Do you think that you could get millions of people to pay up-front for the production of X-Men 4 even though it won't come out for years?
I think it's likely that in the event of the removal of intellectual monopoly laws that there would still be demand for new content, and that corporations that own movie theaters would spend money to make new content to satisfy consumer demand. This being said, it would likely mean that more movies would be made with lower budgets.
Personally I think this would be a good thing.
And Windows Vista?
Apple doesn't make a significant amount of their profits from selling operating systems. Neither does Red Hat, Novell, Sun, Canonical or any number of other companies that are involved in the production of OSs.
The fact that Microsoft's business model depends on intellectual monopoly laws does not mean that it is the only business model that can be profitable and make an OS.
Consider that many users will not realize it is their browser. They will simply decide your site is screwed up, and leave promptly.
People may forget that they're driving with snow tires in the middle of summer, but we don't build our roads to work around the ignorance of the drivers that do.
This may or may not be true, but what you are basically saying is, "they are going to work hard (to create), and someone else will pay them for it, therefor I should be able to enjoy it freely." You're freeloading off someone else's hard work.
I'm suggesting that supply (stuff, in this case information) and demand (people that want new stuff) existed before IP laws, and that it will exist after IP laws are gone. I believe that IP laws are now obsolete, even if they ever were useful to the progress of mankind.
Shakespeare wrote plays before there was copyright. He was paid to make plays, because people wanted to perform them. Are people that perform his plays today freeloading, and should they pay his descendants for using his IP? The same goes for Motzart, Beethoven, Plato, Aristotle, etc. Do you seriously think that Fox will stop making crappy TV shows because they no longer have a monopoly on distributing the video after it is broadcast? They haven't (de facto) since the invention of the VCR.
Copyright was originally created to prevent people from profiting (i.e. selling) from the works of others without their consent and not designed to prevent people from reading their works in libraries for free. I don't see how it applies in a world where everyone has access to their own personal printing press and a library with the capacity to one day contain the sum total of human knowledge, culture, experience and information.
So you think that movie studios should spend $100+million on a movie and then give it away?
Good point (I wish all pro-IP arguments made as much sense as this). I will elaborate in hopes of making a bit more sense.
First, there is demand from movie theaters to have movies. If they don't have new and interesting content, they will go out of business. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that even if Hollywood kicked the bucket, movie studios would pool their resources to make movies that people want to watch in theaters. They may not end up costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but this may be a good thing for the quality of films (and with computers continually getting faster special effects will get better every year, just within the budgets that people are willing to pay for).
Second, the people making movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars depend on the shared cultural experiences and works of civilization (see: Disney). There is no reason to assume that culture, memes and archtypes that were created hundreds or thousands of years before IP law will not be expanded upon without IP law, nor that they would create such interesting works without that groundwork laid by those before them.
Third, innovation always changes the playing field. Before the invention of the printing press the world of information was largely controlled by the church (at least in the west). After it's invention the works of many people became available to others at a dizzying rate. The monopoly on information was lost to the church and they never regained it. Looking back on it it is obvious that the innovation of the printing press was good for society, but while the revolution was going on it was not clear that it would be a good one.
Finally, I believe that people that create are driven to create. They may not become multimillionaires, but there will always be a demand for people to create content and a willingness for people to create it. When it makes sense for people to do this as full time jobs there will be people willing to pay them for it. And if there is no one willing to pay for content, and no one that is willing to do it for free, then the conclusion I would draw would be that no one really wanted it in the first place.
If you've gotten this far I thank you for your time.
I believe that people have a right to read, listen, watch, remix, rebuild, modify, reverse engineer and otherwise contribute or take part in our culture. Obviously laws around the world today don't match my beliefs, and many people disagree with this statement.
I believe that a commons, a public library by and for everyone is a better model for creation and distribution of content than one that is limited by an unnatural monopoly. That everyone stands on the shoulders of giants and no man is an island of information.
The student that got kicked out of their dorm is not Rosa Parks. They are likely not oppressed in their day to day lives, just the victim of an IP scheme that has outlived it's usefulness.
They are supposed to contain knowledge, wisdom, insight, information, ideas and imaginings.
If you don't have access to information that could offend someone (or at least challenge how they look at the world), then you can't have access to anything. In this sense a program that can read books is the most offensive possible program you can make.
However, Steve Jobs' comments about people not reading books anymore aside, I don't want to live in a world without books or one with a reading list approved by some organization or bureaucrat.
I use Word and vim daily. I have had nightmares about all my users complaining about problems in Word, and my inability to read Google search results due to the fact that I was dreaming.
vim, once you've gone through the tutorial, is really easy to use. It is only hard when you try to use it without reading about how it works for 5 minutes.
By contrast, a seasoned Windows admin is typically someone who's amassed a stale collection of trivia consisting of GUI shortcuts, registry edits, familiarity with utilities provided by someone other than Microsoft to accomplish ordinary things, a mental list of workarounds for things that never seem to work right, and memories of DOS that just won't go away. If he's really good, he'll be able to cite KB numbers.
In my experience, solving Windows problems involves a lot of bottle shaking. Solving problems on Unix-like platforms typically rewards logical thinking and expecting that the computer will do what you tell it to do (the trick is learning how to be specific).
Attempting to prevent people from copying digital versions of your books will fail. Even if one person has to manually scan in pages from a paper version of your book and upload the OCR'd result to some network, if people want to get your content for free, they will.
This is the point of the Internet. We share information, and everyone benefits. This isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to make money, it's just to say that de facto you don't have a monopoly on information.
It's time that we lobby our various governments to pass the "Public Library Enhancement Amendment for Spreading information via Everyone".
It's pretty simple. If you have information (books, stories, music, video, etc.) you're encouraged to spread it to everyone. Doing so is considered the polite thing to do, and you should be shielded from lawsuit if you're simply sharing the information.
We've built a network designed to share information across vast distances very cheaply. This is a very good thing.
Being able to share your movies with people across a continent the same way you would in your living room is a feature.
Allowing people to share books with one another and learn from them is a feature.
Letting people remix content from artists and share it with the world is a feature.
Telling people they cannot speak, read, listen or watch because they're part of the future and not part of the past is a bug.
I know this sounds crazy, but if there are too many features to fit in a particular GUI model, is the model deficient or are we simply trying to fit too many features into one application?
... make everything available via hotkeys (emacs and vi mappings should be provided) and change the arrow keys to print the particular arrow typed. This would be a significant improvement over the current design and would encourage users to work instead of playing with their mice.
So you want game publishers to get out of the games business, and go find other jobs?
Sort of. An entire industry has built itself around the publishing and distribution of electronic games, which is now basically irrelevant for anything that isn't the Sims, WoW, Halo, or Madden 20xx. Many of these guys will lose their jobs, but people like them will still exist as someone needs to talk to someone to get the latest game on the shelf at Target or Walmart. This, however, wasn't the point I was trying to make.
My comments were directed at the programmer suggesting that piracy is theft from them, and trying to address the difference between their time (something which is not free and cannot be duplicated easily) and code (which can be easily transmitted and copied, assuming that the Internet exists).
Ideally the programmer will get a job doing something that someone will pay them money for. When people become unwilling to pay them due to the large amount of that something is now available for free, they can then work to make something that is in less supply that people demand and are willing to pay. When they no longer have marketable skills that people are willing to pay for, there is no reason to expect that people pay for their lifestyle in perpetuity.
They're not outlaws. They're for amateur librarians and are anti-monopolist. Just because they believe that laws today are unjust and want to reform them doesn't make it right to exclude them from political debate.
Would you really want social networking sites to prevent the ALA from having their say because Barnes and Nobel decided that libraries are killing the publishing industry?
You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.
Most people have a hard time justifying paying money for a non-finite good that can be had for free. Your time is a finite good. Code that you've written is non-finite, and so is this post.
If you wish to make money in a world where everyone can talk with everyone, you may wish to reconsider your business model of trying to sell things which can be easily copied and sell things which cannot.
This is no worse than construction workers put out of work by a machine that can be operated by fewer people with the same (or more) level of productivity. They learn new skills and hopefully end up producing more goods and services, possibly in the same field they were in, possible in new ones. Society as a whole wins as more of everything is made.
Basically, it's called the free market. Welcome to it.
So you're saying that people need to go to a university to learn how to do things like make food with a microwave and use a laundry machine? Also, didn't you have to get yourself out of bed to go to school before you were 18? (and pay attention, and take notes, etc.)
I'm not saying going to a university is a bad thing, just curious why more people don't pick up basic life skills as they grow up.
... people pirating content and porn. This means that the network is functional. Attempting to prevent this from happening is futile.
ISPs will never have a magical world where their only customers are people over the age of 30 who never stream video, download (or, god forbid seed) torrents or buy music, video, books and games online. The only thing they can do is throttle heavy users, make them pay per MB or upgrade their pipes.
You've sold people a network. Let them use it and charge them for it.
... does not take into account the fact that the people that want information will find a way to get it for free, you do not have a business model.
This doesn't mean freeloading is a good thing, just that we're passed the "don't copy that floppy" stage and piracy happens regardless of how much or how little DRM you put in your product.
Slashdot Mirror
Is your name 'M'? If so, were you imprisoned in cell number 1000?
If you want to make it illegal, you're going to show evidence that it needs to be.
Evidence? We live in a democracy good sir, we have to think of the children! ;)
Do you think that you could get millions of people to pay up-front for the production of X-Men 4 even though it won't come out for years?
I think it's likely that in the event of the removal of intellectual monopoly laws that there would still be demand for new content, and that corporations that own movie theaters would spend money to make new content to satisfy consumer demand. This being said, it would likely mean that more movies would be made with lower budgets.
Personally I think this would be a good thing.
And Windows Vista?
Apple doesn't make a significant amount of their profits from selling operating systems. Neither does Red Hat, Novell, Sun, Canonical or any number of other companies that are involved in the production of OSs.
The fact that Microsoft's business model depends on intellectual monopoly laws does not mean that it is the only business model that can be profitable and make an OS.
Consider that many users will not realize it is their browser. They will simply decide your site is screwed up, and leave promptly.
People may forget that they're driving with snow tires in the middle of summer, but we don't build our roads to work around the ignorance of the drivers that do.
This may or may not be true, but what you are basically saying is, "they are going to work hard (to create), and someone else will pay them for it, therefor I should be able to enjoy it freely." You're freeloading off someone else's hard work.
I'm suggesting that supply (stuff, in this case information) and demand (people that want new stuff) existed before IP laws, and that it will exist after IP laws are gone. I believe that IP laws are now obsolete, even if they ever were useful to the progress of mankind.
Shakespeare wrote plays before there was copyright. He was paid to make plays, because people wanted to perform them. Are people that perform his plays today freeloading, and should they pay his descendants for using his IP? The same goes for Motzart, Beethoven, Plato, Aristotle, etc. Do you seriously think that Fox will stop making crappy TV shows because they no longer have a monopoly on distributing the video after it is broadcast? They haven't (de facto) since the invention of the VCR.
Copyright was originally created to prevent people from profiting (i.e. selling) from the works of others without their consent and not designed to prevent people from reading their works in libraries for free. I don't see how it applies in a world where everyone has access to their own personal printing press and a library with the capacity to one day contain the sum total of human knowledge, culture, experience and information.
So you think that movie studios should spend $100+million on a movie and then give it away?
Good point (I wish all pro-IP arguments made as much sense as this). I will elaborate in hopes of making a bit more sense.
First, there is demand from movie theaters to have movies. If they don't have new and interesting content, they will go out of business. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that even if Hollywood kicked the bucket, movie studios would pool their resources to make movies that people want to watch in theaters. They may not end up costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but this may be a good thing for the quality of films (and with computers continually getting faster special effects will get better every year, just within the budgets that people are willing to pay for).
Second, the people making movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars depend on the shared cultural experiences and works of civilization (see: Disney). There is no reason to assume that culture, memes and archtypes that were created hundreds or thousands of years before IP law will not be expanded upon without IP law, nor that they would create such interesting works without that groundwork laid by those before them.
Third, innovation always changes the playing field. Before the invention of the printing press the world of information was largely controlled by the church (at least in the west). After it's invention the works of many people became available to others at a dizzying rate. The monopoly on information was lost to the church and they never regained it. Looking back on it it is obvious that the innovation of the printing press was good for society, but while the revolution was going on it was not clear that it would be a good one.
Finally, I believe that people that create are driven to create. They may not become multimillionaires, but there will always be a demand for people to create content and a willingness for people to create it. When it makes sense for people to do this as full time jobs there will be people willing to pay them for it. And if there is no one willing to pay for content, and no one that is willing to do it for free, then the conclusion I would draw would be that no one really wanted it in the first place.
If you've gotten this far I thank you for your time.
I believe that people have a right to read, listen, watch, remix, rebuild, modify, reverse engineer and otherwise contribute or take part in our culture. Obviously laws around the world today don't match my beliefs, and many people disagree with this statement.
I believe that a commons, a public library by and for everyone is a better model for creation and distribution of content than one that is limited by an unnatural monopoly. That everyone stands on the shoulders of giants and no man is an island of information.
The student that got kicked out of their dorm is not Rosa Parks. They are likely not oppressed in their day to day lives, just the victim of an IP scheme that has outlived it's usefulness.
They are supposed to contain knowledge, wisdom, insight, information, ideas and imaginings.
If you don't have access to information that could offend someone (or at least challenge how they look at the world), then you can't have access to anything. In this sense a program that can read books is the most offensive possible program you can make.
However, Steve Jobs' comments about people not reading books anymore aside, I don't want to live in a world without books or one with a reading list approved by some organization or bureaucrat.
What are these applications of which you speak?
vim, ssh, screen, a decent terminal (cygwin doesn't count), partimage, rysnc, apache, postfix, courier, squirrelmail, etc.
I use Word and vim daily. I have had nightmares about all my users complaining about problems in Word, and my inability to read Google search results due to the fact that I was dreaming.
vim, once you've gone through the tutorial, is really easy to use. It is only hard when you try to use it without reading about how it works for 5 minutes.
By contrast, a seasoned Windows admin is typically someone who's amassed a stale collection of trivia consisting of GUI shortcuts, registry edits, familiarity with utilities provided by someone other than Microsoft to accomplish ordinary things, a mental list of workarounds for things that never seem to work right, and memories of DOS that just won't go away. If he's really good, he'll be able to cite KB numbers.
In my experience, solving Windows problems involves a lot of bottle shaking. Solving problems on Unix-like platforms typically rewards logical thinking and expecting that the computer will do what you tell it to do (the trick is learning how to be specific).
I'm sure you've already heard this old quote, but it deserves repeating:
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Attempting to prevent people from copying digital versions of your books will fail. Even if one person has to manually scan in pages from a paper version of your book and upload the OCR'd result to some network, if people want to get your content for free, they will.
This is the point of the Internet. We share information, and everyone benefits. This isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to make money, it's just to say that de facto you don't have a monopoly on information.
I prefer elinks. There is a slight tradeoff in performance from lynx, but it is much more usable.
It's time that we lobby our various governments to pass the "Public Library Enhancement Amendment for Spreading information via Everyone".
It's pretty simple. If you have information (books, stories, music, video, etc.) you're encouraged to spread it to everyone. Doing so is considered the polite thing to do, and you should be shielded from lawsuit if you're simply sharing the information.
We've built a network designed to share information across vast distances very cheaply. This is a very good thing.
Being able to share your movies with people across a continent the same way you would in your living room is a feature.
Allowing people to share books with one another and learn from them is a feature.
Letting people remix content from artists and share it with the world is a feature.
Telling people they cannot speak, read, listen or watch because they're part of the future and not part of the past is a bug.
I know this sounds crazy, but if there are too many features to fit in a particular GUI model, is the model deficient or are we simply trying to fit too many features into one application?
... make everything available via hotkeys (emacs and vi mappings should be provided) and change the arrow keys to print the particular arrow typed. This would be a significant improvement over the current design and would encourage users to work instead of playing with their mice.
;)
It's too bad we can't just share books with one another online. Like a peer to peer library.
So you want game publishers to get out of the games business, and go find other jobs?
Sort of. An entire industry has built itself around the publishing and distribution of electronic games, which is now basically irrelevant for anything that isn't the Sims, WoW, Halo, or Madden 20xx. Many of these guys will lose their jobs, but people like them will still exist as someone needs to talk to someone to get the latest game on the shelf at Target or Walmart. This, however, wasn't the point I was trying to make.
My comments were directed at the programmer suggesting that piracy is theft from them, and trying to address the difference between their time (something which is not free and cannot be duplicated easily) and code (which can be easily transmitted and copied, assuming that the Internet exists).
Ideally the programmer will get a job doing something that someone will pay them money for. When people become unwilling to pay them due to the large amount of that something is now available for free, they can then work to make something that is in less supply that people demand and are willing to pay. When they no longer have marketable skills that people are willing to pay for, there is no reason to expect that people pay for their lifestyle in perpetuity.
They're not outlaws. They're for amateur librarians and are anti-monopolist. Just because they believe that laws today are unjust and want to reform them doesn't make it right to exclude them from political debate.
Would you really want social networking sites to prevent the ALA from having their say because Barnes and Nobel decided that libraries are killing the publishing industry?
You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.
Most people have a hard time justifying paying money for a non-finite good that can be had for free. Your time is a finite good. Code that you've written is non-finite, and so is this post.
If you wish to make money in a world where everyone can talk with everyone, you may wish to reconsider your business model of trying to sell things which can be easily copied and sell things which cannot.
This is no worse than construction workers put out of work by a machine that can be operated by fewer people with the same (or more) level of productivity. They learn new skills and hopefully end up producing more goods and services, possibly in the same field they were in, possible in new ones. Society as a whole wins as more of everything is made.
Basically, it's called the free market. Welcome to it.
So you're saying that people need to go to a university to learn how to do things like make food with a microwave and use a laundry machine? Also, didn't you have to get yourself out of bed to go to school before you were 18? (and pay attention, and take notes, etc.)
I'm not saying going to a university is a bad thing, just curious why more people don't pick up basic life skills as they grow up.
... people pirating content and porn. This means that the network is functional. Attempting to prevent this from happening is futile.
ISPs will never have a magical world where their only customers are people over the age of 30 who never stream video, download (or, god forbid seed) torrents or buy music, video, books and games online. The only thing they can do is throttle heavy users, make them pay per MB or upgrade their pipes.
You've sold people a network. Let them use it and charge them for it.
... does not take into account the fact that the people that want information will find a way to get it for free, you do not have a business model.
This doesn't mean freeloading is a good thing, just that we're passed the "don't copy that floppy" stage and piracy happens regardless of how much or how little DRM you put in your product.
... and we throw them in jail for it. It's a sad day in the world.