The main mistake people make about "life" is that they think it is an attribute - that there is a "life particle." That is incorrect, the true way to look at life is that it is a process. An orderly decay of energy states.
An insight I'd like to pass on to yourself:
Motivation for such an extremely-pro approach to intellectual property laws. Revolves around money. Money is power. The old power structures seek preservation in the wave of new information structures.
The internet has changed the game, what results is all that remains to be seen. Publishing costs alone are minuscule with the internet versus running a printing press and then delivering all those papers. Traditional news also costs a lot of money for overhead like editors and reporters. The internet allows anyone to be an editor or reporter cooperatively with others. The result right now may not be as polished or carry the authority of established news sites but it has a great advantage. The market can support it. When news sources were limited money was funneled into relatively few players allowing them to afford all that overhead. Now they are finding that with what the internet has done to news - devalued it - the money they take in is not enough to cover their old structures. What is happening is that the market is adjusting to the new reality of smaller funding spread over many more people. You can partner with Blogger for a cut of advertisement revenue from your page for example. News will never be the same as it was while and after the market realities adjust. Perhaps it will be worse in the future but what will remain is that it will be within what people are willing to pay for it. You don't run out and say "Pay me!" right off the bat when there are enough other players providing cheaper news, you work within the market and scale back your operations to what you can finance. If enough people miss high-priced news and the editors and reporters that it allows then you'll be able to charge for it when people see that need if ever again. Right now with the internet and this period of explosion in decentralized news all the traditional players are doing is yelling into the wind. People have to want it to make it viable and the failure of pay-walls so far indicates that people don't want it bad enough. If everyone colluded to make pay-walls standard it would be different but as long as some players as willing to make a smaller profit with smaller overhead then that is just competition and high-overhead players need to either make what they have actually more valuable or scale back their costs in any creative ways they can find.
You're welcome, I was worried I was bordering on spam with posting the links but eventually decided to post them as they are real world examples of what people are doing within this topic. All too often it seems people rush to judge before all the evidence is in. These services are evidence by their very existence, you as an individual judge can try them out and see if they actually provide something of value that you could not get from individual sources. Trying these services refines opinions of their value beyond simple black-and-white attitudes. With the theory that more refined experience leads to better arguments within discussion.
I'm going to drop two links here for aggregators that work cooperatively with content providers. Just to make you aware of them. Both work through RSS feeds so there is an implicit permission for both to operate - the content originators provided the feed so they provide permission for it to be consumed. The two sites are: Feedly and Lazyfeed. Feedly is integrated with Google Reader so any feeds you place into reader are automatically collated and translated into a magazine like format on the Feedly web-site. Lazyfeed is run by keyword and scans other aggregators such as feedburner for those keywords and then displays the results by your keywords. Feedly being composed of your hand-picked sources is much more signal than Lazyfeed. Lazyfeed contains some noise (spam) but overall has quite a bit of signal too. I lied, heres a third link: NewsMap. The interesting thing about NewsMap is that it collates how often a story is mentioned in sources and the more often something is mentioned the larger screen area it is given. That is another aggregator function that provides value above the individual sources.
These three aggregators show that there is value to be provided above what individual sources provide: that is why aggregation is not automatically evil.
I think that unregulated capitalism can start out as moral but it is not sustainable over time. As soon as one party cuts a corner say polluting the environment for a cheaper manufacturing process or pays their workers an unfair wage then it becomes a race to the bottom. To me the market is what needs to be regulated and then within the market the capitalistic feedback seeking efficiency is a powerful way to live.
My issue is not with capitalism: I think capitalism is wonderful. I also think that capitalism needs to be carefully regulated. The "two parties" ideal is correct, capitalism allows everyone to better themselves. Where I believe capitalism needs to be regulated is when each party is composed of nested sub-parties. Two businesses may be better off through a deal but what if their manufacturing process harmed other parties? Or one party did not honor a minimum standard of living for their employees so they could manufacture goods cheaper? Capitalism is an excellent method for dealing with scarcity and the only reason we can't have pure capitalism is that capitalism is not a person with any feelings and only seeks efficiency, it does not seek what is "right" and that is what regulation codifies. By whatever standard you consider to be "right." Regulation applying to all parties equalizes the costs involved so regulation simply puts your nations "morals" into the capitalistic framework and from there the beauty and magic of capitalism seeks efficiency within those flavors. As a side note when you consider intra-nation parties dealing with each other there is disparity in the cost of doing business because different nations encode different "morals."
You are right, I don't think that the proper penalty was served in this case. I think the huge fine Pfizer received will do quite a bit to restructure them but I fully believe that instead of trusting them to restructure themselves that they should have received the "corporate death penalty" and had the restructuring forced onto the market through either breaking them up or denying the medicare/aid contract. I don't trust companies to change themselves - they just don't seem to be capable of doing it most of the time - I think that for the health of the market itself it would have been better to cut them up into pieces and then hung those pieces out in the public square to terrify the next generation of companies that would have grown to replace them. To me, that would have effectively addressed what I see as the structural issues.
Regulated markets exist because pure capitalism has no morals. Pure capitalism is about seeking the most efficient method of accomplishing a goal. Regulated capitalism provides moral values in the form of costs for pure capitalism to take into account. Pfizer's conflict here arises because they were not properly taking the regulated values into account and were instead following a more pure capitalism of maximizing profit. The consequences have been severe, they have lost a very large portion of profit and hopefully that will make Pfizer consider regulations with more weight in the future. What I find troubling is that if Pfizer is "too big to nail" then perhaps it should be broken up into companies that are not "too big to nail." This is a systemic issue, a healthy market depends on a diverse set of players that follow the regulations while seeking efficiencies to make a profit. The fine penalized the profit but does not effectively address the organization of the player(s). If Pfizer itself had been denied a major contract because they broke the regulations then they would have had to restructure themselves and their assets to continue to sell their products. Restructuring would have reflected better the consequences of their actions and the new player(s) that emerged from the restructuring would also have had more incentive to follow the regulations. Pfizer has still been dealt a large blow: they lost a very significant portion of profit. The issue I have is that simply removing the profit does not fully address the structure of the organization that collected it.
There is always somewhere to go: like here. It depends what kind of news you are into. I rarely go to general "national" news sites but go to specialized ones all the time. Then there is the magic of RSS feeds and sites like http:/www.feedly.com to aggregate them into convenient formats. I happen to think the future is not monolithic news but rather everyone reporting what matters to them and then that being aggregated. It may be more difficult to make money when news is decentralized - perhaps traditional news has been overvalued the entire time and only now the bubble is popping.
It also depends what the money is hedging against I would forward: if the money can be seen as a "cost of doing business" in that it solidifies your competitiveness then it might be seen as a bargain. If it drives your competitors out of business that is more of the pie for you.
Thank you for agreeing with me ;) And providing a crucial point: patent trolls vs everyone else. A patent troll could also be a large company or even an individual so size is not such an issue rather the intent is more so. Resources to be a patent troll also matter very much so.
Weight of cross-licensing means in this context the small cost of doing business to a wealthy company to buy a currency of patents that can be spent for like material. Getting this kind of currency as a small player in trade for dollar currency is not as affordable. And of course patent currencies can be spent without losing them until the monopoly expires.
I'd like to understand in effect how software patents work. My totally bogus ideas so far are: if you are a big company you can afford to buy patents using a shotgun technique. Patent examiners and under-knowledged and under-staffed so they will approve practically anything. So you collect your portfolio of whatever sticks against the wall. Then if you happen to conflict with another big company you use your own arbitrary patents as a kind of currency and cross-license. If you conflict with a small company or individual you crush them with your lawyers - which is another kind of currency small players lack relatively. Big companies get to only have to deal with big companies. Small companies and individuals sometimes prevail but the deck is completely stacked against them due to the weight of cross-licensing and ability of big players to drag things forever through the legal system.
So, am I just being a cynical idiot or is this roughly how it works?
Sorry, didn't mention that the Ubuntu One Music Store has as a major feature of offering major label music with as little DRM as possible which means that most tracks are simply MP3s.
Often when I go to a YouTube channel for a musician I find out that the label has blocked it in Canada for copyright reasons. Also the new version of my operating system, Ubuntu 10.04, is coming with a music store but in Canada that music store is crippled by not carrying any of the major labels music. Is this what it means to have "301" status or has my country simply not signed enough treaties to enjoy the latest fad out of hollywood? Seriously, I want to buy my music from the Ubuntu One Music Store but in Canada I am being denied the opportunity to legally purchase my music! I guess I won't be incrementally replacing my existing music library just yet. You can bet that someday when I can get my music as MP3s only without any DRM surrounding them from my favorite artists who happen to have signed with major labels then the incremental replacement will begin. Now if hollywood would only serve me as a customer too: there is no theatre in my town, I'd like to see movies released to DVD earlier so that wouldn't suck so much too.
I think it is much more difficult to control a distributed mass of web-broadcasters and that is what shifted the balance to making them pay-to-play. When you can't move the payola around effectively to promote where your profits will come from there is no benefit to the "promotion" argument. The lack of control and therefore requirement to pay for web-casters accidently came back to bite radio broadcasters to maintain the illusion of being "fair." Of course, taken with a grain of salt ;)
This article makes me think of Open Source. Right now, Open Source isn't always the best solution but it is good enough. It also upsets the checks and balances of the old "complex" systems. It has done this by being better in really one key area: it is more scalable. Scalability in Open Source means that with peer review more bugs can be found faster and more features can be added on the fly. The complementary practice of "release early, release often" reinforces this. Closed source still has a lot of money to keep itself going but in the meantime, unless it is made illegal to share your efforts with your neighbor (the real basis of Copyleft): Open Source is reconstructing the playing field.
Think they may be suffering symptoms of: The Stanford Prison Experiment? Here are some: Videos. Basically give 'em power and they get stupid and abuse it. Same pattern happens all over, as in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. So, I guess they need to be spanked by a grown-up.
The main mistake people make about "life" is that they think it is an attribute - that there is a "life particle." That is incorrect, the true way to look at life is that it is a process. An orderly decay of energy states.
I am not a lawyer but..
What is Fark's standing to countersue for not only their lawyer's fee's but also punitive damages?
Power
An insight I'd like to pass on to yourself:
Motivation for such an extremely-pro approach to intellectual property laws. Revolves around money. Money is power. The old power structures seek preservation in the wave of new information structures.
Re:
The internet has changed the game, what results is all that remains to be seen. Publishing costs alone are minuscule with the internet versus running a printing press and then delivering all those papers. Traditional news also costs a lot of money for overhead like editors and reporters. The internet allows anyone to be an editor or reporter cooperatively with others. The result right now may not be as polished or carry the authority of established news sites but it has a great advantage. The market can support it. When news sources were limited money was funneled into relatively few players allowing them to afford all that overhead. Now they are finding that with what the internet has done to news - devalued it - the money they take in is not enough to cover their old structures. What is happening is that the market is adjusting to the new reality of smaller funding spread over many more people. You can partner with Blogger for a cut of advertisement revenue from your page for example. News will never be the same as it was while and after the market realities adjust. Perhaps it will be worse in the future but what will remain is that it will be within what people are willing to pay for it. You don't run out and say "Pay me!" right off the bat when there are enough other players providing cheaper news, you work within the market and scale back your operations to what you can finance. If enough people miss high-priced news and the editors and reporters that it allows then you'll be able to charge for it when people see that need if ever again. Right now with the internet and this period of explosion in decentralized news all the traditional players are doing is yelling into the wind. People have to want it to make it viable and the failure of pay-walls so far indicates that people don't want it bad enough. If everyone colluded to make pay-walls standard it would be different but as long as some players as willing to make a smaller profit with smaller overhead then that is just competition and high-overhead players need to either make what they have actually more valuable or scale back their costs in any creative ways they can find.
Re: Re:
You're welcome, I was worried I was bordering on spam with posting the links but eventually decided to post them as they are real world examples of what people are doing within this topic. All too often it seems people rush to judge before all the evidence is in. These services are evidence by their very existence, you as an individual judge can try them out and see if they actually provide something of value that you could not get from individual sources. Trying these services refines opinions of their value beyond simple black-and-white attitudes. With the theory that more refined experience leads to better arguments within discussion.
I'm going to drop two links here for aggregators that work cooperatively with content providers. Just to make you aware of them. Both work through RSS feeds so there is an implicit permission for both to operate - the content originators provided the feed so they provide permission for it to be consumed. The two sites are: Feedly and Lazyfeed. Feedly is integrated with Google Reader so any feeds you place into reader are automatically collated and translated into a magazine like format on the Feedly web-site. Lazyfeed is run by keyword and scans other aggregators such as feedburner for those keywords and then displays the results by your keywords. Feedly being composed of your hand-picked sources is much more signal than Lazyfeed. Lazyfeed contains some noise (spam) but overall has quite a bit of signal too. I lied, heres a third link: NewsMap. The interesting thing about NewsMap is that it collates how often a story is mentioned in sources and the more often something is mentioned the larger screen area it is given. That is another aggregator function that provides value above the individual sources.
These three aggregators show that there is value to be provided above what individual sources provide: that is why aggregation is not automatically evil.
Re: Re: Regulating a healthy market?
I think that unregulated capitalism can start out as moral but it is not sustainable over time. As soon as one party cuts a corner say polluting the environment for a cheaper manufacturing process or pays their workers an unfair wage then it becomes a race to the bottom. To me the market is what needs to be regulated and then within the market the capitalistic feedback seeking efficiency is a powerful way to live.
Re: Re: Regulating a healthy market?
My issue is not with capitalism: I think capitalism is wonderful. I also think that capitalism needs to be carefully regulated. The "two parties" ideal is correct, capitalism allows everyone to better themselves. Where I believe capitalism needs to be regulated is when each party is composed of nested sub-parties. Two businesses may be better off through a deal but what if their manufacturing process harmed other parties? Or one party did not honor a minimum standard of living for their employees so they could manufacture goods cheaper? Capitalism is an excellent method for dealing with scarcity and the only reason we can't have pure capitalism is that capitalism is not a person with any feelings and only seeks efficiency, it does not seek what is "right" and that is what regulation codifies. By whatever standard you consider to be "right." Regulation applying to all parties equalizes the costs involved so regulation simply puts your nations "morals" into the capitalistic framework and from there the beauty and magic of capitalism seeks efficiency within those flavors. As a side note when you consider intra-nation parties dealing with each other there is disparity in the cost of doing business because different nations encode different "morals."
You are right, I don't think that the proper penalty was served in this case. I think the huge fine Pfizer received will do quite a bit to restructure them but I fully believe that instead of trusting them to restructure themselves that they should have received the "corporate death penalty" and had the restructuring forced onto the market through either breaking them up or denying the medicare/aid contract. I don't trust companies to change themselves - they just don't seem to be capable of doing it most of the time - I think that for the health of the market itself it would have been better to cut them up into pieces and then hung those pieces out in the public square to terrify the next generation of companies that would have grown to replace them. To me, that would have effectively addressed what I see as the structural issues.
Regulating a healthy market?
Regulated markets exist because pure capitalism has no morals. Pure capitalism is about seeking the most efficient method of accomplishing a goal. Regulated capitalism provides moral values in the form of costs for pure capitalism to take into account. Pfizer's conflict here arises because they were not properly taking the regulated values into account and were instead following a more pure capitalism of maximizing profit. The consequences have been severe, they have lost a very large portion of profit and hopefully that will make Pfizer consider regulations with more weight in the future. What I find troubling is that if Pfizer is "too big to nail" then perhaps it should be broken up into companies that are not "too big to nail." This is a systemic issue, a healthy market depends on a diverse set of players that follow the regulations while seeking efficiencies to make a profit. The fine penalized the profit but does not effectively address the organization of the player(s). If Pfizer itself had been denied a major contract because they broke the regulations then they would have had to restructure themselves and their assets to continue to sell their products. Restructuring would have reflected better the consequences of their actions and the new player(s) that emerged from the restructuring would also have had more incentive to follow the regulations. Pfizer has still been dealt a large blow: they lost a very significant portion of profit. The issue I have is that simply removing the profit does not fully address the structure of the organization that collected it.
Re: Re:
You're welcome, I find it to be a very useful service! ;)
There is always somewhere to go: like here. It depends what kind of news you are into. I rarely go to general "national" news sites but go to specialized ones all the time. Then there is the magic of RSS feeds and sites like http:/www.feedly.com to aggregate them into convenient formats. I happen to think the future is not monolithic news but rather everyone reporting what matters to them and then that being aggregated. It may be more difficult to make money when news is decentralized - perhaps traditional news has been overvalued the entire time and only now the bubble is popping.
Re: Re:
It also depends what the money is hedging against I would forward: if the money can be seen as a "cost of doing business" in that it solidifies your competitiveness then it might be seen as a bargain. If it drives your competitors out of business that is more of the pie for you.
Thank you
Thank you for agreeing with me ;) And providing a crucial point: patent trolls vs everyone else. A patent troll could also be a large company or even an individual so size is not such an issue rather the intent is more so. Resources to be a patent troll also matter very much so.
Re: Explain to me why this is wrong.
Weight of cross-licensing means in this context the small cost of doing business to a wealthy company to buy a currency of patents that can be spent for like material. Getting this kind of currency as a small player in trade for dollar currency is not as affordable. And of course patent currencies can be spent without losing them until the monopoly expires.
Explain to me why this is wrong.
I'd like to understand in effect how software patents work. My totally bogus ideas so far are: if you are a big company you can afford to buy patents using a shotgun technique. Patent examiners and under-knowledged and under-staffed so they will approve practically anything. So you collect your portfolio of whatever sticks against the wall. Then if you happen to conflict with another big company you use your own arbitrary patents as a kind of currency and cross-license. If you conflict with a small company or individual you crush them with your lawyers - which is another kind of currency small players lack relatively. Big companies get to only have to deal with big companies. Small companies and individuals sometimes prevail but the deck is completely stacked against them due to the weight of cross-licensing and ability of big players to drag things forever through the legal system.
So, am I just being a cynical idiot or is this roughly how it works?
Re: Is this why I can't get major label music?
Sorry, didn't mention that the Ubuntu One Music Store has as a major feature of offering major label music with as little DRM as possible which means that most tracks are simply MP3s.
Is this why I can't get major label music?
Often when I go to a YouTube channel for a musician I find out that the label has blocked it in Canada for copyright reasons. Also the new version of my operating system, Ubuntu 10.04, is coming with a music store but in Canada that music store is crippled by not carrying any of the major labels music. Is this what it means to have "301" status or has my country simply not signed enough treaties to enjoy the latest fad out of hollywood? Seriously, I want to buy my music from the Ubuntu One Music Store but in Canada I am being denied the opportunity to legally purchase my music! I guess I won't be incrementally replacing my existing music library just yet. You can bet that someday when I can get my music as MP3s only without any DRM surrounding them from my favorite artists who happen to have signed with major labels then the incremental replacement will begin. Now if hollywood would only serve me as a customer too: there is no theatre in my town, I'd like to see movies released to DVD earlier so that wouldn't suck so much too.
Control?
I think it is much more difficult to control a distributed mass of web-broadcasters and that is what shifted the balance to making them pay-to-play. When you can't move the payola around effectively to promote where your profits will come from there is no benefit to the "promotion" argument. The lack of control and therefore requirement to pay for web-casters accidently came back to bite radio broadcasters to maintain the illusion of being "fair." Of course, taken with a grain of salt ;)
Open Source
This article makes me think of Open Source. Right now, Open Source isn't always the best solution but it is good enough. It also upsets the checks and balances of the old "complex" systems. It has done this by being better in really one key area: it is more scalable. Scalability in Open Source means that with peer review more bugs can be found faster and more features can be added on the fly. The complementary practice of "release early, release often" reinforces this. Closed source still has a lot of money to keep itself going but in the meantime, unless it is made illegal to share your efforts with your neighbor (the real basis of Copyleft): Open Source is reconstructing the playing field.
In the head...
Think they may be suffering symptoms of: The Stanford Prison Experiment? Here are some: Videos. Basically give 'em power and they get stupid and abuse it. Same pattern happens all over, as in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. So, I guess they need to be spanked by a grown-up.