The argument about committing crime being outlawed would be more convincing if basic copyright infringement were treated as a crime and was actually investigated and punished in some proportionate way by the authorities when it occurs. The reality is that copyright is in most cases a civil matter, which means that while the cumulative damage to a genuine victim can be significant, they are essentially responsible for their own protection, without any police or public prosecutors to help them the way a victim of say theft or fraud would have. And the costs of bringing an action to recover losses are disproportionate in most cases, because copyright infringement kills with a thousand cuts.

Also, we're talking about the EU. Everything your wrote about fair use doesn't apply here. We tend to have more specific exemptions to copyright in our national laws in Europe, often including certain special privileges for libraries because of their unique public service role, and that is the matter at hand.

The thing is, as many a Slashdotter has pointed out, you can't accomplish the same thing virtually. If you let people download material from a library then there are only two realistic options. One is that you provide the material with huge amounts of DRM and interfere with readers' own systems in dubious ways. The other is that you create a blatant avenue for copyright infringement and inherently give it special legal blessing that is intended to protect the public resource of a library for entirely different reasons. It is highly unlikely that libraries would support the former, and there is no way the latter was going to fly legally.

I would agree with you, except that a free and competitive market can only work this way if it's also an informed market.

If you can lawfully sell someone a ticket for a flight, which they purchase with reasonable expectations in terms of promptness, comfort or whatever else, and you can then fail to meet the customer's reasonable expectations when they bought their ticket without their having any recourse, then you aren't really in a competitive market at all. The customer has no way to know when, or how, to vote with their wallet.

You can certainly make a reasonable argument that this is more about transparency and advertising standards than it is about needing heavyweight industry regulation, but either way the current market dynamics evidently are not sufficient to protect the customer alone.

Of course there is. It's not 100% obviously, but the idea that you can in general provide inferior products or services and yet charge the same as or more than your competition makes no sense on any level.

I don't have a fancy name for it. For essentials like shoes and food I'm lucky enough to have plenty in the bank these days to buy what I need, so I have the luxury of choosing quality without sacrificing timeliness. But for something that costs a significant amount by whatever my financial standards are today, I'd rather wait and buy something good.

Why? I for one will happily pay a higher price, even a much higher one, for good quality and service. I don't think this costs as much as it seems, because for example a good pair of shoes will last much longer than a bad pair that you'll have to replace much sooner. In any case, I prioritise value for money over cost, so for any non-essentials I'll usually prefer to save up for something nicer than buy cheap consumer tat that I won't really enjoy or find useful.

The irony of this discussion is that as someone who lives in the UK and pays his licence fee, I still sometimes run into content on the BBC that I'm told I'm not allowed to see because I live in the wrong place.

This is why I lack much sympathy for the Beeb when people use VPNs and the like to circumvent geographical restrictions. I do understand that there are commercial agreements and licensing conditions at work here, and I do understand that the BBC Worldwide commercial arm is not the same as the BBC itself (though it is a wholly owned subsidiary).

Just to be clear, I think the BBC is a borderline national treasure. It is certainly not perfect, but the range and quality of programming it has produced over the years is so much better than the apparent norm on commercial television channels that I pay my licence fee gladly, even if it is a bizarre pseudo-tax based on archaic rules about who has to contribute.

However, if you're going to take primarily public funding, with only a relatively small amount coming from BBC Worldwide's commercial activities, then not sharing the results with those members of the public who are paying your bills is not on, IMHO.

Which is an argument ethically akin to car companies knowing they have a potentially fatal defect but weighing up the cost of actually fixing it and saving lives vs. the expected cost of compensation lawsuits and not fixing it if the latter is lower.

The solution, of course, is to structure the law and/or regulate the industry so that the cost of screwing people unreasonably is always substantially greater than the cost of behaving more appropriately. Passenger suffered unreasonable discomfort on any flight? Automatic 100% refund, with a presumption in favour of the passenger if your provision is significantly below the industry average (or minimum regulated standards if the industry colludes to reduce the average).

I would have a lot more sympathy if budget airlines didn't keep pulling so many obviously shady moves to try to look cheap yet acceptable quality while actually charging more that customers expected and not always offering the experience people thought they were buying. This has become so bad that we literally have new consumer protection laws taking effect in Europe around now precisely to make a bunch of the tricks that some of these airlines pull explicitly illegal.

It should have been a reasonable and simple solution to offer transparent pricing and mid-range options, but I think that ship sailed^W^Wplane departed already. Now the industry, particularly on the budget end, needs to clean up its act or face increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction at a time when people are already looking to alternatives where viable ones exist.

Yes, there's a standard way to specify autoplay for HTML5 videos. However, not all browsers will respect it. For example, Safari on iOS won't play unless the user specifically starts the video, and this was a deliberate decision on Apple's part.

In some ways, I wish more sites would do stuff like that. It would stop my mobile ISP from "helping me save bandwidth" by intercepting all the images on sites I visit and compressing them so horribly that they are often useless. I didn't ask them to do that, I don't get anywhere near my bandwidth allowance, and they aren't providing the service I pay for.

Is it? I've worked for plenty of employers who said they offered things like on-the-job training, but in practice that often meant they had a book shelf and sometimes a senior developer would give a 45 minute talk. Compared to attending multiple lectures every day for a few years... well, it's hardly a comparison at all, it's a completely different depth of study.

As I wrote elsewhere, I firmly believe that studying for a degree is not the only way to acquire this level of theoretical knowledge, but I find the idea that any developer would just pick up the same material as a normal result of day-to-day work in a typical programming job implausible. It's not about being stupid, it's about being ignorant (in the literal sense, not the derogatory one), and it takes a lot more than reading a few chapters in a book from the office library and a couple of blog posts to meet the standard.

Perhaps, if all you do is join-the-dots programming for CRUD front-ends. Personally, my clients pay me to create new data structures and algorithms that solve problems no-one ever solved before. I can't just write result=solve_my_problem(), because I'm the guy they hire to create that API.

Remember all that theory about space and time complexity, and which guarantees you can and can't achieve in distributed systems, and formally proving algorithms correct, and how compilers and virtual machines and run-time environments work? I use this stuff all the time.

Yes it is, but the quality of that experience -- what you know and how you think as a result -- matters. As has been noted many times in this industry, there is a difference between someone who has had ten years of experience and someone who has had the same year of experience ten times.

A good CS degree course is one way to gain a lot of useful experience in a relatively short time. There are others, but a job where you spend all day writing glue code that joins up someone else's library and framework APIs isn't one of them.

What do you mean "no real excuse to not help out"?

I think FOSS is great. I appreciate the work that a lot of people in the community do, and I'm happy to help out a bit myself if I can. I also think competition is healthy in the browser market, and I'm glad that Firefox is out there.

But the last time I tried to be helpful by following a Mozillian's bug reporting advice, it took me several hours to fix the damage after their instructions resulted in damage to my normal set-up. That was time I was not then billing to a client, which ultimately reduced my income by a few hundred bucks that month. Setting up a VM on my normal (Windows) PC as suggested a few posts up is not a trivial undertaking either. This is more than I'm willing to do as a favour on personal time, and it's not what my clients pay my company to do.

Mozilla Corporation is a commercial organisation. It has over 1,000 employees, it brings in millions of dollars in revenues, and it reportedly pays its CEO more than most of us here are ever likely to earn. I'm a professional, and my company is available for software development and consultancy work. If you want me to do your testing or bug fixing for you, there's a line from Goodfellas that comes to mind.

Given my own past experience with trying to help, and my position on why I won't do it myself any more, I do find it irritating when Firefox developers/fans start writing as if anyone else has some sort of moral obligation to follow onerous procedures to help out. I rarely write about this myself, but since you've pressed the issue, I thought a few facts might bring some perspective.

Obviously your second statement is over-generalised, but in any case, you're assuming that the only reason to understand different sorting algorithms is to implement them. How do you know which of a variety of algorithms to choose, or even that there's a useful question you could go ask the Internet, if you aren't even aware of the possibilities that are out there?

Sure, I could go read a bunch of papers every time I needed to choose which tool to choose, but if I had to do that then someone who actually knew their data structures and algorithms would be getting useful stuff done while I was reading. What next, don't bother learning the syntax of your programming language, you can just look up operator precedence in the on-line help of your IDE, and if you get it wrong your compiler will probably just give you a warning anyway?

I agree with you that CS is more about theory than practice, but it's easy to construct a false dichotomy here. A lot of university-level CS courses are less beneficial than they could be even in teaching theory precisely because they get so stuck on theory that they forget to give either motivating examples or sufficient practical skills for students to explore on their own.

University-level mathematics often seems to suffer from the same affliction, presenting undergraduates with the kind of obscure, magical results that might be interesting to someone with a heavily theoretical mindset working on a PhD, but ignoring the reality that even among undergraduate mathematics students, those who have that mindset are probably a small minority. Maybe more of them would develop that kind of thinking during their studies and go on to enjoy or develop deep theoretical work, but if you confuse and/or bore them out of academia first you'll never know.