Copyright again ... potentially a serious problem.

They can't. It's not a crime.

 

That't the main reason for most professions not to leave
assets.

You limit authors to self-employed book writers. I don't think
that's correct.

On the other hand there are many other self-employed
professions without benefits and pensions and retirement
plans ... and are not well paid.

Yep, nobody cares for telephone sanitizers. You know what
happened next.

Name any company paying million bonusses that does not have
offices. Others are also not making millions of an author's
creative work, that's just what they're using at the time.

Name a character from the last 50 years that's not based on
any previous character, but fully invented. Same with plot.

That's because they file off the serial numbers very
carefully and sometimes use a blender.

The reward in the case of music goes to the big labels, the
rewards of film actors is what fixed amount they get from
their contracts. Top 10 performers may be different in that
they actually do get some percentage --- in the case of music
most money stays with the label.

Sports --- if you're a top performer, you get well paid
and can get money for advertizing, but --- what about the
"midlist" player? Do they get paid 70 years after death for
their performances? Do they get royalties? Do they leave
their sport successes as assets?

Do you really want that for authors?

What about the camera man, the sound technican and all the
rest of the crew that allows you to watch your favorite
athlete at the olympics or world games and all the games ---
or recording your favourite actor in these newfangled things
called movies?

What about the studio crew recording and mixing the CD or our
favourite musician or group?

Aren't they just as necessary for the performers to reach
their audience? Don't they and their skill not deserve just
as much reward?

What of the relationship between architect and building?
Does the architect get to decide what companies are allowed
to use "his" buildings?

So the Mickey Mouse Copyright Protection Act was forced on
the US by the Berne Convention? Really?

Perfect --- for whom? For Disney (and other rights owners
and exploiters)? For the creatives? For the general
public?

And who *should* by right be the one for whom the solution
should be good, even perfect if possible?

What is the goal, the reason for existence, the pinnacle by
which 'it works' or 'it fails' must be measured, of copyright?

Music is tangible? I beg to differ!
Plays are tangible?

Limiting art to "works of fiction" is like reducing
photography to mugshots.

So how many of them are generating relevant income of works
first published 20 or 30 years ago?

And how comes you're not moving things so your favourite writers
get a $5 stipend (as a group, not each individual) from you
for writing their works? Even a comparatively small number
of people doing this will make their finances less marginal
and less depenent of hitting just the right *mass* taste ---
missing that just once will have a more than small change
for them.

Are these authors offering advanced readers' copies at a
higher price for those who need to have their dose of the
next (still incomplete and terribly raw) book?

Are these authors selling tuckerizations?

And so on --- there's a whole internet out there, and --- if
the authors are good --- many people willing to use some
spare money to insure the next book won't be held up.

It seems rethorical devices need to be marked clearly here.

Copyright *is* a simple solution, and extending it is a pat
solution. It doesn't even work too well either for society
nor for creatives.

If you are still thinking I'm looking for a "simple pat
solution" (isn't that a "personal identification PIN
number"?) me Engrish be much bad then I tink.

In theory. Only works in DVDs and similar.

Iron Skies: 7.5 mio € cost, 1 mio € crowdfunded, and that
being a special interest, independent movie, all in all.
A typical major motion picture today weights in at 100 mio
USD --- so 1% can certainly be had.

Just a very quick look on Kickstarter finds multiple projects
that weight in at well over 1 million USD. There's one with more
than USD 8.500.000 ... that would be near 3% of the MOST
EXPENSIVE FILM EVER (yet): "Pirates of the Caribbean: At
World's End" (USD 300 million)

So pardon me if I tell you your 1% claim is bollocks.

And you think the Nielsen Ratings doesn't rate third quartile
shows and formats correctly?

What does the third quartile get from the copyright between
20 years after publication and decades past their death, as
that seems to be your preferred answer?

What? A report that an average of N computers on the network
were downloading a registered work carrying a given fingerprint
during a given time period?

Did you know that they already do that with p2p networks?
That YouTube allows automatic uploading of fingerprints to
deny uploaders from showing the so-identified works?

Did you not notice that about every website you visit tracks
what pages you visit and your IP --- and if you are lucky,
none of the usual web bugs, 1 pixel gifs, flash cookies,
normal cookies, browser identification, million-sites spanning
ad-network javascripts, Facebook "like" buttons, google (or
similar) web analytics tools etc track you in addition to that?
With the site-spanning they can track you over many sites ...

Did you know that almost all computers can be identified with
the information a simple javascript and flash test can
produce, even if you switch off all cookies?
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/tracking-by-user-agent


So how comes that it's "*extremely* intrusive" to report the
activity of files? In p2p networks they always come with a
finger print --- you gotta check if you downloaded the file
correctly or if there was a bad/malicious host amongst your
sources! --- and usually comes with fingerprints for every
sub-part, too ...
See also:
https://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing

If perfection cannot be attained, then any bad and broken
scheme must do, there's no room for improvement?

Do you want a scheme that does help the top 1% (or less) and
often actively hurts the rest of the creatives (never mind the
public for a moment)? A scheme where most money goes to big
companies who do not care for creatives except for what they
can make them money?

Google doesn't seem to find relvant answers.

The only one I am conversant with is a system which has the
legal right to assume every bit of music is licenced by them
(unless *proven* not to) and which is set up in a way the the
top 100 earners have the say (including how to distribute the
income, mostly to themselves, that is. Of course, the exact way
the money is split is secret.).

Works well for the top 100, works sort of for commercial music
(every CD printing, every performance of music, every listening
to music in commercial environments has to be reported to
them with title and author, e.g. the complete playlist of
the day of a restaurant), doesn't work for independent music.
Also enforces that you can either have all your past, current
and future work licenced through them or none at all (which
sort of precludes you from radio & co. as they are not in the
mood of making contracts with individual artists.

Still, it *does* funnel quite some money to non-best-sellers,
contrary to your claim

So an artifact of the 1950's *TV* ratings in the US is supposed
to have impact on the 2010's internet monitoring? If you're
serious, you're also putting your storage cards into developer
and fixer to develop your digital pictures.

Did you ever notice that every TV receiver is a potential TV
sender, and many, many are? Me neither, but just that's the
case for internet ...


So let me ask, do you have any indications --- that are
applicable to a halfway sane system for the internet in the
internet age --- that only the best-sellers would get money?

A couple million USD isn't exactly "small stuff" any more.
Not even if you're looking at projects with just a couple
hundred man years.

A couple million USD might be small stuff for colonizing Mars
with a million people using our current technology.

So books stolen from retail outlets *before ebooks* didn't
cause the retailer not to re-order the book because they still
thought they had one?

And when was that "before ebooks"? Before 1988 (Mona
Lisa Overdrive), before 1971 (the first results of Project
Gutenberg), before early 1960 (Augment and FRESS), of before
the Index Thomisticus in the 1940s?

There's a lot of stuff that seems easy for humans that's really
hard for computers (at least with our knowledge about computer
programming) and vice versa.

I cannot comment on whether that's stupid or not, not having
the data to consider if it's mostly right or wrong nor having
the data to say for which segments it's right and for which
ones it's wrong.

-Wolfgang

 

[full-post snipped]

My ISP delays posts from cretins like you who full-quote
without good reason. I will ask them to just delete them
instead.

-Wolfgang

 

The Bible known to Christianity does happen to have the Old
and the New Testament --- you'd be hard pressed to find a
scholar supporting your claim. The Bible known to the Jewish
religion may not, but that makes your "There is only one Bible"
claim false.

Might as well say that the Bible does not consist of several
books.

-Wolfgang

 

I and millions of others do not accept the document you call the
"Christian Bible," as the Bible.
I never attempt to force my religious view upon anyone. Please do not
not attempt to force yours upon others, especially me.

 

I've watched lots of people in a number of fields, and the authors are
some of the most stretched.

That's what the term means in normal usage.

Other times it means the peopel who wrote some piece of softare, or
whatever; that's a very different world.

Most of the really poor jobs are normal employment, not self-employed.

Name any offices that make a difference to the corporate profits.

All matters of opinion, not fact. There is already good legal precedent
for where the line comes, it works out fine.

Yes, music has a label problem right now, though things are getting
interesting.

It's not just top-10 performers. Mark Hamill does okay, and he was
nobody when he got that role. Among actors it goes a LOT deeper than
10. A couple of orders of magnitude, it looks to me like.

Once you make the big leagues, you do pretty well. There's an order of
magnitude top to bottom, but the top is stratospheric, so the bottom
doesn't suck. (How long they play also makes a big difference.)

Want what? Life + 70, like they get now? Not especially, I think
that's excessive.

No, absolutely not. The craftspeople are much more interchangeable.
They're doing expert and valuable work -- but they're pretty
interchangeable, just like good programmers in a field or whatever. We
get paid well (programmers), but not like performers. (Relative to
performers, I mean. Far less interchangeable than cashiers, of course.)

No, obviously.

Although Frank Lloyd Wright famously tried to control where they put the
furniture.

The extension from 50 to 70 was not (that's what the Mickey Mouse
Copyright Protection Act usually means). But I never said it was. I
said quite specifically what I meant just above there, and I don't
believe you didn't understand it; jumping to other points means you
can't get anywhere with this one.

A "perfect" solution has to be at least tolerable to everybody. Ideally
rather better than that (situations control the available solutions).

Drawing the "works" vs. "fails" line is a whole different question.

Well, actually doing private or public premieres of music and plays *is*
pretty tangible; it gives the patron a pretty big payoff. They're not
tangible in the same way a painting or sculpture is though, obviously.

So who did that again? I missed seeing it.

What's "relevant"?

But my immediate answer is "all of them that are still publishing".

No book ever really hits "mass taste" -- the biggest sellers are 10% of
the population or less.

Generally one can't (contractually prevented).

I don't think any of my immediate friends are.

Shadow Unit is an interesting experiment in that, for example; some of
the people involved are friends, more are friendly acquaintances.

Or used less. I'm not interested an an argument, I have no position to
push. I have a long list of interesting questions, and some objections
to some of the common answers.

It's worked quite well for authors historically, until the extensions
(now lots of stuff is getting locked up, and authors are going out of
print because of copyright).

Then I guess it is.

Reruns on TV, too. Netflix streaming, Amazon streaming, Hulu, etc.

One example that hasn't produced a result yet is NOT "demonstrating"
that something works. Five isn't either. This is all new.

I know sweeps week on the radio doesn't.

As I have repeatedly said, I don't have a preferred answer.

Twenty years after publication, thousands to tens of thousands of
dollars are possible (from the totality of previous work, usually
doezens of books). It tends to go down very quickly after most authors
die.

Banning encryption, putting monitoring stations in all exchange routers,
having the cpu power in major hubs to examine packets (not currently
feasible), distinguishing between full and partial downloads, etc.

I know that this technology has caused major embarrassment to the users
by cutting completely legitimate traffic, including Neil Gaiman's Hugo
acceptance speech.

Irrelevant, this has nothing to do with tracking downloading of works by
fingerprint.

You mean identifying it's the same computer on two hits? Sure.

Because that's not what you're proposing; you're proposing identifying
fingerprints of arbitrary streams and allocating income to the content
owner based on that. You haven't yet suggested, by the way, how that
works to figure out who gets *charged* for that content.

Sorry, don't understant.

Anything worse than the current scheme is a bad idea.

No, which is why I don't like what you're proposing.

Sweeps week is a radio thing, not a TV thing. (Maybe it was a TV thing
long ago, I dunno.)

Um, it's smaller stuff now than in the past; it's called "inflation".

You keep jumping around. Try to follow the discussion! Harlan's
statement about counting for full royalties was about paper books, and
was made before ebooks.

The point was that a book stolen from the bookstore could not be
returned for credit. Thus, it was "sold" in terms of the payment stream
from retailer to distributor, distributor to publisher, and publisher to
author.

I think it was 60s or 70s, don't remember exactly where it was though.

There sure is. And vice versa.

Well, it makes the results look stupid to me, and hence makes me pay
less attention to them in general.

 

I'd rather pay for that that it being parked outside my front door or someone elses and still having to pay road tax and insurance for a stationary car.

Nah takes too long, quicker to walk it.

I'm hoping an automated car would take it'self to be fixed ;-)
it should know it has a fault same as it'd know when it was running out of fuel oil, and water.

Yeah wait in line like you do for a 'black cab' or a bus.

 

[/QUOTE]

So basically you agree that the notice of a book may be correct
for one place and only sorta-correct for other places.

OK, so "which additional rights to the content does buying
(compared to lending) grant one" where *you* reside. You
claim that there's a difference ... which one is it?

'recent'? The music industry was self-proclaimed dying ever
since ther was radio and/or tape recorders. "Home recording
kills music!"

Anyway, what additional rights does buying a music or video
carrier (CD, tape, DVD, BlueRay, ...) grant one --- in your
neck of the woods --- over lnding one?

You haven't answered that yet ...

You seem to be very easy to fool. "Look, a three-headed
squirrel behind you!"

Now, that the US does admit that there is an international
copyright, everyone else has to follow their "lead"?

(Nearly) everyone has never ended the life of a human being,
therefore, no murderers exist. Let's do away with all the
unneccessary laws about that topic. Right?

WHY should doing exactly as you permit me --- in writing, no
less --- land ME in trouble? Care to explain how you propose
to tell the judge "I didn't mean what I wrote when I granted
that right"?

-Wolfgang

 

That's fine.
*B*illions however, do.

We can now go a couple rounds of "A word means what I want it to
mean" and "If you wish to communicate with others, it's much
better to use the generally accepted meaning of the words you
use, or at least define the meaning if you use a different
one".

Noting that either your statement is not supported by scholars
or that (due to meaning a different bible) your "There is only
one Bible" is logically wrong is most certainly not forcing
any religion on anybody.

If anything was 'forcing ones religious views on others' it
would be your claim (i.e. telling Christians they're reading
a/the --- in your view --- incorrect bible (the one with an
AT and a NT, namely)). I think reading either your or mine
statements as "forcing religious views on others" would
require a rather thin skin.


Just for the record: If I was attempting to force my religous
views on you, we'd probably discussing the moon far more than
books. Including any version of any bible.

-Wolfgang

 

So they deserve to get paid decades after they are dead?

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/author
disagrees. (As does Wikipedia.)

Naah, let's keep it at the written word. There are more
writers than book writers, and some are not self-employed.

So what assets do they have regularly to pass on when they
die?

Any that represent. Any that are missing. Any that cause
worse communication or bad work conditions or unhappy employees
(e.g. too loud, too cramped and sunglare on the screen) ---
and extending that, any that exactly avoid these problems.

Any that are not effective --- and thus any that are.
And so on.

Only when employees do not care and react at all about their
work environment (or they don't work in offices in the first
place) or when the employees do not have any impact on corporate
profits what ever they do do offices not make a difference.

Rather obvious, isn't it?

Name a character.

You are worried about authors seeing others legally making
a profit of their works without them getting any, should
copyright be sufficiently shortened. What's your problem again?
That (then) perfectly legal stuff might happen?

So how much is he making from Wing Commander, again? It's
not even 20 years ago ...

The big league authors are also rich. Maybe not sports-rich,
but they get to write till late in life ...

OK, so how much does a soccer player make in the US? Then look
up how much they can make in Europe, and vice versa, what an
American Football player makes in both places.

So shortening wouldn't hurt? And the only thing left to decide
(assuming we want copyright, because the alternatives are seen
as worse) is *how much* would be the best balance between having
authors get enough money to be able to write as much as they
can and having the people (who offer copyright for this type
of reason alone, nowadays, not for censorship reasons any more)
not having to restrict themselves further than necessary ...

I'd vote musicians and actors craftspeople, too. (And studio
musicians and stuntpeople and extras are quite interchangeable.)

Depending on the field you'll have to search long for good
programmers --- and not very much to find a good musician.

And yet there are programmes that are 10 times as effective(!)
as some other programmers, yet get paid only twice as much on
the average.

So we see that the author and the architect are not that far
from each other. (And as to the bulldozer operator, what's
the relationship between a staff writer and the ordinary sports
news he wrote?)

So what was "Basically, it's the price we paid for bringing
our copyright law in line with the rest of the world."?

I'd call that a tolerable, not a perfect solution. But then,
I'm not a native English speaker, so what do I know?

Your English is better than that.

What's the goal of copyright, and how likely is a given
copyright system reaching said goal?

And a premiere is not exactly repeatable, whereas a painting
can be shown to each new visitor.

Patronage -> sometimes for books -> but rare for
now-important works of fiction

Seems like you did.

Let's say more than 1% or 0.1% of the authors' income.
A sale every year granting the author $1 just isn't gonna be
relevant in most cases.

OK, and how many % of all books would that be?

7 Billion / 200 million (since 1943) doesn't even get close
to 10%. Still, the market is not "the population", but much
smaller, and "the market" is like "the American": very different
and depends very much on the subset you're looking at.

For example, the market for a science fiction book centering
on space opera in the far future with much unobtainium, lots
handwavium and impossible physics is not in the same market
as one on the independence of the penal colony on the moon,
using very little handwavium.

Depends on the publisher --- some offer ARCs themselves.

Ah, thanks for the pointer. Not exactly my preferred subgenre
(i.e. the markets I am part of have probably very little
overlap with this), but we'll see.

This isn't always obvious. When you proclaim "Extending
[copyright] is far less damaging than contracting [it]." it
sure seems *to me* you are against all copyright term reductions
and have a rather fixed position.

I also have some objections over ever increasing copyright
terms.

Yep, and note that I don't want to abolish copyright, merely
lead it (back? forwards?) to a saner method.

For example, I would want a copyright that you don't have
to register or spell out --- you create something which is
copyrightable: poof, copyright applies.

On the other hand there needs to be a sane way to get abandoned
works back into the heritage of mankind within a sane period.
An unknown, anonymous author or noone who steps up as owning
the rights shouldn't keep a work "out of print" for decades.

Also you certainly want to reward both creatives who supply
the mass market with (often shallow) entertainment --- hey,
people *are* enjoying it --- and those who create what the
future will call "important works" and "classics". (The latter
is rather hard, short of the invention of the 'future reader',
which will cause the future to change drastically as all it's
inventions will be copyrighted and patented today, and thus
unavailable in the future, if this goes on.)

Ah. OK. Maybe I should use Google Translate then.

Studios destroyed their films, when they thought it had no
more commercial value. It's thought 90% of the American silent
movies and 50% of the talkies up to 1950 are lost. Not having
reruns on TV was one of the "no more commercial value" points.

Note that film studios aren't in TV reruns and even TV isn't
much in Netflix, Amazon streaming, Hulu & co. It seems it's
always the others --- usually branded evil in the beginning ---
that find business models with content. And it's rare that
the current copyright owners (as copyright can be sold) are
at least jumping on the speeding train till it's very very late.

Many creatives are far more flexible with their own works.

So noone has ever demonstrated:
- manned landings on the moon (if 5 doesn't count, 6 doesn't
either)
- working mars rovers (Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity,
Curiosity --- that's only 4)
- a self-controlled robot driven by wave energy crossing the
Pacific (the first arriver was fished out at Byron Bay
today, 2 others are still en route (and one diverted due to
damage)
- the submarine as a dangerous weapon in a war against a foe
with a vastly larger fleet (only happened twice)
- that you can actually resign as a president of the US (only
Nixon did it)
- Sending a probe to Neptune (only Voyager 2)
- Building a space probe that still works after 35 years
(Voyager 1 & 2, confirmed. Pioneer 6, confirmed in 2000,
but not since. Others could be, but are not confirmed)
- landing a rover on the moon. (Lunokhod 1 & 2)
- landing on Titan (Huygens)
- returning samples from a comet's coma (Stardust)


However, I count at least 19 crowd-funding projects (not
counting Iron Skies, which used several models at once)
which are above the $1.000.000 mark in a single channel. A
quick check would have shown you the same ...

Is 19 or 20 times still not demonstrating? Well, then, what
is? 7 Billion times?

And that cannot be remedied by more-or-less continuous
observation of the medium.

I see. I leave it to you to calculate the ratio of books and
income between 0 and 20 years afte publishing and 20-60 years
after publishing.

And I shall note that there are very few occupations that keep
paying you a decade after you stopped working. The other
way I know that seems to more-or-less reliably pay you even
if you stop working is investing money and paying someone to
handle all the details of the investments. Something that
most people don't get thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a
year out of on top of whatever they do.

Any usable P2P network needs to advertize what it offers.
It also needs to advertize where one can get parts from; and
usually notes (or allows one to deduct) the number of seeders
and leechers for any given file.

Partially downloading is unusual --- the file will usually
simply not work unless complete, as random parts will be
missing from everywhere --- and will not cause the computer
in question to become a seeder. All it takes is a number of
computers recording these data for every interesting file
in P2P network, e.g. doing the same dance as any computer
downloading it has to do, minus the downloading.

There --- you got a good yardstick for P2P network downloads
without banning encryption, monitoring any excange routers,
or deep packet inspection in major hubs (which will be coming
anyways if net neutrality isn't enforced by the law: after all,
if traffic can be differently priced on content, someone has
to count the beans!)

As to large download and streaming sites: They already collect
data on what is downloaded/streamed when by how many and how
often a stream is only partially seen (and in which way and
how much of it) --- partial streams _are_ quite common. All
they need to do is to report anonymous numbers.

Creatives' and publishers'/labels'/... servers usually are
smaller, but again will collect data about their own wares.
Simply let them report. Maybe they need to be audited every
now and then, too, lest they overreport.

My guess is that other small download sites do not have
enough traffic to matter; and those that might have can be
compelled to report anonymous numbers by law, without being
onerous.


What part of the above was so surprising that you didn't
think of it yourself?

Yep, but the fault of that is not with YouTube, but with rights
owners who either upload hashes of stuff that is *meant*
to be viewed via YouTube (the routine being that it's not),
or that contrary to their contracts someone uploaded a hash
that was not theirs to begin with.

The former, IIRC, happened with several networks and Obama's
acceptance speech: live it worked, later not.

Relevant: it's quite possible to track visitors, and what
links they click and how far they download anything. No new
techniques needed.

Please read more carefully. Noone --- except maybe the content
mafia and dictatorial states bent on censorship --- sees a
need to fingerprint each and every stream. All that's needed
is representative streams, and they are advertized and can be
searched for (how else does Jane Doe find the newest Madonna
track on P2P?), or even bound to a single server cluster.

Oh, I thought it was not a problem. You could use a flat rate
'tax' for everyone using media. If you wanted much more work
and waste in the name of false "fairness", you could tie it
to a internet access owner (e.g. by IP -> ISP -> access owner)
and bill him on the number of points.

Did you understand enough to at least formulate a question?

Worse for whom? Copyright extension is fine for everyone ---
except for recipients of creative works. (You have to pay
longer and, worse, more works are longer unavailable.)

That's exactly what we're seeing with copyright as it is today.
So even if you were right, my scheme wouldn't be worse than
the current scheme.

Googling for sweeps week shows something different. OK, it's
more like a month everywhere, and not sweeping over America
from one cost to the other.

Still, would it be very onerous to require radio broadcasters
to keep correct and complete playlists, and using something
like 'sweeps week' --- best stretched over 52 weeks/year ---
only for reach calculation, not for seeing what they play?

So you're basically saying that in a halfway sane system only
the best-sellers would ever be transmitted, right? Anything
even mid-list would simply never appear in the calculation,
since (here's the same part) it's never transmitted?


If not, kindly detail why mid list works must be invisible to
the accounting.

The same is true for ANY sum. Like, say, $56.8 trillion
(the net worth of all households in the US in 2010 Q4).

You keep not reading closely.
| It's similar with books: the problem for almost everyone is [...] not
| being found. Either because someone has stolen the last copy of the
| book in a brick&motar shop ("noone buys this author/book! So why order
| more?") [...]

1 stolen book == 1 royalty
1 stolen book == 10+ missed sales.

Does ONE royalty equal TEN OR MORE sales?

Do you get now why Ellison's "pointing out" is probably very
stupid --- unless the book is not sellable in first place?

Then people were even more dependent on actually being able
to see and touch a copy in a bookstore to buy one.

So why are you surprised something turns out HARD for
computers?

Which is only relevant at the current stage of technology
if you're Joe Average when it comes to buying gifts and own
preferences and looking at the recommendations. Are you?

-Wolfgang

 

The significance IS the work needed.

I can download Debian easily, put it on a couple sticks and
share them with my friends and neighbours. The only significant
parts are
a) I share something and thereby help my friends and neighbours
b) I probably want the sticks back



Now compare that to, say, a functionally equivalent Windows.
Not only do I need to spend months finding all the software
to get the function I got out of the box (and some of the
functionality isn't even available[1]), I also need to spend
tens of thousands of USD on software. Then I need to have
lots of CDs and key codes and so on.

Installing the whole mess is lots of work (instead of just
choosing the packages and letting the computer do all the
work while I'm away from it). And it doesn't update itself
automatically, only a few parts do.

Oh, and I'm not allowed to share. And even if I were, there
are lots of technical barriers.

Now, tell me, what is the significance of THAT?


And tell me a society that makes it artifically hard to help
your friends and neighbours (and thinks the profits of a
convicted monopolist more important) is on the right way.

Are you sure the creatives do lose their physical objects?

-Wolfgang

[1] Try to get Windows to understand sloppy focus (i.e. the
window last touched by the mouse is active) *and* not to
raise the active window.

 

Some have, but not due to principle, but due to ba protection
spans or overbroad application.

So how do you suppose they should be prevented from starving?
Downloading stuff via the Food Transfer Protocol?

How long have you made your living from your creative works?
Or are you saying all real creative people should waste 40
hours each week not being creative?

-Wolfgang

 

Just as the difference betwen the printing press and "the days
of the pen".

As you found out, advancing technology makes some things
practical that weren't before: "ease and speed" can be a
question of life or death for applications.

Therefore: yes, there are radical differences between the
computer and the printing press. Like the fact that there
are millions more computers than printing presses ...

-Wolfgang

 

So you're basically saying monasteries waited for a century
till the original author was safely dead, then started
copying the work. Any book newly written would have to wait
that long before it could appear as a copy in the library of
another monastery.

I think not.


Oh, authorship wasn't nearly as important then as it is today.
Many books were anonymous.

-Wolfgang

 

Naah. The books were from other monasteries. And they didn't
need to do copies by the dozen just to preserve their one copy.

Yep, and it often took them half a year to send a message
one way. However, most people were NOT networked outside
their parish at all. They never left it ...

Logical fail. You assume everyone who has NOT ripped off a
copy (yet) is a customer. Most people are decent. If they
want an item, can pay the price and consider the price fair,
they'll rather pay. Assuming they can find the place to pay
and don't get stones laid in their way there.

Logical fail, second: For most creators the problem is not
people not wanting to buy, but people not knowing there exists
something they'd want to buy. A free sample, a test drive,
so to say, is an effective way of finding out if the pig in a
poke is actually something they'd enjoy. Paying 20 bucks on
the off chance that that CD is something I'd enjoy? Are you
joking? But 20 bucks for a group I know I like is something
quite different ....

Yes, people who go into brick and motar stores to take a copy
without paying are thieves. They're not the decent majority.

Do you really want them as your customers?

Naah, it's been granted to the publishers and labels.
At least in the real world, if not in the letters of the law.

-Wolfgang

 

From when to when, and sources, please.

They'd need only one, maybe 2 copies from each book for that.

And the act of copying a CD to my computer and uploading it
(or burning it via a CD burner) via P2P is more costly to me
in time, tools and materials than the original creator of the
work paid to have another CD pressed.

But they did read the books.

And if I am storing an additional copy of some work on my
computer, giving it a better chance to survive if others let
it lapse or a mass extinction event (think asteroid) nearly
wipes the Earth ...

-Wolfgang

 

Does it matter? Why?

If I tell a business secret (even if I'm forbidden), are you
bound by law not to listen to it and not to repeat it?

-Wolfgang

 

^^^^

What's that, Savageduck? That wasn't broken into a new line
in Alan's post!

You should at least be able open a ticket with your
vendor and get it fixed --- assuming you don't have the
sourcecode already.

Something else did happen ...


-Wolfgang

 

However, you cannot steal intellectual property. At most you
can steal a physical object embodying intellectual property, say
a DVD embodying a film or blueprints embodying some invention.

You *can* copy intellectual property without permission, but
that's not theft or stealing[1]. Nor is it robbery on a ship
on the high seas cutlass between your teeth, no matter what
some quarters would like you to believe.

-Wolfgang

[1] Ask your lawyer. "stealing" as a moral issue is something
else, and often shouted most loud by people who think
digital downloads need to have a downward adjustment in pay
to the creator for "grampohone records broken in transit".

 

If your great-grandfather purchased a house, willed it to your
grandfather, who willed it to your father, who willed it to you, do
you deserve to own it?


An estate is an estate, whether it's real or intellectual property.