So it's ok to steal, as long as you steal more than you could possibly have bought legitimately otherwise?
The point is that the law itself is wrong. Neither the government nor google have a god given monopoly on the free exchange of culture (libraries). When I buy a book, I share it with anyone I can. No one gets paid when I do this so it must be destroying capitalism, right?
People are building book scanners, compressing the results and distributing them by the tens of thousands. No one had to tell them, pay them, ask accounting, check with marketing, find a market, organize a focus group, ask a lawyer, take some investors to lunch, play golf with the ceo of a supplier, etc. Nor did anyone have to deal with the bizantine process of asking the government for money. They're doing this because they love books and they want to make the world a better place.
If you think that telling some kid in India (or Indiana) that downloading a book from a friend is bad, fine. But at least have the decency to suggest that we ban the sale of used books, ban private libraries and install fingerprint scanners on kindles to prevent people from sharing them with friends.
I don't think any of the real nerds you mention wore ironic tee shirts or talked about how social media will transform how the world finds the best sushi restaurant in San Francisco.
But the ultimate goal is to send humans into space not robots.
And do what? Live? Currently we do not have the means or technology to build a self supporting orbital colony, or one on the Moon or on Mars. Spending more money on putting humans in space won't magically develop technologies needed to support life outside of Earth.
I agree that it is imperative that for the survival of our species that we have more than one home in the solar system. We can better work towards that by focusing on science, which outside of our orbit is most efficiently done with probes.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher.
Information is a commodity. Make it available to everyone and the information is very useful, but now has no value.
Make it available at a high price to people that have an incentive to keep it to themselves and you have something much less useful, but far more valuable.
This can work with some academic content (there are only so many places you can publish research for peer review, and they're all in on the game), but cannot work with news where a large amount of people are interested in reading, writing and disseminating the content.
Well, I'm sure that's exactly the attitude Linux needs to gain market share: bigotry and elitism. Keep it up guys, year of the Linux is coming any day now.
Bigotry and elitism didn't prevent Linux from getting healthy amounts of market share in the server space.
Okay, how do home-schooled children do when compared to children of reasonably well-educated parents who take a lot of interest in the child and his or her education? There's a tremendous amount of selection bias here.
My brother was told at age 5 that he was retarded because he was dyslexic. My mother took him out of school and after being homeschooled until highschool he did quite well academically (he eventually got an MBA).
The selection bias was simple: You are different and therefore we the people select that you are in a group that cannot learn.
... is to not give end users admin rights on their computers, automate patching at regular intervals and hope that they don't put their bank credentials into a phishing site.
If you're dealing with end users that have control over their computers, they will destroy them on a regular basis. There is nothing you can do to fix human nature.
Unless they are planning on 3D hologram devices in 10-15 years that project a table-top movie, I can't see how they are going to bleed their customers in the next cycle.
They'll use what they always have: lawyers, lobbyists and lazy consumers. They don't have to make things better, they just have to make 'stealing' it more effort than buying it again.
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
Many people like pornography/drugs/fatty foods/violence/bogeyman of the week. Expecting people to stop liking such things is futile, especially when they have massive self interest to not engage in such behavior and still do so.
Similarly, many people also like being hypocritical. Even if "Will someone please think of the children" is a cliche on Slashdot, raising children to not do what they have done is many people's raison d'etre.
Let it be known throughout the lands that anyone caught watching a movie without paying for it shall have their eyes taken from their heads!
Anyone caught listening to music that they haven't paid for shall have their ears ruptured and made deaf!
Anyone caught reading a book they did not pay for shall be forced to read twilight for the rest of their days.
Let us ban TVs that more than one person can see, so that all freeloaders will be forced to pay for the content they view! Let us regulate the sale of speakers so that people must use headphones if they wish to listen to music and prevent people from hearing music they haven't paid for! Let us burn down every library in the land so that authors can be paid for their efforts!
I don't imagine that the country will suddenly become less hypocritical 20 years from now, we'll just have less people running for office, attempting to become police officers and working in the intelligence community.
Assuming that things keep going this way, boring mediocre people will run the country. Whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate.
Although I am not your customer, were I your customer, I would gladly be a beta tester and give you all sorts of useful information (automated or otherwise) about how I used your products.
This being said, I would hope that you would have the courtesy of asking me to opt-in, rather than assuming that you own my usage habits.
... uses the word 'pirate' in a sentence, replace it with 'amateur librarian'. You now know how pirates think, if only subconsciously.
We can spend the next few decades trying to recreate the scarcity of information. Seriously, we can. There is no magical reason why copyright laws have to get more liberal, or that the rent seeking industries of the world will start producing things that people are willing to pay for, or that the government will 'get' file sharing as the baby boomers are replaced by people that have been trading information since the mid 90's.
This won't put humpty dumpty back together. Everyone has their own printing press/itunes store/app store, and has had one since end of the last century. The incredible utility of having computers that can run whatever software a user wants will not be dulled. A business model based on scarcity that used to exist *will* fail. As in the flunky working for $big_media_conglomerate that says 'hai guise wii can prevent people from steeling are stuff bi suing people and passing laws to make p2p moar eleegal' is wasting everyone's time and money.
There is no scarcity of information. This is the point of the Internet. Build a business around the artificial creation of scarcity at your job's peril.
That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related.
98% of books and 99.9% of magazines I never re-read. I'd prefer a library model, say $1 a day to read a book, then I could stop access and paying for it. The main exception would be course-texts.
I love libraries! You should check out TPB, I've heard they have a great selection of books and magazines you can borrow. Just like an analog library, but from your home computer or mobile device!;)
Slashdot Mirror
But is it legal to rent that way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
So it's ok to steal, as long as you steal more than you could possibly have bought legitimately otherwise?
The point is that the law itself is wrong. Neither the government nor google have a god given monopoly on the free exchange of culture (libraries). When I buy a book, I share it with anyone I can. No one gets paid when I do this so it must be destroying capitalism, right?
People are building book scanners, compressing the results and distributing them by the tens of thousands. No one had to tell them, pay them, ask accounting, check with marketing, find a market, organize a focus group, ask a lawyer, take some investors to lunch, play golf with the ceo of a supplier, etc. Nor did anyone have to deal with the bizantine process of asking the government for money. They're doing this because they love books and they want to make the world a better place.
If you think that telling some kid in India (or Indiana) that downloading a book from a friend is bad, fine. But at least have the decency to suggest that we ban the sale of used books, ban private libraries and install fingerprint scanners on kindles to prevent people from sharing them with friends.
How much cooler do you want?
I don't think any of the real nerds you mention wore ironic tee shirts or talked about how social media will transform how the world finds the best sushi restaurant in San Francisco.
I've jumped from Archlinux (love it, but in the end... it's too much manual work) to Ubuntu 9.10 recently.
Funny, I stopped using Ubuntu on my notebook over a year ago and installed Arch Linux on it for the same reason :D
But the ultimate goal is to send humans into space not robots.
And do what? Live? Currently we do not have the means or technology to build a self supporting orbital colony, or one on the Moon or on Mars. Spending more money on putting humans in space won't magically develop technologies needed to support life outside of Earth.
I agree that it is imperative that for the survival of our species that we have more than one home in the solar system. We can better work towards that by focusing on science, which outside of our orbit is most efficiently done with probes.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher.
Information is a commodity. Make it available to everyone and the information is very useful, but now has no value.
Make it available at a high price to people that have an incentive to keep it to themselves and you have something much less useful, but far more valuable.
This can work with some academic content (there are only so many places you can publish research for peer review, and they're all in on the game), but cannot work with news where a large amount of people are interested in reading, writing and disseminating the content.
Well, I'm sure that's exactly the attitude Linux needs to gain market share: bigotry and elitism. Keep it up guys, year of the Linux is coming any day now.
Bigotry and elitism didn't prevent Linux from getting healthy amounts of market share in the server space.
Okay, how do home-schooled children do when compared to children of reasonably well-educated parents who take a lot of interest in the child and his or her education? There's a tremendous amount of selection bias here.
My brother was told at age 5 that he was retarded because he was dyslexic. My mother took him out of school and after being homeschooled until highschool he did quite well academically (he eventually got an MBA).
The selection bias was simple: You are different and therefore we the people select that you are in a group that cannot learn.
No desktop apps. Less hard drive space than an iPod. Lame.
... is to not give end users admin rights on their computers, automate patching at regular intervals and hope that they don't put their bank credentials into a phishing site.
If you're dealing with end users that have control over their computers, they will destroy them on a regular basis. There is nothing you can do to fix human nature.
Unless they are planning on 3D hologram devices in 10-15 years that project a table-top movie, I can't see how they are going to bleed their customers in the next cycle.
They'll use what they always have: lawyers, lobbyists and lazy consumers. They don't have to make things better, they just have to make 'stealing' it more effort than buying it again.
... the parody hole first. All the people watching bad movies and making fun of them is costing the industry trillions!
But you have to download something to stream it. Why not just let the end user keep what they've already downloaded?
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
Many people like pornography/drugs/fatty foods/violence/bogeyman of the week. Expecting people to stop liking such things is futile, especially when they have massive self interest to not engage in such behavior and still do so.
Similarly, many people also like being hypocritical. Even if "Will someone please think of the children" is a cliche on Slashdot, raising children to not do what they have done is many people's raison d'etre.
Let it be known throughout the lands that anyone caught watching a movie without paying for it shall have their eyes taken from their heads!
Anyone caught listening to music that they haven't paid for shall have their ears ruptured and made deaf!
Anyone caught reading a book they did not pay for shall be forced to read twilight for the rest of their days.
Let us ban TVs that more than one person can see, so that all freeloaders will be forced to pay for the content they view! Let us regulate the sale of speakers so that people must use headphones if they wish to listen to music and prevent people from hearing music they haven't paid for! Let us burn down every library in the land so that authors can be paid for their efforts!
I don't imagine that the country will suddenly become less hypocritical 20 years from now, we'll just have less people running for office, attempting to become police officers and working in the intelligence community.
Assuming that things keep going this way, boring mediocre people will run the country. Whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate.
Although I am not your customer, were I your customer, I would gladly be a beta tester and give you all sorts of useful information (automated or otherwise) about how I used your products.
This being said, I would hope that you would have the courtesy of asking me to opt-in, rather than assuming that you own my usage habits.
I, on the other hand, believe people can change.
[citation needed]
How is decrypting information broadcast to everyone similar to taking a car away from someone else?
the more potential working business models will slip through your fingers.
Innovation is made possible by lowering barriers to entry, not raising them.
So what was your point?
I believe it was "past performance is not indicative of future results".
... uses the word 'pirate' in a sentence, replace it with 'amateur librarian'. You now know how pirates think, if only subconsciously.
We can spend the next few decades trying to recreate the scarcity of information. Seriously, we can. There is no magical reason why copyright laws have to get more liberal, or that the rent seeking industries of the world will start producing things that people are willing to pay for, or that the government will 'get' file sharing as the baby boomers are replaced by people that have been trading information since the mid 90's.
This won't put humpty dumpty back together. Everyone has their own printing press/itunes store/app store, and has had one since end of the last century. The incredible utility of having computers that can run whatever software a user wants will not be dulled. A business model based on scarcity that used to exist *will* fail. As in the flunky working for $big_media_conglomerate that says 'hai guise wii can prevent people from steeling are stuff bi suing people and passing laws to make p2p moar eleegal' is wasting everyone's time and money.
There is no scarcity of information. This is the point of the Internet. Build a business around the artificial creation of scarcity at your job's peril.
That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related.
Some good pointers can be found in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
98% of books and 99.9% of magazines I never re-read. I'd prefer a library model, say $1 a day to read a book, then I could stop access and paying for it. The main exception would be course-texts.
I love libraries! You should check out TPB, I've heard they have a great selection of books and magazines you can borrow. Just like an analog library, but from your home computer or mobile device! ;)
So what you're saying is that piracy is the better quality option, right? ;)