Wow, it's hard to be a moderate in this world. Chris_Brown has me from one side as not having strong enough convictions. and JJJ gets me from the other as being "naive."
Er you are not being moderate. Your ideas are to my mind a tad extreme.
Chris, to answer your question about how I should pursue something like this with more conviction. Simply put, I try not to be self righteous about everything I believe. When true injustice faces the world in the form of starvation, human trafficking, war, suppression of free speech, or poverty, it is hard to see a debate about intellectual property as something worthy of self-righteousness. It is the tendency for hyperbole in all debates that creates the toxic political environment we have today and makes compromise and progress impossible. Few are likely to starve due to the lengthening or shortening of copyright. I will advocate and politely pursue my point of view, but I am not taking to the streets for THIS issue.
And this particular quote is ironically,a perfect example of hyperbole.
In case you hadn't noticed, caring about one particular subject does not stop you caring about other aspects of life which may be less or more important. And as it happens, if you do not earn money from one's work, putting food on your table gets a bit tricky. Local supermarkets do not accept bylines in exchange for groceries.
And now onto JJJ's littany:
I specifically mentioned one: Apache server. Do you want some others? TCP/IP, PHP, or Perl. Though I disagree, you said that software doesn't count (I think you said that somewhere above).
What I said was you cannot patent software like you can gadgets. Software is usually protected by copyright.
"Within European Union member states, the EPO and other national patent offices have issued many patents for inventions involving software since the European Patent Convention (EPC) came into force in the late 1970s. Article 52 EPC excludes "programs for computers" from patentability (Art. 52(2)) to the extent that a patent application relates to a computer program "as such" (Art. 52(3))." Though some companies have tried and succeeded to finagle patents for software.
If I recall correctly, you diminished open initiatives as unimportant because they are software and all of these had some large manufacturer backing as a loss leader. I don't think that is true of these technologies.
Not really what I said. So was no-one involved in creating these open source initiatives, not employed by anyone else. As it's easy to do free work if you are being subsidised by a day job. Now if you dismiss patents and copyright a lot of people in work, suddenly won't be.
As for one-click shopping, we agree that this is another absurd example of a dumb patent.
Actually do you know what would solve a lot of problems with copyright and patents? Ignore the crazy American legal system which allows these abuses to take place. It's far less of an issue in rest of the world, just as suing Raleigh, a bike company for an accident caused by the rider cycling a night without lights or MacDonalds getting done by someone who spilt a hot coffee over themselves whilst driving. Here in the UK, the driver would simply get done for careless driving and the cyclist told off for riding withoutl ights.
As for digital copies of my work, you said...It is impossible to create a second generation copy of a print that equals the first generation. Each subsequent digital rendering loses data and diminishes quality. With all the very sophisticated printing and imaging discussions here at LuLa, I would have thought that everyone would understand that a copy of a print would always lose quality in each subsequent version. My product is the highest quality print, not a low-res knockoff.
You really think a high quality copy cannot be made of your prints? Of course it can. Technology is quite clever now.
The type of customer that I seek (and many of us here) values the highest quality. If you are referring to stock photography, yes fine. But for fine art prints, copies will not be good enough.
Lots of people have spent a lot of money on fake works of art. And no I was not referring to stock imagery - which actually demands pretty high levels of quality. And the beauty [and drawback for some] of digital, is that copying does not degrade information, unlike analogue data recordings.
Could you please tell me what examples I have sited that are made up?
"Amazon wasn't able to patent online shopping because 500 people invented it at the same time," was one of several inaccurate statements.
What you don't see is that I AM being constructive. I have mentioned several times that by lowering barriers to copyright and patent, you would stimulate more disruptive technologies. You would also reduce the wasteful impact of all these bad patents and patent wars. This would increase efficiency of our economies so we could focus on actually inventing and building things instead of arguing about them and paying lawyers more money. This IS being constructive, though you don't see the wisdom in it.
Abolishing Copyright/patents is not constructive, it is destructive. Tell you what I will abolish all those pesky laws that impede my business progress and stop paying all those lawyers money. Robbing banks, of course I should be allowed to do that as then I can afford to buy a camera then, because with no copyright, I won't earn very much money from photography itself. Other laws that annoy me and impede my progress as a business are things like custom's tax. Why can't I simply buy things from abroad with out paying import duty, after all if everyone could do that people would shop more and stimulate the economy.
Except it wouldn't as loads of other people would lose money locally and would make my countrie's economy suffer really badly. Technology has been continually disruptive over last few years even with patents in place. So much so, that it's a full time job keeping up and you think it should be even faster! Not to mention the big flaw in your plan that even a short 5 year patent would be irrelevant when things change annually or faster.
Another thing to bear in mind is that patents/copyright was brought is as no copyright/patents didn't work/was unfair.
Actually, it really appears that you are the one lacking in ideas. You have offered very little outside of 'reforming' intellectual copyright laws, but you haven't given any sort of idea what that might entail. How would you prevent patents on "on click shopping" from tyrannizing the market of ideas?
Copyright and patents are a good idea in principle. So why do I have to suggest a better solution as I already approve in principle of this system despite its flaws. The US allowing just about anything to be patented is the real issue.
You like to call people naive.
Only naive people.
That is almost the definition of a demeaning word choice...now on to the substance of your comment. Well, actually, you didn't say much true here. Science has repeatedly proven that humans don't increase creative and analytical performance based on financial incentives.
And I'd also be the first one to argue that financial rewards are not key to improving productivity or whatever. But unless money is made overall, businesses will fail. Which is the important issue here, not individuals motivation within a business. I am not primarily motivated by money, but am very aware that if I do not make make money I don't get to be creative or get to feed myself. Copyright allows people to be creative as they benefit from the fruits of their labour. Copyright is simply a wage for work done. We live in a world where money is needed and until that changes.......
Not really sure how to respond to rest of this point as the English doesn't much sense make.
As for the
Dan Pink talk you referenced. On the whole I'm very much in accord with motivation as described in this talk, but do not think it relevant to copyright protection. As removing copyright/patent protection is more akin to stopping people's entire wages and not their bonuses.
As it happened I solved the candle issue in about two seconds and the reason why offering money slowed people down when solving this problem is that it then put a stress on people to perform, as opposed to just letting them do things in their own time. Which is what the control group did. The erroneous and simplistic conclusion stated by Dan Pink in the early part of his talk is that money was the problem, whereas money was just the symbol of the pressure. Money could be replaced by a variety of other stress risers and you'd get the same results.
Seth Godin wrote an interesting article on motivation a while back and spoke about very similar things.
You say this isn't relevant, but it is. The purpose of copyright and patent is to motivate people to create and innovate. Increasing monetary profit doesn't increase performance and won't increase innovation in our society.
The purpose was for those who do create to be able to benefit from their work and to prevent others taking advantage of them. People do object to themselves being exploited. I'm not money motivated, but I'm buggered if someone else is going to profit out of my labour with recompensing me. People do not feel exploited when adding to wikipedia, but if Wikipedia stated charging money and made billionaires out of their business, then people would be far less inclined to help.
My girlfriend's uncle is typical of those who do photography as a hobby and are not bothered about getting paid for it and as a result is thoroughly exploited by some businesses who now do not have to pay a pro to do it for them. Yet he can only do this as he had a well paid job already. Now if the photographers offered to do his job for nothing as it was fun, he'd be out of a job and would have to charge for his photography and he'd be really pissed off.