Uh, most interesting conversations include a large degree of opinion. When the facts are clear and everybody understands and accepts them and agrees on what to do in response, there really isn't much to talk about.
When the facts are unclear, or when the best course of action in responding to clear facts is less than obvious, or when cognitive biases prevent people from acknowledging the facts, that's when a meaningful discussion can take place.
Radio is a good format for encouraging people to buy? WTF?
I hear a song on the radio: I don't know who it's by, I don't know what it's called, I don't know where I can buy it, I can't go back and listen to the whole thing if I came in partway through, and even if I find those things out I'd have to remember to go buy it later.
I hear a song on the internet: Ooh, look, metadata letting me know the name of the song and the artist. In some contexts, even a direct link to the artist's page where I can buy their stuff. All in a context that makes impulse buying very easy (since you can do it right now without going anywhere)
Yes, one of these is a much better medium for encouraging people to buy your stuff, but it sure as hell ain't radio.
How is an Internet capable set-top box different from a HTPC?
Yeah, I suspect Google are trying to draw an impossible* distinction here. Where does a set-top box end and a home theatre PC begin? What's next, no Youtube on an Ubuntu netbook because Canonical didn't pay up?
*(Impossible in terms of normal human English. You can draw any distinction you want in law by defining terms correctly. But the law isn't how Google will be judged by their customers in this case)
Australia has a somewhat similar setup to the BBC in our ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, largely government funded, nothing to do with the US ABC network).
The value lies in having a news source that isn't beholden to *advertisers* for its ongoing operations, and hence is in a position to investigate corporate issues that the commercial newspapers may be reluctant to bring up for fear of jeopardising major sources of advertising revenue.
So if the commercial news sources can get stuck into the government, and the government funded news source can get stuck into the corporations, there's an outside chance major issues in both areas will at least be picked up and covered by *somebody* (even with the rise of the internet, an awful lot of information is still conveyed through the mainstream news networks).
Fine, but don't tell me all peer-reviewed journal articles are shining examples of reason and academic brilliance. A lot of them are finely-sliced research rehashing the same findings, or are closely examined and exquisitely detailed trivia.
(Yes, I realise the comic is mostly about something else. The coincidence in reading this article and that comic within an hour of each still amuses me)
Except if you took away all copyrights tomorrow (or drastically shortened them) all the business models relying on fair use exceptions would keep right on trucking, while those relying on a government granted monopoly would likely collapse.
So, while both numbers are rather silly, only one of them is even theoretically dependent on the existence of copyright law.
There's actually an interesting quote from Bill Gates years ago (I forget the details unfortunately) where he says that he would prefer for people to pirate Windows or Office than to use someone else's stuff.
There's actually an interesting distinction in some free-as-in-beer software licenses that rather than trying to define a commercial/non-commercial split as is the case with Creative Commons licenses instead try to define a personal use/professional use split.
I sometimes wonder if the latter kind of split would do a better job of meeting the intent many creators have in using the non-commercial clause in CC licenses (i.e. "I don't care if you put this up on a page that happens to have a Google AdWords box or use it somewhat incidentally in a company blog post, but if you want to incorporate it into your national advertising campaign, contact me").
I suspect it would just move the inevitable murky grey area to a different set of use cases though.
One point worth making when it comes to "reasonable" transaction costs is that they're relative. In manufacturing industries (e.g. cars, tractors, etc) and other industries with large up front capital requirements (e.g. lab facilities for pharmaceutical research), the transaction costs associated with patents just aren't that big relative to other costs.
The up front expenditure associated with independent software development, on the other hand, can be close to nil. High quality development tools (including compilers, runtime interpreters, code editors, source control tools, defect trackers, online collaboration tools) can all be legally downloaded for free, cloud computing services such as Google's App Engine or Amazon's S3 offer low cost entry into the web service world, plenty of cheap hosting sites (and bittorrent) offer entry into the downloadable software world, etc.
In an environment of such minimal capital expenditure, the transaction costs involved with the patent start looking ridiculously out of proportion (particularly when patent examiners have very little idea what an experienced software developer would consider obvious, and even when they do recognise an idea as obvious, they still have trouble knocking back an application without documented prior art that someone, somewhere, had previously combined a bunch of trivial ideas in the particular way that the patent describes).
Umm, you seem to be a touch confused about the difference between "innovation" and "invention".
'Invention' is coming up with completely new ways of doing things (i.e. what you seem to be talking about). It often represents a profound break with preceding technology.
'Innovation' is applying existing solutions to new problems, creating novel combinations of existing ideas that weren't effective on their own, that kind of thing. The key point about 'innovation' is that the *idea* is often the least important part. *Execution* of that idea and turning it into a useful product, successfully navigating all the inevitable compromises that reality will enforce upon you is the hard part.
A key word associated with innovation is "incremental" - party A implements a good idea, party B later does the same thing but adds their own twist, party A later adopts that twist as well since users like it, etc, etc.
The patent system unduly rewards merely having ideas without putting any effort into making them actually happen. Without execution to put them into effect, ideas are largely useless, but companies like Intellectual Ventures are able to game the patent system and act as a tax on the real innovators.
Just the venerable crippleware shareware model variant with lower bandwidth costs
As the subject line says, this sounds like a software distribution model that has been around for years, only with the tweak of using bittorrent (sensibly) to defray the costs of distributing the limited free version.
Not a bad idea, but hardly groundbreaking stuff.
P.S. Escapist has content other than Zero Punctuation? Who knew? :)
The article at least answers your first question: $70 average value for purchases excluding the 'higher tier Insight Community packages' and $12000 total for purchases of the $5 to $150 tiers. Since nobody bought the $1000 Day With Techdirt and the $5000+ tiers are the Insight packages, the $12000 total and the $70 per user average can be combined to determine that there was most likely just over 170 distinct customers for the merchandise tiers.
I can easily see my large screen TV from the kitchen at the far end of the hallway (handy when making dinner or cleaning up afterwards).
I don't see how you could have a facial recognition program with current technology that could tell the difference between my face at that distance and a photo or poster closer to the TV that included a person's face.
And that's without even getting into the issues of what would happen when someone is watching TV with the lights switched off. Are they going to put IR lamps around the camera and try to pick faces at the lower frequency?
Yep - I'll occasionally poke fun at friends about poor spelling and grammar because it really is a painful mental experience having to back up the train and reparse a sentence with the correct words inserted*.
The occasional error or typo is one thing (e.g. my brain knows how to use apostrophes correctly, but my fingers don't always get it right, so I'm fairly forgiving of such errors, especially in contexts that don't allow editing of posted messages), but allowing endemic errors in published writing is being disrespectful to one's readers.
However, in such cases, I probably still won't try to correct it - if the problem is bad enough and persistent enough, I'll just stop paying attention to that writer.
The one time I will post corrections is when someone has made a typo that significantly changes the meaning of what they wrote. In such cases, I have found a simple "s/what they wrote/what I think they meant/?" (or "Was 'written' meant to be 'intended'?" if the writer isn't another programmer) to be both polite and sufficient (i.e. assuming the author just made an accidental typo and seeking clarification rather than assuming they must be a poorly educated idiot and abusing them for it as some grammar nazis do).
*(A novel I read recently consistently used "insure" instead of "ensure" throughout, and it was a stumbling block every time I came across it. From context, the author definitely meant "ensure", but the error happened so many times that I couldn't see how it could be accidental that the author and editor both missed the mistake).
Whoops, I meant to go back and change that phrasing before posting. Streeting wasn't complaining - he was just pointing out that the additional copyleft restrictions won't make any practical difference for most projects (and, in some cases, may actually be harmful).
I believe the copyleft licences do have their place as an educational tool in bringing traditionally closed source vendors into a more collaborative environment for genuinely large scale projects (e.g. I personally suspect that without the GPL to enforce the rule of "play nice or go home", Linux would have suffered the same proprietary fragmentation problems that afflicted Unix in the past).
Mike, you don't have the terminology quite right there. The "Open Source" and "Free Software" licenses include the more permissive ones that permit proprietary redistribution (e.g. BSD, Apache, MIT).
The ones that Streeting is complaining about are the "Copyleft" licenses (e.g. GPL, LGPL, AGPL*) that impose restrictions on the redistributors of the code.
Both kinds of license provide the four freedoms espoused by the Free Software Foundation:
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The *only* difference between the copyleft and non-copyleft licenses is in the obligations they impose on developers that want to *redistribute* parts of the code. The copyelft licenses requite that redistributors also respect the four freedoms. The non-copyleft licences let redistributors largely do whatever they want.
And on that front, OSI won the practical argument a long time ago - the difficulty and overhead involved in maintaining a private fork means that many heavy users of an open source library or framework eventually become contributors.
Accordingly, for quite some time, the choice of GPL/LGPL/AGPL over BSD-style licensing has been more a statement of principle than one of engineering practicality.
In some cases, it is done to enable a dual licensing model - those that want to maintain private forks are given the option of paying for a more permissive license, while a free version is made available under a copyleft license.
In other cases (as appears to have been the case with Streeting), someone has selected a more restrictive license without properly recognising the implications of their choice (i.e. they're prohibiting something that doesn't actually matter to them, thus creating unnecessary complications for everyone).
In still other cases, it is a conscious decision to exclude proprietary forks that are then redistributed. Streeting explicitly acknowledges this point of view in his article, and it is the fundamental split between the goals of OSI and the FSF - the former just wants to encourage good collaborative software development practices, while the latter is trying to encourage increased software freedom.
Does the choice of a copyleft licence limit the kind of redistributors you're going to get? Yes it does - but if promoting the ideals of software freedom is one of your objectives, then making it clear that you only welcome other contributors that are at least willing to tolerate that goal isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The major difference between this argument and that of copyright maximalists though is that neither camp (copyleft and non-copyleft) is trying to restrict the behaviour of ordinary end users of the software. If you aren't modifying and then redistributing the code under a different licence, you simply don't need to care about any of these details.
*A quick note on the GPL variants:
GPL - full copyleft licence that allows redistribution that would normally be prohibited by copyright law only if the four software freedoms are respected for both the GPL code and any linked application. Violations are typically remedied either by ceasing redistribution or by coming into compliance with the license (i.e. respecting the four freedoms as required)
LGPL - Library (or Lesser) GPL that applies only to the LGPL code itself with no restrictions on the linked application.
AGPL - the Affero GPL is a relatively new variant that closes the "software as a service" loophole by applying the downstream licensing restrictions when the application is hosted by the vendor rather than being run directly by end users.
Wait AC, you're saying that there's more to doing something professionally than just doing the same things that an amateur would do in the same field?
Like the way a professional writer already has to actually meet their publisher's deadlines, go on book tours and, well, generally be professional about things rather than just writing when they feel like it?
Professional art creation has *never* been just about the art - that's an outright lie peddled by the current crop of publishers and other professional middlemen that saw an opportunity to make a great deal of money at the artists' expense.
The next generation of professional middlemen (such as Topspin and Nettwerk on the music side and the foresighted folks at Baen on the publishing side) recognise that the disintermediating effects of the internet are placing the artists and their intermediaries in direct competition with each other. So new deals are going to have to be worked out that are much fairer to the artist.
Exactly where the money will come from in a world where pay-per-copy is an obsolete model is something people are still figuring out, but strident cries of "OMG, there will be no more art unless we make copying illegal" demonstrate a woeful lack of understanding of human psychology (or, more likely, a vested interest in maintaining the status quo).
A lot of classical music was created under a patronage system where someone wealthy (e.g. royalty or high ranking clergy) paid for compositions up front.
Those composers were no doubt *very* concerned with making sure their patrons remained happy with them (not to mention having to make a name for themselves in the first place in order to *attract* those wealthy patrons).
So, no, it wasn't just about the music even then. Although note that those composers weren't in the business of selling music - they were in the business of selling the service of creating *new* music at a patron's behest. Each new piece then acted as an advertisement of their abilities in seeking their next patron (or in retaining the interest of their current one).
On the post: Reuters, AP Refuse To Cover Cricket Matches Over Restrictive Press Accreditation Rules
Re: Re: What's big in the US isn't always big worldwide and vice-versa
On the post: Comparing File Sharing To Payola: Could Have Had That Promotion For Free
Re:
When the facts are unclear, or when the best course of action in responding to clear facts is less than obvious, or when cognitive biases prevent people from acknowledging the facts, that's when a meaningful discussion can take place.
On the post: Comparing File Sharing To Payola: Could Have Had That Promotion For Free
Re: Re: radio vs internet
I hear a song on the radio: I don't know who it's by, I don't know what it's called, I don't know where I can buy it, I can't go back and listen to the whole thing if I came in partway through, and even if I find those things out I'd have to remember to go buy it later.
I hear a song on the internet: Ooh, look, metadata letting me know the name of the song and the artist. In some contexts, even a direct link to the artist's page where I can buy their stuff. All in a context that makes impulse buying very easy (since you can do it right now without going anywhere)
Yes, one of these is a much better medium for encouraging people to buy your stuff, but it sure as hell ain't radio.
On the post: Google Blocking Set Top Boxes From Showing YouTube Unless They Pay Up?
How is an Internet capable set-top box different from a HTPC?
*(Impossible in terms of normal human English. You can draw any distinction you want in law by defining terms correctly. But the law isn't how Google will be judged by their customers in this case)
On the post: Larry Magid Calls For News Tax To Fund Failing Newspapers
A government funded news source can be valuable
The value lies in having a news source that isn't beholden to *advertisers* for its ongoing operations, and hence is in a position to investigate corporate issues that the commercial newspapers may be reluctant to bring up for fear of jeopardising major sources of advertising revenue.
So if the commercial news sources can get stuck into the government, and the government funded news source can get stuck into the corporations, there's an outside chance major issues in both areas will at least be picked up and covered by *somebody* (even with the rise of the internet, an awful lot of information is still conveyed through the mainstream news networks).
On the post: Oh No! Nobody Reads! Oh No! It's Too Cheap For Everyone To Read!
Coincidentally apropos XKCD comic?
(Yes, I realise the comic is mostly about something else. The coincidence in reading this article and that comic within an hour of each still amuses me)
On the post: We See Your 'Copyright Contributes $1.5 Trillion' And Raise You 'Fair Use Contributes $2.2 Trillion'
Re: The problem is....
So, while both numbers are rather silly, only one of them is even theoretically dependent on the existence of copyright law.
On the post: Microsoft Patents Changing User Privileges Temporarily On The Fly
Re: Re: "And now no one else can wrap a sudo in a GUI without paying to play."
As far as I know, the gnome equivalent does the same.
On the post: Compare And Contrast: How GPL Enforces Violations vs. How RIAA/MPAA/BSA Enforce Violations
There's actually an interesting distinction in some free-as-in-beer software licenses that rather than trying to define a commercial/non-commercial split as is the case with Creative Commons licenses instead try to define a personal use/professional use split.
I sometimes wonder if the latter kind of split would do a better job of meeting the intent many creators have in using the non-commercial clause in CC licenses (i.e. "I don't care if you put this up on a page that happens to have a Google AdWords box or use it somewhat incidentally in a company blog post, but if you want to incorporate it into your national advertising campaign, contact me").
I suspect it would just move the inevitable murky grey area to a different set of use cases though.
On the post: Clear And Concise Explanation For Why Software Patents Harm Innovation
Transaction costs
The up front expenditure associated with independent software development, on the other hand, can be close to nil. High quality development tools (including compilers, runtime interpreters, code editors, source control tools, defect trackers, online collaboration tools) can all be legally downloaded for free, cloud computing services such as Google's App Engine or Amazon's S3 offer low cost entry into the web service world, plenty of cheap hosting sites (and bittorrent) offer entry into the downloadable software world, etc.
In an environment of such minimal capital expenditure, the transaction costs involved with the patent start looking ridiculously out of proportion (particularly when patent examiners have very little idea what an experienced software developer would consider obvious, and even when they do recognise an idea as obvious, they still have trouble knocking back an application without documented prior art that someone, somewhere, had previously combined a bunch of trivial ideas in the particular way that the patent describes).
On the post: Clear And Concise Explanation For Why Software Patents Harm Innovation
Re: giggles
'Invention' is coming up with completely new ways of doing things (i.e. what you seem to be talking about). It often represents a profound break with preceding technology.
'Innovation' is applying existing solutions to new problems, creating novel combinations of existing ideas that weren't effective on their own, that kind of thing. The key point about 'innovation' is that the *idea* is often the least important part. *Execution* of that idea and turning it into a useful product, successfully navigating all the inevitable compromises that reality will enforce upon you is the hard part.
A key word associated with innovation is "incremental" - party A implements a good idea, party B later does the same thing but adds their own twist, party A later adopts that twist as well since users like it, etc, etc.
The patent system unduly rewards merely having ideas without putting any effort into making them actually happen. Without execution to put them into effect, ideas are largely useless, but companies like Intellectual Ventures are able to game the patent system and act as a tax on the real innovators.
On the post: PC Game Developer Pirates Own Game As Promotion
Just the venerable crippleware shareware model variant with lower bandwidth costs
Not a bad idea, but hardly groundbreaking stuff.
P.S. Escapist has content other than Zero Punctuation? Who knew? :)
On the post: Irony: U2's 'Free' Concert At The Berlin Wall, Blocked By A Big Wall
Re: MTV was concerned
Making it opaque suggest there were more than just safety concerns involved (or someone really didn't think things through).
On the post: Results From Our CwF+RtB Business Model Experiment
Re: Thanks
On the post: Smart TVs Know When You Look Away
I don't see how you could have a facial recognition program with current technology that could tell the difference between my face at that distance and a photo or poster closer to the TV that included a person's face.
And that's without even getting into the issues of what would happen when someone is watching TV with the lights switched off. Are they going to put IR lamps around the camera and try to pick faces at the lower frequency?
On the post: Grammar Nazis: Useful Language Experts, Or Elitist Snobs?
Re: Re: Re:
The occasional error or typo is one thing (e.g. my brain knows how to use apostrophes correctly, but my fingers don't always get it right, so I'm fairly forgiving of such errors, especially in contexts that don't allow editing of posted messages), but allowing endemic errors in published writing is being disrespectful to one's readers.
However, in such cases, I probably still won't try to correct it - if the problem is bad enough and persistent enough, I'll just stop paying attention to that writer.
The one time I will post corrections is when someone has made a typo that significantly changes the meaning of what they wrote. In such cases, I have found a simple "s/what they wrote/what I think they meant/?" (or "Was 'written' meant to be 'intended'?" if the writer isn't another programmer) to be both polite and sufficient (i.e. assuming the author just made an accidental typo and seeking clarification rather than assuming they must be a poorly educated idiot and abusing them for it as some grammar nazis do).
*(A novel I read recently consistently used "insure" instead of "ensure" throughout, and it was a stumbling block every time I came across it. From context, the author definitely meant "ensure", but the error happened so many times that I couldn't see how it could be accidental that the author and editor both missed the mistake).
On the post: Even The Open Source Community Gets Overly Restrictive At Times
Re: Terminology clarification
Whoops, I meant to go back and change that phrasing before posting. Streeting wasn't complaining - he was just pointing out that the additional copyleft restrictions won't make any practical difference for most projects (and, in some cases, may actually be harmful).
I believe the copyleft licences do have their place as an educational tool in bringing traditionally closed source vendors into a more collaborative environment for genuinely large scale projects (e.g. I personally suspect that without the GPL to enforce the rule of "play nice or go home", Linux would have suffered the same proprietary fragmentation problems that afflicted Unix in the past).
On the post: Even The Open Source Community Gets Overly Restrictive At Times
Terminology clarification
The ones that Streeting is complaining about are the "Copyleft" licenses (e.g. GPL, LGPL, AGPL*) that impose restrictions on the redistributors of the code.
Both kinds of license provide the four freedoms espoused by the Free Software Foundation:
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The *only* difference between the copyleft and non-copyleft licenses is in the obligations they impose on developers that want to *redistribute* parts of the code. The copyelft licenses requite that redistributors also respect the four freedoms. The non-copyleft licences let redistributors largely do whatever they want.
And on that front, OSI won the practical argument a long time ago - the difficulty and overhead involved in maintaining a private fork means that many heavy users of an open source library or framework eventually become contributors.
Accordingly, for quite some time, the choice of GPL/LGPL/AGPL over BSD-style licensing has been more a statement of principle than one of engineering practicality.
In some cases, it is done to enable a dual licensing model - those that want to maintain private forks are given the option of paying for a more permissive license, while a free version is made available under a copyleft license.
In other cases (as appears to have been the case with Streeting), someone has selected a more restrictive license without properly recognising the implications of their choice (i.e. they're prohibiting something that doesn't actually matter to them, thus creating unnecessary complications for everyone).
In still other cases, it is a conscious decision to exclude proprietary forks that are then redistributed. Streeting explicitly acknowledges this point of view in his article, and it is the fundamental split between the goals of OSI and the FSF - the former just wants to encourage good collaborative software development practices, while the latter is trying to encourage increased software freedom.
Does the choice of a copyleft licence limit the kind of redistributors you're going to get? Yes it does - but if promoting the ideals of software freedom is one of your objectives, then making it clear that you only welcome other contributors that are at least willing to tolerate that goal isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The major difference between this argument and that of copyright maximalists though is that neither camp (copyleft and non-copyleft) is trying to restrict the behaviour of ordinary end users of the software. If you aren't modifying and then redistributing the code under a different licence, you simply don't need to care about any of these details.
*A quick note on the GPL variants:
GPL - full copyleft licence that allows redistribution that would normally be prohibited by copyright law only if the four software freedoms are respected for both the GPL code and any linked application. Violations are typically remedied either by ceasing redistribution or by coming into compliance with the license (i.e. respecting the four freedoms as required)
LGPL - Library (or Lesser) GPL that applies only to the LGPL code itself with no restrictions on the linked application.
AGPL - the Affero GPL is a relatively new variant that closes the "software as a service" loophole by applying the downstream licensing restrictions when the application is hosted by the vendor rather than being run directly by end users.
On the post: The Debate Is Not Free vs. Paid
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Like the way a professional writer already has to actually meet their publisher's deadlines, go on book tours and, well, generally be professional about things rather than just writing when they feel like it?
Professional art creation has *never* been just about the art - that's an outright lie peddled by the current crop of publishers and other professional middlemen that saw an opportunity to make a great deal of money at the artists' expense.
The next generation of professional middlemen (such as Topspin and Nettwerk on the music side and the foresighted folks at Baen on the publishing side) recognise that the disintermediating effects of the internet are placing the artists and their intermediaries in direct competition with each other. So new deals are going to have to be worked out that are much fairer to the artist.
Exactly where the money will come from in a world where pay-per-copy is an obsolete model is something people are still figuring out, but strident cries of "OMG, there will be no more art unless we make copying illegal" demonstrate a woeful lack of understanding of human psychology (or, more likely, a vested interest in maintaining the status quo).
On the post: Musicians Are Never Just About The Music
Re: Classical Composers
Those composers were no doubt *very* concerned with making sure their patrons remained happy with them (not to mention having to make a name for themselves in the first place in order to *attract* those wealthy patrons).
So, no, it wasn't just about the music even then. Although note that those composers weren't in the business of selling music - they were in the business of selling the service of creating *new* music at a patron's behest. Each new piece then acted as an advertisement of their abilities in seeking their next patron (or in retaining the interest of their current one).
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