The problem with with the use-it-or-lose-it so far as the inventor is concerned is that it makes things harder for the individual to market. Potential manufacturers and distributors who would need to be involved know that all they have to do is wait for a little bit and they get my revolutionary work for free. If that's the case, why should I bother trying? That's counter to the purpose of copyright/patent, which is to encourage creativity by making sure that inventors get a chance to profit. Limit that time too much, and you limit the effort and risks people will put out. Free cancer cure = good, certainly, but no cancer cure because nobody thinks it's worth the effort = bad.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with corporations holding copyright. If Corporation X organized and funded the effort to find a cure for such-and-such a disease or develop a more efficient engine, I've got no problems with said corporation making a profit off of that. After all, without the work provided by that group of people, those innovations probably wouldn't have come about.
The problem, though, is that unlike a person, whose death provides a convenient milestone around which to set a reasonable copyright limit, corporations can go on forever, which means that that damn mouse has a vested interest in lobbying for an infinite cycle of copyright extentions, effectively but legally circumventing the intention of the Constitution.
What to do, then? I'm not a fan of "use it or lose it" limits. Under the provisions you're suggesting, that damn mouse can issue limited runs of "Steamboat Willie" every few years, ensuring that it will never, ever, ever go out of copyright. It could be even worse in science and technology. Say I'm a clever guy who has come up with a plan for a hugely efficient water desalinization process. It's a marvelous invention, but it only works on a massive scale, and I'd need millions of dollars just to build a working prototype. If I'm a big corporation, I have the choice of either buying the plans for a huge sum of money or just sitting around until the patent, which the inventor can't capitalize on by himself, expires.
The best answer, I'm afraid, is a difficult one: stop moving the goalposts. There's no reason to extend copyright any farther than is has been. They could even be moved back to where they were before the most recent round of legislation. And that means the mouse must be stopped. Not something I've got the money for.
It's not closed, but it is narrowing. It'd just take a few deft strokes of legislation to return the limit on copyright to something reasonable, but that damn mouse keeps buying up the legislature. What we need to do is get a time machine and have someone write into the Constitution an explanation to the effect that "Steamboat Willie" must eventually go out of copyright.
Re:there is an old russian joke...
on
Earth Sandwich
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· Score: 1
Ah, well, that's because you're not an old Russian.
If anything, the reason I think people hate it so much is precisely because it allows just any wanker to come in and crap out a solution without thinking about it.
And even that can be effectively prevented with a few deft strokes of the admin client. The big problem is ignorance. Witness, for example, the number of people who are still poorly informed enough to think that Notes is an email client. Sure, Notes sucks if you deploy it in an environment where nobody knows what to do with it and resents the imposition enough that they refuse to learn about it, but I've seen too many well-tuned, stable Notes environments to blame all or even most the problems on the software.
Those changes in size are most likely related to environment, in the form of improved nutrition, rather than genetic changes. Besides, to be a consequence of evolutionary forces, there'd have to be something making sure that taller people reproduce at a higher rate than shorter ones.
I was about to post something allegedly clever about how you were already giving the pornographers a chunk of your salary, but then I remembered the context of the discussion. We're all downloading our porn for free!
Stand up for privacy. No data retention nonsense based on terrorism shills or failed **AA business models.
Without getting into whether or not that's a good idea, does this strike anyone else as inconsistent? If there's no "immaterial law," that would suggest no laws preventing anyone from gathering and retaining whatever data that fell into their hands.
Unless the original legislation specifically states that the tax was enacted to defeat those damn'd Spaniards, "fraud" strikes me as overreaching. It'd be more like a company raised its prices because its suppliers were charging them more, then decided to keep them at that level when it discovered that the market would bear that price even after its suppliers' prices dropped again. Bad administration? Sure. Greedy? No argument with that. But criminal? Doubt it.
The help database provided with the Notes client didn't help? Granted, nobody may have told you about such a basic feature, but that would seem to be the fault of your organization, not the software. Do this:
Launch the Notes Client
Hit F1 to bring up the help database
Click on the Search button
Type your search term (say, "Notes minder") into the search bar and click "Search"
I've always found the built-in documentation useful, though it's a better reference than a teaching tool.
IBM has better sales? That doesn't mesh well with what I hear in the Notes/Domino community. There's a sizable community of developers and admins who love the product, but despair of a sales department which appears disinclined to actually sell anything.
the learning curve is quite steep and requires actual training it seems
FWIW, I've made a career as a Domino developer with precious little formal training. It probably helps that I started with Notes before I got more heavily involved with relational databases, so I didn't have so many preconceived notions about how databases should work that I had to throw out the window.
which requires us not only to use Lotus Notes, but to have it open at all times so we can be sametimed and be alerted of new emails
You know you don't have to do that, right? Sametime will work whether or not Notes is running, and you can have Notesminder keeping you alert to emails and alarms. It's entirely possible that your admins have screwed things up in such a way that that's not possible, but the tools to keep chat and email up with a small footprint are right there in the box.
New editions cost nearly as much as original editions. The author has to go through the whole book and decide what should and shouldn't be changed, the entire book has to do a pass by the editor to make sure it all still makes sense, and printing the book doesn't cost any less (in fact, it probably costs a lot more). Certainly, the original writing has been long since paid off, and the editor probably has to do less work on later editions than the first one, but new editions incur new costs, which must be paid off as well.
I suspect that technical publishing will slowly make the transition to an electronic basis, which will reduce costs and overhead somewhat, though it'll take a while. The business end is still using the best principles the nineteenth century can give us and is only slowly moving into the twentieth. I can see the industry reacting negatively to inserting ads. IIRC, that was tried in paperbacks in the 70s and ultimately didn't work out. I know I'd hate it.
Ultimately, though, there's a fundamental problem of supply and demand: it takes $X for humans to write and edit a book on such-and-such an esoteric subject, and there's at best $Y available to pay for it. Unless somebody invents an AI which can detect good prose and effective communication and can generate novel and pleasing layouts, $X isn't going down. And until someone comes up with a way of making programming and hardware the new [insert your favorite fad here], $Y isn't going up. It's a niche with the economic burden that implies, and it's going to stay that way.
You seem to be working with a novel definition of the word "limited." Certainly, only one publisher is going to publish my book on, say, the Notorious VBA, but another publisher can print yours, and those books compete with one another in the marketplace for shelf space and readers. Publishers of technical books most definitely pay attention to what the rest of the industry is printing on any given subject with a focus on the question "why should people buy our book instead of theirs?" If that's "limited" competition, then there's only limited competition between auto manufacturers, clothing designers, and soft drink producers.
But "The C programming language", written in 1978, and (according to Amazon) last updated in 1998, is a 274 page paperback. It has, no doubt, sold THOUSANDS (millions?) of copies over the years, and easily paid off it's production and update costs.
Probably. Of course, there was no way of knowing that it would have sold that long or that much when it was initially published.
This is just plain greed on the part of the publisher.
Or maybe it's just making money where they can. There's this one book which has sold well. That's great. But for that book, there are probably four or five others which just broke even or made a small profit and a lot more which lost money. Publishing is a gamble. Publishers put out lots of books in hopes that some of them will make it. Most don't. The few that do make the difference between more books and going out of business.
So why not make the books on the latest, unstable API into a 3-ring binder-type? Then, every year, you can purchase the updates to it.
Mostly because it does precious little to reduce most of larger fixed costs other than printing and binding. If any significant changes happen, the whole work essentially needs to be re-edited to make sure it's all consistent, and then the whole thing needs to be reindexed. It's unlikely that most changes to one feature will require widespread changes to the text, but until you have someone go and look, you won't actually know. Yes, you might be able to keep your printing costs down, but you can't ensure that changes to the technology will happen in such a way that makes it cheap and easy to update documents.
It also plays hell with page numbering. If what you wrote on feature foo in the first edition takes up two pages and now takes up three, how do you find the section on feature bar a few pages on? Certainly, publishers could use hierarchical numbering schemes (page foo.1, foo.2, bar.1, bar.2, etc.), but customers tend to hate those.
And yet it is. But that's the case for just about every book. The vast majority of all books sell pretty much all they're going to sell in the first year, and often in the first quarter. Books which sell consistently, or at least well enough to keep in print for years, no matter what the genre, are very much exceptional. And the books the grandparent was referring to are books which definitely are self-dating. Books which are purely theoretical may last longer, but whether or not they should have a short shelf life, it remains the case that most of them, in actual practice, do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with with the use-it-or-lose-it so far as the inventor is concerned is that it makes things harder for the individual to market. Potential manufacturers and distributors who would need to be involved know that all they have to do is wait for a little bit and they get my revolutionary work for free. If that's the case, why should I bother trying? That's counter to the purpose of copyright/patent, which is to encourage creativity by making sure that inventors get a chance to profit. Limit that time too much, and you limit the effort and risks people will put out. Free cancer cure = good, certainly, but no cancer cure because nobody thinks it's worth the effort = bad.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with corporations holding copyright. If Corporation X organized and funded the effort to find a cure for such-and-such a disease or develop a more efficient engine, I've got no problems with said corporation making a profit off of that. After all, without the work provided by that group of people, those innovations probably wouldn't have come about.
The problem, though, is that unlike a person, whose death provides a convenient milestone around which to set a reasonable copyright limit, corporations can go on forever, which means that that damn mouse has a vested interest in lobbying for an infinite cycle of copyright extentions, effectively but legally circumventing the intention of the Constitution.
What to do, then? I'm not a fan of "use it or lose it" limits. Under the provisions you're suggesting, that damn mouse can issue limited runs of "Steamboat Willie" every few years, ensuring that it will never, ever, ever go out of copyright. It could be even worse in science and technology. Say I'm a clever guy who has come up with a plan for a hugely efficient water desalinization process. It's a marvelous invention, but it only works on a massive scale, and I'd need millions of dollars just to build a working prototype. If I'm a big corporation, I have the choice of either buying the plans for a huge sum of money or just sitting around until the patent, which the inventor can't capitalize on by himself, expires.
The best answer, I'm afraid, is a difficult one: stop moving the goalposts. There's no reason to extend copyright any farther than is has been. They could even be moved back to where they were before the most recent round of legislation. And that means the mouse must be stopped. Not something I've got the money for.
It's not closed, but it is narrowing. It'd just take a few deft strokes of legislation to return the limit on copyright to something reasonable, but that damn mouse keeps buying up the legislature. What we need to do is get a time machine and have someone write into the Constitution an explanation to the effect that "Steamboat Willie" must eventually go out of copyright.
Ah, well, that's because you're not an old Russian.
HP calculators he uses, for RPN he thinks in.
How so? I'd see it as a competitor to Sharepoint, maybe, but despite some notification features, it's no more an email client than Notes is.
If anything, the reason I think people hate it so much is precisely because it allows just any wanker to come in and crap out a solution without thinking about it.
And even that can be effectively prevented with a few deft strokes of the admin client. The big problem is ignorance. Witness, for example, the number of people who are still poorly informed enough to think that Notes is an email client. Sure, Notes sucks if you deploy it in an environment where nobody knows what to do with it and resents the imposition enough that they refuse to learn about it, but I've seen too many well-tuned, stable Notes environments to blame all or even most the problems on the software.
And they're still used in colloquial English that way, even if strict grammarians disapprove.
Those changes in size are most likely related to environment, in the form of improved nutrition, rather than genetic changes. Besides, to be a consequence of evolutionary forces, there'd have to be something making sure that taller people reproduce at a higher rate than shorter ones.
Why do you hate America?
Hang on...
not build a big wall, 20 feet high, and thousand miles long?
Sure, that might stop the Mexicans, but it'll just attract Mongolian hordes.
I was about to post something allegedly clever about how you were already giving the pornographers a chunk of your salary, but then I remembered the context of the discussion. We're all downloading our porn for free!
- Strike out immaterial law. Every last bit of it.
- Stand up for privacy. No data retention nonsense based on terrorism shills or failed **AA business models.
Without getting into whether or not that's a good idea, does this strike anyone else as inconsistent? If there's no "immaterial law," that would suggest no laws preventing anyone from gathering and retaining whatever data that fell into their hands.Unless the original legislation specifically states that the tax was enacted to defeat those damn'd Spaniards, "fraud" strikes me as overreaching. It'd be more like a company raised its prices because its suppliers were charging them more, then decided to keep them at that level when it discovered that the market would bear that price even after its suppliers' prices dropped again. Bad administration? Sure. Greedy? No argument with that. But criminal? Doubt it.
- Launch the Notes Client
- Hit F1 to bring up the help database
- Click on the Search button
- Type your search term (say, "Notes minder") into the search bar and click "Search"
I've always found the built-in documentation useful, though it's a better reference than a teaching tool.IBM has better sales? That doesn't mesh well with what I hear in the Notes/Domino community. There's a sizable community of developers and admins who love the product, but despair of a sales department which appears disinclined to actually sell anything.
the learning curve is quite steep and requires actual training it seems
FWIW, I've made a career as a Domino developer with precious little formal training. It probably helps that I started with Notes before I got more heavily involved with relational databases, so I didn't have so many preconceived notions about how databases should work that I had to throw out the window.
which requires us not only to use Lotus Notes, but to have it open at all times so we can be sametimed and be alerted of new emails
You know you don't have to do that, right? Sametime will work whether or not Notes is running, and you can have Notesminder keeping you alert to emails and alarms. It's entirely possible that your admins have screwed things up in such a way that that's not possible, but the tools to keep chat and email up with a small footprint are right there in the box.
The "lifetime" part of that would seem to nicely avoid any "inheritance" problem.
New editions cost nearly as much as original editions. The author has to go through the whole book and decide what should and shouldn't be changed, the entire book has to do a pass by the editor to make sure it all still makes sense, and printing the book doesn't cost any less (in fact, it probably costs a lot more). Certainly, the original writing has been long since paid off, and the editor probably has to do less work on later editions than the first one, but new editions incur new costs, which must be paid off as well.
I suspect that technical publishing will slowly make the transition to an electronic basis, which will reduce costs and overhead somewhat, though it'll take a while. The business end is still using the best principles the nineteenth century can give us and is only slowly moving into the twentieth. I can see the industry reacting negatively to inserting ads. IIRC, that was tried in paperbacks in the 70s and ultimately didn't work out. I know I'd hate it.
Ultimately, though, there's a fundamental problem of supply and demand: it takes $X for humans to write and edit a book on such-and-such an esoteric subject, and there's at best $Y available to pay for it. Unless somebody invents an AI which can detect good prose and effective communication and can generate novel and pleasing layouts, $X isn't going down. And until someone comes up with a way of making programming and hardware the new [insert your favorite fad here], $Y isn't going up. It's a niche with the economic burden that implies, and it's going to stay that way.
You seem to be working with a novel definition of the word "limited." Certainly, only one publisher is going to publish my book on, say, the Notorious VBA, but another publisher can print yours, and those books compete with one another in the marketplace for shelf space and readers. Publishers of technical books most definitely pay attention to what the rest of the industry is printing on any given subject with a focus on the question "why should people buy our book instead of theirs?" If that's "limited" competition, then there's only limited competition between auto manufacturers, clothing designers, and soft drink producers.
But "The C programming language", written in 1978, and (according to Amazon) last updated in 1998, is a 274 page paperback. It has, no doubt, sold THOUSANDS (millions?) of copies over the years, and easily paid off it's production and update costs.
Probably. Of course, there was no way of knowing that it would have sold that long or that much when it was initially published.
This is just plain greed on the part of the publisher.
Or maybe it's just making money where they can. There's this one book which has sold well. That's great. But for that book, there are probably four or five others which just broke even or made a small profit and a lot more which lost money. Publishing is a gamble. Publishers put out lots of books in hopes that some of them will make it. Most don't. The few that do make the difference between more books and going out of business.
So why not make the books on the latest, unstable API into a 3-ring binder-type? Then, every year, you can purchase the updates to it.
Mostly because it does precious little to reduce most of larger fixed costs other than printing and binding. If any significant changes happen, the whole work essentially needs to be re-edited to make sure it's all consistent, and then the whole thing needs to be reindexed. It's unlikely that most changes to one feature will require widespread changes to the text, but until you have someone go and look, you won't actually know. Yes, you might be able to keep your printing costs down, but you can't ensure that changes to the technology will happen in such a way that makes it cheap and easy to update documents.
It also plays hell with page numbering. If what you wrote on feature foo in the first edition takes up two pages and now takes up three, how do you find the section on feature bar a few pages on? Certainly, publishers could use hierarchical numbering schemes (page foo.1, foo.2, bar.1, bar.2, etc.), but customers tend to hate those.
"Yet this shouldn't be the case."
And yet it is. But that's the case for just about every book. The vast majority of all books sell pretty much all they're going to sell in the first year, and often in the first quarter. Books which sell consistently, or at least well enough to keep in print for years, no matter what the genre, are very much exceptional. And the books the grandparent was referring to are books which definitely are self-dating. Books which are purely theoretical may last longer, but whether or not they should have a short shelf life, it remains the case that most of them, in actual practice, do.