DISQUS

I also agree with MikeT. If the full costs of these data breaches were borne by the people storing the data, we'd see a lot less data collected and it would be much better protected. As it stands, having to pay out for a year's credit reporting for a few people is just a cost of doing business, while the costs to people who's data is mis-used is huge.

The phone network is also a very public network, but we don't expect the phone company to listen in on our conversations.
When I view a web-page, that's a one-to-one conversation between my computer and the one hosting the web-page. The fact that the network is packet-switched rather than circuit-switched doesn't really make any difference to my expectation of privacy.
As for who pays, as Mike points out, web-pages frequently carry their own ads, and I pay my ISP to provide me with the routers, etc to connect my computer to the rest of the Internet. I can see that there might be room for a new ISP to offer a cut-price service where they inject ads (hasn't that been tried already, and failed ?), but it would be the customer's choice to opt in to that service rather than the more conventional one where the ISP charges directly for connectivity.

To be fair, where you posted about the Valleywag article, you said "properly excluded" (that's also the opposite).
So in mis-reporting their mis-reporting of the case, you did state the correct facts :-)

are the rights of the secondary artist more important than the rights of the primary artist?

This is a fascinating question, well deserving of further investigation.


Given the purpose of copyright in the US, encouraging the creation of two works (the primary and secondary) is clearly better than just encouraging the creation of the primary. So the ideal amount of copyright protection would reward the creator of the primary work just enough that the work does, in fact, get created, while giving the creator of the secondary work broad enough rights to ensure that that work gets created, too.

Can you get "premium cable" without "basic cable" ? I'd be surprised.


"Satellite TV" does seem to be missing. I would guess that some of the "basic cabel" decline is explained by the "Internet access" line.

Of course those people who grew up letting the car drive itself would probably crash it as soon as it turned control over to them. :-)

I've always had a problem with the "right to earn a living doing what you want" argument. Lots of people can't make a living doing what they want. Many people try to do so and fail because they don't find a business model that works.



So while I agree that I want people to be able to make a living from writing, I'm far from convinced that they have some "natural right" to do so.




I note that Noah does qualify it with "from creating a successful work", which is definitely better than what you frequently hear.




Oh, and Noah should check out Baen books - where they've shown increases in book sales as a result of giving away free electronic copies of works.

You have to wonder whether the PTC website generates three messages to the FCC for each individual American who uses it to express their opinion, don't you ?

Did you look at who funded those studies ?

I know that the Liebowitz analysis of the Industry Canada funded paper was funded by the music industry.

I'm not aware of any paper that wasn't funded by the music industry that has shown harm from peer-to-peer downloading.

twinkerzzz, what you're missing is that paying creators is not the purpose of copyright. It is merely the means to the end - "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts". It's entirely possibly that that end could be satisfied by different means.

Jim, so what about "intellectual property rights" ? Grounded in natural law ?

Actually, I think that last comment is exactly right - if my comment were as important as my vote, I wouldn't rely on sending it electronically (I might send an electronic copy as well as a paper copy, of course).

As a software developer, I know that I very often create "bug reports" along the lines of "here's a better way to do this, when somebody has the time", most of which never actually get done. (Now I wonder whether it's a good idea to say that - some company lawyer might start going through their bug database looking for things they could patent).

I also have a book at home of ideas that I might actually implement some day.

Time/manpower is much more of a limiting factor than lack of ideas. A lot of effort goes into deciding which innovations *not* to implement.

Innovation does indeed feel cheap in the software world. Personally, I always find it hard to read pro-software-patent arguments because they always seem to be speaking about a world that's very different from the one I inhabit. :-)

As to TLF, I read it regularly and I wouldn't say that TLF comes across as "indifferent" to the cost of lawyering. We, the readers, certainly hear plenty about the cost of regulation, and I do recall Tim equating (software) patents with regulation at one time.

Having said that, it does seem that more of the posters here have a "lawyer-centric" than "technology-practitioner-centric" viewpoint. Now I'm off to follow the "meet your contributors" link to find out whether that impression is, in fact, correct.

Ahem.

that should of course be :

while disfavouring those who have yet to create

Here's a thought.

One of the key differences between copyrights and patents is that you only get the copyright when you've actually created the thing to be protected.

With patents, you're actually safer not to actually develop any products, because then you can't be sued by the other companies that managed to patent the same thing you did.

Gary - that *is* the problem. The copyright deal is that the creator gets a monopoly for a while and the public gets to benefit from the fact that the work was created. If the creator's monopoly lasts for the entire useful life of the work, that's not fair to the public.

Of course they can be both good for the incumbents and bad for the industry as a whole.

Noel - for your #2 can't the smaller company sue the larger for breach of contract just as easily as for patent infringement ? (And it costs much lesser to get a good contract drafted, negotiated and signed than to get a patent awarded).

I always think of the GPL this way : people releasing code under the GPL ask to be "paid" for it in the form of getting access to the enhancements and other changes that people make to it, in addition to the "payment" they would also get if they used a BSD-style license.

The console argument is interesting. I thought that one of the main reasons that the latest round of consoles have taken so long to get into stores was because of the time it takes to develop the games for them (there being no point releasing a console without games to play on it).

So if the games were somehow compatible with all consoles, it would be much easier to release a new console, simply because there would already be vast numbers of games out there that you could play on it.

Of course, it's the imcompatibilities that actually make new consoles attractive, which certainly isn't the case with music formats.

This sentence :
"When Rubin described security vulnerabilities in their products, Diebold could have taken the opportunity deployed smoke and mirrors to discredit the study, just as they did with Felten's study last month."
appears to be missing some words (between "opportunity" and "deployed").

There are lots of alternative music distribution services that aren't being sued. eMusic and MySpace come to mind.



So when Grokster was sued, we could have argued "but they haven't sued Limewire". You can use that argument until the RIAA are suing their last competitor, which is probably too late.

Of course there's also the common sense aspect - if you put something online with no restrictions on who can access it, it seems insane that you can then stand up in court to complain that somebody accessed it in a way you don't like.

It's exactly the same issue we're facing here in Canada where there's a push for a levy on internet access to pay all those people who put their valuable content online where anyone can access it for free and who then don't get paid when it is downloaded.

If you do so little research that you put your valuable newspaper in one of the "free - please take one" boxes at the side of the road, rather than the "insert the appropriate amount of money to buy a copy" box, then it's your own fault if people don't pay for the newspapers you put there. Don't ask the government to force us to pay for all those papers just because you made a mistake.

Actually, I think the "locks" analogy is fine. The problem is who holds the keys.


If I buy a DVD player in Canada and a DVD in Europe, I (probably) can't play the DVD on the player because of the DRM (region coding) "lock". This is a lock on my property (I bought both the player and the disk), but it's actively preventing me from using my property. Because I don't hold the "keys", I can't remove the lock.



The lock is applied by other people before they sell me the property, and they keep the keys.



Now imagine that happening with houses, and you see why I quite like the "locks" analogy. :-)

Why "that extend beyoind criticism, news reporting, etc" ?

If contract law is good enough to secure our fair use rights, why isn't it also good enough to preserve our rights to criticise and news report ?

I suspect that it isn't, and it also isn't good enough to secure things like reverse-engineering rights, which are only likely to be exercised by a small subset of purchasers.

There's also the issue of all those people who were quite happy with the restrictions on songs "bought" from iTunes at the time of purchase, but who later discovered that the limitations on the number of machines *did* affect them.

Finally, do we really want libraries and the like to pay extra for a copy that they can actually copy freely when the copyright term has expired ? Most regular purchasers aren't going to care about that, for sure.