"Have they actually deprived you of anything, by your standards?"
Well, let's apply the test:
Prior to the theft, I have a hard drive and whatever data is on that drive.
Following the theft, I do not have a hard drive, and unless I made a copy of the data, I do not have the data either.
So yes, I was deprived by the theft.
"There are a vast, wide majority of people consuming media like this that have zero idea what a torrent even is, let alone how to safely acquire and use them."
True, and it was a bit extreme to claim that nobody would use the system when it is first introduced. In the long run, though, I expect that any restriction technology will ultimately fail to gain or maintain acceptance, and would point to what is happening with for-pay music downloads. Whether the process of failing will be peaceful, as it has been with music, or not so peaceful remains to be seen.
Now, the situation is a lot different when it comes to breaking the restriction system itself. Yes, it requires an unusually high level of skill to break these systems, but it requires little to no skill to distribute and use the break. As a case in point, look at what happened with the Macrovision system on VHS -- it was broken by electrical engineers, whose work was then placed in newer VCRs which an average consumer had little difficulty using. Granted, that was before the DMCA made it illegal to distribute such breaks, but I know plenty of people who use deCSS without really understanding what it does or how it works.
"If you really, honestly believed that the content held no value, and had stronger ethics, you'd simply stop consuming it."
Well, first of all, creative works are not "consumed" the way food or fuel is consumed. Suppose I stopped downloading or buying creative works, etc. -- I would still have many gigabytes available for my enjoyment. These works do not break down over time. A CD from the 90s sounds no worse now than it did when it was first produced, and may even sound slightly better (because of improvements in playback technologies). You might claim that there is a decrease in the utility of the work, because after enjoying it once it loses novelty, but most people have such a vast collection that their enjoyment need not be diminished very much (imagine hearing a song you have not heard in 10 years).
I argue that there is nothing unethical about copying creative works, regardless of how much time and effort went into their creation, as long as you are not trying to claim that you created it yourself. What made sense 50 years ago, prior to our current age of vast computing power and instant global communication, no longer makes sense today. The recording industry is overweight, and is lobbying to protect its unnecessary size from the reality of this age.
You seem to believe that the only way musicians can make enough money to create music is if ordinary citizens pay for every song they have a copy of, or at least that a certain critical number of citizens do so. Why not focus on the real money makers for musicians: concerts, business use, etc.? Recording studios do not need to make CDs anymore; for over a decade now, a fast and cheap way to distribute music to the masses has been available. All the money that is used to create CDs should be given to the artists themselves, and there should be a focus on business use and concert sales as revenue sources.
Yes, that means reducing the size of these corporations, which (God forbid) means a reduction in their market capitalization. So what? Nobody said it was unethical to use digital cameras, even though it caused a similar reduction in the film development industry. The same argument applies to the movie industry: they should focus on movie theaters and commercial use of movie scenes and characters as revenue sources, rather than harassing consumers over DVD and BD sales.
Copyrights are not property rights. Copyrights are not even natu
Keep in mind that most CS departments have a lot of techies and geeks (this should be obvious), who sometimes talk about cool new technology during snack/coffee breaks. In my post, I was referring more to this sort of talking, rather than talk that is related to classes or research.
How is making a copy "stealing?" You are failing to meet a key criterion by not depriving the person from whom you made the copy of whatever you copied. Stealing would be walking into my house and taking my hard drive.
This system will fail because nobody will download the restricted media; there is unrestricted media available at no cost. Further, the amount of time needed to extract the secret keys from the restricted codecs is minimal, unless a hardware crypto module is required. I expect that any software implementation will be broken within a week; an implementation using hardware crypto will probably be defeated within a year of its release.
Some of us stopped feeling remorse for the recording and movie industries when we saw how extensive their lies are. Like, the RIAA claiming that Kazaa was killing CD sales, when in reality they had record setting revenues during the height of Kazaa. Or Hollywood accounting. Or the claim that downloading is benefiting violent Mexican gangs. After a decade of claiming that they are suffering financially, I would expect to see RIAA and MPAA member companies all defunct or near bankruptcy, yet in reality these companies are among the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world.
"They've been focusing on creation and delivery of content for decades."
Have they? The iPod is just over a decade old, and prior to that, Apple was barely staying afloat as a company. When Apple was more dominant, the big name in "content creation" was SGI, with its high end graphics design systems, and multimedia on a PC was only starting to become a reality. Sure, Apple has been a big player in computerized multimedia for a long time (on the scale of technology), but "decades" is a bit of a stretch.
I won't deny that Apple has a history of making nice looking computers with nice looking software, but they have certainly made some flops in the past; remember the broken cubes? Let's at least wait until people have a chance to use this tablet before talking about how well engineered it is.
"Would you buy a tablet now if you knew that a company that has a track record of being a game changer is going to release a tablet?"
Would you buy a tablet at all? Really, tablet hype is past its prime. There are a few people who like them, but tablets only meet the needs of a small group of people. You are paying more for a lower performing computer that has an interesting input device, but that is about all -- great if you really like to hand write your notes, not so great if you are looking to save money or get serious performance.
"We know the design will be elegant,"
Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.
"Think of what market they haven't disrupted?"
These markets:
Supercomputing
Mainframes/high reliability systems
Military/security sensitive systems
Embedded/industrial systems
Telecom
Engineering design and simulation
Data analysis software
Storage
Remote sensing and control
These are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head. Basically, any market that is not "consumer electronics" is beyond the scope of what Apple does. Even within consumer electronics, there are submarkets that they are not touching, like gaming. None of these markets are being targeted by this tablet, and I am guessing that most of them are not even on Apple's radar. After all, there is no need for "pretty" or "trendy" in telemetry or automotive systems.
You can always do what I do: install some Linux OS on your PS3 (if you have one), connect a wireless keyboard/trackball mouse combo to it, and browse from your couch. Of course, I do not have an actual couch...
They are? I remember people talking about the iPhone and how they were planning to get one...why can I not find anyone talking about the Apple tablet now?
"competition is trying hard to diminish any possible announcement (like the no-show of Balmer at CES) pointing to the competition not being ready whatsoever."
Actually, Apple's competition already makes tablets, and they have been making them for years now. People were excited about an Apple tablet years ago, with a bit of a bump in that excitement when the iPhone was released, but at this point it is just an overdue entry to an already crowded market.
"As for Android catching up, read up on developer's issues with the Android platform."
Right, let's just ignore how many people are actually using Android, and focus on unhappy developers. This is kind of like saying, "Mac OS X catching up to Windows?! Nonsense! Look at how many developers are pissed off about Objective C!"
Your post raises an interesting point about the society we live in. We are so paranoid about people abusing our generosity that we actively refuse to be neighborly and help each other. I know plenty of people who use open access points just to check their email and go to a few websites, but nothing else. I know more people in that category than people who are trying to conceal some kind of criminal activity.
Frankly, WEP and WPA2 are doing more harm to the innocent people who just want to use your connection to check email than to the people who are doing something illegal. A good lawyer could argue that your open access point weakens evidence based on IP addresses, because it decouples your IP address from your legal identity, but most innocent people would not be able to defeat WEP.
"More people who may hop on your network and negatively impact your performance would likely cause you to learn to secure things."
I have yet to meet someone who locks down their wifi network because of concerns about performance. All of the people I know were concerned about what people will use their connection to do, and of the possibility that they will be accused of having committed some crime.
What I find particularly amusing is that a few months ago, 60 Minutes ran a segment about movie bootlegging and downloading (predictably biased) which ended with a director claiming that nobody in Hollywood would take a large risk like this because of Bittorrent.
And how long of a process are we talking about there? We are pushing 30 years of Reagen/Thatcher globalization, and it has been 62 years since GATT, yet it is not universally true that the nations that joined these various free trade agreements are better off.
So how long will the citizens of those nations have to wait? Why did the citizens of some nations see the promised changes, but other nations do not?
"That is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the things that make it rather successful. I dont want any random jackass viewing my profile."
Well, I have to wonder what you are posting that has you so worried about individual people seeing it. Look, I am with you on privacy being important, but why focus on individuals? Facebook does not hide your information from the large organizations that really have the power to invade your privacy.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and I shouldn't put it on the internet if I dont want all to see it."
Pretty much; why would you post something online, with no encryption whatsoever, if you wanted to keep it between you and your friends? Also, why, if this is personal information between you and your friends, would you need to use the global Internet at all? Do you not see your friends in person? Are you and your friends incapable of using email?
Really, the whole situation sounds bizarre from where I sit. You have this information that you believe should remain between you and your friends, so you post it on a massive, global network and rely on a massively popular, international website with hundreds of millions of users and a history of failing to respect privacy, to ensure that the data is only accessible by your friends. Yeah, I know Facebook is popular and trendy and whatnot, but I really cannot see why you would post information on Facebook that you did not want to spread beyond a close circle of friends.
"Well, guess what--I dont want everybody to see it, I only want people I invite to see it. If I can't use the internet for that purpose, what can I use?"
Well, you could do what I do: show your pictures off to your friends when they are sitting next to your computer, talk to them in person, and engage in non-electronic social interactions. For friends in far away places, there is email, IM, telephone, etc., none of which runs the risk of some "random jackass" stumbling across your conversation (unless the jackass is trying to eavesdrop, but do you really think Facebook is going to protect you from such people?).
"If you like to make an original website, this is still possible."
I think his bigger issue is that nobody is doing that anymore, so it is becoming impossible to find such things. Maybe he has weird taste or memory distortion, though, because my memory of personal web pages from the 90s is of horrible marquee text, blink text, animated gifs, and black backgrounds without hundreds of different colors in the text.
"Thing is - where the masses previously had no websites, they now have a facebook account... which is equally empty as no website at all. But internet did not lose anything - it just didn't gain anything either."
Actually, it did lose something: openness. Facebook is closed off to anyone without a Facebook account, which is definitely a change from the way things used to be done. Sure, there were places that you had to log in to in order to participate during the 90s, but I have trouble remembering websites that required a login just to see what users had posted.
"somebody is expressing concern for a future in which the next Bono never makes it thanks to rampant piracy"
Funny, a quick check on Gnutella, Megaupload, and The Pirate Bay do not turn up many songs or albums by unknown artists. Amazingly, it is as if the popularity of an artist is somehow directly related to the rate at which people share the artist's music with each other.
I think Bono is simply uninformed. He seems to be equating file sharing with old-fashioned bootleg recording. From TFA, he also seems to think that the US government's attempts to track child pornography are more than just a scratch at the surface, or that the government should treat file sharers the same way it treats child pornography possessors.
Except that human rights and education did not improve during the oil boom, did not decline in the years that followed, and have not improved in recent years. Gross income, per capita income, GDP, and all of the dozens of other economic indicators that tend to rise when a country signs on to the globalization platform are not tied to human rights, freedom, democracy, education, or living standards. That was my point, and the fact that Saudi Arabia has experienced a decline in its per capita income does not change that.
Different definition of "free." In the WTO's vision of the world, the freedom applies to corporations to move their operations between countries, seeking favorable laws for different parts of the operation, and to do so uninhibited by any government. The WTO rules and regulations concern the laws of nations, not the practices of businesses, and those rules and regulations involve strengthening the power of corporations that operate within member states. The WTO has, on many occasions, overturned laws enacted by democratic and freedom respecting governments because those laws are not favorable to corporations operating in those countries.
Perhaps the most ironic part about the WTO is the way it protects "free trade" in nations where the people suffer under dictatorships -- sometimes even countries where the general population cannot access the economic benefits of free trade because of repression and political corruption.
No, the old model of distributing their works is no longer viable, because of computers and the Internet. At one time, artists of all sorts could rely on the fact that producing a copy of their works required significant effort and money as the vehicle for their profits. Now, things have changed: computers can create perfect copies (or nearly perfect) of a given work in an instant, and such copies can be passed between computers very rapidly using the Internet, and with little effort on the part of the computer's users. Nothing, no amount of legal maneuvering, no amount of lobbying, no amount of propaganda or fear mongering or restriction technologies can change that fundamental fact about computers or the Internet.
What artists should do is adopt a new model of distribution. For authors, this means abandoning the publishing industry altogether, which is not necessary in an age of instant and perfect copying. For fiction writers, stories should not be released all at once, but one chapter at a time, with the requirement for the next chapter's release being a certain minimum number of payments; each chapter should include instructions for payment at the end, with a note about the conditions for releasing the next chapter (there is nothing in the "pirate" culture that should compel people to remove such information). For textbooks, this means a very radical shift away from the for-profit textbook publishing model, and towards a model where universities have their best professors take some time away from teaching to collaborate on textbooks; the professors involved may demand extra payment for such work, which is fine, and could be rolled into tuition as a "textbook fee."
It is not like there is no potential solution to the problems you outlined. Resistance to a new model will be very strong, given the power that the movie, TV, music, and publishing industries currently wield and the fact that these industries spread their propaganda from elementary schools to colleges, attach their message to movies and insert it into TV commercials. The new model may never come to be, since so many people are raised with the message that there is only one distribution model and that deviating from that model is the moral equivalent of theft, kidnapping, and murder.
"Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence."
Except that will not happen. Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases. Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete. The "publishing industry" may come to mean systems that automate this process, perhaps even online communities where readers not only pay authors but also communicate with the authors and with each other, commenting about the stories and characters.
Of course, that is not the picture that the current publishing industry wishes to paint, since it means the demise of their current business model and way of life. They will tell us that unless they continue to yield growing profits, authors will not write anything and we will be left without great novels to read, textbooks to study, or any number of other printed media.
"But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?"
Educate new authors about direct compensation, discuss what Stephen King tried, and start building those direct compensation systems and online communities for authors and their fans. Such communities already exist for illegal books, missing only the payment component, so I think it is fair to assume that a community for legal books, complete with a payment system, would be successful. All that is needed is for a few great authors to try it out, to release good stories that people will pay to have revealed, and new authors will start trying it for themselves. We already have the technology necessary to start building such communities, it just has not been combined into a coherent system yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's apply the test:
So yes, I was deprived by the theft.
"There are a vast, wide majority of people consuming media like this that have zero idea what a torrent even is, let alone how to safely acquire and use them."
True, and it was a bit extreme to claim that nobody would use the system when it is first introduced. In the long run, though, I expect that any restriction technology will ultimately fail to gain or maintain acceptance, and would point to what is happening with for-pay music downloads. Whether the process of failing will be peaceful, as it has been with music, or not so peaceful remains to be seen.
Now, the situation is a lot different when it comes to breaking the restriction system itself. Yes, it requires an unusually high level of skill to break these systems, but it requires little to no skill to distribute and use the break. As a case in point, look at what happened with the Macrovision system on VHS -- it was broken by electrical engineers, whose work was then placed in newer VCRs which an average consumer had little difficulty using. Granted, that was before the DMCA made it illegal to distribute such breaks, but I know plenty of people who use deCSS without really understanding what it does or how it works.
"If you really, honestly believed that the content held no value, and had stronger ethics, you'd simply stop consuming it."
Well, first of all, creative works are not "consumed" the way food or fuel is consumed. Suppose I stopped downloading or buying creative works, etc. -- I would still have many gigabytes available for my enjoyment. These works do not break down over time. A CD from the 90s sounds no worse now than it did when it was first produced, and may even sound slightly better (because of improvements in playback technologies). You might claim that there is a decrease in the utility of the work, because after enjoying it once it loses novelty, but most people have such a vast collection that their enjoyment need not be diminished very much (imagine hearing a song you have not heard in 10 years).
I argue that there is nothing unethical about copying creative works, regardless of how much time and effort went into their creation, as long as you are not trying to claim that you created it yourself. What made sense 50 years ago, prior to our current age of vast computing power and instant global communication, no longer makes sense today. The recording industry is overweight, and is lobbying to protect its unnecessary size from the reality of this age.
You seem to believe that the only way musicians can make enough money to create music is if ordinary citizens pay for every song they have a copy of, or at least that a certain critical number of citizens do so. Why not focus on the real money makers for musicians: concerts, business use, etc.? Recording studios do not need to make CDs anymore; for over a decade now, a fast and cheap way to distribute music to the masses has been available. All the money that is used to create CDs should be given to the artists themselves, and there should be a focus on business use and concert sales as revenue sources.
Yes, that means reducing the size of these corporations, which (God forbid) means a reduction in their market capitalization. So what? Nobody said it was unethical to use digital cameras, even though it caused a similar reduction in the film development industry. The same argument applies to the movie industry: they should focus on movie theaters and commercial use of movie scenes and characters as revenue sources, rather than harassing consumers over DVD and BD sales.
Copyrights are not property rights. Copyrights are not even natu
Keep in mind that most CS departments have a lot of techies and geeks (this should be obvious), who sometimes talk about cool new technology during snack/coffee breaks. In my post, I was referring more to this sort of talking, rather than talk that is related to classes or research.
Some of us stopped feeling remorse for the recording and movie industries when we saw how extensive their lies are. Like, the RIAA claiming that Kazaa was killing CD sales, when in reality they had record setting revenues during the height of Kazaa. Or Hollywood accounting. Or the claim that downloading is benefiting violent Mexican gangs. After a decade of claiming that they are suffering financially, I would expect to see RIAA and MPAA member companies all defunct or near bankruptcy, yet in reality these companies are among the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world.
"They've been focusing on creation and delivery of content for decades."
Have they? The iPod is just over a decade old, and prior to that, Apple was barely staying afloat as a company. When Apple was more dominant, the big name in "content creation" was SGI, with its high end graphics design systems, and multimedia on a PC was only starting to become a reality. Sure, Apple has been a big player in computerized multimedia for a long time (on the scale of technology), but "decades" is a bit of a stretch.
I won't deny that Apple has a history of making nice looking computers with nice looking software, but they have certainly made some flops in the past; remember the broken cubes? Let's at least wait until people have a chance to use this tablet before talking about how well engineered it is.
Would you buy a tablet at all? Really, tablet hype is past its prime. There are a few people who like them, but tablets only meet the needs of a small group of people. You are paying more for a lower performing computer that has an interesting input device, but that is about all -- great if you really like to hand write your notes, not so great if you are looking to save money or get serious performance.
"We know the design will be elegant,"
Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.
"Think of what market they haven't disrupted?"
These markets:
These are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head. Basically, any market that is not "consumer electronics" is beyond the scope of what Apple does. Even within consumer electronics, there are submarkets that they are not touching, like gaming. None of these markets are being targeted by this tablet, and I am guessing that most of them are not even on Apple's radar. After all, there is no need for "pretty" or "trendy" in telemetry or automotive systems.
You can always do what I do: install some Linux OS on your PS3 (if you have one), connect a wireless keyboard/trackball mouse combo to it, and browse from your couch. Of course, I do not have an actual couch...
"Expectations are even higher with the slate."
They are? I remember people talking about the iPhone and how they were planning to get one...why can I not find anyone talking about the Apple tablet now?
"competition is trying hard to diminish any possible announcement (like the no-show of Balmer at CES) pointing to the competition not being ready whatsoever."
Actually, Apple's competition already makes tablets, and they have been making them for years now. People were excited about an Apple tablet years ago, with a bit of a bump in that excitement when the iPhone was released, but at this point it is just an overdue entry to an already crowded market.
"As for Android catching up, read up on developer's issues with the Android platform."
Right, let's just ignore how many people are actually using Android, and focus on unhappy developers. This is kind of like saying, "Mac OS X catching up to Windows?! Nonsense! Look at how many developers are pissed off about Objective C!"
I am in a CS graduate program, and nobody in our department is talking about this -- not even the dozen or so Apple fanboys.
Your post raises an interesting point about the society we live in. We are so paranoid about people abusing our generosity that we actively refuse to be neighborly and help each other. I know plenty of people who use open access points just to check their email and go to a few websites, but nothing else. I know more people in that category than people who are trying to conceal some kind of criminal activity.
Frankly, WEP and WPA2 are doing more harm to the innocent people who just want to use your connection to check email than to the people who are doing something illegal. A good lawyer could argue that your open access point weakens evidence based on IP addresses, because it decouples your IP address from your legal identity, but most innocent people would not be able to defeat WEP.
"More people who may hop on your network and negatively impact your performance would likely cause you to learn to secure things."
I have yet to meet someone who locks down their wifi network because of concerns about performance. All of the people I know were concerned about what people will use their connection to do, and of the possibility that they will be accused of having committed some crime.
Let's try to avoid words like "rim" when commenting on sex-related stories...
stab
What I find particularly amusing is that a few months ago, 60 Minutes ran a segment about movie bootlegging and downloading (predictably biased) which ended with a director claiming that nobody in Hollywood would take a large risk like this because of Bittorrent.
And how long of a process are we talking about there? We are pushing 30 years of Reagen/Thatcher globalization, and it has been 62 years since GATT, yet it is not universally true that the nations that joined these various free trade agreements are better off.
So how long will the citizens of those nations have to wait? Why did the citizens of some nations see the promised changes, but other nations do not?
"That is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the things that make it rather successful. I dont want any random jackass viewing my profile."
Well, I have to wonder what you are posting that has you so worried about individual people seeing it. Look, I am with you on privacy being important, but why focus on individuals? Facebook does not hide your information from the large organizations that really have the power to invade your privacy.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and I shouldn't put it on the internet if I dont want all to see it."
Pretty much; why would you post something online, with no encryption whatsoever, if you wanted to keep it between you and your friends? Also, why, if this is personal information between you and your friends, would you need to use the global Internet at all? Do you not see your friends in person? Are you and your friends incapable of using email?
Really, the whole situation sounds bizarre from where I sit. You have this information that you believe should remain between you and your friends, so you post it on a massive, global network and rely on a massively popular, international website with hundreds of millions of users and a history of failing to respect privacy, to ensure that the data is only accessible by your friends. Yeah, I know Facebook is popular and trendy and whatnot, but I really cannot see why you would post information on Facebook that you did not want to spread beyond a close circle of friends.
"Well, guess what--I dont want everybody to see it, I only want people I invite to see it. If I can't use the internet for that purpose, what can I use?"
Well, you could do what I do: show your pictures off to your friends when they are sitting next to your computer, talk to them in person, and engage in non-electronic social interactions. For friends in far away places, there is email, IM, telephone, etc., none of which runs the risk of some "random jackass" stumbling across your conversation (unless the jackass is trying to eavesdrop, but do you really think Facebook is going to protect you from such people?).
"If you like to make an original website, this is still possible."
I think his bigger issue is that nobody is doing that anymore, so it is becoming impossible to find such things. Maybe he has weird taste or memory distortion, though, because my memory of personal web pages from the 90s is of horrible marquee text, blink text, animated gifs, and black backgrounds without hundreds of different colors in the text.
"Thing is - where the masses previously had no websites, they now have a facebook account... which is equally empty as no website at all. But internet did not lose anything - it just didn't gain anything either."
Actually, it did lose something: openness. Facebook is closed off to anyone without a Facebook account, which is definitely a change from the way things used to be done. Sure, there were places that you had to log in to in order to participate during the 90s, but I have trouble remembering websites that required a login just to see what users had posted.
"somebody is expressing concern for a future in which the next Bono never makes it thanks to rampant piracy"
Funny, a quick check on Gnutella, Megaupload, and The Pirate Bay do not turn up many songs or albums by unknown artists. Amazingly, it is as if the popularity of an artist is somehow directly related to the rate at which people share the artist's music with each other.
I think Bono is simply uninformed. He seems to be equating file sharing with old-fashioned bootleg recording. From TFA, he also seems to think that the US government's attempts to track child pornography are more than just a scratch at the surface, or that the government should treat file sharers the same way it treats child pornography possessors.
At most, one less than infinity! Duh!
Except that human rights and education did not improve during the oil boom, did not decline in the years that followed, and have not improved in recent years. Gross income, per capita income, GDP, and all of the dozens of other economic indicators that tend to rise when a country signs on to the globalization platform are not tied to human rights, freedom, democracy, education, or living standards. That was my point, and the fact that Saudi Arabia has experienced a decline in its per capita income does not change that.
"increased wealth (average income) does tend to lead to increased education and an increase in freedom."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_arabia#Human_rights
Hm...
Different definition of "free." In the WTO's vision of the world, the freedom applies to corporations to move their operations between countries, seeking favorable laws for different parts of the operation, and to do so uninhibited by any government. The WTO rules and regulations concern the laws of nations, not the practices of businesses, and those rules and regulations involve strengthening the power of corporations that operate within member states. The WTO has, on many occasions, overturned laws enacted by democratic and freedom respecting governments because those laws are not favorable to corporations operating in those countries.
Perhaps the most ironic part about the WTO is the way it protects "free trade" in nations where the people suffer under dictatorships -- sometimes even countries where the general population cannot access the economic benefits of free trade because of repression and political corruption.
I wish I could mod this funny.
Here they come, ready to defend Apple's move with all sorts of excuses.
"Their works are no longer viable."
No, the old model of distributing their works is no longer viable, because of computers and the Internet. At one time, artists of all sorts could rely on the fact that producing a copy of their works required significant effort and money as the vehicle for their profits. Now, things have changed: computers can create perfect copies (or nearly perfect) of a given work in an instant, and such copies can be passed between computers very rapidly using the Internet, and with little effort on the part of the computer's users. Nothing, no amount of legal maneuvering, no amount of lobbying, no amount of propaganda or fear mongering or restriction technologies can change that fundamental fact about computers or the Internet.
What artists should do is adopt a new model of distribution. For authors, this means abandoning the publishing industry altogether, which is not necessary in an age of instant and perfect copying. For fiction writers, stories should not be released all at once, but one chapter at a time, with the requirement for the next chapter's release being a certain minimum number of payments; each chapter should include instructions for payment at the end, with a note about the conditions for releasing the next chapter (there is nothing in the "pirate" culture that should compel people to remove such information). For textbooks, this means a very radical shift away from the for-profit textbook publishing model, and towards a model where universities have their best professors take some time away from teaching to collaborate on textbooks; the professors involved may demand extra payment for such work, which is fine, and could be rolled into tuition as a "textbook fee."
It is not like there is no potential solution to the problems you outlined. Resistance to a new model will be very strong, given the power that the movie, TV, music, and publishing industries currently wield and the fact that these industries spread their propaganda from elementary schools to colleges, attach their message to movies and insert it into TV commercials. The new model may never come to be, since so many people are raised with the message that there is only one distribution model and that deviating from that model is the moral equivalent of theft, kidnapping, and murder.
"Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence."
Except that will not happen. Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases. Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete. The "publishing industry" may come to mean systems that automate this process, perhaps even online communities where readers not only pay authors but also communicate with the authors and with each other, commenting about the stories and characters.
Of course, that is not the picture that the current publishing industry wishes to paint, since it means the demise of their current business model and way of life. They will tell us that unless they continue to yield growing profits, authors will not write anything and we will be left without great novels to read, textbooks to study, or any number of other printed media.
"But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?"
Educate new authors about direct compensation, discuss what Stephen King tried, and start building those direct compensation systems and online communities for authors and their fans. Such communities already exist for illegal books, missing only the payment component, so I think it is fair to assume that a community for legal books, complete with a payment system, would be successful. All that is needed is for a few great authors to try it out, to release good stories that people will pay to have revealed, and new authors will start trying it for themselves. We already have the technology necessary to start building such communities, it just has not been combined into a coherent system yet.