I really have to think that's an incredibly minor issue. First off, the number of titles that the mass market wants to read that are out of copyright is tiny. Second, they'd have to compete with free (i.e. Project Gutenberg).
You know, normally EULA's are pretty confusing, yet everyone seems to be unable to read plain english. If they don't approve of the methodology, you may not publish the results. Following the EULA, they really have an easy out to just claim they don't like your study and they don't approve. Why would the words "and approved" be in there otherwise?
True. Though that seems to be the very infrequent exception rather than the rule.
It's all about price. If I write a book and someone wants to sell it in one single country, I'm going to get a lot lower of a price from them than someone who wants to sell it worldwide. This is especially true of electronic sales, as it's (unfortunately) tied to certain technologies. Books that only play on the Kindle, audiobooks that only play on the iPod, etc.
This isn't really a major issue with physical goods because you have to pay shipping. This naturally limits the sales outside of your region. So when you go try to shop it around to this new region, you don't actually have to worry about the previous store eating into the sales in the new region. You have an illusion that "nobody has an issue with that", which just isn't true. They just know that it is self-limiting.
So if Amazon wants to sell its Kindle books all over the world, it will need to fork over a much bigger chunk of money. This was be a stupid plan, considering the Kindle may not ever pick up enough steam and fail. Investors aren't going to pony up all that dough to take a global risk when it's much safer to make it succeed in a single country first.
There's an argument there that by not paying for dead authors' works, the living authors actually get more money because you have a certain amount of disposable income. Of course, it's opinion without actual science to back it up, and I can see how it might not work out that way.
It made me think of an additional feature. I often have a different book going that I read at home, one I leave in my car for when I'm waiting on a Dr.'s appointment or eating at a restaurant alone, and another one on my ipod hooked up to my car stereo. It would be great to be able to have a book that I could transition from reading to listening to and back again any time I pleased.
First off, as others pointed out the technology will improve. I think one day it probably will replace human audiobook readers. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Unfortunately, the quality of the performer has a LOT to do with the experience of the listener. Take for example Frank Muller. He was widely known as one of the "best" audiobook readers in the business, his career ended only by a tragic accident in 2001. I knew of him because he read almost all of Stephen King's audiobooks. While I feel for the man and his family, I have to say that I found him unlistenable. I bought a recording of Black House and could not make it past the first half hour. He read things in an overwrought, almost Shakespearean tone, even for mundane bits of narration. And every sentence had the same basic pitch structure. It made me laugh, as well as everyone I played it for. The part that made me stop laughing was that I'd paid $60 for something I couldn't listen to.
Clearly he has plenty of fans, what with all his awards and accolades and such. But he was not my cup of tea. This is unfortunate, as I'm a King fan. Even if I've read a book, it's nice to go back and listen to it again later on audiobook while driving or working out. After Muller had to retire, George Guidall performed the rewrite of Gunslinger. I was dismayed to realize he used the exact same performance style. Since then I haven't even tried another King audiobook. Considering the quality of his more recent output, this hasn't really bothered me that much.
And then you get older or more obscure titles that no one is going to perform because of the costs involved. Or titles that were performed long ago and you can't find them anymore. I recently found a torrent of Heinlein's Time for the Stars. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it was a fairly lousy quality copy of an old cassette and the performer was nothing special. The only other way you're going to find this recording is eBay/craiglist/garage sale.
On top of this, places like Amazon and Audible frequently don't even list the performer. I'd say "usually", in the case of the titles I look for. And when they do and it's a person you've never heard of (also frequent), good luck finding a sample of their performance.
So yeah, I see a huge market for something like this if they can improve the technology enough. Audiobooks are insanely overpriced, and I wonder what using software like this might do to that price. I would hope that there'd still be a market for certain performers, like Jim Dale. His Harry Potter performances are wonderful. And I'd miss hearing the works of Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris in any voice other than his. Of course, eventually it's likely that a computer simulation will be able to mimic them fairly accurately. I know I can already mimic the latter two in my head when I read their writing in print. Imagine if you could get the works of Twain read in a sufficiently Twain-like voice. Or set the voice to "James Earl Jones" when you listen to Lord of the Rings.
The authors have nothing to worry about. In fact, they'll probably make money on the deal. It's the performers and those who work in the recording department who are going to be out of a job. But then, they'll be jobs created for software people. Such is the way of change.
Most likely because they only have the book rights for all those books in the US. It would have been foolish to have paid extra money for worldwide rights (or even US+UK) when they were going to be testing the Kindle in the US first to see if it would flop or succeed. It may or not also be related to purchasing UK versions of books (because yeah, some books are localized even though it's kind of dumb) and purchasing a different title list based on popularity in the UK.
I would expect once they purchase book rights to your region, they'll turn on the iPhone app even before they get the Kindle out the door. Unless some exec gets nervous that somehow that will make the Kindle less likely to sell.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if no copyright would actually lead to an even worse situation. It would be even harder to get source code for a non-free program. The "service model" works ok for some commercial software, but poorly for most. Most of the companies I can think of that make money off the service model (i.e. Red Hat) are actually using a large percentage of someone else's man hours (the people who make most of the software they repackage and sell support for). So what are my options then?
Which of these means I can make a standard of living that doesn't involve cardboard housing? This is a serious question. Please use some actual figures for income to show a business model that means I can continue to make a living as a computer programmer in this post copyright world.
If that's not enough, I'll have to live in a world where almost every programmer is going through this same problem and be stuck with a limited selection of software that will likely suck much more in comparison to what we have today.
First, I don't think you've read many of his comments over the years. One of the thrusts of his disgruntlement over software is when source code isn't provided, because the user can't improve or change the software to meet his needs. He also seems to get quite pissed off when companies take a GPL piece of code and wrap it in a bunch more closed source code. This is a guy who will stop you in mid-sentence and berate you if "GNU" isn't put in front of the word "Linux."
No copyright would not level the playing field. Microsoft's dominance has a lot more to do with keeping things proprietary and closed and constantly adding new proprietary and closed features just as soon as people reverse-engineer the old ones.
Plus, there's the issue that plenty of people that use the GPL != RMS. The GPL is used by a large variety of people with a large variety of philosophies.
Yes, the designed it this way. It's definitely not a perfect system. But it's a decent system and works that doesn't try to pretend that human nature doesn't exist. It's based on "the wisdom of crowds." Look it up, sometime, it's an interesting theory. Basically, at any given point in time, the system may not come up with the correct result. But the theory is that, given some time, it will work itself out.
You might want to read the section starting "Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary?" on this page. First off, users are randomly given a handful of moderation points. Second, if they post a comment on an article, all of their moderation on other people's comments on that article are undone and they can't moderate that article anymore. This helps keep people who are really vocal about a topic from also being the one to moderate their debate opponents.
Now, this doesn't always work if you have a crowd with a bias and they have to moderate someone who takes the opposite opinion. Unfortunately, the way the summary has been written has created an automatic bias against you. I can imagine an alternate version of the summary where it was spun to present you as the underdog going after fraudulent content repackaging middleman, and how you were a shining example to the RIAA of the way they should be working because you never go after end users of your content, only middleman (at least, based on your claims in your post).
Yet another problem you're having is related to being a new user. Every logged in user (as opposed to anonymous posters that show up as "Anonymous Coward") have a score called "karma." This is based on whether people have generally moderated their comments up or down. Since your very first posts were unpopular, you've gotten bad karma already and your new posts start out at a score of 0 instead of the normal neutral score of 1. Since most people seem to default to viewing only comments at score 1 or higher, this may also make it take a bit more time for you to be moderated up.
The last wrinkle here is "meta-moderation." This is where random users of the system are chose to moderate someone else's moderation. So basically, it's another check and balance. These people will review random situations of moderation and say "this user moderated this comment right/wrong." I'm not sure on the details, but this may determine how often the original moderator is allowed to moderate discussions in the future.
Again, not a perfect system but one with some checks and balances. It's very difficult to have discussion groups on the internet and have them not overrun by crap. Slashdot actually does one of the best jobs out there, I think.
Sadly, some idiot has modded your quite informative post as Flamebait. This means your post disappeared for anyone reading this site with their comment threshold set at 1. The comment is the thing near the top of the discussion. It lets you weed out comment moderated below a certain score. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the world who are willing to do such a thing.
Be patient, though, as hopefully someone else will come along and moderate your post back up. Until then, you may need to change the threshold to find it. You'll want to make sure you click on the "Reply To This" button under the post, otherwise your post will show up out of place, like the one you just made (don't worry, I know you said you're new here).
Hey, yeah, that'd be awesome. We'd get rid of that pesky GPL overnight!
Much better formatted!
This response sounds far more reasonable and rational than almost all of the people attacking the guy on the summary links.
As a programmer, I frequently need to find icons for stuff. I've done searches for "free icons" before and looked very skeptically on some sites with thousands of images, none of them attributed in any way. How could I tell they're legit? Answer, you can't. Some people in the comments keep harping about watermarking, but how do you watermark a 32x32 pixel x 256 color icon? How do you watermark a simple vector graphic? And aren't we generally against watermarking anyway, due to a) possible quality depredation due to wedging non-image data in there and b) the NSA being able to track all our images?
This is why I generally just stuck to the crappy icons provided with my IDE. When I found the various CC icon packs (my favorite is silk), it was a godsend. Attribution is a very small price to pay.
Nice strawman you got there.
I'd say the system we have now (and have had for quite some time). If a copyright holder observes their copyrighted material being used, they ask the person in question to show ownership.
The main issue I have with the current system is on the value of the penalties imposed.
So, what is your suggestion? No copyrights at all?
Turns out two can play the strawman game.
God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein
