Right now, prosecutors can't choose to use the various _theft_ laws to get file sharers even if they wanted to
Which would perhaps be relevant if anyone was arguing that "IP violations are labelled as 'theft' in the law", but that's not the sense that "theft" is used in any of the argument that IP violations either are or are analogous to theft. (And, of course, what laws are 'theft' laws isn't particularly consistent, either: you may have things like 'grand theft', 'petty theft', 'grand theft auto', 'theft of service' in some jurisdictions, and some or all of the things those labels apply to in one jurisdiction be covered by laws whose titles don't include 'theft' at all in others.)
Go look up the definition of theft. It is not the same as IP infringement.
Theft is generally defined as simply the act of stealing; there are many definitions of stealing, some of the common ones of which are certainly broad enough to include some or all instances of IP infringement. See definitions of theft, steal.
As it points out, the common analogies to theft are often incomplete or inaccurate.
Analogies are always incomplete and inaccurate (the former necessarily implies the latter, anyhow); if they were complete and accurate, they would be equivalencies, not analogies.
What is important is whether the similarities in the things which are held up as analogous support the conclusion drawn from the analogy; IOW, whether and to what degree the similarities (or, conversely, the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the analogy) are relevant to the purpose of the analogy.
define "needed". its clear that humankind has survived for long time without Photoshop without any immediate pressing need for it, so apparently these features can be wanted, but not needed. which turns the price/performance ratio back to "$0/not the best match for my wishes" which is still very good.
Not necessarily (the "very good" part); consider a business scenario: if missing the Photoshop features causes a greater increase in cost (say, artist time) or loss in revenue than the cost of the Photoshop license, then, no, the GIMP isn't a "very good" value, even with no license cost. The opportunity cost is too great.
GIMP is good enough for the rest of us. . . . For me, even installing a program from CD seems like a hassle I'm not used to (except for base system). Add to that that I need wine. Keeping it up-to-date seems even worse. Do windows even have an update-manager for third party programs? Is that "emulated" in wine?
The effort to get Wine to support Photoshop better is not, I would imagine, primarily aimed at the needs of people like you who are current Linux users and for whom the GIMP is adequate. It is aimed at the people for whom the GIMP is not adequate, and who are, in part for that reason, currently not Linux users (or, perhaps, are currently part-time Linux users who keep Windows around to use Photoshop.) Its to make running on Linux more of a viable solution for people who need Photoshop, not to make Photoshop more accessible to the segment of the market already committed to Linux. Which is why it is being funded by Google, who has an interest in undermining the MS operating system monopoly, not Adobe, who would have the interest in getting more people to use Photoshop.
So, fine, the GIMP is good enough for you: this effort isn't, except insofar as it is aimed at paving the way for wider adoption of Linux and making Linux a more attractive platform generally, isn't about you.
Nothing in this effort is going to make it harder for you to use the GIMP on Linux.
Hmm. I can't help wondering how something that's worth $100 per day to google isn't worth the finder keeping forever.
Well, perhaps its identifiable, and contains some kind of locating system that enables the operator to locate it at need, but the $100 reward is just an incentive so that the operating company saves on going out and recovering some of them, so the finder keeping it forever isn't really a viable option.
Why on earth would you want to switch to Linux to save a fractional amount of the cost of Photoshop if photoshop is going to run exactly the same?
Why on earth would you ask me that question when I never suggested switching to Linux to save a fractional amount of the cost of Photoshop. Not being able to continue to run Photoshop as-is being a barrier to adoption of Linux for some users does not mean, for those users, that running Photoshop would be the main reason for changing. It means that the cost of not being able to do so in Linux is the cost that outweighs, for those users, the other benefits of switching to Linux and thus prevents the switch.
Ah, but F/OSS software isn't driven by demand. It is driven by developers who enjoy sharing ideas.
Lots of F/OSS is, in fact, driven by demand; the for-profit companies that pour resources (money, developers, etc.) into F/OSS projects don't do it based on how much developers enjoy sharing ideas. They do it based on their business interests and needs, which driven by customer demand.
F/OSS may support casual, experimental development that isn't driven by clear business needs (because it eliminates the cost of components so that such development isn't forced with either working from the ground up or facing prohibitive costs), but that certainly isn't the exclusive scope of such development. Google, IBM, RedHat, Sun, and other for-profit businesses that pay for F/OSS development aren't doing it for fun.
High demand will inevitably be filed by proprietary software.
The basis for the conclusion is...what?
Linux needs to keep a healthy ratio of users vs. contributors. If you attract the attention of the masses, that ratio will be broken.
The idea that the success of Linux requires it to remain unpopular is interesting, but I think misguided.
There's just no compelling reason to adopt Linux just to run Windows software.
No one has suggested that there is. You are confusing the idea that the inability to run critical Windows apps is a compelling reason to not adopt Linux for many users with the entirely different idea that the mere ability to run Windows applications would be compelling reason to adopt Linux.
You can be as idealistic as you want about free software but until GIMP becomes as good as Photoshop then professionals won't use it.
Until it becomes much better than Photoshop, or has been "as good" for many years (so that people that never learned Photoshop in the first place have become common in professional circles), it won't be competitive among professionals; "as good" isn't much reason to switch from familiar software, even if it is cheaper. And the price of Photoshop upgrades isn't a big deal if you are making a signficant income doing work that you've gotten familiar with Photoshop for, I'd expect.
Maybe, maybe not. Google's business seems to be served well by making the OS an interchangeable commodity; they don't really need an OS, but in the long-run they need not to have a competitor controlling a monopoly OS that can be used as a platform to push products and services that directly compete with Google's.
Since no one controls Linux, it is to Google's advantage for Linux to become more popular and windows less popular on the desktop (it is likewise to Google's advantage, though less so, for, say, OS X to become more popular: competing single-source OS's are better than one dominant single-source OS.)
Dispite the many claims, I really doubt that photoshop is seriously hindering Linux adoption. I mean, really, what percentage of users out there are photographic professionals?
I think that's the wrong question.
I think the right question is this: what percentage of businesses have Photoshop key to the work of either the business or at least one unit of the business, such that the lack of Photoshop on Linux would substantially increase the resistance of the business to considering Linux as a desktop platform (as they'd either have to [1] transition the Photoshop-dependent unit to alternative software or [2] maintain heterogenous desktop platforms.)
(Of course, making Wine support Photoshop better also means "making Wine do a better job of acting like Windows in general", which makes it incidentally more likely that arbitrary Windows software that the average user will be concerned about will run on Linux.)
While it may be good for a few people who absolutely positively need to use Photoshop in short term, Linux needs more NATIVE software if it is to be stronger in the long run.
The best way to get Linux more native software is to get it more users.
The best way to get it more users is to reduce the cost of transitioning off Windows.
The best way to reduce the cost of transitioning of Windows is to make it so users don't have to go through on OS transition and a transition in critical applications simultaneously.
The best way to avoid that double transition is to assure that the Windows-based applications that large numbers of users rely on in their business run on Linux.
That said, I think it is important for Linux users to always try to look towards free software first.
People who are currently Linux users probably do. And once people see the value that free software brings through being, e.g., a Linux user, they are more likely to. This effort by Google isn't about that, I don't think. It's about targeting the thing that stops most people (particularly, most businesses) from seriously considering Linux as a desktop platform in the first place.
The better Linux (through Wine, etc.; Mono, unpopular as may be with some because of the unhealthy relationship the project is perceived as having with MS, may have a role here, too) is at supporting popular Windows applications, the lower the cost and risk of transitioning to Windows is for users that rely on applications that are currently designed for Windows only. And the lower that cost and risk is, the more likely those people are to try Linux. And the more of them that use Linux, the more demand there will be for new native Linux software. And, presuming that those users have a good experience with Linux and its F/OSS nature, the more resources will flow into supporting quality, Linux-based F/OSS rather than purchasing closed-source software.
But you can't make desktop Linux more popular with business if the initial cost/risk barriers to adopting Linux on the desktop are too high for most businesses to consider, because the OS transition is unavoidably linked to a transition away from their current application set, as well.
My guess is they aren't. However, they do seem to be interested in desktop Linux adoption (probably because destroying MS's OS monopoly is a lot better insurance against MS leveraging its OS monopoly against Google than, say, hoping for government anti-trust enforcers to do their job effectively), and getting software that is currently a critical barrier to linux adoption in certain areas to run on Linux is a good way to advance linux desktop adoption.
It's called The GIMP! I use that program all the time, it does most of the stuff Photoshop does.
The GIMP may be great, but that's not really the issue. Getting Wine, etc., to the point where the most important popular Windows apps run on Linux reduces the perceived transition costs (including retraining costs or lost productivity during the learning curve) and risks to companies and individuals that are already strongly attached to particular software to breaking free of the MS operating system stranglehold.
Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites.
Uh, okay. Maybe the MS technologies at issue (which mostly aren't web-app technologies) are "more powerful" than LAMP (how you measure the "power" of XNA Game Studio against LAMP is beyond me.) So what? LAMP is simple, well-known and documented, and free. If you want more powerful (and still well-documented) tools for any given role than the standard LAMP components (particularly MySQL and PHP), they aren't hard to find.
The Roman Catholic church has recognized evolution essentially as fact and completely compatible with the bible.
Well, certain leaders of the Church, not dictating Church doctrine at the time, have said that evolution appears to be the best scientific explanation of manner of the development of life given the available evidence, and (speaking as to its relation to Church doctrine) that evolution, as such, didn't necessarily conflict with Church doctrine, though certain areas raised concerns.
So I don't really understand what the problem is with Protestants in this country.
Well, you've overstated the Catholic position, and apparently failed to recognize that Protestants are pretty much defined by opposition to Roman Catholic Church, so that Vatican officials (including the Pope) saying something, whether in a personal or official capacity, isn't generally a big influence on Protestants in general.
Projects sometimes ask us about registering their copyrights. You do not need to register in order to have a valid copyright. You do not need to register to enforce your copyright. However, registration can provide a project with better options and an increased ability to enforce its copyright license against violators.
This is technically accurate but potentially dangerously misleading. For virtually all actual ways in which you are likely to want to enforce copyright, in the US at least, registration is a prerequisite for legal action.
Also, section 2.5 on "Copyright enforcement" skips over a rather critical area for a legal issues primer: the law. It focusses on knowing the license and its terms, and knowing the facts. It doesn't discuss much at all about the law which is necessary to understand how licenses apply to the facts. Now, for one audience that the piece is directed to (lawyers), this may be okay, since presumably the step of researching the applicable law isn't something they need to be told about (but then again, neither "gathering the facts" nor "knowing the license" are things that they should need to be told about, either.) For the other stated audience (developers, risk managers, etc.), though, this is a rather important point, and its kind of odd that "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects" would skip over most of the legal issues almost entirely in the section on copyright, and be dangerously misleading on the one point where it does discuss the legal issues as opposed to the terms of particular available licenses. The Copyright section reads more as a primer on and promotion of the GNU Licenses and the FSF as a resource on the GNU licenses than a legal issues primer.
The rest of primer, OTOH, seems a bit more substantial.
The problem with that is that they'll either have had to enable WAN router control panel access (unlikely if they weren't bright enough to change the default password) or you have to physically hit their network - even if just wardriving.
Don't most routers disable wireless control panel access by default as well?
It is true that the marginal cost is not actually zero, but I find the difference to be radical.
Oh, sure. As was, e.g., the difference wrought by the printing press, notwithstanding teh fact that no one would even try to argue that the printing press brought the marginal cost of information products down to zero.
For many of these goods -- let's say an electonic textbook, to get back on topic -- the cost of implementing a system of exclusion, by which non-payers could be reliably prevented from getting access, would astronomically increase the fixed costs.
As it would be for printed books: systematic barriers to copying of that kind have never been particularly effective. The difference with digital means of production is that the fixed costs of production are mostly related to the creation of the content,not the infrastructure to reproduce it; the fixed cost of cheaply (in terms of marginal cost) producing copies of an existing work, with quality indistinguishable from authorized copies, is very low. This makes legal controls of copying less practical, because one of the big factors making legal controls modestly effective at dealing with mass unauthorized distribution of printed works is that you had to make a big investment to produce unauthorized copies as cheaply as big legitimate producers, and that big investment would be at risk if you were caught. Digital means of production change all that.
When the marginal costs get so low that the cost-of-sale (i mean the bare-bones, cost-to-collect) exceeds it, the fundamental economics haven't changed but the practical ones have, namely the concept of selling as selling-individual copies of X. The individual copies are no longer the products, but the aggregate. And you don't sell to the recipients, you sell to someone who's interested in funding the aggregate.
This I agree with entirely (and have, in fact, argued in several posts). This may have a downside of course; work that has a broad but shallow appeal becomes even harder to justify producing, while work that has a strong appeal to a narrow moneyed interest becomes even more the focus of economically viable content development than it already is. Unless, of course, you find away to aggregate those diffuse interests into an up-front payment, since if you can't make the fixed costs of development back on the first copy, you may never make them back at all.
(And, of course, producing content in a form to which access is intrinsically linked to some product or service which isn't made more readily reproducible by the availablility of digital means is, of course, still viable.)
The majority of which is a sunk cost once you have the infrastructure set up to transmit a single piece of information.
Whether its a majority or not depends on the quantity, but it doesn't matter anyway, since the ratio of the fixed costs to the variable costs doesn't fundamentally change anything.
(Though the fact that the fixed costs dwarf the marginal costs is one important reason why Moglen's statement, which, as well as misrepresenting the state of the marginal costs, ignores the fixed costs entirely, is completely off-base.)
The marginal cost is so low it's essentially zero.
No, its just very low, and in many cases difficult to allocate directly to the people making the decisions incurring it effectively.
What the whole copyright/IP argument revolves around is the ability for an author or creator to sell identical copies of the same work over and over again.
Well, no, its not. It isn't restricted to identical copies, and it isn't restricted to the author's ability to sell copies.
It's the work that's at issue, not the cost of delivering it.
The reason the ability of the creator to control the work for some period of time is at issue is precisely related to the ability of the creator to recover the costs associated with delivering the work (though, true, this is mostly about the fixed costs, and has been since long before "digital methods of production" were an issue, which is, again, one of the main reason's why Moglen's argument misses the whole point.)
The vast majority of books that have been written have not been written because the author thought they would make more money than it cost them in time
Sure, but that's immaterial. They've been written because the expected net utility was positive. The expected financial return from sales is in almost every case one of the positive factors, even if it is not the only one, or sufficient on its own.
I am aware of economics and your ability to spout economic theory does not make your point any more valid.
Insofar as my point is valid on its own, and my ability to point to the reasons why is only a means of demonstrating its validity not something that increases its validity, I would agree with the part of that sentence after the "and"; I am less convinced of the part before the "and" unless it is meant only to mean that you are aware that there is a field of inquiry known as "economics", rather than meaning that you have an understanding of that field.
You said "Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy." I noted that that is only true in certain economic systems.
Well, you certainly claimed that. It remains false.
In some systems those costs are shared in ways other than the way they are shared in the U.S. economy.
It doesn't matter what mechanism allows you to counteract the disutility. You have fixed economic (not necessarily financial) costs in producing something, and unless you can recover those costs, there is no incentive to do it. What economic system you are operating in certainly affects the available mechanisms you have to recover costs, but that doesn't change the basic underlying economic fact.
Of course, most people who descend so quickly into economic theory are really heavily invested, emotionally and/or intellectually not necessarily monetarily, in the current economic paradigm of scarcity.
That's a cute ad hominem, and nothing more.
Which is exactly the problem, the sort of distribution of information we are talking about does not work under an economic model of scarcity.
Scarcity isn't a "model", its a fact, and if you want to understand what kinds of distribution of information "digital methods of production" in the real world enable, you won't ignore that fact. There is quite a lot they do enable, but Moglen and those who follow him are deluded if they think that such methods change the foundational economic realities. That's not to say digital methods of production aren't revolutionary, they clearly do revolutionize the practical economics of information dissemination, just as the printing press did; changing the fundamental economic realities of opportunity cost, etc., aren't necessary for revolutionary transformation, and unsubstantiated fantasies about such changes don't help (indeed, they obstruct) understanding of the real impacts of the transformations enabled by new technologies.
If I write a book and someone else starts distributing copies of that book on thepiratebay in pdf format, then the marginal costs for distribution may not be zero, but my costs for distribution are zero.
Sure. Of course, if the first person who buys your book is going to be allowed to do that, you have no economic incentive to write the book at all unless that first person is going to pay all your fixed economic costs (including the opportunity cost of whatever other labor you could have done instead of writing the book during the time it took you to write the book.)
Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy.
Assuming the standard American capitalist economy.
No, not at all. No matter what system governs economic exchanges, every human action has a (positive or negative) net utility to the actor undertaking it. If it is a negative net utility, there is no incentive to take the action unless a countervailing positive utility is added to it. Cost is simply negative utility. If someone can't be compensated for whatever disutility they experience producing a work, they aren't going to produce it, even if there is no marginal disutility in distributing subsequent copies of the work.
All the economic system does is control what choices are available to people who want to get other people to perform acts that would have a positive utility to the person desiring them and a negative utility to the person performing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Which would perhaps be relevant if anyone was arguing that "IP violations are labelled as 'theft' in the law", but that's not the sense that "theft" is used in any of the argument that IP violations either are or are analogous to theft. (And, of course, what laws are 'theft' laws isn't particularly consistent, either: you may have things like 'grand theft', 'petty theft', 'grand theft auto', 'theft of service' in some jurisdictions, and some or all of the things those labels apply to in one jurisdiction be covered by laws whose titles don't include 'theft' at all in others.)
Theft is generally defined as simply the act of stealing; there are many definitions of stealing, some of the common ones of which are certainly broad enough to include some or all instances of IP infringement. See definitions of theft, steal.
Analogies are always incomplete and inaccurate (the former necessarily implies the latter, anyhow); if they were complete and accurate, they would be equivalencies, not analogies.
What is important is whether the similarities in the things which are held up as analogous support the conclusion drawn from the analogy; IOW, whether and to what degree the similarities (or, conversely, the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the analogy) are relevant to the purpose of the analogy.
Not necessarily (the "very good" part); consider a business scenario: if missing the Photoshop features causes a greater increase in cost (say, artist time) or loss in revenue than the cost of the Photoshop license, then, no, the GIMP isn't a "very good" value, even with no license cost. The opportunity cost is too great.
The effort to get Wine to support Photoshop better is not, I would imagine, primarily aimed at the needs of people like you who are current Linux users and for whom the GIMP is adequate. It is aimed at the people for whom the GIMP is not adequate, and who are, in part for that reason, currently not Linux users (or, perhaps, are currently part-time Linux users who keep Windows around to use Photoshop.) Its to make running on Linux more of a viable solution for people who need Photoshop, not to make Photoshop more accessible to the segment of the market already committed to Linux. Which is why it is being funded by Google, who has an interest in undermining the MS operating system monopoly, not Adobe, who would have the interest in getting more people to use Photoshop.
So, fine, the GIMP is good enough for you: this effort isn't, except insofar as it is aimed at paving the way for wider adoption of Linux and making Linux a more attractive platform generally, isn't about you.
Nothing in this effort is going to make it harder for you to use the GIMP on Linux.
Well, perhaps its identifiable, and contains some kind of locating system that enables the operator to locate it at need, but the $100 reward is just an incentive so that the operating company saves on going out and recovering some of them, so the finder keeping it forever isn't really a viable option.
The cost of the ground, among other things.
Why on earth would you ask me that question when I never suggested switching to Linux to save a fractional amount of the cost of Photoshop. Not being able to continue to run Photoshop as-is being a barrier to adoption of Linux for some users does not mean, for those users, that running Photoshop would be the main reason for changing. It means that the cost of not being able to do so in Linux is the cost that outweighs, for those users, the other benefits of switching to Linux and thus prevents the switch.
Lots of F/OSS is, in fact, driven by demand; the for-profit companies that pour resources (money, developers, etc.) into F/OSS projects don't do it based on how much developers enjoy sharing ideas. They do it based on their business interests and needs, which driven by customer demand.
F/OSS may support casual, experimental development that isn't driven by clear business needs (because it eliminates the cost of components so that such development isn't forced with either working from the ground up or facing prohibitive costs), but that certainly isn't the exclusive scope of such development. Google, IBM, RedHat, Sun, and other for-profit businesses that pay for F/OSS development aren't doing it for fun.
The basis for the conclusion is...what?
The idea that the success of Linux requires it to remain unpopular is interesting, but I think misguided.
No one has suggested that there is. You are confusing the idea that the inability to run critical Windows apps is a compelling reason to not adopt Linux for many users with the entirely different idea that the mere ability to run Windows applications would be compelling reason to adopt Linux.
The whole point of a monopoly is that it renders both quality and price substantially less important to the ability to sell product.
Consequentially, it makes devoting resources to QA less justifiable in a profit-maximizing firm.
Until it becomes much better than Photoshop, or has been "as good" for many years (so that people that never learned Photoshop in the first place have become common in professional circles), it won't be competitive among professionals; "as good" isn't much reason to switch from familiar software, even if it is cheaper. And the price of Photoshop upgrades isn't a big deal if you are making a signficant income doing work that you've gotten familiar with Photoshop for, I'd expect.
Maybe, maybe not. Google's business seems to be served well by making the OS an interchangeable commodity; they don't really need an OS, but in the long-run they need not to have a competitor controlling a monopoly OS that can be used as a platform to push products and services that directly compete with Google's.
Since no one controls Linux, it is to Google's advantage for Linux to become more popular and windows less popular on the desktop (it is likewise to Google's advantage, though less so, for, say, OS X to become more popular: competing single-source OS's are better than one dominant single-source OS.)
I think that's the wrong question.
I think the right question is this: what percentage of businesses have Photoshop key to the work of either the business or at least one unit of the business, such that the lack of Photoshop on Linux would substantially increase the resistance of the business to considering Linux as a desktop platform (as they'd either have to [1] transition the Photoshop-dependent unit to alternative software or [2] maintain heterogenous desktop platforms.)
(Of course, making Wine support Photoshop better also means "making Wine do a better job of acting like Windows in general", which makes it incidentally more likely that arbitrary Windows software that the average user will be concerned about will run on Linux.)
The best way to get Linux more native software is to get it more users.
The best way to get it more users is to reduce the cost of transitioning off Windows.
The best way to reduce the cost of transitioning of Windows is to make it so users don't have to go through on OS transition and a transition in critical applications simultaneously.
The best way to avoid that double transition is to assure that the Windows-based applications that large numbers of users rely on in their business run on Linux.
People who are currently Linux users probably do. And once people see the value that free software brings through being, e.g., a Linux user, they are more likely to. This effort by Google isn't about that, I don't think. It's about targeting the thing that stops most people (particularly, most businesses) from seriously considering Linux as a desktop platform in the first place.
The better Linux (through Wine, etc.; Mono, unpopular as may be with some because of the unhealthy relationship the project is perceived as having with MS, may have a role here, too) is at supporting popular Windows applications, the lower the cost and risk of transitioning to Windows is for users that rely on applications that are currently designed for Windows only. And the lower that cost and risk is, the more likely those people are to try Linux. And the more of them that use Linux, the more demand there will be for new native Linux software. And, presuming that those users have a good experience with Linux and its F/OSS nature, the more resources will flow into supporting quality, Linux-based F/OSS rather than purchasing closed-source software.
But you can't make desktop Linux more popular with business if the initial cost/risk barriers to adopting Linux on the desktop are too high for most businesses to consider, because the OS transition is unavoidably linked to a transition away from their current application set, as well.
My guess is they aren't. However, they do seem to be interested in desktop Linux adoption (probably because destroying MS's OS monopoly is a lot better insurance against MS leveraging its OS monopoly against Google than, say, hoping for government anti-trust enforcers to do their job effectively), and getting software that is currently a critical barrier to linux adoption in certain areas to run on Linux is a good way to advance linux desktop adoption.
Well, yeah. Too bad it wasn't called "the GNU IMP" rather than "the GIMP".
The GIMP may be great, but that's not really the issue. Getting Wine, etc., to the point where the most important popular Windows apps run on Linux reduces the perceived transition costs (including retraining costs or lost productivity during the learning curve) and risks to companies and individuals that are already strongly attached to particular software to breaking free of the MS operating system stranglehold.
Uh, okay. Maybe the MS technologies at issue (which mostly aren't web-app technologies) are "more powerful" than LAMP (how you measure the "power" of XNA Game Studio against LAMP is beyond me.) So what? LAMP is simple, well-known and documented, and free. If you want more powerful (and still well-documented) tools for any given role than the standard LAMP components (particularly MySQL and PHP), they aren't hard to find.
Well, certain leaders of the Church, not dictating Church doctrine at the time, have said that evolution appears to be the best scientific explanation of manner of the development of life given the available evidence, and (speaking as to its relation to Church doctrine) that evolution, as such, didn't necessarily conflict with Church doctrine, though certain areas raised concerns.
Well, you've overstated the Catholic position, and apparently failed to recognize that Protestants are pretty much defined by opposition to Roman Catholic Church, so that Vatican officials (including the Pope) saying something, whether in a personal or official capacity, isn't generally a big influence on Protestants in general.
This is technically accurate but potentially dangerously misleading. For virtually all actual ways in which you are likely to want to enforce copyright, in the US at least, registration is a prerequisite for legal action.
Also, section 2.5 on "Copyright enforcement" skips over a rather critical area for a legal issues primer: the law. It focusses on knowing the license and its terms, and knowing the facts. It doesn't discuss much at all about the law which is necessary to understand how licenses apply to the facts. Now, for one audience that the piece is directed to (lawyers), this may be okay, since presumably the step of researching the applicable law isn't something they need to be told about (but then again, neither "gathering the facts" nor "knowing the license" are things that they should need to be told about, either.) For the other stated audience (developers, risk managers, etc.), though, this is a rather important point, and its kind of odd that "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects" would skip over most of the legal issues almost entirely in the section on copyright, and be dangerously misleading on the one point where it does discuss the legal issues as opposed to the terms of particular available licenses. The Copyright section reads more as a primer on and promotion of the GNU Licenses and the FSF as a resource on the GNU licenses than a legal issues primer.
The rest of primer, OTOH, seems a bit more substantial.
Don't most routers disable wireless control panel access by default as well?
Oh, sure. As was, e.g., the difference wrought by the printing press, notwithstanding teh fact that no one would even try to argue that the printing press brought the marginal cost of information products down to zero.
For many of these goods -- let's say an electonic textbook, to get back on topic -- the cost of implementing a system of exclusion, by which non-payers could be reliably prevented from getting access, would astronomically increase the fixed costs.
As it would be for printed books: systematic barriers to copying of that kind have never been particularly effective. The difference with digital means of production is that the fixed costs of production are mostly related to the creation of the content,not the infrastructure to reproduce it; the fixed cost of cheaply (in terms of marginal cost) producing copies of an existing work, with quality indistinguishable from authorized copies, is very low. This makes legal controls of copying less practical, because one of the big factors making legal controls modestly effective at dealing with mass unauthorized distribution of printed works is that you had to make a big investment to produce unauthorized copies as cheaply as big legitimate producers, and that big investment would be at risk if you were caught. Digital means of production change all that.
This I agree with entirely (and have, in fact, argued in several posts). This may have a downside of course; work that has a broad but shallow appeal becomes even harder to justify producing, while work that has a strong appeal to a narrow moneyed interest becomes even more the focus of economically viable content development than it already is. Unless, of course, you find away to aggregate those diffuse interests into an up-front payment, since if you can't make the fixed costs of development back on the first copy, you may never make them back at all.
(And, of course, producing content in a form to which access is intrinsically linked to some product or service which isn't made more readily reproducible by the availablility of digital means is, of course, still viable.)
Whether its a majority or not depends on the quantity, but it doesn't matter anyway, since the ratio of the fixed costs to the variable costs doesn't fundamentally change anything.
(Though the fact that the fixed costs dwarf the marginal costs is one important reason why Moglen's statement, which, as well as misrepresenting the state of the marginal costs, ignores the fixed costs entirely, is completely off-base.)
No, its just very low, and in many cases difficult to allocate directly to the people making the decisions incurring it effectively.
Well, no, its not. It isn't restricted to identical copies, and it isn't restricted to the author's ability to sell copies.
The reason the ability of the creator to control the work for some period of time is at issue is precisely related to the ability of the creator to recover the costs associated with delivering the work (though, true, this is mostly about the fixed costs, and has been since long before "digital methods of production" were an issue, which is, again, one of the main reason's why Moglen's argument misses the whole point.)
Sure, but that's immaterial. They've been written because the expected net utility was positive. The expected financial return from sales is in almost every case one of the positive factors, even if it is not the only one, or sufficient on its own.
Insofar as my point is valid on its own, and my ability to point to the reasons why is only a means of demonstrating its validity not something that increases its validity, I would agree with the part of that sentence after the "and"; I am less convinced of the part before the "and" unless it is meant only to mean that you are aware that there is a field of inquiry known as "economics", rather than meaning that you have an understanding of that field.
Well, you certainly claimed that. It remains false.
It doesn't matter what mechanism allows you to counteract the disutility. You have fixed economic (not necessarily financial) costs in producing something, and unless you can recover those costs, there is no incentive to do it. What economic system you are operating in certainly affects the available mechanisms you have to recover costs, but that doesn't change the basic underlying economic fact.
That's a cute ad hominem, and nothing more.
Scarcity isn't a "model", its a fact, and if you want to understand what kinds of distribution of information "digital methods of production" in the real world enable, you won't ignore that fact. There is quite a lot they do enable, but Moglen and those who follow him are deluded if they think that such methods change the foundational economic realities. That's not to say digital methods of production aren't revolutionary, they clearly do revolutionize the practical economics of information dissemination, just as the printing press did; changing the fundamental economic realities of opportunity cost, etc., aren't necessary for revolutionary transformation, and unsubstantiated fantasies about such changes don't help (indeed, they obstruct) understanding of the real impacts of the transformations enabled by new technologies.
Sure. Of course, if the first person who buys your book is going to be allowed to do that, you have no economic incentive to write the book at all unless that first person is going to pay all your fixed economic costs (including the opportunity cost of whatever other labor you could have done instead of writing the book during the time it took you to write the book.)
No, not at all. No matter what system governs economic exchanges, every human action has a (positive or negative) net utility to the actor undertaking it. If it is a negative net utility, there is no incentive to take the action unless a countervailing positive utility is added to it. Cost is simply negative utility. If someone can't be compensated for whatever disutility they experience producing a work, they aren't going to produce it, even if there is no marginal disutility in distributing subsequent copies of the work.
All the economic system does is control what choices are available to people who want to get other people to perform acts that would have a positive utility to the person desiring them and a negative utility to the person performing them.