confuse cyclical employment with availability of jobs. High turnover doesn't mean unsatisfied demand.
I call those regulations, and most of those nothing to do with artificially limiting supply in order to create more jobs than are really necessary.
They artificially limit supply to serve the greater interests of society. Some of them are to ensure stable prices (taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and the like), some of them are designed to ensure sustainable development (licensing of radio towers to prevent saturation, regulation of consumption rates, etc.) and some of them are designed to protect natural resources at the expense of maximum efficiency. There is no difference between wanting to preserve a healthy planet and wanting to preserve a healthy society.
And apparently you don't understand how programming works either.
Show us one truly novel line of programming you've ever written. A line that has never been written before by anyone in your field. Alternatively, show a finished function that you'll never use again and be paid for.
Oh really? Then I guess you wouldn't mind a law that banned you from saying or writing the word "speech", because after all, it's not YOUR word; someone else invented it long ago.
A language isn't a novel work of a person. It's also not possible to protect a word (outside of trademark contexts). Even those that can be protected ultimately expire or undergo a process of generalization. Even if you could copyright a word, someone else would just create an alternative without such a protection, and everyone would use that. A word no one uses doesn't communicate anything.
Software is still covered by copyright for many decades after it becomes obsolete. When a work doesn't enter the public domain until everyone who lived to see its creation has died, the timespan may as well be infinite.
First, nonsense--just because YOU can't use it doesn't mean it's infinitely protected. Second, the solution to that problem is to enforce copyright limits. It does not follow that a copyri
Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits.
No, it does not. It says that if you are not the creator of said digits, you do not have the right to redistribute them, and the government has designated a party which does have that authority. If you really want to get right down to it, you can't actually own land either, but you seem to have no problem with government-designated controls on that.
And as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay,
A binding agreement for a product you can't sell. Take that agreement to a court. You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute. Say you couldn't own land--you couldn't sue for squatting, nor could you sue for unpaid rent. Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time. Do you see the problem with enforcing your fantasy vision yet?
Like any good programmer, I don't like spending my time rewriting the same stuff over and over either, so this wouldn't really affect me.
Bullshit. There is very little new material in software--it's all assembling provided blocks into functions and assembling those functions into a program. You're just drawing the line one stage past what you do, without giving any rationale. Why should you get paid for rearranging some characters but someone else shouldn't get paid for repeating a performance?
You don't like it. We get that. It's not going anywhere. It's also not really very different from what you want--instead of waiting for you to pile up that $40 million to give everyone a copy, you go ahead and give everyone the copy and keep collecting money until you reach $40 million. In exchange for your risk (because some products won't break even), you get to turn a profit for a limited period of time without an earnings threshold. It's better for consumers (faster gratification, lower cost of entry) and better for producers (potential for large profits and easy access to the market).
ntil one person is able to write all the world's software single-handedly, there will be a market for more than one programmer.
No kidding. My point is that there will not be a need for the vast majority of programmers. Most of you don't do anything worthwhile anyway.
Would you mind explaining how, exactly, you think abolishing copyright would make universities obsolete?
Sure. Professors publish works to supplement lower salaries than they'd earn in the business sector. They don't have time to publish on a weekly basis to accomplish same without IP, and so universities would lose professors by the boatload. You can't teach classes without teachers. Further, there's a little thing called a "research university" which is essentially a patent and copyright mill. Universities use IP to fund their operating costs if private, or to justify their immense tax expense if public. If universities did not generate IP, they would not only lose professors, but also the income necessary to exist institutionally. Now I can't wait for you to come back with some pie-in-the-sky "they'd get money from 'somewhere' else." Since you haven't solved the problem of what would fuel the economy in its place, I won't hold my breath.
Then I'd get another job to pay the bills
Doing what? What, specifically, would you do, specifically? That's the question. Good luck as a lawyer with your ill-conceived understanding of and opposition to IP, by the way. I speak from experience when I say that one of the fundamental foundations of legal philosophy includes IP. Not everyone likes it, but everyone accepts that there's no alternative (think "Churchill on democracy").
Funny how no other form of labor needs those "prot
Freedom of speech. Copyright says that there are certain sequences of words I'm not allowed to say to another person because someone else has a monopoly on speaking them.
First of all, no, and second "freedom of speech" does not apply to the work of others. It's not free speech to duplicate a painting.
Only if he's not good enough to get people to pay him to paint.
You mean like Goya, or Picasso, or Van Gogh?
They become public the moment they're shared or sold
Under what philosophy? Certainly not existing law, and not even categorically in your fantasy world of "private vs. public with no IP."
If you're going to keep broadening the definition of "IP" like this, is it any wonder why I insist on only discussing copyright?
Broadened how? You're the one insisting that on real property should have any sort of protections. Stock isn't real property. You seem quite confused about what property even is.
A programmer gets paid every time he writes code. If he writes 55 programs, then he gets paid 55 times, not just for the first one. Do you really think there's going to be a time when no more software needs to be written?
How long does it take you to write 55 programs? How long does it take you to do 55 oil changes? The current cost of a typical software title is about the same as the price of an oil change. Is your labor worth more? What makes you think people would pay you up front for your software? I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends. You wouldn't have a market if you charged individuals the full expected price.
But I'm not going to hand over $40 and hope that a million other people do the same before you get off your ass and write what I hope will be what I want. Consumers don't pay in advance.
Why should we have to come up with a plan for factory workers before deciding to replace them with something more efficient?
They've already had somewhere to go in the past. What is there past information? Nothing. Thinking is the only skill we have that can't be automated (yet). Factory workers left the factory to enter the booming service sector. They didn't create it. It existed already. What exists for people to move into, since we'd be dumping tens of millions of jobs?
So, what's to stop me from getting all my music from friends, who get it from their friends, and so on?
Practicality. Casual file sharing is supplemental to purchasing CDs. You might get a few tracks you like, become interested in the group, and buy albums. If you're just pumping your friends for music, they cross over into distribution. Unless you have a thousand friends each giving you a mix CD, you can't build a library that way. The nature of enforcement would also change to adapt to the situation you describe, should it come to pass. People should pay for the things they like. A little sharing around the edges doesn't hurt, but illegal distribution (no matter how distributed you make it) is a problem. There are fuzzy edges on everything with a natural balance.
What if someone took your "only get paid the first time" to the extreme you want for art and music? Your customer wants to see your source code. He's only going to pay you for the funtions you've never written before (changing variable names won't count). After all, performing those functions again is effortless and instant, just like providing another copy of a song you've already recorded.
You keep saying this, but it doesn't stand up any more than it did the first time. Please give just one example of a service industry that wouldn't exist without copyright - other than the copyright litigation industry.
Publishing, printing, information collection services, commercial film, professional photography, universities, major record
That group gaming the system is the very reason why the system exists.
No, it's not. The system exists because the framers of society determined that access to the arts was not being shared. Some form of IP has existed since before the industrial revolution (reinforced by limited availability of education). Given that individuals were not required to share anything and others did not have the capacity to steal it, a company could create a product and have no competition because would-be competitors could not recreate it on their own. In the art world, people could not afford art. A commissioned work could not sit in 10,000 living rooms (just as it can't today--only one person gets the original). Apart from museums and galleries providing public display of privately-owned pieces, the general public had no access to works of art. They were not invited to performances and could not afford paintings.
The solution was to devise a system where people could kick start development by letting their own work help others, without losing the financial advantage of having created it. Other companies could enjoy a license to use that innovation which would allow them, too, to make more money. In the arts, a copyright allowed artists to subsidize their product across many people interested in copies. Lithographic printing allowed an artist to create a painting and let thousands of people pay a few dollars toward it, instead of selling the original for several thousand dollars.
The gamers you speak of didn't even exist until the 20th Century. Gamers of some kind exist from day one and will exist until the end of time. You have to deal with the problem, not the carrier.
is better than taking away everyone else's freedom
What freedom? You apparently believe in a right to privacy. The works protected by IP laws aren't public works. They are private works which are shared with the public through the protections of IP. You don't have any intrinsic right to them. Without IP, the majority of these works wouldn't be put on the market in the first place, and it would remove the incentive to innovate. Painters would still paint, because they love doing it. Society wouldn't be bettered by it, though, since the painter would have to finance his hobby by working a physical labor job. You might still write software because you enjoy it, but you'd probably have to do something else to make money because there'd be too many programmers competing for too little money.
Yes, that's what everyone already does in every other field. If you need your car fixed, you don't go with the most expensive mechanic, do you? Has that destroyed the industry? I think not.
No, but a mechanic gets paid every time he does a repair. If he changes oil 55 times a day, he gets paid 55 times, not just the first time he figures out how to do it. He also doesn't have to be the first one to figure out how to change oil in order to profit from it.
My income simply does not depend on selling copies
I find that nearly impossible to believe. Is your company publicly traded? If so, it relies on selling IP (stock certificates). Are you salaried? Then your work relies on the company's IP product being sufficient to support its employees. Unless you are paid per-project on an individual basis, and unless your customers are buying software with a free software license (indicating that they cannot sell it or control its distribution), then your income is dependent on IP.
The same way anyone competes for any job! Why do you think this is a new concern?
No one else has to compete the same was as service jobs do. If a technology were invented tomorrow that could instantly produce anything that had been built just one time before it (from apples to steak to Ford trucks to houses to the freakin' space shuttle), how would people make money? What would the billions of production line workers do? Not everyone can cr
These laws benefit a minority which can effectively lobby in its own favor
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. How is this different from lobbying in any other capacity? Abolishing legal frameworks because there's a group gaming the system is not the answer.
If he isn't a rational actor, then we can't predict much about his behavior anyway.
Non sequitur. The law does not depend on rational actors, nor does it depend on predictions. The law deals in real controversies exclusively. Predictions are of zero consequence. If A and B cannot convince C to split the cost, then they cannot bear the risk, because paving the road will put them out of business, and not paving the road might do the same. A and B should not have to relocate because they have one asshole competitor.
I'm not drawing that distinction, because as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. If I get paid for spending my time at some task, then I'm doing labor, period.
I'm not sure why I have to keep explaining this to you, since you're the one who thinks IP should be wiped off the face of the earth. If you don't have IP, you wouldn't have a job. Companies would pay only the bare minimum to accomplish their goals, and they would shop the lowest bidder and the earliest bidder. I sincerely doubt you have ever created something that has not been created before or that you are uniquely suited to produce. How would you compete with your tens of millions of fellow programmers for being 1) the lowest bidder and 2) the first to create a given software solution? The only reason you have a job now is because IBM doesn't share with Novell, who doesn't share with Adobe. If everything created was freely accessible to all, you would have nothing to offer, except maybe the occasional code tweak. How would you finance your education with such bleak prospects?
I've demanded no such thing.
No, you've demanded that someone foot the bill (up front) for the entire cost of your services sufficient to generate a living wage. But very few people make money that way now, and even fewer consumers are willing to pay in advance for material of questionable quality to be delivered at an uncertain time. You've suggested that individuals might group together to purchase a service, but again you face the problem of "why should anyone pay you when they can simply wait for someone else to do it and reap the benefit for free?" If your product costs $6 million to create, where are you going to find a group of users with that sort of money pool?
That arrangement produces bare minimums on both sides--minimal quality, minimal spending, minimal innovation. Artists are not going to spend years working on their magnum opus if they have to churn something out every week and hope someone likes it. (And before the 'art and music is crap today' bubbles to the surface, remember that it is not for the law to decide, and that good art and music *is* still produced and it is produced by artists who *do* really on their IP rights in order to create it.)
No, the rest of the world can get paid for working, too.
They could all join you in the fields, perhaps. Your labor is utterly worthless so long as there is a single competent person willing to do it for $1 cheaper, right up until that particular task had been completed the first time, when it would be worthless 100% of the time. Fewer people at the top in key positions cascades exponentially down the line. Intel hires fewer chip designers, because they refuse to waste money on large-scale R&D for the entire industry (and after being ripped off and undercut long enough, Intel collapses and lays off its workforce, forcing someone else to spend money and self-destruct).
There are benefits--sharing information reduces costs initially. However, it also reduces the number of jobs and reduces salaries. It doesn't matter that a CPU would cost half as much if only half the peo
That's exactly what they do, but at that point, vinyl becomes the superior choice. It is cheaper (say you're releasing a 35 minute EP; that's basically a full record and half a CD--since CDs are slightly more expensive and have higher minimum orders, the proportional ROI on vinyl is much better) and you get "street cred" and generally just a different sort of distribution model. Vinyl in 2007 seems less "corporate." It also has the advantage of being suitably professional that you can still be taken seriously (as opposed to burned CDs with photocopied inserts).
Of course, all of this only applies to those groups who release vinyl at all. Many release EPs on CD exclusively. Many indie bands also choose to release EPs on both media, but not full albums (because it takes more than one record, so they stick to CD).
This is a meaningless distinction. No, it's not. You're just not connecting the dots. Intellectual Property is a metonym, just like "gun control" is a metonym and "family practice" is a metonym. Like any other field of law, it regulates actions and not thoughts. It's inconvenient to your line of reasoning, not meaningless.
Some people deem that act to interfere with their idea of what society's interests might be If by "some people" you mean six centuries of legislators and courts and by "their idea" you mean "laws" then absolutely, I agree with you. Society's interests have been determined, individual judgments notwithstanding. If I don't think murder is categorically wrong, that doesn't mean the society isn't against me.
In a case like that, it probably wouldn't make sense for A and B to pave the road themselves Ding ding ding! The road goes unpaved, to the detriment of all, because C is a bastard. Now imagine a situation where A and B *could* pave the road by themselves and benefit from it without allowing freeloading. Gosh, what a wonderful system that would be. It would have its problems (creating high barriers to entry in established fields where the building blocks are all secured by older entities, for example), but it would work remarkably well.
If not, please tell me where I can sign up for one of these jobs where you don't have to make anything or do any work, but you still get paid. Surprise! You've already got one of those magical jobs. Your only labor is thinking. You could say that you get paid to type and to speak, but unless you're handed the content to type and/or speak verbatim, you are engaging in intellectual labor, not physical labor.
The software doesn't exist before I write it, which means I can charge those people to write it for them You can't sell something you don't own. No IP==no control over information==no way to demand payment.
Because if you don't, then I won't write it. But ARTISTS should create works of art and release them to the world for nothing. Why can't you give your contributions to society for free like you demand of them? You see, you're proving the point exactly. If you don't have a mechanism to collect money for your intellectual labor, you've said that you're not going to produce. This is exactly what the rest of the world would do without IP. The US economy would implode practically overnight.
You should not, however, pay me for having written code in the past. So once one person buys your software, I can have that same software for free, since you already wrote it? What if the software you're writing involves thousands of programmers and two years of time? Where are you going to find a single buyer to cover those expenses?
They spend time creating works which will not ultimately sell enough copies to justify the time spent, and then they scramble to file lawsuits, impose DRM, and buy new laws, hoping that if others won't buy their work, they can at least keep those others from enjoying it You see, the reason people do this is because it WORKS. If people didn't buy or use such products, the offenders would not have any vector to complain, nor would they have the financial clout to pursue litigation. You're still just complaining. If someone is going to be an asshole about what they make, it's either worth putting up with the crap (if it's amazing) or it's not (in which case, move on with your life). Stop giving those people money to use to sue you, and if you stop giving them money, stop using their products so that they don't have anything to sue about. If they make frivolous lawsuits, deal with them as you would any other frivolous lawsuit (false rape allegations, extortion schemes, what have you).
The plural is, however, the preferred and best choice there. No, it's not. You can't deconstruct the syntax from false priming. The structure of the sentence and the supersentential structure (i.e. the work containing it) does not allow a plural interpretation in the English grammar. 'None' is higher in the syntax than 'the parties' and cannot inherit any semantic coloring without head movement. There is none of that here. (In fact, according to your hypothesis, the previous sentence should also work both ways, but you'll not that it does not.) You can only apply a plural form after a plural has been introduced. That is not the context here. Again, the singular and plural forms are not in free variation.
Casual speech will accept either form (because construction on-the-fly is not required to parse without errors but merely to convey mutual intelligibility), but formal writing always prefers the unmarked construction (the singular form), as once upon a time English speakers valued proper construction that checked out in the "debugging" phase, to borrow a computer term.
You're clearly not a trained linguist (no response to mechanics) or an English grammarian (the reason Swedish speakers have difficulty is because English speakers don't follow the rules, and thanks to the convergence of a number of historical factors [1066, French-speaking English kings, no formal academy, and many others], English is fraught with exceptions to well-established rules and is forced to endure even more bludgeoning from hypercorrection and the simple fact that English speakers have at best a casual obedience to formal grammatical rules when compared to most other popular IE languages.
The preferred form is always the unmarked form, and the unmarked form here is the singular. Many people will happily accept the plural, but no one can claim that the singular form is wrong with any structural support. You can, however, support the converse with a narrow reading. Using the singular isn't wrong; it's simply ungrammatical for formal English (because it introduces false priming and therefore a parsing error) and therefore undesirable.
I think we'd all like the government to evaluate the "value" of actions in determining whether restrictions should be placed on them, right?
Intellectual Property *is* the evaluation of actions. It is a false notion claim to attack Intellectual Property as promulgating a theory of "owned information." That's not at all what's going on. Even Richard Stallman can't wrap his head around this (having no subtlety in the area of philosophy of law), so it's not surprising that the myth doesn't often get stopped. Intellectual Property is the regulation of the FLOW of information or the CONTROL of the realization of information. It is not the information itself that is controlled, it is merely the manifestation of that information (either by an action, such as a production method or process or by a representation, such as a recording or written document). You can't unlearn something you've learned, nor can you purposefully erase knowledge or memory. You can, however, be barred from realizing those ideas--IP isn't "thought policing" but merely "action policing" just like any other kind of legal restriction. You can store whatever you want in your brain, just like you can fantasize about committing petty larceny or even murder. The law only has a stake in what you DO to ACT on those thoughts.
Your act of copying a file is deemed to interfere with the interests of society, since that file was provided to society for consumption on the provision that the author/producer retains distribution rights (among others). Failure to uphold society's end of the bargain means collapse of the system, whether damage was done or not.
The information we're talking about here is released the moment its author decides to broadcast or sell it.
A decision made with the full faith and credit of IP protections on it. Artists don't release information and hope for the best; they know from the beginning that they have certain rights in releasing it. If those guarantees were not provided, it would not be released. As an individual, having created a work, you have two choices without IP: keep it to yourself and retain control, or share it and lose control. IP law encourages sharing by artificially enforcing author control after publicization. It only adds to the breadth of human knowledge (anyone who wants to release their work without any sort of protection for the good of society is free to do so). It is a framework to which you can avail yourself if you choose to.
This discussion started with music, music is only covered by copyright, and so I am only going to discuss copyright.
THIS discussion started with your conflation of theft and stealing, and moved over to your false notions on the concept of intellectual property. Copyright has nothing to do with the former, and is only one example of the latter.
The world didn't end. Everyone got to benefit. The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in.
That isn't the case, because that's only the first half of the process. Let's say those property owners were business owners and they all sold flowers. Say two of them split the costs of the road repairs, at $50,000 each. The third paid $0 for the repairs, but has full use of the road. In order to pay for the new road, the first two shop owners sacrificed their saved profits. The third shop owner didn't have to spend that money, and so he could make an equal sacrifice by reducing prices 10%. Free market that it is, everyone goes to Florist C for the lower prices, and Florists A and B go out of business. They all sacrificed $50,000 of saved profits in an effort to improve customer access/sales revenue (better roads make it easier for customers to get to them), but the vulture spent the $50,000 on reducing prices--which attracted more customers and generated more profit OVER AND ABOVE the benefit of the nice, new roads.
Yes, it can be either, but no, it's not in free variation. The OED does not conclusively provide for pluralization, as you implied ("THE correct form") and in fact does not even give a parallel example to this story (again, the context-free model problem surfaces). The OED does not give any conclusive entry for this item, because it is context-dependent and beyond the scope of a dictionary overview.
Speakers of English as a second language shouldn't have any trouble with zero pluralization; it's perhaps the most common cross-linguistic number system element.
No properly trained English editors (and only the most laissez-faire linguists) would accept a plural in this sentence. Casual English speech doesn't have a problem with it, and grammaticality is individual. The singular form is preferred here; pluralization here is a marked form in casual speech and unacceptable in formal writing.
In Old English, 'ne' is 'not' and 'an' is 'one,' forming a contraction that in ModE would be "n'one" if it were not already lexicalized. It's right there in the etymology of the word; first sentence in that section of the OED. None most certainly does not take a categorical plural form, and if you read that from the OED, you need to review the entry.
The word 'none' is neither exclusively singular nor exclusively plural, and it depends largely on in situ phrase structure rules. That is why a context free model cannot explain the construction. Take, for example, the clause "none of the facts is/are true." Using the plural form is only appropriate when you entertain the notion of multiple objects--if your intent, as in the original sentence, is to emphasize that NOT A SINGLE ONE is true, then you must use the singular verb. You would, however, have the option of saying "none are true" after encapsulating "facts" into the pronoun (enter the context-free failure). The sentence in the summary, further, does not carry the agent of "parties" (it is in fact the other way around) because "none" is the head of the phrase and does not carry semantic sense from a previous sentence. The expansion of "none" in that sentence is "not one."
Had the "none" appeared AFTER the word 'parties' then you would have the stylistic freedom to choose either the singular or the plural verb. You are falsely priming the sentence. The example cannot expand to "no parties of the parties"--it expands to "not one of the parties."
It won't parse to your ear because you chose a mass noun, not because the construction differs from "no(t) one"--mass nouns have a separate class of agreement in English. Strunk and White would fall into the "overly prescriptivist" camp which has little to do with English usage and grammar from a linguistics perspective (it is a grammar guide for English teachers, not a phrase structure grammar as used by linguistics, and so it is shunned by nearly the entire linguistics community). Curiously, you link to an Arkansas Court style guide (itself waffling on usage and construction) and label it as Strunk and White. The examples on that linked page are correct, but not for the reasons outlined.
It is irrelevant what people "think of" in normal usage--the construction exists for historical reasons, like all grammatical rules. Your final example should be "none of you is friendly." The marked form is "are", just as the marked form of 'regardless' is 'irregardless.' People do tend to think of an all/some/none continuum, but that does not drive agreement. Water as a linguistic concept is infinitely divisible, but almost everyone knows that water is in fact a collection of individual (and divisible) molecules. They do not alter their usage accordingly.
Second, the fundamental principle here is that I'm considering the consequences of disclosure, and "I find it a little harder to make a buck" isn't nearly as damaging as "now everyone knows I used to be a man" or "now the enemy knows where our troops are headed" (to use another example of justified suppression of information).
So rather than have intellectual property laws, you'd rather the government evaluate the value of information in determining whether restrictions should be placed on it. Again, deliciously arbitrary. The current framework, which suggests that information not produced in public is protected unless released offers a far more robust approach. The controlled publicization of private information is exactly what intellectual property is about, and why it is grouped together. Privacy is nothing more than the control of the information flow; it is the natural counterpart to intellectual property. One cannot exist without the other (one of the most important lessons of law school). If you restrict the flow of information, you have created a protectionist schema which isolates some intellectual work (whether it's simple knowledge of troop deployment or a force depletion report) from free exchange.
If you really didn't want everyone to have it, you wouldn't be selling it to everyone who shows up with cash.
They're not. They're selling it to everyone who shows up with cash in the presence of existing copyright law. Absent those protections, these artists wouldn't be selling anything, because to release it would be to cede control to the public.
No, you're thinking of patents. Copyright is nothing like that in practice
Puzzlingly, you seem to have glossed over the part where I said IP. You keep gravitating toward copyright, but that's not the only game in town regarding the issue of stealing information. IP is an umbrella group of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and information protection law (where the latter is often forgotten and glossed over as part of patent and trade secret law, which it in fact is not). The reason they are grouped together is because they all involve restrictions on the free flow of information for reasons deemed beneficial to society. Certainly, you might question whether, say, patents actually do benefit society, but that determination was made long ago and opposition is academic (just like opposition to the existence of Social Security). Protecting proprietary information by regulating access and use is exactly what the field is about. If information is restricted with legal force for any purpose, you have an IP framework, because the law can't take action against an idea directly.
In the instance of artwork, that private artwork, which in past eras was commissioned by the wealthy for their own private ownership and enjoyment, was made available to the public at large through the evolution of copyright law. The production of copies allowed the lower classes access to artwork which they could not ordinarily afford in exchange for limitations on that use. In effect, the government incentivized artists to release works in mass formats for public consumption. The artist is guaranteed ownership rights (control of distribution and reproduction) in exchange. Absent these protections, art will simply return to an expensive trade commissioned by the wealthy, save for the artwork that is voluntarily produced for the public (at the artist's expense).
Then the R&D will be funded by industry coalitions, or the other parties who benefit from it
Only to the minimum extent necessary--without any legal protections, there's nothing to stop a company from not participating in the research and simply waiting for the results, stealing them, and using them for their own gain in their production of, say, drugs or cellular phones. Without any IP framework, there is no mechanism to punish these vultures, which make similar profits with near-zero expense. Th
So you're saying that the government has the authority to withhold access to some in the interest of protection of individuals, but they don't have the authority to limit access in the interest of fostering business and promoting the sharing of art with a greater population? That seems deliciously arbitrary.
What we currently consider IP is private information that has been voluntarily publicized in exchange for some measure of control over that information. If there were no IP protections in place, much of that artwork would never be shared in a public capacity (with or without limits). It is a compromise between the binary "public/private" state that you propose, because neither is ideal for all involved parties.
"That provides proof that I had a copy at this time, and now it's up to someone else to prove that they had a copy first. If they can't, my evidence stands."
You're missing the point. If there are no ownership rights or access controls, you claim of authorship doesn't carry any weight. Authorship without ownership is worthless--you can't be forced to give credit to any original source if that author has no legal status. Credit would be voluntary, and so would revenue streams--commissioned works, touring deals, and so forth. People would be far less likely to share information, particular in the arts and sciences where progress requires tremendous time and effort. New scientific achievements would be relegated to weekend projects, since there would be no way to secure income without protections, and no corporate market to drive and fund research. There absolutely must be a tradeoff--individuals cannot afford the kind of research that needs to be done, and companies won't throw away the money to handle R&D for the entire industry.
"What are they paying for, exactly?"
It doesn't matter. I agree the scenario is tenuous, but the question is simple: if someone copied your work, and a third party offered that person a wad of cash because of it (endorsement deal, book tour, lecture circuit, even simply a gift because the content was riveting and enjoyable to some senile millionaire), but you were offered nothing, would you be upset?
Well, since English doesn't have polypersonal agreement and the subject of the sentence is "none," the verb should be singular. "None of you has taken out the trash" would be the proper construction of that sentence, and not "none...have." This is the same process that creates "has anyone finished his homework?" and why "has anyone finished their homework?" is malformed for some overly prescriptivist types. Since the OED accepts (and has used for centuries) 'their' as both a singular and plural pronoun (singular when referring to an individual of indeterminate gender; plural when referring to a group possessive), this latter "pluralization" is actually correct. Unfortunately, people see that "anyone...their" is plural and jump to conclusions that any of the "-one" pronouns can be pluralized in sentences. This is not the case.
This is also immediately clear if you look at the word "none"--it's a portmanteau of "no one" or "not one" just like many other English contractions.
I'm not talking exclusively of copyright. I'm saying that a legal framework which doesn't include intellectual property cannot have any notion of privacy. If you can't regulate access to information and you can't exercise control over your own data, you can't mount a legal defense of an invasion of privacy--there would be no enforceable notion of privacy, because privacy is an IP control and nothing more. What authority would you have to deny someone's use or access to information if you had no ownership rights to it?
As for the website--it's not lying if it can't be proved. If no one can own the information, the content, or the design, and no one has controlling power, any party can claim to be the author. There would be no way to grant you recognition for your creation. The other party would profit from your work while you went undiscovered. How do you prove that you are the author of anything if the system is incapable of recognizing ownership? They copied your website and sold it for profit, and the buyer isn't interested in reimbursing you at all. You really mean to tell me you wouldn't be upset about that? You wouldn't feel wronged?
But if you can't own your work, then there is no legal recourse for you to take. So what if they've lied about who created it--you've just said that there's no ownership or control rights.
Same thing with confidential records--if you can't own the information, you can't construct a legal framework to protect its privacy. Without information controls, you can't enforce any sort of privacy law whatsoever.
Possession - n. legal ownership, occupancy, or control. (Ownership - "legal right of control and possession;" control - "command; exercise direction over; a legal or official means of regulation or restraing")
That would include a recording of a song, an arrangement of pigment molecules or pixels, or a work of cinematography.
Copies of data don't spring up from nowhere, either. Even if they did, you do not have any intrinsic rights to the works of others, whether in digital form or not. Tell me, if someone decided to copy your website and assumed credit for all of your work and was offered $100,000 for it, would you say "oh well, there's nothing wrong with it because I still have my website up?"
Apathy is apathy. Whether it is peanut butter or brands of cars or social policy, people in this country simply do not care as much as those in other countries (at least as far as the five I've lived in). It's not about activism in the least; it's merely about having a preference or opinion. Americans on the whole are notorious for accepting what's fed to them and not really questioning or being inquisitive, and that's driven by a sense of complacency. Life is good, so it doesn't matter.
The US has been institutionally stable for two centuries, hasn't fought a war on home soil in over 140 years, and hasn't had any serious economic scare since the 1930s. Consumer protection laws and regulatory oversight are quite good (try 1950s France for comparison), no matter how much complaining happens. Those are all good things, but they do produce a system where people have very little reason to care about anything.
Again, I'm not saying anyone *should* care. I'm simply saying that they don't, and most of the rest of the world does (from web browsers to policy issues). Europeans tend to be more informed on political matters and to be more critical of spoonfed "news"--in my undergraduate days, I participated in conducting a study which was designed to test previous claims of this nature which found that older studies making this claim were not unsound, and our results corroborated that tendency.
Ah. Fair enough. In any case, the original reference was mostly tongue-in-cheek (they've actually come out with a rather expensive laser-based turntable, too that was actually discussed on Slashdot many years ago).
Slashdot Mirror
Can you explain the advantage of push email to me? I'm a professional user, and I use an Exchange server. I simply do not understand the advantage to push email over, say, IMAP with one-minute polling. IMAP has the further advantage of allowing you to see email subjects first, so you can skip the giant emails with attachments you don't need or can't work with effectively with the crap Office Mobile.
I have never been in a situation where getting an email 30 seconds faster actually made a difference. I understand that it's a cool feature and the iPhone doesn't have it and some other phones do, but I would be hard-pressed to take anyone seriously who considered it a deal-breaker.
You can't do jack shit with it aside from preview badly-formatted versions of presentations, spreadsheets, and documents. You can't edit anything on it in the way of fonts or any formatting beyond a basic bulletin board editor (bold/italic/center/left/color/etc.). As soon as you save anything, you destroy the document. Except for sending brief and relatively simple documents to your phone for review (in which case, why not just use HTML or PDF?) or for typing/editing quick notes and the like (in which case any notepad application works perfectly fine) or previewing a VERY SHORT spreadsheet or simple slideshow, Office Mobile is a piece of crap.
I'd happily surrender all editing options if it would simply DISPLAY the files properly (with a pan and scan zoom mode). Excel can't open 90% of the spreadsheets I have, and Word totally destroys the formatting of my pleadings to the point that they're literally unreadable jumbles of text. Powerpoint is a complete joke.
I'll probably buy the iPhone because it doesn't tease the user with a set of tools that don't even deserve "half-assed" status, they're so bad.
Yes, you win. *rolleyes* Now, I didn't introduce new material, so I guess this doesn't count as a reply.
Clearly a restriction on my speech.
No, it's not. Those digits aren't YOUR speech. You have no conceivable need to reproduce verbatim chunks of identifiable content. The requirement of writing original papers for publication is also a restriction on free speech, if that's how you look at it.
Look, if you promise to pay me to mow your lawn, it doesn't matter whether a "mowed lawn" is a product either of us can sell. You still have to pay me if I perform the service, and it's no different with any other labor.
Wrong! You can't stipulate to an illegal act, and you can't enforce a contract with no consideration. Try again, Dexter.
Again, the law disagrees with you.
No, you just don't understand that you can't enforce a contract just because you signed it, no matter what you signed. Your abolishment of IP also means that you didn't actually suffer any damages as a result. There is no legal canon for "time spent thinking" without IP. You've got nothing recoverable in that contract.
All right. Now what happens next? Just like in any other market, salaries for teaching would rise until they're attracted back.
No, they wouldn't. There's no money to provide higher salaries. You've eliminated the source of funding and there is no other source to take its place. This country doesn't produce very much--most money available to be thrown around for loans and venture capital comes directly from IP.
although I'm eagerly awaiting your bizarre explanation of how no one would be able to deliver Chinese food, work a retail cash register, or answer phones in a world with no copyright.
Because we don't need six million Chinese delivery drivers. If we needed more physical labor workers, we'd have them, generally speaking. Everyone already working those jobs would continue to do so. Don't confuse cyclical employment with availability of jobs. High turnover doesn't mean unsatisfied demand.
I call those regulations, and most of those nothing to do with artificially limiting supply in order to create more jobs than are really necessary.
They artificially limit supply to serve the greater interests of society. Some of them are to ensure stable prices (taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and the like), some of them are designed to ensure sustainable development (licensing of radio towers to prevent saturation, regulation of consumption rates, etc.) and some of them are designed to protect natural resources at the expense of maximum efficiency. There is no difference between wanting to preserve a healthy planet and wanting to preserve a healthy society.
And apparently you don't understand how programming works either.
Show us one truly novel line of programming you've ever written. A line that has never been written before by anyone in your field. Alternatively, show a finished function that you'll never use again and be paid for.
Oh really? Then I guess you wouldn't mind a law that banned you from saying or writing the word "speech", because after all, it's not YOUR word; someone else invented it long ago.
A language isn't a novel work of a person. It's also not possible to protect a word (outside of trademark contexts). Even those that can be protected ultimately expire or undergo a process of generalization. Even if you could copyright a word, someone else would just create an alternative without such a protection, and everyone would use that. A word no one uses doesn't communicate anything.
Software is still covered by copyright for many decades after it becomes obsolete. When a work doesn't enter the public domain until everyone who lived to see its creation has died, the timespan may as well be infinite.
First, nonsense--just because YOU can't use it doesn't mean it's infinitely protected. Second, the solution to that problem is to enforce copyright limits. It does not follow that a copyri
Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits.
No, it does not. It says that if you are not the creator of said digits, you do not have the right to redistribute them, and the government has designated a party which does have that authority. If you really want to get right down to it, you can't actually own land either, but you seem to have no problem with government-designated controls on that.
And as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay,
A binding agreement for a product you can't sell. Take that agreement to a court. You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute. Say you couldn't own land--you couldn't sue for squatting, nor could you sue for unpaid rent. Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time. Do you see the problem with enforcing your fantasy vision yet?
Like any good programmer, I don't like spending my time rewriting the same stuff over and over either, so this wouldn't really affect me.
Bullshit. There is very little new material in software--it's all assembling provided blocks into functions and assembling those functions into a program. You're just drawing the line one stage past what you do, without giving any rationale. Why should you get paid for rearranging some characters but someone else shouldn't get paid for repeating a performance?
You don't like it. We get that. It's not going anywhere. It's also not really very different from what you want--instead of waiting for you to pile up that $40 million to give everyone a copy, you go ahead and give everyone the copy and keep collecting money until you reach $40 million. In exchange for your risk (because some products won't break even), you get to turn a profit for a limited period of time without an earnings threshold. It's better for consumers (faster gratification, lower cost of entry) and better for producers (potential for large profits and easy access to the market).
ntil one person is able to write all the world's software single-handedly, there will be a market for more than one programmer.
No kidding. My point is that there will not be a need for the vast majority of programmers. Most of you don't do anything worthwhile anyway.
Would you mind explaining how, exactly, you think abolishing copyright would make universities obsolete?
Sure. Professors publish works to supplement lower salaries than they'd earn in the business sector. They don't have time to publish on a weekly basis to accomplish same without IP, and so universities would lose professors by the boatload. You can't teach classes without teachers. Further, there's a little thing called a "research university" which is essentially a patent and copyright mill. Universities use IP to fund their operating costs if private, or to justify their immense tax expense if public. If universities did not generate IP, they would not only lose professors, but also the income necessary to exist institutionally. Now I can't wait for you to come back with some pie-in-the-sky "they'd get money from 'somewhere' else." Since you haven't solved the problem of what would fuel the economy in its place, I won't hold my breath.
Then I'd get another job to pay the bills
Doing what? What, specifically, would you do, specifically? That's the question. Good luck as a lawyer with your ill-conceived understanding of and opposition to IP, by the way. I speak from experience when I say that one of the fundamental foundations of legal philosophy includes IP. Not everyone likes it, but everyone accepts that there's no alternative (think "Churchill on democracy").
Funny how no other form of labor needs those "prot
Freedom of speech. Copyright says that there are certain sequences of words I'm not allowed to say to another person because someone else has a monopoly on speaking them.
First of all, no, and second "freedom of speech" does not apply to the work of others. It's not free speech to duplicate a painting.
Only if he's not good enough to get people to pay him to paint.
You mean like Goya, or Picasso, or Van Gogh?
They become public the moment they're shared or sold
Under what philosophy? Certainly not existing law, and not even categorically in your fantasy world of "private vs. public with no IP."
If you're going to keep broadening the definition of "IP" like this, is it any wonder why I insist on only discussing copyright?
Broadened how? You're the one insisting that on real property should have any sort of protections. Stock isn't real property. You seem quite confused about what property even is.
A programmer gets paid every time he writes code. If he writes 55 programs, then he gets paid 55 times, not just for the first one. Do you really think there's going to be a time when no more software needs to be written?
How long does it take you to write 55 programs? How long does it take you to do 55 oil changes? The current cost of a typical software title is about the same as the price of an oil change. Is your labor worth more? What makes you think people would pay you up front for your software? I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends. You wouldn't have a market if you charged individuals the full expected price.
But I'm not going to hand over $40 and hope that a million other people do the same before you get off your ass and write what I hope will be what I want. Consumers don't pay in advance.
Why should we have to come up with a plan for factory workers before deciding to replace them with something more efficient?
They've already had somewhere to go in the past. What is there past information? Nothing. Thinking is the only skill we have that can't be automated (yet). Factory workers left the factory to enter the booming service sector. They didn't create it. It existed already. What exists for people to move into, since we'd be dumping tens of millions of jobs?
So, what's to stop me from getting all my music from friends, who get it from their friends, and so on?
Practicality. Casual file sharing is supplemental to purchasing CDs. You might get a few tracks you like, become interested in the group, and buy albums. If you're just pumping your friends for music, they cross over into distribution. Unless you have a thousand friends each giving you a mix CD, you can't build a library that way. The nature of enforcement would also change to adapt to the situation you describe, should it come to pass. People should pay for the things they like. A little sharing around the edges doesn't hurt, but illegal distribution (no matter how distributed you make it) is a problem. There are fuzzy edges on everything with a natural balance.
What if someone took your "only get paid the first time" to the extreme you want for art and music? Your customer wants to see your source code. He's only going to pay you for the funtions you've never written before (changing variable names won't count). After all, performing those functions again is effortless and instant, just like providing another copy of a song you've already recorded.
You keep saying this, but it doesn't stand up any more than it did the first time. Please give just one example of a service industry that wouldn't exist without copyright - other than the copyright litigation industry.
Publishing, printing, information collection services, commercial film, professional photography, universities, major record
That group gaming the system is the very reason why the system exists.
No, it's not. The system exists because the framers of society determined that access to the arts was not being shared. Some form of IP has existed since before the industrial revolution (reinforced by limited availability of education). Given that individuals were not required to share anything and others did not have the capacity to steal it, a company could create a product and have no competition because would-be competitors could not recreate it on their own. In the art world, people could not afford art. A commissioned work could not sit in 10,000 living rooms (just as it can't today--only one person gets the original). Apart from museums and galleries providing public display of privately-owned pieces, the general public had no access to works of art. They were not invited to performances and could not afford paintings.
The solution was to devise a system where people could kick start development by letting their own work help others, without losing the financial advantage of having created it. Other companies could enjoy a license to use that innovation which would allow them, too, to make more money. In the arts, a copyright allowed artists to subsidize their product across many people interested in copies. Lithographic printing allowed an artist to create a painting and let thousands of people pay a few dollars toward it, instead of selling the original for several thousand dollars.
The gamers you speak of didn't even exist until the 20th Century. Gamers of some kind exist from day one and will exist until the end of time. You have to deal with the problem, not the carrier.
is better than taking away everyone else's freedom
What freedom? You apparently believe in a right to privacy. The works protected by IP laws aren't public works. They are private works which are shared with the public through the protections of IP. You don't have any intrinsic right to them. Without IP, the majority of these works wouldn't be put on the market in the first place, and it would remove the incentive to innovate. Painters would still paint, because they love doing it. Society wouldn't be bettered by it, though, since the painter would have to finance his hobby by working a physical labor job. You might still write software because you enjoy it, but you'd probably have to do something else to make money because there'd be too many programmers competing for too little money.
Yes, that's what everyone already does in every other field. If you need your car fixed, you don't go with the most expensive mechanic, do you? Has that destroyed the industry? I think not.
No, but a mechanic gets paid every time he does a repair. If he changes oil 55 times a day, he gets paid 55 times, not just the first time he figures out how to do it. He also doesn't have to be the first one to figure out how to change oil in order to profit from it.
My income simply does not depend on selling copies
I find that nearly impossible to believe. Is your company publicly traded? If so, it relies on selling IP (stock certificates). Are you salaried? Then your work relies on the company's IP product being sufficient to support its employees. Unless you are paid per-project on an individual basis, and unless your customers are buying software with a free software license (indicating that they cannot sell it or control its distribution), then your income is dependent on IP.
The same way anyone competes for any job! Why do you think this is a new concern?
No one else has to compete the same was as service jobs do. If a technology were invented tomorrow that could instantly produce anything that had been built just one time before it (from apples to steak to Ford trucks to houses to the freakin' space shuttle), how would people make money? What would the billions of production line workers do? Not everyone can cr
These laws benefit a minority which can effectively lobby in its own favor
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. How is this different from lobbying in any other capacity? Abolishing legal frameworks because there's a group gaming the system is not the answer.
If he isn't a rational actor, then we can't predict much about his behavior anyway.
Non sequitur. The law does not depend on rational actors, nor does it depend on predictions. The law deals in real controversies exclusively. Predictions are of zero consequence. If A and B cannot convince C to split the cost, then they cannot bear the risk, because paving the road will put them out of business, and not paving the road might do the same. A and B should not have to relocate because they have one asshole competitor.
I'm not drawing that distinction, because as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. If I get paid for spending my time at some task, then I'm doing labor, period.
I'm not sure why I have to keep explaining this to you, since you're the one who thinks IP should be wiped off the face of the earth. If you don't have IP, you wouldn't have a job. Companies would pay only the bare minimum to accomplish their goals, and they would shop the lowest bidder and the earliest bidder. I sincerely doubt you have ever created something that has not been created before or that you are uniquely suited to produce. How would you compete with your tens of millions of fellow programmers for being 1) the lowest bidder and 2) the first to create a given software solution? The only reason you have a job now is because IBM doesn't share with Novell, who doesn't share with Adobe. If everything created was freely accessible to all, you would have nothing to offer, except maybe the occasional code tweak. How would you finance your education with such bleak prospects?
I've demanded no such thing.
No, you've demanded that someone foot the bill (up front) for the entire cost of your services sufficient to generate a living wage. But very few people make money that way now, and even fewer consumers are willing to pay in advance for material of questionable quality to be delivered at an uncertain time. You've suggested that individuals might group together to purchase a service, but again you face the problem of "why should anyone pay you when they can simply wait for someone else to do it and reap the benefit for free?" If your product costs $6 million to create, where are you going to find a group of users with that sort of money pool?
That arrangement produces bare minimums on both sides--minimal quality, minimal spending, minimal innovation. Artists are not going to spend years working on their magnum opus if they have to churn something out every week and hope someone likes it. (And before the 'art and music is crap today' bubbles to the surface, remember that it is not for the law to decide, and that good art and music *is* still produced and it is produced by artists who *do* really on their IP rights in order to create it.)
No, the rest of the world can get paid for working, too.
They could all join you in the fields, perhaps. Your labor is utterly worthless so long as there is a single competent person willing to do it for $1 cheaper, right up until that particular task had been completed the first time, when it would be worthless 100% of the time. Fewer people at the top in key positions cascades exponentially down the line. Intel hires fewer chip designers, because they refuse to waste money on large-scale R&D for the entire industry (and after being ripped off and undercut long enough, Intel collapses and lays off its workforce, forcing someone else to spend money and self-destruct).
There are benefits--sharing information reduces costs initially. However, it also reduces the number of jobs and reduces salaries. It doesn't matter that a CPU would cost half as much if only half the peo
That's exactly what they do, but at that point, vinyl becomes the superior choice. It is cheaper (say you're releasing a 35 minute EP; that's basically a full record and half a CD--since CDs are slightly more expensive and have higher minimum orders, the proportional ROI on vinyl is much better) and you get "street cred" and generally just a different sort of distribution model. Vinyl in 2007 seems less "corporate." It also has the advantage of being suitably professional that you can still be taken seriously (as opposed to burned CDs with photocopied inserts).
Of course, all of this only applies to those groups who release vinyl at all. Many release EPs on CD exclusively. Many indie bands also choose to release EPs on both media, but not full albums (because it takes more than one record, so they stick to CD).
PS: Sorry for the run-on in the penultimate paragraph.
Casual speech will accept either form (because construction on-the-fly is not required to parse without errors but merely to convey mutual intelligibility), but formal writing always prefers the unmarked construction (the singular form), as once upon a time English speakers valued proper construction that checked out in the "debugging" phase, to borrow a computer term.
You're clearly not a trained linguist (no response to mechanics) or an English grammarian (the reason Swedish speakers have difficulty is because English speakers don't follow the rules, and thanks to the convergence of a number of historical factors [1066, French-speaking English kings, no formal academy, and many others], English is fraught with exceptions to well-established rules and is forced to endure even more bludgeoning from hypercorrection and the simple fact that English speakers have at best a casual obedience to formal grammatical rules when compared to most other popular IE languages.
The preferred form is always the unmarked form, and the unmarked form here is the singular. Many people will happily accept the plural, but no one can claim that the singular form is wrong with any structural support. You can, however, support the converse with a narrow reading. Using the singular isn't wrong; it's simply ungrammatical for formal English (because it introduces false priming and therefore a parsing error) and therefore undesirable.
I think we'd all like the government to evaluate the "value" of actions in determining whether restrictions should be placed on them, right?
Intellectual Property *is* the evaluation of actions. It is a false notion claim to attack Intellectual Property as promulgating a theory of "owned information." That's not at all what's going on. Even Richard Stallman can't wrap his head around this (having no subtlety in the area of philosophy of law), so it's not surprising that the myth doesn't often get stopped. Intellectual Property is the regulation of the FLOW of information or the CONTROL of the realization of information. It is not the information itself that is controlled, it is merely the manifestation of that information (either by an action, such as a production method or process or by a representation, such as a recording or written document). You can't unlearn something you've learned, nor can you purposefully erase knowledge or memory. You can, however, be barred from realizing those ideas--IP isn't "thought policing" but merely "action policing" just like any other kind of legal restriction. You can store whatever you want in your brain, just like you can fantasize about committing petty larceny or even murder. The law only has a stake in what you DO to ACT on those thoughts.
Your act of copying a file is deemed to interfere with the interests of society, since that file was provided to society for consumption on the provision that the author/producer retains distribution rights (among others). Failure to uphold society's end of the bargain means collapse of the system, whether damage was done or not.
The information we're talking about here is released the moment its author decides to broadcast or sell it.
A decision made with the full faith and credit of IP protections on it. Artists don't release information and hope for the best; they know from the beginning that they have certain rights in releasing it. If those guarantees were not provided, it would not be released. As an individual, having created a work, you have two choices without IP: keep it to yourself and retain control, or share it and lose control. IP law encourages sharing by artificially enforcing author control after publicization. It only adds to the breadth of human knowledge (anyone who wants to release their work without any sort of protection for the good of society is free to do so). It is a framework to which you can avail yourself if you choose to.
This discussion started with music, music is only covered by copyright, and so I am only going to discuss copyright.
THIS discussion started with your conflation of theft and stealing, and moved over to your false notions on the concept of intellectual property. Copyright has nothing to do with the former, and is only one example of the latter.
The world didn't end. Everyone got to benefit. The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in.
That isn't the case, because that's only the first half of the process. Let's say those property owners were business owners and they all sold flowers. Say two of them split the costs of the road repairs, at $50,000 each. The third paid $0 for the repairs, but has full use of the road. In order to pay for the new road, the first two shop owners sacrificed their saved profits. The third shop owner didn't have to spend that money, and so he could make an equal sacrifice by reducing prices 10%. Free market that it is, everyone goes to Florist C for the lower prices, and Florists A and B go out of business. They all sacrificed $50,000 of saved profits in an effort to improve customer access/sales revenue (better roads make it easier for customers to get to them), but the vulture spent the $50,000 on reducing prices--which attracted more customers and generated more profit OVER AND ABOVE the benefit of the nice, new roads.
I remember hea
Yes, it can be either, but no, it's not in free variation. The OED does not conclusively provide for pluralization, as you implied ("THE correct form") and in fact does not even give a parallel example to this story (again, the context-free model problem surfaces). The OED does not give any conclusive entry for this item, because it is context-dependent and beyond the scope of a dictionary overview.
Speakers of English as a second language shouldn't have any trouble with zero pluralization; it's perhaps the most common cross-linguistic number system element.
No properly trained English editors (and only the most laissez-faire linguists) would accept a plural in this sentence. Casual English speech doesn't have a problem with it, and grammaticality is individual. The singular form is preferred here; pluralization here is a marked form in casual speech and unacceptable in formal writing.
In Old English, 'ne' is 'not' and 'an' is 'one,' forming a contraction that in ModE would be "n'one" if it were not already lexicalized. It's right there in the etymology of the word; first sentence in that section of the OED. None most certainly does not take a categorical plural form, and if you read that from the OED, you need to review the entry.
The word 'none' is neither exclusively singular nor exclusively plural, and it depends largely on in situ phrase structure rules. That is why a context free model cannot explain the construction. Take, for example, the clause "none of the facts is/are true." Using the plural form is only appropriate when you entertain the notion of multiple objects--if your intent, as in the original sentence, is to emphasize that NOT A SINGLE ONE is true, then you must use the singular verb. You would, however, have the option of saying "none are true" after encapsulating "facts" into the pronoun (enter the context-free failure). The sentence in the summary, further, does not carry the agent of "parties" (it is in fact the other way around) because "none" is the head of the phrase and does not carry semantic sense from a previous sentence. The expansion of "none" in that sentence is "not one."
Had the "none" appeared AFTER the word 'parties' then you would have the stylistic freedom to choose either the singular or the plural verb. You are falsely priming the sentence. The example cannot expand to "no parties of the parties"--it expands to "not one of the parties."
It won't parse to your ear because you chose a mass noun, not because the construction differs from "no(t) one"--mass nouns have a separate class of agreement in English. Strunk and White would fall into the "overly prescriptivist" camp which has little to do with English usage and grammar from a linguistics perspective (it is a grammar guide for English teachers, not a phrase structure grammar as used by linguistics, and so it is shunned by nearly the entire linguistics community). Curiously, you link to an Arkansas Court style guide (itself waffling on usage and construction) and label it as Strunk and White. The examples on that linked page are correct, but not for the reasons outlined.
It is irrelevant what people "think of" in normal usage--the construction exists for historical reasons, like all grammatical rules. Your final example should be "none of you is friendly." The marked form is "are", just as the marked form of 'regardless' is 'irregardless.' People do tend to think of an all/some/none continuum, but that does not drive agreement. Water as a linguistic concept is infinitely divisible, but almost everyone knows that water is in fact a collection of individual (and divisible) molecules. They do not alter their usage accordingly.
Second, the fundamental principle here is that I'm considering the consequences of disclosure, and "I find it a little harder to make a buck" isn't nearly as damaging as "now everyone knows I used to be a man" or "now the enemy knows where our troops are headed" (to use another example of justified suppression of information).
So rather than have intellectual property laws, you'd rather the government evaluate the value of information in determining whether restrictions should be placed on it. Again, deliciously arbitrary. The current framework, which suggests that information not produced in public is protected unless released offers a far more robust approach. The controlled publicization of private information is exactly what intellectual property is about, and why it is grouped together. Privacy is nothing more than the control of the information flow; it is the natural counterpart to intellectual property. One cannot exist without the other (one of the most important lessons of law school). If you restrict the flow of information, you have created a protectionist schema which isolates some intellectual work (whether it's simple knowledge of troop deployment or a force depletion report) from free exchange.
If you really didn't want everyone to have it, you wouldn't be selling it to everyone who shows up with cash.
They're not. They're selling it to everyone who shows up with cash in the presence of existing copyright law. Absent those protections, these artists wouldn't be selling anything, because to release it would be to cede control to the public.
No, you're thinking of patents. Copyright is nothing like that in practice
Puzzlingly, you seem to have glossed over the part where I said IP. You keep gravitating toward copyright, but that's not the only game in town regarding the issue of stealing information. IP is an umbrella group of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and information protection law (where the latter is often forgotten and glossed over as part of patent and trade secret law, which it in fact is not). The reason they are grouped together is because they all involve restrictions on the free flow of information for reasons deemed beneficial to society. Certainly, you might question whether, say, patents actually do benefit society, but that determination was made long ago and opposition is academic (just like opposition to the existence of Social Security). Protecting proprietary information by regulating access and use is exactly what the field is about. If information is restricted with legal force for any purpose, you have an IP framework, because the law can't take action against an idea directly.
In the instance of artwork, that private artwork, which in past eras was commissioned by the wealthy for their own private ownership and enjoyment, was made available to the public at large through the evolution of copyright law. The production of copies allowed the lower classes access to artwork which they could not ordinarily afford in exchange for limitations on that use. In effect, the government incentivized artists to release works in mass formats for public consumption. The artist is guaranteed ownership rights (control of distribution and reproduction) in exchange. Absent these protections, art will simply return to an expensive trade commissioned by the wealthy, save for the artwork that is voluntarily produced for the public (at the artist's expense).
Then the R&D will be funded by industry coalitions, or the other parties who benefit from it
Only to the minimum extent necessary--without any legal protections, there's nothing to stop a company from not participating in the research and simply waiting for the results, stealing them, and using them for their own gain in their production of, say, drugs or cellular phones. Without any IP framework, there is no mechanism to punish these vultures, which make similar profits with near-zero expense. Th
So you're saying that the government has the authority to withhold access to some in the interest of protection of individuals, but they don't have the authority to limit access in the interest of fostering business and promoting the sharing of art with a greater population? That seems deliciously arbitrary.
What we currently consider IP is private information that has been voluntarily publicized in exchange for some measure of control over that information. If there were no IP protections in place, much of that artwork would never be shared in a public capacity (with or without limits). It is a compromise between the binary "public/private" state that you propose, because neither is ideal for all involved parties.
"That provides proof that I had a copy at this time, and now it's up to someone else to prove that they had a copy first. If they can't, my evidence stands."
You're missing the point. If there are no ownership rights or access controls, you claim of authorship doesn't carry any weight. Authorship without ownership is worthless--you can't be forced to give credit to any original source if that author has no legal status. Credit would be voluntary, and so would revenue streams--commissioned works, touring deals, and so forth. People would be far less likely to share information, particular in the arts and sciences where progress requires tremendous time and effort. New scientific achievements would be relegated to weekend projects, since there would be no way to secure income without protections, and no corporate market to drive and fund research. There absolutely must be a tradeoff--individuals cannot afford the kind of research that needs to be done, and companies won't throw away the money to handle R&D for the entire industry.
"What are they paying for, exactly?"
It doesn't matter. I agree the scenario is tenuous, but the question is simple: if someone copied your work, and a third party offered that person a wad of cash because of it (endorsement deal, book tour, lecture circuit, even simply a gift because the content was riveting and enjoyable to some senile millionaire), but you were offered nothing, would you be upset?
Well, since English doesn't have polypersonal agreement and the subject of the sentence is "none," the verb should be singular. "None of you has taken out the trash" would be the proper construction of that sentence, and not "none...have." This is the same process that creates "has anyone finished his homework?" and why "has anyone finished their homework?" is malformed for some overly prescriptivist types. Since the OED accepts (and has used for centuries) 'their' as both a singular and plural pronoun (singular when referring to an individual of indeterminate gender; plural when referring to a group possessive), this latter "pluralization" is actually correct. Unfortunately, people see that "anyone...their" is plural and jump to conclusions that any of the "-one" pronouns can be pluralized in sentences. This is not the case.
This is also immediately clear if you look at the word "none"--it's a portmanteau of "no one" or "not one" just like many other English contractions.
Submitter would be correct. "None" is a singular subject. The verb does not modify the object, but rather the subject.
I'm not talking exclusively of copyright. I'm saying that a legal framework which doesn't include intellectual property cannot have any notion of privacy. If you can't regulate access to information and you can't exercise control over your own data, you can't mount a legal defense of an invasion of privacy--there would be no enforceable notion of privacy, because privacy is an IP control and nothing more. What authority would you have to deny someone's use or access to information if you had no ownership rights to it?
As for the website--it's not lying if it can't be proved. If no one can own the information, the content, or the design, and no one has controlling power, any party can claim to be the author. There would be no way to grant you recognition for your creation. The other party would profit from your work while you went undiscovered. How do you prove that you are the author of anything if the system is incapable of recognizing ownership? They copied your website and sold it for profit, and the buyer isn't interested in reimbursing you at all. You really mean to tell me you wouldn't be upset about that? You wouldn't feel wronged?
But if you can't own your work, then there is no legal recourse for you to take. So what if they've lied about who created it--you've just said that there's no ownership or control rights.
Same thing with confidential records--if you can't own the information, you can't construct a legal framework to protect its privacy. Without information controls, you can't enforce any sort of privacy law whatsoever.
Possession - n. legal ownership, occupancy, or control. (Ownership - "legal right of control and possession;" control - "command; exercise direction over; a legal or official means of regulation or restraing")
That would include a recording of a song, an arrangement of pigment molecules or pixels, or a work of cinematography.
Copies of data don't spring up from nowhere, either. Even if they did, you do not have any intrinsic rights to the works of others, whether in digital form or not. Tell me, if someone decided to copy your website and assumed credit for all of your work and was offered $100,000 for it, would you say "oh well, there's nothing wrong with it because I still have my website up?"
Apathy is apathy. Whether it is peanut butter or brands of cars or social policy, people in this country simply do not care as much as those in other countries (at least as far as the five I've lived in). It's not about activism in the least; it's merely about having a preference or opinion. Americans on the whole are notorious for accepting what's fed to them and not really questioning or being inquisitive, and that's driven by a sense of complacency. Life is good, so it doesn't matter.
The US has been institutionally stable for two centuries, hasn't fought a war on home soil in over 140 years, and hasn't had any serious economic scare since the 1930s. Consumer protection laws and regulatory oversight are quite good (try 1950s France for comparison), no matter how much complaining happens. Those are all good things, but they do produce a system where people have very little reason to care about anything.
Again, I'm not saying anyone *should* care. I'm simply saying that they don't, and most of the rest of the world does (from web browsers to policy issues). Europeans tend to be more informed on political matters and to be more critical of spoonfed "news"--in my undergraduate days, I participated in conducting a study which was designed to test previous claims of this nature which found that older studies making this claim were not unsound, and our results corroborated that tendency.
Ah. Fair enough. In any case, the original reference was mostly tongue-in-cheek (they've actually come out with a rather expensive laser-based turntable, too that was actually discussed on Slashdot many years ago).