I play on a RP-PVP server, Maelstrom, Alliance side, and every spam I receive is on that range. Anyway, I just checked Swagvault to see whether their prices also are, and guess what? Yes, they are!
WOW US - Maelstrom - Alliance - 100 Gold: $15.34 WOW US - Maelstrom - Alliance - 5000 Gold: $752.67
I guess this happens because RP players are way more unforgiving with whisper and in-game mail spams than normal players, and thus report them a lot more than normal players. After all, these things break the immersion and suspension of disbelief, which are the main reasons we're playing on RP servers in the first place. I myself, for instance, open a "verbal abuse" ticket to report each, every and all gold spams I receive, and since I never see the gold price on those go down, only up, I'm fairly certain gold sellers are being severely hurt.
Being a gold seller in a RP server might be way more profitable than in a normal server, but it's also way more risky.:)
Unfortunately real world money is NOT backed by gold stashed away somewhere. This was the case until 30 years ago, then that was abandoned. Nowadays no country backs their money with anything. Or, rather, they back their own currencies on US dollars, which are backed by nothing.
Let me get this straight. Some students, very concerned about their works being copied without their consent, are trying to the best of their efforts to remove said works from a service that prevents them from being copied without their consent. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I don't know on which classes these guys are "A-grade", but whatever these are, Logics 101 isn't among them.
Copyright is dying, and whatever hastens its demise is welcome. I applaud Google for doing whatever is in their hands, up to and into any and all legal gray areas, for this to happens as fast as possible.
Now, of course there will be strong reactions making the efforts to destroy copyright to sometimes stops, sometimes even go back one or two steps. And some people who are on the cutting edge of these changes (call them "pirates" if you wish, for me this is an honorable word) will be arrested and put into jail. But in the end it's all in vain.
And no, this isn't bad. Copyright is a novelty, create some few centuries ago. Before that we had 5,000 to 10,000 years without copyright, and people managed fine. The post-copyright world will still work, and won't be all that different.
Because even for unapproved articles the submitter's real name must be known, something that doesn't happen on Wikipedia. The assumption is that people will be more concerned and careful with what they write when it appears under their real names and not under something like "Anonymous" or "ubergeek35".
I don't know whether this will actually improve the overall quality of the unapproved articles, or if they'll end up being no better than Wikipedia's versions, but it's an experiment worth trying. Anyway, one improvement at least has already been felt in that the amount of vandalism happening under these stricter registration rules is very small, and this is by itself a valuable accomplishment.
Citizendium will have both kinds of articles: approved and unapproved. While approved ones will have the same reliability that a standard encyclopedia has, thus being apt for citation on school work and the like, unapproved ones will be in the same league of Wikipedia articles in general. The whole thing with Citizendium is that it''ll be easy to distinguish between both kinds of articles.
Thus, articles in the topics you mentioned probably won't have an editor, and none of them will appear as approved. In some cases they'll be as useful as Wikipedia entries on the same subject, in other cases they'll be more useful, and in yet other case they'll be less useful. This is all there is to it.
Citizendium has a policy in place for cases where a person cannot have his name known. These cases are allowed to use pseudonyms, but they must be hand approved by Citizendium's board.
Folks in the 19th century didn't have P2P apps, high-speed connections, iPods, and CD burners. It was good enough for them. Is it good enough for you, too?
Yes, of course! Not that technology will disappear, but yes, I would be fine with that. Besides, don't forget that millenia before copyright was invented, people used to write, copy and play songs, write and copy books, write, copy and enact theatrical dramas etc., and that copying was then, as it should still be now, the highest level of flattery an author could hope for, even more so if it happened during his lifetime.
I'm so much a conservative I want to conserve the way things in IP-land were before copyright appeared. Throwing "the old" on me doesn't weakens my argument, on the contrary, it only reinforces and strengthens it.:)
Perhaps "pay" wasn't the most effective word to use there. In the 19th Century, nearly all music was enjoyed in a live fashion, for the simple reason that recording technology wasn't invented until the latter helf of the century, and even then did not enjoy widespread adoption.
Yes, but at the time "non-worked" money was in selling printed music sheets (sorry, I don't know the exact word for this in English) for others to play and, in some instances, mechanical devices such as automatic pianos.
Anyway, the point is that, once you consider that music making or performing is a service, not a good, no contradiction arises. Since I've developed the "intellectual goods as service" argument in lots of details in the thread I linked, I won't reproduce it all here. Suffice it to say that it's based on a very intuitive assumption only interested parties can deny: that one must be paid while one's working, and when one's not working, one shouldn't be paid. Kinda simply actually.
What is then to be paid? The musician work while he's authoring a music, and while he's playing it. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything above, below or on the sides of this is undue profit, because it's profiting from work already completed. What do you think the world would be like if everyone, no matter what's his profession, wanted to earn an eternal wage on each single professional activity he ever made?
Cultural pursuits have no economic value? I realize that's not exactly what you're saying here, but that's the inevitable result.
On the contrary, that's exactly what I'm saying. Cultural pursuits have cultural value. And economic pursuits have economic value. Sometimes things you do can have at the same time cultural and economic value, but both things aren't naturally linked in any objective way, nor does the fact that one being highly valued on one field should make it highly valued on the other, as the mega-hit hyper-profitable crap worth culturally nothing we see out there are proof enough. This is another topic I developed in more details in the linked thread.
Ah, but what's not in infinite supply is time. The consumer desires entertainment, which has a certain value, given that it is in the consumer's best interest to fill his limited entertainable time with a quality product. A musician provides such a product which fulfills that desire, and therefore is justified in claiming compensation for his efforts. (. ..)
A chair too. But you won't say the chair manufacturer should earn for every minute you use it. Do you know this classic example (that I already explained in details in the linked thread): if you have an apple and I take it from you, you end up without any apple and I end up with one, but if you share an idea with me, I end up with an idea I didn't have and you don't lose the idea you had? The fact is that, no matter how much time you spent creating a music, once it's created, on copying it doesn't make you have an less of it. That's why it has no economic value: because nothing limited has changed hands. Take a million copies from the original, and the original remains intact.
I agree that a musician should be entitled to earning something while he is making a music, provided someone contracted him to make it. But after the music was made? No, sorry. He already made it and earned for making it. There's no logic on he receiving more. If others will enjoy his music afterwards, that's not his business, literally. He already profited from it, either in the form of money, or in the form of increasing the recognition and marketability of his name for purposes of living performances. Anything besides this is undue, because it's money not made from actual work, but from mere special-interest legislation.
First, I'm sorry you were modded down. Your question is legitimate. If someone's reading this and has mod points, please mod parent "underrated".
Now, to your questions:
Guess what, Mr. Economic Genius, customers don't want live performance. They want recordings, and they want them for free. Yes, there is always going to be a small subset of the music-consuming population that is willing to take the time out of their lives to see live, original music (assuming it's even an option where they live), but they are in the extreme minority.
Yes, of course they are. But those in the XIX century who were willing to go out and pay to listen to live music also were a minority. If today's minority is smaller or not than the one of that time I don't know, but anyway it wasn't a common desire then, and it isn't a common desire now. And you have to deal with that. In IP matters (all kinds: software development, fiction writing, music making etc.), as I've explained in the linked thread, there's a cost of entrance. You begin by not earning much or even nothing at all, by trying to make your name recognized, and with time, if you're good enough in it, you begin making more.
Things such as copyright are attempts at short-circuiting certain steps in this process by making valuable that which has no economic value. It's of little surprise then that a significant amount of people won't adapt to such artificial devices. How many? Well, it depends on how detached from reality the device in question is. Most people have some fairly high level of tolerance, but once you raise the bar, as RIAA is doing, more people end up in the unaccepting side of the equation.
The simple fact, as I stated in that thread, is that whatever is in infinite supply has a value of $0. People don't "want" recordings for free. Recordings are free. They simply know intuitively this to be the case. It's only by means of laws, police, threat of violence and other kinds of governmental interference that recordings can become a limited-quantity good and then something with economic value. Remove those and suddenly sanity comes back into the matter and what's naturally free becomes again free.
A question for you and everyone who agrees with you:
How many live acts have you paid to see in the past month, how much did you spend, and how many of the people you know have done the same?
I don't know what's the importance of this, but anyway, I myself am not into music that much to go in any such event. Actually, almost all the my music I own I either purchased on eMusic or ripped from some (very few actually) CDs I have, the exception are some anime music that weren't released here in Brazil. But my brother loves these things, and he and his friends go into a lot of shows. I don't know how much he spends on those, but it's sizable. And yes, he gets a lot of MP3 from the Internet.
If anything at all, this works as anecdotal evidence for what lots of people already say is a rule of thumb: that anyone who is so much into downloading music is also so much into music in general that he now and then will go into a show. The amount they spend on shows is the amount the music (all the music they listen) is really worth to them. Try to charge much more than this and you'll see a reaction in the form of "piracy". This is as certain as 2+2 gives 4.
Wow, I guess if one musician from one band can do it, so can everyone else.
Yes. This is a market thing: either you do what customers want and profit, or you do what you want (as a hobby or some kind of personal-improvement) not caring for profit, or you discover you're not fit for that function and go search something else you are able to do and people are willing to pay you for.
So my method of making income as a musician should be limited to what 19th century musicians did?
Yes. It was good enough for them, it's good enough for you.
And what if I would like to be able to sell my recordings so I don't have to travel? Maybe so I could raise my son, or have a family or social life in general. Or maybe I have a job I can't take major time off of.
Then I say to you that you don't understand what "making money" is. Again: it is you doing what others want and are willing to pay you for, not what you want.
I know I'm sounding harsh, but there are good reasons for things being this way. I've discussed this matter extensively on another/. thread I suggest you read. For some people it's simply a matter of principles.
Free enterprise mustn't be regulated by stupid rules, such as "prior art"
Er... "free enterprise" (I think you meant "free market") is market unregulated by political entities. The patent and copyright systems are regulation by political entities. Ergo, a free market can only exist in the absence from, or in opposition to, any kind of patents-copyright system.
I appreciate your response, but I don't think it addressed any of these issues. Information has always been a commodity. Someone owns it and controls it for a while until its usefulness wanes, or until it is stolen, or otherwise revealed by some other means. However it is true, for the most part, that once freed, information is rarely able to be contained again. So it could be argued perhaps that information has value as long as it is able to be controlled, and that as soon as it gets beyond its owner to control, it is public and cannot (or is rarely) be contained again and thus becomes public.
I believe the problem, and all the questions you expressed, arise from a set of unintentional misunderstanding on the nature of the various concepts employed. And the most fundamental of these concepts is that of monetary valuation. Once we understand what money is; what is the relation between objective money bills (or, nowadays, numbers in our bank statements) and the subjective valuations we hold intuitively of "better/worse", "more/less desirable", "worthy/unworthy", "valuable/valueless", "needed/unneeded/wanted/unwanted" etc.; and what is the relation between both things and those other many things we group on the abstract categories of "products", "goods", "services" etc.; at the moment all of these aspects become clear, those questions you made also all begin to receive pretty clear answers. But the problem is actually getting to know the fundamental economic principles behind all of this, and the sad truth is that these are still a matter of dispute.
Not that I think I don't know the answer. In fact I think I know. I've studied enough economics to know one thing or two about the state of discussions and the arguments used by the different parties, and I came consider that so far the best one is the so-called Austrian School theory of value, which is the basis for most of the reasonings I've used on this thread, including the notion that the intellectual activity is a service and must be dealt with as such, notwithstanding the specific contents of this or that intellectual endeavor.
This isn't something that I could explain well in a post, or even a small series of posts. If you're interested I can point you to some ebooks you could download and read for "free as in beer" (they practice what they preach, and it works). They're not difficult to read, because most "Austrians" (the name comes from the school founder economists who came from there, but it's actually American) prefer to write in plain English, using mathematical formulas only where absolutely necessary. But you'd still need to read them. If you're interested I suggest beginning by either An Introduction to Austrian Economics or Economics in One Lesson. They'll provide you some good basis from which to analyze this and other, related subjects.
Other than this, I don't have much to add to what I've already written. But if you're going after the ebooks, then feel free to ask me something you don't understand. I'll try to answer.
"Knowledge"? Without trying to sidetrack the argument here, I'd say this is a pretty limited view of what writing -- and other arts/crafts -- are all about. Many of history's top-shelf authors had no particular "knowledge" that made them valuable; they had a gift for molding and massaging language. It's not just about function. It's also about aesthetics.
Knowledge is one proficiency that's worth paying for. Good storytelling is another. Fiction authors, and the publishing houses, would have to adjust the way they work, having to try several business models until finding one that worked, and of course having to deal with some errors in the way, but in the end the market would find a new equilibrium, be it through serialization or not. Where there is offer and demand a price structure develops and people start to profit and lose as usual. It's in the nature of things.
By the way, I don't know about the USA, but here in Brazil some of the most important works in our XIX century literature were published as serializations in newspapers of the time, only appearing in books form much later. Do you think weekly and monthly magazines, or daily newspapers, wouldn't sell anymore just because the same content might appear elsewhere afterwards? I wouldn't bet on that. They would adjust, and that's it.
Tell you what: Starting tomorrow, let's eliminate copyright protection for all new works. While I don't think it will lead to a fruitful environment, we'll give it a shot. But if I agree to that, can you agree that we should protect the works that were created during the copyright era? These are the works that were created in a good-faith understanding with society -- that the investment (of time, energy, talent, money, whatever) would result in something over which the creator had exclusive rights.
I have no problem with that idea. I myself prefer to purchase "official" releases instead of "pirated" ones whenever I can, and I can see how a transition period would be useful, if not for other reason than allowing authors, publishers etc. the time to adapt in a reasonable pace. Just make sure that whatever is still copyright protected, remain protected only by the original terms valid at the time it was produced. It's not reasonable for something that was originally protected for 50 years to become, out of nowhere, protected for the life-time of the author plus 75 years (or has it already been Disney-extended to life+95?).
Too bad it won't happen that way. The MAFIAA lobby is too strong to allow for the transition to happen smoothly. They're going to fight teeth and nail until the point they'll have to forcefully accept reality as it is. It'll be an ugly fight, but they simply cannot win.
You've raised some interesting points about the concept of copyright in general, but your approach seems to me like it would destroy the commercial value of R&D.
I don't think so. Companies would still want to sell new goods to consumers. But R&D would probably become a more collaborative effort between companies, not so much of an individual thing. After all, reverse engineering nowadays is almost trivial.
Are you really advocating the complete abolition of copyrights and patents?
That's all fine and well. But who exactly, in your no-copyrights utopia, is going to be "interested enough in it to contract you to do it"? A charity service?
Easy enough: whomever needed the specialized knowledge that that author, and no one else, had.
I think it interesting that, even here in Slashdot, with all the knowledge people have on the inner-workings of the "for-profit free software" (free both in "as in beer" and "as in speech" meanings, mind you) companies, many still don't know how to generalize the idea to all areas of intellectual content production. Everything would work the same way: software, books, music, movies etc. There's simply no reason why software can work this way, but other kinds of content cannot.
Now, it's obvious that a publisher would work in different ways in a copyrightless legal framework than what he does in a copyright one. Don't RedHat, Novell, Canonical etc. have working business models, even giving away their intellectual goods for free? Why would not an author's "official publishing house" be able to develop ways to profit from its "official" status? Don't you now and then buy official DVDs even when "pirated" copies are being sold for a tenth of the price 200 feet away from the "officials only" store, or for $0 a click away from the "officials only" webstore? The copyrightless legal framework would redefine some things, sure, but it wouldn't destroy the intellectual goods market.
So, make no mistake. The "work-for-hire" doesn't exist "because" of the copyright. It existed way before copyright was invented, and will continue existing way after is disappears in the shadows of History. For details on this, see my other answers in this thread, more specifically this one.
I've already replied to the OP's reply, so I'll leave out of this text what I've already explained there and on other answers in this thread.
I don't see how removing the copyrighting system will help anybody, authors or publishers.
There are three ways to work or approach the subject:
a) One starts from the "principles" and goes towards a conclusion. It is the one I'm using the most: you look at the abstract concept and judge from it's internal and external coherence with other well assumed principles, such as, in this case, that of the nature of private property, and of the equity of law (that the government mustn't favor different groups with different laws), both amounting to a solid ground inside the classical liberal tradition.
b) The second one, which I use only as a supportive argument, is that of the state of affairs in reality. You can call it the "moral" argument, if you accept using the word in its value-free meaning of uses and customs, or more precisely, "what people do and think is correct and armless". You're also using it secondarily when you refer to the way publishers, writers etc. worked in the decades past. I'll come back to this below.
c) The third way is that of the "utility" of something based on variable criteria. This is both your and the OP's main argument. The OP talks mostly about the utility of copyright for himself, while you, on the quote above, add the consideration of the utility of the copyright system for the whole of society.
I personally think "c" is a despicable kind of reasoning because it's very easy to incur in sophistry with it. You ask any special interest group why he should be benefited by some special kind of legislative provision, and the special interest group representatives, or even it's typical members, will always answer the same way: that although it will directly benefit only its own members alone, it indirectly serves the good of the population as a whole.
Writers, music authors etc. are in no way different, and your one line quote above proves as much: they're a special interest group; they strongly benefit from certain legislative measures; if these measures go away and the legal system gets simplified, with all the laws becoming generic, they'll have to accommodate and lose power and favors; so they argue that their special benefits are actually good not only for themselves, but for everyone.
But as is always the case, in reality (and we come back to "b") this is not so. All that the copyright system causes is that everyone is forbidden from fully enjoying their private property. No matter how much you argue on "c" about the virtues of everyone being legally forbidden to actually fully own what's theirs, the matter of fact is that they're being forbidden. And for what? For the sake of higher profit making for 3rd parties (writers and publishers, music authors and labels, film directors and movie studios, etc.) who didn't help anyone with a single dime in the purchasing of said property.
No amount of rhetorics will ever be able to change this simple fact. If the rhetorics is well done it can surely convince lots of people that their bad is actually their good. But the facts that such rhetorics are trying to cloud remain unchanged, and unchangeable. Copyright violates private property, it violates privacy, it violates morals (in the above value-free meaning), and so on and so forth. Utility-wise, it's not a good thing for anyone but the interest group, as is always the case with each, every and all legislation specially enacted to favor an interest group.
Since that time, nothing has changed. Authors haven't changed, publishers haven't changed, the people reading the books haven't changed-- only the methods of distribution available have changed.
This, and the remaining of your post, take us back to "b", the moral argument. I agree with most of wh
What is this pain and suffering? First of all, a book is an inanimate object, and cannot feel pain. Secondly, aside from ripping the book in half, how would you inflict any suffering on it? This part of the rhetoric is empty.
On the person whose private property you're taking possession. If he doesn't obey your demands on how she "should" use her private property, you're entitled to demand from the government that it confiscate money from her and even that it removes her liberty, sending her to prison. It's a power in your hand to inflict pain and suffering to others.
You explaining what copyright is supposed to protect is not necessary. My original post was a rebuttal of the whole concept. You reexplaining it won't make my rebuttal go away. My position is quite simple actually: if something isn't limited, it isn't property of any kind. Using and old example: if I have an apple and you take it from me, you end with an apple and I end with none. On the other hand, if I have a book and you copy it from me, you end with the book and I retain mine. Intellectual goods are "infinite" by nature, because from one (copy) I can produce infinite (copies) without neither the original nor me losing anything. And anything that is infinite is by itself devoid of economical valuation. The only way an intellectual good can become economically valuable is if there's an artificial limitation on its ability to be copied. And the most effective limitation is the treat of strong punishment by a 3rd party, which in the end is always the government, the only entity that can officially use violence to achieve its goals, and the goals of whom it supports.
And frankly, you are wrong about me not losing money. By your argument, I could hire a secretary or office assistant and then refuse to pay him, and it's all right because they haven't lost any money. But they have - they've worked hard, and they were not given the compensation they earned, and any labour lawyer will tell you that it does constitute lost income. When dealing with piracy of intellectual property, the same model applies.
No. X contracts you to write a book. X is obliged to pay you. This is a contract after all, you're working for him. Then comes Y and copies the book. Y isn't obliged to pay you, because you have no contract with him. Same thing when you enter a place that was cleaned by Z. The place owner is the one who must pay Z, not you. Same thing with the secretary you contracted, you must pay her, not, let's say, the person to whom she sent a letter you told her to send, or the 3rd party who read the letter that was open in the addressee's desk.
Let's do some math.
Instead of dreaming highly hypothetical math that has no bearing on reality, you should seek information on what actually happened to publishers who posted themselves their books for free on the Net. Want an actual example? Here's a good one.
You're showing the same lack of understanding on the way intellectual content actually works in an free information exchange reality that RIAA shows. I congratulate you on your despising their methods, but the fact is that you, and probably your publisher, as well as RIAA, all of you still aren't taking the subject from the proper angle. When, and if, you do, you'll finally understand what's wrong with the whole concept.
Boy, there's a part of me that wishes you were right about this. I'd be so much better off financially if you were. Unfortunately, you're entirely wrong. This is the reality:
This is the reality because the legal framework is distorted and publishers work based on the absurd concept of copyright. Were this nonexistent and the market would realign itself to the new situation. In the new scenario, authoring as a service is as any service: you must prove to whomever would contract you that it's worth the investment. Ask any open-source
Sorry to say this, but what you're asking is not reasonable.
When a customer of yours buys a copy of your book, the book becomes his possession, his private property. What he does from then on isn't your business, it's his. If he purchases a printer, the printer is his private property. If he purchases a scanner, the scanner is his private property. If he purchases a computer, paper, ink, DVD-R writer, all of these are their property, exactly as your book you sold him is now his property. If he then wishes to use all of his properties together, then sell the result of this mix, which also is his property, to someone else, to become that persons' property, not a single step on this whole process is your business.
Copyright and patent laws are means by which a 3rd party, namely you, is granted power (and by that I mean power to inflict pain and suffering) over other people's private property, so that their private property isn't entirely theirs anymore. If you can say to someone else: "Do you know this printer in your desk? Well, you can use it in such and such ways, but not to do so and so", this ipso facto means you own the printer, not him. Being the owner of something is the right to do with it whatever one wants. If I cannot do with something what I want, I'm not its owner. It's as simple as that.
Then you say: "Oh! But if we were to strongly protect private property, I would lose money! My job wouldn't be respected!", to which I answer that no, you are not losing a single penny. Look at the list of your properties and at your bank account's statement before someone copied your book. Look after the book was copied. Noticed something different? No, nothing is different. What you lost is the possibility that maybe, someday, who knows, luckily, if God wished, evolution didn't forbid and the astrological charts were properly aligned, the person who got the copy would dream of maybe spending the money to purchase your book from someone who, again with some luck, would pass part of the money to you. What, to make things worse, by definition excludes used books shops. In other words, the only thing you "lost" was the shadow of a cloud of smoke, if that.
What most authors, including you, don't understand, is that the whole copyright idea is bogus, that it's founded on a lack of understanding on what authoring actually is. Authoring is a service. Nothing more, nothing less. It's something you should be paid for while you're doing it. By whom? By whomever was interested enough in it to contract you to do it. Writing your book took 18 months? So, you should have been paid a reasonable income for the 18 months it took you to do it. Service completed? Go provide your specialized kind of service (authoring) to someone else. No one stays paying the cleaner for a cleaning that got completed a year ago, the chef for a dish he eat a month ago, the flight company for a flight he took 20 years ago.
Authors and inventors usually think of the intellectual nature of their work as being too above the mere service providing of other careers to accept the notion that what they're doing is in the same class. That's why nonsensical concepts such as copyright and patents have arisen, got lobbied for, and ended up being approved as law. The Internet has proven how wrong they are, but they still don't accept it. It's a misconception that must die. With time it will, authors finally recognizing their work as the service providing it has always been. Unfortunately this recognition will be a painful process, since old habits, even the most nonsensical ones, struggle to survive. But that it will happen, it will. The transitional means (GPL, Open-Content etc.) have already been established and shown successful. Reality has its ways to reassert itself, and we're watching this process unfolding before our eyes.
Embrace it or reject and fight it, there's no going back. The destruction of these old legal fantasy concepts and it's substitution for sound ones is irreversible. You can embrace it since now, or wait until it reaches you, but one way or the other, things won't remain as they are. Copyright is dead. It's just unaware of its demise.
Interestingly enough, I was reading yesterday about a two-series Japanese manga called Aqua (the 1st series) and Aria (the 2nd one), about a 24th century Mars whose terraformation gone bad and ended up 90% covered in water, being afterwards renamed Aqua. It's not a sci-fi manga, mind you. The premise is that Mars, being filled with so much water, didn't become a good place for exploration. It's a technologically backwards planet when compared to Earth, but at the same time a slow pace place that attracts people interested in a simpler life-style.
I wonder how prescient the author was. Judging from this news, a lot, even if we don't come to actually terraform the place.
Any good metaphysician will tell you that saying god is a creature is missing the point. And even more so if you think there was a space-time for him to be created in. The concept actually goes like this: god didn't "came to exist", because "to exist" is already a delimitation. "Existence" comes from god, not the other way around, and as such, you saying he exists, or you saying he doesn't exist, are both meaningless propositions. And to be more precise, anything you try saying about he is by definition wrong, no matter what it is.
"God is intelligent." Wrong. "God has no mind." Wrong. "God wants to do things." Wrong. "God has no wants, needs, nothing." Wrong. "God is complex." Wrong. "God is simple." Wrong. "God exists." Wrong. "God doesn't exist." Wrong. "God is good." Wrong. "God is evil." Wrong. "God is good and evil." Wrong. "God is neither good nor evil." Wrong.
Literalism is a sin. Or, at least, for 1500 years or so it was, just look at what the Church Fathers and the Scholastics wrote on the subject. Strangely enough, nowadays literalist interpretations of the Bible seem to be the norm.
Anyway, what the Genesis is saying, when you read it as symbols (which is what the Christians of old used to do), is pretty much standard realist metaphysics enclosed in mythological concepts. It describes reality as a complex entity composed of different gradations / mixes of order and chaos, with humanity in the middle as the most mixed of all. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus etc. don't tell things much differently, except for the language used. The former was poetic-rhetorical, the later were logic-dialectical. But that's it.
And modern science isn't that different in this regards. When you discover mathematical rules for nature, and logical rules that "existed" before nature, you're saying "order". When you discover that nature's building blocks are made of irreducible randomness, you're saying "chaos". When you look at human beings and recognize that they are subject to both and that, different from everything else, they are also able to know this is so, you're saying "humanity is in the middle". Description methods change, and emphasis vary a lot, but what's being described is in the end mostly the same.
Simple: "Left" and "Right", even when coupled with adjectives such as "Extreme", "Far", "Moderate", "Center-" etc., offer a very limited set of labels to describe political positions. The political landscape isn't a line, it's more of a multidimensional entity. You have a line that goes from "Anarchism" to "Totalitarianism", another that goes from "Individualism" to "Collectivism", another that goes from "Progressism" to "Conservatism", another that goes from "Monarchism" to "Republicanism", another that goes from "Federalism" to "Centralism", another that goes from "Authoritarianism" to "Democratism", another that goes from "Theocracism" to "Secularism", another that goes from "Realism" to "Idealism" (this one is usually tied to International Relations), and so on and so forth. Any single individual can be at any point in each and every of these lines, and any attempt to group all these differing positionings into a mere two overly-broad categories is by definition bound to ultimately fail. Human beings, thus human politics, are and will always be a complex phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
I play on a RP-PVP server, Maelstrom, Alliance side, and every spam I receive is on that range. Anyway, I just checked Swagvault to see whether their prices also are, and guess what? Yes, they are!
:)
WOW US - Maelstrom - Alliance - 100 Gold: $15.34
WOW US - Maelstrom - Alliance - 5000 Gold: $752.67
I guess this happens because RP players are way more unforgiving with whisper and in-game mail spams than normal players, and thus report them a lot more than normal players. After all, these things break the immersion and suspension of disbelief, which are the main reasons we're playing on RP servers in the first place. I myself, for instance, open a "verbal abuse" ticket to report each, every and all gold spams I receive, and since I never see the gold price on those go down, only up, I'm fairly certain gold sellers are being severely hurt.
Being a gold seller in a RP server might be way more profitable than in a normal server, but it's also way more risky.
Unfortunately real world money is NOT backed by gold stashed away somewhere. This was the case until 30 years ago, then that was abandoned. Nowadays no country backs their money with anything. Or, rather, they back their own currencies on US dollars, which are backed by nothing.
You're underestimating this. A level 70 epic mount goes for 5000 gold. At $15 per 100 gold, that means as much as $750.
Let me get this straight. Some students, very concerned about their works being copied without their consent, are trying to the best of their efforts to remove said works from a service that prevents them from being copied without their consent. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I don't know on which classes these guys are "A-grade", but whatever these are, Logics 101 isn't among them.
Copyright is dying, and whatever hastens its demise is welcome. I applaud Google for doing whatever is in their hands, up to and into any and all legal gray areas, for this to happens as fast as possible.
;)
Now, of course there will be strong reactions making the efforts to destroy copyright to sometimes stops, sometimes even go back one or two steps. And some people who are on the cutting edge of these changes (call them "pirates" if you wish, for me this is an honorable word) will be arrested and put into jail. But in the end it's all in vain.
And no, this isn't bad. Copyright is a novelty, create some few centuries ago. Before that we had 5,000 to 10,000 years without copyright, and people managed fine. The post-copyright world will still work, and won't be all that different.
Enjoy the ride.
Because even for unapproved articles the submitter's real name must be known, something that doesn't happen on Wikipedia. The assumption is that people will be more concerned and careful with what they write when it appears under their real names and not under something like "Anonymous" or "ubergeek35".
I don't know whether this will actually improve the overall quality of the unapproved articles, or if they'll end up being no better than Wikipedia's versions, but it's an experiment worth trying. Anyway, one improvement at least has already been felt in that the amount of vandalism happening under these stricter registration rules is very small, and this is by itself a valuable accomplishment.
Citizendium will have both kinds of articles: approved and unapproved. While approved ones will have the same reliability that a standard encyclopedia has, thus being apt for citation on school work and the like, unapproved ones will be in the same league of Wikipedia articles in general. The whole thing with Citizendium is that it''ll be easy to distinguish between both kinds of articles.
Thus, articles in the topics you mentioned probably won't have an editor, and none of them will appear as approved. In some cases they'll be as useful as Wikipedia entries on the same subject, in other cases they'll be more useful, and in yet other case they'll be less useful. This is all there is to it.
Citizendium has a policy in place for cases where a person cannot have his name known. These cases are allowed to use pseudonyms, but they must be hand approved by Citizendium's board.
I'm so much a conservative I want to conserve the way things in IP-land were before copyright appeared. Throwing "the old" on me doesn't weakens my argument, on the contrary, it only reinforces and strengthens it.
Anyway, the point is that, once you consider that music making or performing is a service, not a good, no contradiction arises. Since I've developed the "intellectual goods as service" argument in lots of details in the thread I linked, I won't reproduce it all here. Suffice it to say that it's based on a very intuitive assumption only interested parties can deny: that one must be paid while one's working, and when one's not working, one shouldn't be paid. Kinda simply actually.
What is then to be paid? The musician work while he's authoring a music, and while he's playing it. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything above, below or on the sides of this is undue profit, because it's profiting from work already completed. What do you think the world would be like if everyone, no matter what's his profession, wanted to earn an eternal wage on each single professional activity he ever made?On the contrary, that's exactly what I'm saying. Cultural pursuits have cultural value. And economic pursuits have economic value. Sometimes things you do can have at the same time cultural and economic value, but both things aren't naturally linked in any objective way, nor does the fact that one being highly valued on one field should make it highly valued on the other, as the mega-hit hyper-profitable crap worth culturally nothing we see out there are proof enough. This is another topic I developed in more details in the linked thread.A chair too. But you won't say the chair manufacturer should earn for every minute you use it. Do you know this classic example (that I already explained in details in the linked thread): if you have an apple and I take it from you, you end up without any apple and I end up with one, but if you share an idea with me, I end up with an idea I didn't have and you don't lose the idea you had? The fact is that, no matter how much time you spent creating a music, once it's created, on copying it doesn't make you have an less of it. That's why it has no economic value: because nothing limited has changed hands. Take a million copies from the original, and the original remains intact.
I agree that a musician should be entitled to earning something while he is making a music, provided someone contracted him to make it. But after the music was made? No, sorry. He already made it and earned for making it. There's no logic on he receiving more. If others will enjoy his music afterwards, that's not his business, literally. He already profited from it, either in the form of money, or in the form of increasing the recognition and marketability of his name for purposes of living performances. Anything besides this is undue, because it's money not made from actual work, but from mere special-interest legislation.
Now, to your questions:Yes, of course they are. But those in the XIX century who were willing to go out and pay to listen to live music also were a minority. If today's minority is smaller or not than the one of that time I don't know, but anyway it wasn't a common desire then, and it isn't a common desire now. And you have to deal with that. In IP matters (all kinds: software development, fiction writing, music making etc.), as I've explained in the linked thread, there's a cost of entrance. You begin by not earning much or even nothing at all, by trying to make your name recognized, and with time, if you're good enough in it, you begin making more.
Things such as copyright are attempts at short-circuiting certain steps in this process by making valuable that which has no economic value. It's of little surprise then that a significant amount of people won't adapt to such artificial devices. How many? Well, it depends on how detached from reality the device in question is. Most people have some fairly high level of tolerance, but once you raise the bar, as RIAA is doing, more people end up in the unaccepting side of the equation.
The simple fact, as I stated in that thread, is that whatever is in infinite supply has a value of $0. People don't "want" recordings for free. Recordings are free. They simply know intuitively this to be the case. It's only by means of laws, police, threat of violence and other kinds of governmental interference that recordings can become a limited-quantity good and then something with economic value. Remove those and suddenly sanity comes back into the matter and what's naturally free becomes again free.I don't know what's the importance of this, but anyway, I myself am not into music that much to go in any such event. Actually, almost all the my music I own I either purchased on eMusic or ripped from some (very few actually) CDs I have, the exception are some anime music that weren't released here in Brazil. But my brother loves these things, and he and his friends go into a lot of shows. I don't know how much he spends on those, but it's sizable. And yes, he gets a lot of MP3 from the Internet.
If anything at all, this works as anecdotal evidence for what lots of people already say is a rule of thumb: that anyone who is so much into downloading music is also so much into music in general that he now and then will go into a show. The amount they spend on shows is the amount the music (all the music they listen) is really worth to them. Try to charge much more than this and you'll see a reaction in the form of "piracy". This is as certain as 2+2 gives 4.
I know I'm sounding harsh, but there are good reasons for things being this way. I've discussed this matter extensively on another
Not that I think I don't know the answer. In fact I think I know. I've studied enough economics to know one thing or two about the state of discussions and the arguments used by the different parties, and I came consider that so far the best one is the so-called Austrian School theory of value, which is the basis for most of the reasonings I've used on this thread, including the notion that the intellectual activity is a service and must be dealt with as such, notwithstanding the specific contents of this or that intellectual endeavor.
This isn't something that I could explain well in a post, or even a small series of posts. If you're interested I can point you to some ebooks you could download and read for "free as in beer" (they practice what they preach, and it works). They're not difficult to read, because most "Austrians" (the name comes from the school founder economists who came from there, but it's actually American) prefer to write in plain English, using mathematical formulas only where absolutely necessary. But you'd still need to read them. If you're interested I suggest beginning by either An Introduction to Austrian Economics or Economics in One Lesson. They'll provide you some good basis from which to analyze this and other, related subjects.
Other than this, I don't have much to add to what I've already written. But if you're going after the ebooks, then feel free to ask me something you don't understand. I'll try to answer.
By the way, I don't know about the USA, but here in Brazil some of the most important works in our XIX century literature were published as serializations in newspapers of the time, only appearing in books form much later. Do you think weekly and monthly magazines, or daily newspapers, wouldn't sell anymore just because the same content might appear elsewhere afterwards? I wouldn't bet on that. They would adjust, and that's it.I have no problem with that idea. I myself prefer to purchase "official" releases instead of "pirated" ones whenever I can, and I can see how a transition period would be useful, if not for other reason than allowing authors, publishers etc. the time to adapt in a reasonable pace. Just make sure that whatever is still copyright protected, remain protected only by the original terms valid at the time it was produced. It's not reasonable for something that was originally protected for 50 years to become, out of nowhere, protected for the life-time of the author plus 75 years (or has it already been Disney-extended to life+95?).
Too bad it won't happen that way. The MAFIAA lobby is too strong to allow for the transition to happen smoothly. They're going to fight teeth and nail until the point they'll have to forcefully accept reality as it is. It'll be an ugly fight, but they simply cannot win.
I think it interesting that, even here in Slashdot, with all the knowledge people have on the inner-workings of the "for-profit free software" (free both in "as in beer" and "as in speech" meanings, mind you) companies, many still don't know how to generalize the idea to all areas of intellectual content production. Everything would work the same way: software, books, music, movies etc. There's simply no reason why software can work this way, but other kinds of content cannot.
Now, it's obvious that a publisher would work in different ways in a copyrightless legal framework than what he does in a copyright one. Don't RedHat, Novell, Canonical etc. have working business models, even giving away their intellectual goods for free? Why would not an author's "official publishing house" be able to develop ways to profit from its "official" status? Don't you now and then buy official DVDs even when "pirated" copies are being sold for a tenth of the price 200 feet away from the "officials only" store, or for $0 a click away from the "officials only" webstore? The copyrightless legal framework would redefine some things, sure, but it wouldn't destroy the intellectual goods market.
So, make no mistake. The "work-for-hire" doesn't exist "because" of the copyright. It existed way before copyright was invented, and will continue existing way after is disappears in the shadows of History. For details on this, see my other answers in this thread, more specifically this one.
There are three ways to work or approach the subject:
a) One starts from the "principles" and goes towards a conclusion. It is the one I'm using the most: you look at the abstract concept and judge from it's internal and external coherence with other well assumed principles, such as, in this case, that of the nature of private property, and of the equity of law (that the government mustn't favor different groups with different laws), both amounting to a solid ground inside the classical liberal tradition.
b) The second one, which I use only as a supportive argument, is that of the state of affairs in reality. You can call it the "moral" argument, if you accept using the word in its value-free meaning of uses and customs, or more precisely, "what people do and think is correct and armless". You're also using it secondarily when you refer to the way publishers, writers etc. worked in the decades past. I'll come back to this below.
c) The third way is that of the "utility" of something based on variable criteria. This is both your and the OP's main argument. The OP talks mostly about the utility of copyright for himself, while you, on the quote above, add the consideration of the utility of the copyright system for the whole of society.
I personally think "c" is a despicable kind of reasoning because it's very easy to incur in sophistry with it. You ask any special interest group why he should be benefited by some special kind of legislative provision, and the special interest group representatives, or even it's typical members, will always answer the same way: that although it will directly benefit only its own members alone, it indirectly serves the good of the population as a whole.
Writers, music authors etc. are in no way different, and your one line quote above proves as much: they're a special interest group; they strongly benefit from certain legislative measures; if these measures go away and the legal system gets simplified, with all the laws becoming generic, they'll have to accommodate and lose power and favors; so they argue that their special benefits are actually good not only for themselves, but for everyone.
But as is always the case, in reality (and we come back to "b") this is not so. All that the copyright system causes is that everyone is forbidden from fully enjoying their private property. No matter how much you argue on "c" about the virtues of everyone being legally forbidden to actually fully own what's theirs, the matter of fact is that they're being forbidden. And for what? For the sake of higher profit making for 3rd parties (writers and publishers, music authors and labels, film directors and movie studios, etc.) who didn't help anyone with a single dime in the purchasing of said property.
No amount of rhetorics will ever be able to change this simple fact. If the rhetorics is well done it can surely convince lots of people that their bad is actually their good. But the facts that such rhetorics are trying to cloud remain unchanged, and unchangeable. Copyright violates private property, it violates privacy, it violates morals (in the above value-free meaning), and so on and so forth. Utility-wise, it's not a good thing for anyone but the interest group, as is always the case with each, every and all legislation specially enacted to favor an interest group.
This, and the remaining of your post, take us back to "b", the moral argument. I agree with most of wh
On the person whose private property you're taking possession. If he doesn't obey your demands on how she "should" use her private property, you're entitled to demand from the government that it confiscate money from her and even that it removes her liberty, sending her to prison. It's a power in your hand to inflict pain and suffering to others.
You explaining what copyright is supposed to protect is not necessary. My original post was a rebuttal of the whole concept. You reexplaining it won't make my rebuttal go away. My position is quite simple actually: if something isn't limited, it isn't property of any kind. Using and old example: if I have an apple and you take it from me, you end with an apple and I end with none. On the other hand, if I have a book and you copy it from me, you end with the book and I retain mine. Intellectual goods are "infinite" by nature, because from one (copy) I can produce infinite (copies) without neither the original nor me losing anything. And anything that is infinite is by itself devoid of economical valuation. The only way an intellectual good can become economically valuable is if there's an artificial limitation on its ability to be copied. And the most effective limitation is the treat of strong punishment by a 3rd party, which in the end is always the government, the only entity that can officially use violence to achieve its goals, and the goals of whom it supports.
No. X contracts you to write a book. X is obliged to pay you. This is a contract after all, you're working for him. Then comes Y and copies the book. Y isn't obliged to pay you, because you have no contract with him. Same thing when you enter a place that was cleaned by Z. The place owner is the one who must pay Z, not you. Same thing with the secretary you contracted, you must pay her, not, let's say, the person to whom she sent a letter you told her to send, or the 3rd party who read the letter that was open in the addressee's desk.
Instead of dreaming highly hypothetical math that has no bearing on reality, you should seek information on what actually happened to publishers who posted themselves their books for free on the Net. Want an actual example? Here's a good one.
You're showing the same lack of understanding on the way intellectual content actually works in an free information exchange reality that RIAA shows. I congratulate you on your despising their methods, but the fact is that you, and probably your publisher, as well as RIAA, all of you still aren't taking the subject from the proper angle. When, and if, you do, you'll finally understand what's wrong with the whole concept.
This is the reality because the legal framework is distorted and publishers work based on the absurd concept of copyright. Were this nonexistent and the market would realign itself to the new situation. In the new scenario, authoring as a service is as any service: you must prove to whomever would contract you that it's worth the investment. Ask any open-source
Sorry to say this, but what you're asking is not reasonable.
When a customer of yours buys a copy of your book, the book becomes his possession, his private property. What he does from then on isn't your business, it's his. If he purchases a printer, the printer is his private property. If he purchases a scanner, the scanner is his private property. If he purchases a computer, paper, ink, DVD-R writer, all of these are their property, exactly as your book you sold him is now his property. If he then wishes to use all of his properties together, then sell the result of this mix, which also is his property, to someone else, to become that persons' property, not a single step on this whole process is your business.
Copyright and patent laws are means by which a 3rd party, namely you, is granted power (and by that I mean power to inflict pain and suffering) over other people's private property, so that their private property isn't entirely theirs anymore. If you can say to someone else: "Do you know this printer in your desk? Well, you can use it in such and such ways, but not to do so and so", this ipso facto means you own the printer, not him. Being the owner of something is the right to do with it whatever one wants. If I cannot do with something what I want, I'm not its owner. It's as simple as that.
Then you say: "Oh! But if we were to strongly protect private property, I would lose money! My job wouldn't be respected!", to which I answer that no, you are not losing a single penny. Look at the list of your properties and at your bank account's statement before someone copied your book. Look after the book was copied. Noticed something different? No, nothing is different. What you lost is the possibility that maybe, someday, who knows, luckily, if God wished, evolution didn't forbid and the astrological charts were properly aligned, the person who got the copy would dream of maybe spending the money to purchase your book from someone who, again with some luck, would pass part of the money to you. What, to make things worse, by definition excludes used books shops. In other words, the only thing you "lost" was the shadow of a cloud of smoke, if that.
What most authors, including you, don't understand, is that the whole copyright idea is bogus, that it's founded on a lack of understanding on what authoring actually is. Authoring is a service. Nothing more, nothing less. It's something you should be paid for while you're doing it. By whom? By whomever was interested enough in it to contract you to do it. Writing your book took 18 months? So, you should have been paid a reasonable income for the 18 months it took you to do it. Service completed? Go provide your specialized kind of service (authoring) to someone else. No one stays paying the cleaner for a cleaning that got completed a year ago, the chef for a dish he eat a month ago, the flight company for a flight he took 20 years ago.
Authors and inventors usually think of the intellectual nature of their work as being too above the mere service providing of other careers to accept the notion that what they're doing is in the same class. That's why nonsensical concepts such as copyright and patents have arisen, got lobbied for, and ended up being approved as law. The Internet has proven how wrong they are, but they still don't accept it. It's a misconception that must die. With time it will, authors finally recognizing their work as the service providing it has always been. Unfortunately this recognition will be a painful process, since old habits, even the most nonsensical ones, struggle to survive. But that it will happen, it will. The transitional means (GPL, Open-Content etc.) have already been established and shown successful. Reality has its ways to reassert itself, and we're watching this process unfolding before our eyes.
Embrace it or reject and fight it, there's no going back. The destruction of these old legal fantasy concepts and it's substitution for sound ones is irreversible. You can embrace it since now, or wait until it reaches you, but one way or the other, things won't remain as they are. Copyright is dead. It's just unaware of its demise.
After writing and posting the above I noticed another slashdotter also posted about Aqua / Aria. Well, so far, so good. :)
Interestingly enough, I was reading yesterday about a two-series Japanese manga called Aqua (the 1st series) and Aria (the 2nd one), about a 24th century Mars whose terraformation gone bad and ended up 90% covered in water, being afterwards renamed Aqua. It's not a sci-fi manga, mind you. The premise is that Mars, being filled with so much water, didn't become a good place for exploration. It's a technologically backwards planet when compared to Earth, but at the same time a slow pace place that attracts people interested in a simpler life-style.
I wonder how prescient the author was. Judging from this news, a lot, even if we don't come to actually terraform the place.
Any good metaphysician will tell you that saying god is a creature is missing the point. And even more so if you think there was a space-time for him to be created in. The concept actually goes like this: god didn't "came to exist", because "to exist" is already a delimitation. "Existence" comes from god, not the other way around, and as such, you saying he exists, or you saying he doesn't exist, are both meaningless propositions. And to be more precise, anything you try saying about he is by definition wrong, no matter what it is.
"God is intelligent." Wrong.
"God has no mind." Wrong.
"God wants to do things." Wrong.
"God has no wants, needs, nothing." Wrong.
"God is complex." Wrong.
"God is simple." Wrong.
"God exists." Wrong.
"God doesn't exist." Wrong.
"God is good." Wrong.
"God is evil." Wrong.
"God is good and evil." Wrong.
"God is neither good nor evil." Wrong.
And so on and so forth.
Literalism is a sin. Or, at least, for 1500 years or so it was, just look at what the Church Fathers and the Scholastics wrote on the subject. Strangely enough, nowadays literalist interpretations of the Bible seem to be the norm.
Anyway, what the Genesis is saying, when you read it as symbols (which is what the Christians of old used to do), is pretty much standard realist metaphysics enclosed in mythological concepts. It describes reality as a complex entity composed of different gradations / mixes of order and chaos, with humanity in the middle as the most mixed of all. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus etc. don't tell things much differently, except for the language used. The former was poetic-rhetorical, the later were logic-dialectical. But that's it.
And modern science isn't that different in this regards. When you discover mathematical rules for nature, and logical rules that "existed" before nature, you're saying "order". When you discover that nature's building blocks are made of irreducible randomness, you're saying "chaos". When you look at human beings and recognize that they are subject to both and that, different from everything else, they are also able to know this is so, you're saying "humanity is in the middle". Description methods change, and emphasis vary a lot, but what's being described is in the end mostly the same.
Simple: "Left" and "Right", even when coupled with adjectives such as "Extreme", "Far", "Moderate", "Center-" etc., offer a very limited set of labels to describe political positions. The political landscape isn't a line, it's more of a multidimensional entity. You have a line that goes from "Anarchism" to "Totalitarianism", another that goes from "Individualism" to "Collectivism", another that goes from "Progressism" to "Conservatism", another that goes from "Monarchism" to "Republicanism", another that goes from "Federalism" to "Centralism", another that goes from "Authoritarianism" to "Democratism", another that goes from "Theocracism" to "Secularism", another that goes from "Realism" to "Idealism" (this one is usually tied to International Relations), and so on and so forth. Any single individual can be at any point in each and every of these lines, and any attempt to group all these differing positionings into a mere two overly-broad categories is by definition bound to ultimately fail. Human beings, thus human politics, are and will always be a complex phenomenon.