I pay taxes and I work in a library and yes, it isn’t completely free, but it’s as close as we can get.
And yes, I also know a library can’t have every work in the world at your disposal, but that’s when you walk up to a library and say “You need X.” Trust me, we listen.
I actually don’t really feel the man is keeping me down, I think the system is collapsing due to the weight of it’s inequities. There’s a slight difference that constitutes a wide gulf between those two concepts.
Erek
Voyager: In a society where we didn’t have intellectual property, your entire life would be drastically different. I simply said I see intellectual property rights as eroding into obsoletion. Your wife may earn her living however she likes without compelling me to believe that she has an inherent right to the ideas that she believes are her property.
Erek
I know about interlibrary loan, and I even donate to our library.
When the next time to vote on a library tax comes around, I don’t want anyone to think the money falls from the sky.
What ideas? Copyright is not about ideas, but the expression of something. The stupidest rock song in the universe deserves copyright protection just as much as the most erudite thesis. Some of the stuff she’s written has helped people. She wouldn’t have if the publisher didn’t pay her, and the publisher wouldn’t pay her if there were no copyright protection. If any successful work out there could be copied so the market would be flooded, why would a publisher pay a decent amount for a work? Why would an author write it? (You can only make so much on lecture fees.) Maybe academics would for tenure, maybe fanboys would, and maybe some people would self publish still, but the quality would go down tremendously.
Saying that there should be no intellectual property is as absurd as saying that IP should last forever, and that we should still be paying royalties on Hamlet.
I didn’t say there SHOULD be no intellectual property only that I saw the concept as eroding, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
I am not saying what I think SHOULD happen, I am saying what I think IS happening, and I don’t think it can be stopped, information is going to be freer and freer. Just think of all the information one can have on someone now.
We got a hatemail from this guy who was bitching about the design on one of our sites. I figured he was probably a graphic designer who was unsure of his own ability puffing himself up by saying “I can do better than what you did”. We looked him up, and sure enough he was a Sophomore in college, studying graphic design. Who knows how much more info I could have uncovered from there, by getting the student registry or any number of collegiate publications at his school.
The information is there, the method with which we disseminate it, is now under attack, and is going to change dramatically, as we begin to see the rise of the logical conclusion to globalization and instantaneous communication.
Erek
The style of the haircut, which presumably is what the barber would lay claim to, is information, even though the actual hairs are physical. Much like the image of a painting is information, even though the painting itself is a physical object.
Nonsense. I’ve acknowledged that in this very thread. I do not, however, believe that just because someone puts time and effort into something, that creates an obligation on my part to pay them for it.
If I order something from a restaurant, not only am I using up a finite resource (their supply of ingredients and their cooks’ time), I’m also forming a contract with them. I agree to pay $X in exchange for meal Y, and if I leave without paying, then I’ve defrauded them in addition to depriving them of those resources. However, I have no such agreement with any artist, and the number of people who download a song has no effect on the artist’s finite resources.
Now who’s being willfully blind? People produce new information for distribution all the time without being paid for it. You’re using some of it right now, in fact (and I’m not just talking about this post ;)).
The creation of that song is a service. The MP3 file, like the look of a new haircut, is not a product but an intangible thing that results from performing that service.
Pay artists directly for creating new works… like the old patronage model, except the patron doesn’t have to be a single rich individual - it could be a group of fans chipping in a few bucks each, or perhaps an agency set up for this specific purpose. The details are negotiable; the key point is that people get paid for using their talent, not for selling pieces of plastic that anyone with a CD burner and an existing copy could make themselves.
They’re also only necessary because of copyright. One of the main driving forces behind open source is that proprietary software’s usefulness is limited by copyright - if it breaks, you can’t fix it; if you buy a new workstation, you can’t install a new copy without paying for another seat license. Open source licenses give back the abilities that copyright took away.
In a world without copyright, companies might release binaries without source… but you could legally decompile those binaries to produce editable source code (after a bit of human intervention to clean it up), and you’d only need to do so once. Then you could publish the source code for anyone else to use.
Not if these folks have their way regarding “storyline patents”.
I’m not talking interlibrary loan. I’m saying, in any good library, if you ask the librarian to purchase any weird, obscure tome (be it music, movie or good old fashioned book) they will buy it for you.
I live in California, where our wonderful Prop. 13 and associated nonsense has made our library hours not the best - and Salinas almost closed its library entirely. I’m not saying the librarians wouldn’t take input, but I’m sure they are financially constrained.
That’s true. But there are certain types of software (EDA for instance) where this model wouldn’t work. It is too specialized and too complex to build the community needed for an open source model. (I know about the open eda type efforts which you can visit from links at opencores.org). The ability to make hundreds of copies of an advanced EDA tool would cripple anyone’s ability to fund its development. Without them, the processor you are reading this on would not be possible.
That might be real tough for something like Itanic. I rather doubt the technology exists to make something like a word processing application understandable through decompiling.
Given that, a company like Microsoft can steal code from open source tools and incorporate it into their proprietary tools. You’d wind up with the open advances in both open and closed tools, while closed advances being in the closed tools only. That’s not fair to the open source community.
The link didn’t work for me but :eek:
I’m deadset against software patents myself - though I have a few patents that might be classified that way.
Voyager: The thing is that there will always be some form of commerce, and there will always be ways to gain power through the market, but open source programmers can do their thing without copyright, and microsoft can use it if they like. That’s hardly the point. If one can remove one’s dependence upon microsoft they can do everything for much more cheaply, that means a lot to big corporate bottom lines, who might be willing to just produce an open application because they need it and there is an incentive for them to allow developers to develop it freely. What about the breakdown of jurisdiction between different countries with competing laws, as more and more countries come around to higher tech levels. What about the third world country who can’t afford the high American prices reverse engineers a software, and find themselves not compelled to care about America’s copyright laws. What then?
Erek
Interesting that you mentioned Microsoft. They’ve been pushing .NET for a while now, and decompiling a .NET application is like downloading candy.torrent from tracker.baby.net. There are tools like Dotfuscator designed to make it harder, but they only really discourage casual users.
“Closed” would mean significantly less than it does today, though. Instead of “you can’t modify or redistribute this”, it’d be “you can modify and redistribute this, but we don’t have to make it easy for you”.
Well, that’s the other edge of the sword. They’d have to get used to not having control over the information they distribute just like everyone else. Not everyone in the OSS movement wants that control, though - the GPL gets a lot of attention, but there’s still a lot of support for BSD licensing, which allows the work to be used in proprietary software as well as open source.
Here’s the Slashdot article. It’s as bad as it sounds: some guy is trying to patent a plot he “invented”. Here’s the quote from the front page:
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, IMO. If one writer can prevent another from using a character he thought up, even though he didn’t actually use any of the first author’s words, then we’re already giving authors monopolies on their ideas, not just their expressions. What difference does one more turd make on top of that mountain of stool?
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that we allow people to patent archetypes. I think that would be considered extremist by the vast majority.
Erek
Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear here and elsewhere. I’m still waiting for you to tell me what happens when they no longer feel an obligation to keep creating things for you.
What, the web itself? Tim Berners-Lee and the Consortium have declared its technology to be freely available. I’m quite grateful for their donation. That doesn’t change the fact that the decision was theirs to make.
So the hair stylist deserves no pay, either? What the hell are you driving at here?
If you insist on comparing the two, what’s wrong with pay-as-you-go music. That’s how we pay for haircuts.
Yes, nothing says “modern visionary progress” like turning back the clock 200 years.
You mean the same fans that say they don’t “believe that just because someone puts time and effort into something, that creates an obligation on my part to pay them for it”? Yeah, that’s a working model right there. Or would it be someone else? Who are these fantasy chumps you envision?
Set up by whom?
The government? Don’t make me laugh!
The private sector? See my earlier post where no free download comes without commercial promotion built in. You want that shit? I don’t.
And why aren’t we subsidizing the barbers as well, so you only have to pay higher taxes and nothing out of pocket when you get a haircut, either?
In a world with copyright, companies can and do release binaries with source. All the law says is that the decision whether to do so or not rests with them and not you or anyone else. You have failed to demonstrate why it needs to be otherwise.
This is an unlikely scenario. I am sorry you are incapable of wrapping your mind around a culture that isn’t based upon intellectual property, but it is possible, the freer the resources are the more available they are to the populace at large, who can use this here thing called the intarweb to coordinate with others working toward the same goals. Ever hear of a Foundation? Ever hear of Patronage? Now put those two words together, and you will understand an organization that gives out “DEVELOPMENT GRANTS”.
He said the stylist gets paid for the service, over and over. I figure maybe someone else saying it might help it to sink in.
Pay as you go music is called a concert. Not every mook with Fruity Loops deserves to be a rock star.
Newer does not necessarily equal better, and actually it’s called a “revolution”, history moves in what are known as “cycles” and it has an ebb and a flow, back and forth as ideas get recycled, so taking an old idea from the past and MODIFYING it to suit the present would be called “PROGRESS”. The universal clock doesn’t get set back, linear time moves forward.
See, we believe that obligation is not a necessary component. I simply don’t believe that someone deserves to get paid over and over and over for doing work one time. People share resources without feeling a legal obligation all the time. Just because one is not OBLIGATED to pay for things doesn’t mean they won’t. I download music and I buy CDs, I do both.
The people who feel there is a need.
The government has it’s hands tied up killing civilians in other countries and need not sully itself as all it would do is get in the way.
Your ignorance of the way art is distributed is not compelling to this argument. Commercial promotion IS NOT a necessary component. I am a party promoter, I promote artists all the time, people know who artists are because of me, and other people like me. I don’t think loss of the rockstar fantasy is a reasonable argument as to why we should have copyright. I know a lot of people who live like rockstars without having a big corporate machine behind them.
See above
They can release binary with source in a world without copyright as well, it’s a personal decision. It’s not a matter of what it needs to be. You need to open up your eyes and realize that intellectual property rights are going to change drastically.
Erek
If they ever felt an obligation, they were mistaken. I’ll thank them for their past contributions, continue enjoying the things they made in the past, and start looking for new stuff somewhere else.
Of course not, but it illustrates perfectly that people don’t need a financial incentive to write.
“The web” is not a technology to be given away or kept secret, it’s a set of protocols software packages can use to talk to each other.
According to Netcraft, the SDMB is running FreeBSD (as are millions of other sites). As the name suggests, it’s a free operating system, written by people who put time and effort into it just to give it away. FreeBSD contains somewhere around 1.2 million lines of code, but it still represents just a tiny fraction of all the free software out there. (The Linux kernel is around 5-6 million lines; all of Red Hat Linux 7.1 is about 30 million lines.)
Furthermore, many other operating systems use parts of FreeBSD’s code. Many of the routers and other systems you rely on to use the internet also use free software. When you send or receive email, odds are your email server is running free software. If you’re using Firefox, that’s free software too.
No one had to pay those developers to write; they did it because they wanted to. (Actually, in some cases, the developers are paid by companies like IBM and Sun, with the knowledge that whatever they write will be free for anyone to use.) As a result, I’m not worried that no one will write software in a world without copyright. Why should I worry about books or songs?
Nope. (I’ve never said artists deserve no pay.)
Hairstylists and artists deserve to be paid in exactly the same way: for the service they provide. A barber’s service is cutting hair; once he has cut my hair, I pay him and our business relationship is over until my hair gets long again. A musician’s service is writing/performing/recording music; once he has recorded a song, I believe he should get paid (according to the terms of his contract with whoever agreed beforehand to pay him), and then his business relationship with the people who listen to that song should be over until they want a new one.
Have you listened to a top 40 rap song lately? They’re nothing but 4-minute ads for cars, booze, and designer clothes anyway. 
I’m not sure what you mean by “pay-as-you-go”, but I suspect it’s not what I’m thinking of.
The way I pay for haircuts is, when I want a new haircut, I go to someone who knows how to cut hair and pay him to do it. When I want a song written or recorded, I can go to a musician and pay him to make one. That’s fine.
But I suspect you’re saying I should pay someone when I want to listen to music. I don’t need to pay anyone for that; I already have a few things that know how to play music, copy music, etc. The only thing I can’t do on my own is produce music.
Your homework for tonight is to ponder the difference between “I just wrote a song, can I have some money?” and “If you pay me, I’ll write a song.”
Copyright is a restriction on free speech, and I believe free speech is inherently good. Copyright keeps people from (legally) enjoying parts of our culture and sharing their experiences with others, and I believe those are good things too. If you disagree, I don’t expect you to agree with the rest of my argument.
OK, so you go commission a song. See how that works out for you. I’d imagine the price it would take for a musician to write and record a song and make it “your song” would be a little out of your price range if you want any kind of quality.
Quality being the key word.
Sure there will always be people who are scribbling words down. But the ones that have talent, they’re going to want (and deserve) to be paid. What if you want a recording of said work? More money. Set up a concert? Money, money, money.
And let me make sure I’m reading you right… You want an on-demand music service to be FREE? How do you expect such a thing to be possible?
You are both either very young, or have some less excusable reason for your naivete.
Both your dreamworlds are founded on the notion that recorded music, in the same variety and quantity as today is just sort of going to keep appearing once you stop paying for it.
Original recordings cost serious cash to create. My comment about them feeling an obligation to record was, of course, facetious. No entity, as a general rule, performs the trifecta of writing, recording and distributing music for any other reason than eventually turning a profit from it.
I refer you again to Passman, who can show you that the recording artist who performs on the recording gets pennies on the dollar of each sale already. Now, if the recording artist and the composer are one and the same, they can get some more cash from royalties paid, but of course, your world does away with such trivialities. So the artist either has to live on the pennies, which would dwindle under your plans, or we need to completely restructure the music industry.
The corporations that record and distribute music will need to pay composers, singers, instrumentalists and engineers and producers hefty contract fees, and keep hoping that someone with some cash will feel like sending some their way in order to create a new recording to be distributed far and wide, and for which your new laws will forbid them from charging a dime for.
You do realize, I hope, that this would not happen very often. Artistic grants are hard to come by for avant-garde performers as it is, and when you throw the entire pop music world in there, you’re going to end up with much less new music than you would otherwise.
That would be for the people with talent. There will be people with home studios putting up music on there own, certainly. Shareware and freeware music, however, will have an even worse reputation than shareware and freeware software, though (a much smaller percentage of stuff that is really good, a much larger percentage that is mind-bogglingly bad). It takes a much larger investment of time and effort to become a good musician than it does to become a good programmer.
No doubt. That’s why I wouldn’t pay for it myself; I’d find a bunch of other people who are interested in hearing something similar.
Of course. They have every right to ask for money before they perform their services, and if no one wants to pay them to perform, they don’t have to perform.
The example of free software, however, shows us two things: that many people are more than happy to perform without being paid, and that there are ways for the rest to make money even when the information they produce is made freely available.
No, I want information to be free - as in liberated. As in no one can step in and tell you, “You can’t copy those bits, they belong to someone else.” If someone wants money to produce–discover–a string of bits that makes a good song, or a good book, or a good program, then let them demand money for the service of producing it.
The latter.
Actually, they could charge whatever they want, just like I could charge someone for a 2 liter bottle filled with the same air they can breathe for free (or a CD filled with the same Linux distribution they can download for free). If the bottle were shiny enough, or it came with a concert ticket inside, I could probably find some takers.
It isn’t hard to find good freeware; all you need is a decent review site or user group. Sure, there’d be bad music, but there’s already a lot of bad music - it’s just filtered out by record companies and DJs.