Frankly, I'm not sure we ever stood a chance. If you read the "debates" in the House of Lords and with senior civil servants that have taken place in recent months, they are among the most one-sided politics I have ever seen on any subject. Several of the prominent members of the Lords who speak on the subject came from Big Media backgrounds or have continuing interests in the area. I recall noticing one prominent figure openly acknowledging that their primary concern with the whole issue was the promotion of "UK PLC".

In contrast, hardly ever have I seen anyone who walks the corridors of power raise the question of whether copyright and the associated restrictions were morally justifiable as a statutory limitation on freedoms that would otherwise exist, or suggest that perhaps the existing implementation of the law might have been excessive or that the proposed changes might not go far enough, or give the slightest consideration to the negative effects of copyright on over 60 million people living in the UK, or acknowledge that existing copyright laws have been coerced and sidelined to further the interests of rightsholders at the expense of the public. There are a few rare exceptions to this, even including one or two of the Lords who have spoken, but they are barely a drop in the ocean.

This was never a debate, because one side wasn't even invited. Whether that was a deliberate policy or merely an indication of the ignorance and one-sided experience of almost everyone in this field who operates at a senior government level we cannot easily tell, but the effect is the same either way.

That's not a reason to lower ticket prices. That's a reason to either (a) stop paying for stadiums with tax dollars or (b) tax the tickets so that taxpayers recoup the expense.

But as long as the stadiums are full of people who willingly bought the tickets, there's no reason to lower ticket prices.

So... what you're saying is that Apple hacked her blackberry in order to leak her photos? Dastardly indeed!

(Honestly, given the Kardashians' history, my first guess is that she leaked them herself in order not to be left out when all the other celebrity photos were retrieved from their hacked iCloud accounts.)

Not really. If there is sufficient demand for something, the market would tend to provide it at a viable price. For more niche uses, it wouldn't, but that's always the deal when you go outside the mainstream with any technology.

The difference in "my world" is that there would be a much shorter time limit on how long any sort of lock-in could last for. If anything, that should create a greater incentive to maximise availability via different channels as broadly and quickly as possible to gain the maximum commercial advantage from the limited-time opportunity. Creators and distributors would not be able to play the waiting game or lock people into very expensive payment schemes, because they would always be competing with the not-so-far-away alternative of completely free access, so it would almost inevitably be more profitable to promote more access sooner while it still brings in revenues for them.

On the other hand, I simply don't subscribe to the "everything must be free" camp. It costs a lot to make good content, and someone has to pay for it. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that a lot of people aren't holding up their side of the deal, and that means some combination of the content providers and the other consumers who do pay for content are picking up the slack unfairly. So, want to play something on Linux? Get Linux to support my idealised bulletproof DRM and show there's enough of a market to justify any overheads in making the content available on that platform -- just like any other platform has to. Don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else? No problem, you aren't forced to, but unlike today you'll still get to enjoy the content within a relevant time frame after its statutory protection expires.

I was thinking that the "perfect" solar cell already existed....

http://ask.metafilter.com/1430...

Hah... and so far, nobody noticed my gaffe regarding the Apple II -- 1-2-3 actually ran on the IBM PC XT IIRC; it'd been reading too many other comments and TFS and got sucked into a reality distortion field.

Interesting that you should raise the FDIV bug (which was discovered via an Excel spreadsheet IIRC, didn't read the wiki page) -- I seem to recall there was some rounding error that hit excel spreadsheets later on in life too, where the rounding rules differed in two parts of the cell operations, so that you could have data that became more inaccurate each time the page was run.

You can always leave it; romantic relationships are not a divine right. I'm a proponent of "do lots of group activities and develop relationships based on commonality, some of which may become romantic" -- traditional/e-dating tends to be a shortcut, and like most shortcuts, has its own hazards.

Arranged marriage tends to have just as high a success ratio as marriages based on formal dating. Just saying.

Indeed. No-one is arguing that abolishing copyright today wouldn't be good for everyone but the rightsholders tomorrow. It's whether it's still good for everyone next week or next year or ten years from now that is in question.

Your point about the best amateur work today competing with good professional work from a decade or two ago is well made, and it's a sign of how far and how fast technology has evolved in recent years. However, it's also a sign that amateurs now have access to tools and techniques originally developed for professionals a few years ago. You're ignoring that in a world where no-one has any incentive to make big budget productions like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, there is also no budget to develop those professional-grade tools in the first place and nothing to start the trickle down effect.

I think you're also overstating the case dramatically. While today's dedicated and skilled amateurs can make work rivalling professional quality from yesteryear, few amateurs have the time and skill to actually do it. The rest of the time, you get music recordings that are good, but not as good as they would have been if someone had hired a professional recording studio with the right acoustics and equipment. You get the occasional brilliant piece of writing, but you have to filter out a thousand uninspired works of fan fiction to find it. You get a fun film project, but it looks like someone's friend held the camcorder and they ran through a couple of After Effects tutorials afterwards, because that really is what happened. And of course they used After Effects, probably downloaded from a pirate site, to do that, because for the most part the community-built alternatives to professionally created software don't cut it.

As a final point, the growth in capabilities and scale for modern creative projects is astounding. Twenty years ago, a single developer could create a state-of-the-art game, maybe with a little help from specialists on the graphics and audio fronts. Today, a single good developer can still create a fun game, but it won't look like the state-of-the-art, or anything close to it. I'm all for games with interesting gameplay and films with interesting storylines, and I'll be the first to agree that those are more important than the latest big budget effects and a full soundtrack. But professional quality work today can produce all of the above, and no small group of amateurs will ever compete with that, no matter how enthusiastic or skilled they might be or how long you wait.

So I don't think it's self-evident from your valid point about what some today's amateurs can do today that amateurs in a few years would match today's best professional work if we abolished the incentives for big budget productions tomorrow. Star Wars was released in 1977, nearly four decades ago, and today's hobbyists on YouTube are still doing light saber effects. At that rate, most of us will be dead before anyone is keeping up with what today's commercial industry can do.

Right, but it's that scarcity that matters in this case, because that is the part that takes serious time and money to do. Copyright is just a way of amortizing those costs over a large user base who are only willing to contribute a small amount individually, such that expensive-to-create works are still viable. I would argue that having some economic model that allows this distribution of costs, whether copyright or something else, is clearly a good thing if we value the creation and distribution of high quality work.

Yes there are, and there are some interesting ideas there that might offer better alternative models in time. Moreover, as you say, there is a question of how much distributors artificially distort the markets using copyright; one of the more infamous examples is Disney's strategy of releasing a movie on disc for only a very limited time and then locking it back in the vault for years.

Even so, right now, today, alternative funding models have yet to reach within about two orders of magnitude of funding what copyright does. Therefore, while copyright obviously has some undesirable properties, as an economic tool I claim it is currently the least bad model we have found.

Of course you are, and I have no problem with that. Copyright wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for locking up culture indefinitely. As long as enough people still want things soon enough to pay for them at reasonable prices, creators can still make a decent return and will still create and share stuff, and that is what it's all about.

Well, I was talking about Cygwin at that point. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

But then what would I run on Novell NetWare???

Thay're talking 30 years ago -- that'd be 1984.

VisiCalc was from 1979. In 1982, Lotus 1-2-3 was born. It ran well on the Apple II. That's 32 years, not 30 years. Lotus 1-2-3 includes the bits that were supposed to go into VisiCalc's front end and presentation modules, but were rejected. Excel was 1984, and was released for the Mac. In 1986, Lotus bought VisiCalc. In 1987, when MS DOS 3 was released, Excel 2.0 was ported to it and was one of the flagship packages. IBM bought Lotus in 1995, same year that Excel became a flagship Office product for Windows 95.

Quattro, Foxbase, etc. are kind of a footnote to this.

The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.

Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.

What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.

In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?

If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.