I'm not instigating an 'insane left vs. right debate' ;-)

I agree that your solution would be relatively cheap, but it would be wrong. There seems to be an attitude that those associated with the ??AAs deserve to be supported by the public. Why them, and not people who deliver measurable benefit to society - teachers, garbagemen, nurses and so forth?

I think I'd rather that artisits and musicians provide for themselves, just like everyone else. I don't owe them special rights to work created 50 years ago, nor do I owe them any special retirement fund that is denied to software developers, private tutors, or any other work-for-hire private market participant.

Corporate musicians and artists are better treated by our society than almost any class of persons throughout history. Yet we can probably all agree that these people contribute less to creativity and originality than most independent artists, where an 'artist' is defined purely as someone who creates something.

There's really nothing special about these people - music existed before the 1930s, and it will exist even if we allow the RIAA to go to the wall. Their advantage is hype, marketing and spin. They've no celestial right to that.

I can't help but think that this is a troll, and the mods have been taken for suckers.

If we look at the major creative works of the last 100 years, there's Disney animated film, the creation of Rock & Roll, the majority of Science Fiction, almost all Televisual and Film works and a bunch more things that have built on 'plundering the past of its riches'. Disney ripped off the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (Grimm and Andersen 'plundered' folklore), Rock & Roll was based on blues rhythms, most SciFi is folklore, rewritten with shiny robots and there's nothing on TV or in Film that doesn't rip-off Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.

Yes, that's pretty facile, but you have to remember to what I am responding ;-) These things are all worth watching, and learning from. Simply because they are not entirely original does not mean that they are worthless...

Still, congratulations, DNS-and-BIND - I think that when you are unable to see any worth in contemporary culture, you qualify for a stick, a cap, a bus-pass and possibly a kid-infested lawn!

Do you know that in Scotland, we deep-fry pizza? It's called pizza crunch, and it's disgusting! :-)

Best. Slashdot. Comment. Ever.

How long were you waiting for the French to use one egg on /. in order to make that joke? Well played sir!

In fact, this is as close to 'copyright theft' as we have yet seen. In this case, the artist's copyright has been more or less appropriated by the music label, with no visible attempt on their part to rectify the situation...

Well, evolution can skew towards all sorts of benefits in long life. This can happen quite easily if having grand parents who help look after the family mean that the youngest survive to reproduce.

To say that evolution is all about reproduction is nonsense. It's also about raising offspring to survive better than the environment and other predators can kill them off.

"This is a public street, not a beach"

Umm...aren't most beaches public?

Not everyone can afford a $30k SUV. On the whole, we in the UK feel that if you can't afford to have a life-saving procedure at the age of 40, then the nation-wide community should pay for it for you. There's a lot of waste in the NHS (stop-smoking co-ordinators, diversity outreach co-ordinators, etc. - anything with 'co-ordinator' in it, basically), but I prefer to live in a community where someone who needs that broken leg fixed so that they don't walk with a limp for the rest of their lives gets treatment.

I do recall a rumour from a few years ago that the US health system is not cheaper than socialised health care though. If that's true, then I think that our system is superior. Even if all our system does is stop you from dying for a few years...

In which case, why not let it die? If you want a populist service, there is Sky, and ITV and Five and Channel 4. The BBC should stick to high-quality, informative broadcasting - rather than paying premium salaries to ensure that they have the 'talent' to fulfil their obligations on BBC 1 and Radio 1.

Why should I have to prove that I don't watch TV online? That's impossible.

They should prove that I do.

The TV licence is anyway ridiculous when you consider the populist direction that the BBC has taken in the last 10 years. It does very little under its public service remit and the licence is anachronistic and unfair now. I don't think, for example, that football would be unknown in the UK were it not for MOTD. There are other available outlets.

But the idea that I should fund the BBC unless I can prove that I take steps not to consume its output is scary, and a good measure of the political atmosphere of guilty until proven innocent that has invested the UK over the last 10 years or so.

That's remarkably reasonable. If I was LOVEFiLM or Amazon I'd be cackling with glee. I'm not though, so I'll just be depressed that one could hope to patent an algorithm. Not hardware that carries out an algorithm, but just an algorithm.

Although if I were a netflix shareholder I'd be pissed off that the company were giving away my funded research for free, when they could probably get it closed off and reap the rewards. Mind you, the amount of publicity that they have received - I know about Netflix now and I don't watch DVDs or live in the USA! - is probably more than worth it...

It's not selling yourself short to work on FOSS for a very simple reason. Work on FF, or Thunderbird, or open-sourcing a script that I wrote to convert music is free at the point of delivery. That is, anyone can use it without paying. Freely given, and freely distributed.

However, in this case the user of the algorithm is paying Netflix. Netflix takes the work that I have done, and closes it off from other people. My work goes not to benefit the community, but merely to benefit one company - a company that has paid me (cheaply) for my work. Since companies by definition only care about the bottom line, their intent is not to benefit the community, but to benefit themselves. You are effectively working for them for cheap, selling yourself short.

If netflix were to give away the algo for use by anyone else too, then it would be very generous and then you may be able to make a comparison with FOSS. I( have no idea if they will do that or not. However, if I were a shareholder, I would not want them to give away a potentially killer feature for which they paid $1m.

Saying that, if you enjoy playing with this, go ahead! Just be honest with yourself about. If you still want to do it, wallow in it. But it's an extremely pernicious thing to do to link this with working on something that is done to benefit everyone. It simply is not the same thing.