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I have a bad feeling about this

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#21

Post by eternalban »

olefoo wrote: post #11
camwest wrote: post #7

I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity ( http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book... ) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people. It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists. Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet. That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.

The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#22

Post by tnicola »

bo1024 wrote: post #15
tnicola wrote: post #6

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrel…

> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires Good luck finding one of those. More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic sys…

> More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives.

100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other.

An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month.

Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000.

Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely.

Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#23

Post by tnicola »

petercooper wrote: post #17
tnicola wrote: post #6

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrel…

don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition. But that partly encourages new competitors. If a market is dominated by a good product at a good price, it's harder to compete than if it is grossly overpriced.

So imagine how far ahead a company would be if they were first with a fairly priced product.

I believe that this is why price is not a competitive advantage and you need more substance to beat out your competition.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#24

Post by redstripe »

The BBC commissioned a study [1] that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. This from a public domain "brand". Meanwhile companies like Disney lobby for perpetual copyright to protect their own interest at the cost of all the lost opportunities that will never exist.

I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses.

I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#25

Post by noibl »

TL;DR: As I enter my twilight years, I know that Star Wars will continue to comfort me long into my dotage.

raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game.

America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it.

---

To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand.

Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#26

Post by tnicola »

SethMurphy wrote: post #14

This artical is dead on. With this as motivation, we should all be more like Stallman and un-marginalize his point of view. His point of view is also mostly dead on, and always has been ... We can not let the mighty few rule the majority, it is not the way the internet was envisioned to be, and we should fight for it to remain as envisioned. In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of a…

And if I lived in the US, where my daily internet activity would be considered a felony, I would consider it a grave injustice that I had to pay more than companies' cost +10% for the internet service.

As it stands, I don't pay for the TV service, so I have no problem paying going rates. (I'll let you deduct the rest and plead the 5th).

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#27

Post by bo1024 »

tnicola wrote: post #22
bo1024 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires Good luck finding one of those. More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic sys…

> More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. 100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other. An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each…

I agree to a point, but I'm not so sure about this.

> Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down.

Here, you seem to be implying that incentives and benevolence are exclusive. The political (and economic) system can be set up so that it rewards benevolence, or it can punish benevolence. To get more benevolence, I think we must also work on changing the rules to encourage it. (As well as voting with our wallets for benevolent companies/authors/etc.)

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#29

Post by meow »

FourSquareToo wrote: post #9

Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.

Software patents are already not valid in India. So no patent on implementing one-click buying. On the other hand, no protection for mpeg family of protocols either.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#30

Post by zanny »

eternalban wrote: post #21
olefoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet. That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.

The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.

Reminds me of the Confederacy from the prequels.

Oh yeah, those are forbidden.

Regardless, the Republic and Confederacy were both toys of the Emperor, so I guess Google and Firefox...

Ok I'll just leave.

Star Wars should be public domain though (the original 3 movies). Fuck infinite copyright.

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