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Copyright law today is a corruption of copyright, plain and simple.
The idea of copyright itself is a corruption of how the process of creativity and innovation actually works. You can never create anything new without building on the past. And the newest past everybody can freely build upon is over a century old. Anything newer is in the middle of copyright minefield.
If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with [compulsory licensing].
This is already the law for a few specific uses of works, such as recording cover versions of musical works.
Payright is not the same thing as compulsory licensing. Compulsory licensing is an exception to universal monopoly. The existence of the monopoly itself causes lots of problems without actually solving all that much. Also, whenever the original artist is supposed to be paid for uses covered by the compulsory licence, the money has to go through a government-appointed third party that usually gets to set the licence fees.
If we look at compulsory licensing as one possible implementation of payright, it's a really bad one. Rather, the need for existence of compulsory licensing is a proof that payright is the right way to go.
And therein lies the difference: producers of "premium" works would BAWW that distribution without charge "cheapens" their works.
Note: do not confuse distribution without charge and distribution without revenue. Distribution without charge can still generate revenue and the artist should get a generous slice of that.
You people think copyrights only job is to make material open?
It says so in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of US Constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
But we all know that the government doesn't care.
You could have it written in the law that the original holder can nullify said agreement at will if it is beyond, say, 5 years. That seems to fix everything I think. Can't see much of it being used for wrong. Admittedly I only spent 12 seconds thinking about possible scenarios.
Good idea (US copyright law currently allows the author to unilaterally terminate the copyright assignment after 35 years with a notice 2 years in advance) but it doesn't fix everything by a long shot. If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with payrights. (When somebody makes money off your work which would be eligible for copyright at this moment, he owes you an unspecified cut of his revenue. You can sue for money but you can't shut his business down. And of course zero revenue means zero cut to be paid.)
By voting for which party in our political duopoly? The whole American political system is a mess because with the two entrenched parties, there is almost no ballot space for new ideas.
Do something to create that ballot space then! We're working hard to create ballot space for Pirate Parties here in Europe so you're not alone in the fight.
Why the MPAA would want to associate with a scumbag of that caliber is anyone's guess.
That's his perfect qualification for the job, of course.
There will always be people who take a class, take notes on the ports and vendor-specific procedures who will always be a paper tiger, but people who actually get something out of classes can take broad concepts away from even specific classes (like vendor specific identity management products).
Do you really think that high school students have the knowledge and motivation to look for general concepts?
Because you can navigate the command prompt and write batch scripts,
Even after all those years, DOS command line is still so pitiful that I have to install Cygwin whenever I need to do any serious scripting on Windows. Knowing DOS command line won't help you understand Unix shells simply because the most useful Unix shell features don't exist in DOS and things like variables and pipes are so limited in DOS that they're almost useless.
are familiar with driver configuration concepts (still relevant today if you're developing them, admittedly pretty useless just as a user of PnP hardware),
What driver configuration concepts?
know what Windows binaries look like inside (assuming you used the debug program available at the time),
We didn't, I don't and I don't see the relevance of such knowledge. Those who really need to know that can look up the documentation and learn it in a week tops.
understand hierarchical file systems and the Windows registry, are familiar with Windows shortcuts files,
Most of that knowledge is so trivial that anybody with half a brain can learn it in five minutes. Except Windows registry (we didn't learn that at school BTW) which is a nightmare.
are familiar with Windows' built-in programs (really, many of them haven't changed that much since 98),
Like Minesweeper and Solitaire? Because those built-in programs were by far the most used at our school.
probably have pretty good keyboarding skills (that was one of the main things I learned in elementary school computer classes, and I'm probably within five years of your age),
I have but school had nothing to do with it. I'm writing this on Linux with a custom Dvorak keyboard layout BTW.
and plenty of other things, both vendor-specific and not? Computer skills don't just evaporate with each new OS release, or even switching between completely different systems (although it sometimes feels that way when I use a Mac, and yes, I use both Linux and FreeBSD...)
Lots of my fellow elementary school students probably still think that if you change filename extension of an Excel spreadsheet from XLS to CSV, you'll be able to open it in a program which only supports CSV files. Other basic concepts of using a computer that they probably don't understand: When one program doesn't have all the functions you need, you can combine multiple programs supporting the same file formats to do the job. Solving repetitive tasks using loops and conditions. Using styles in word processor documents/HTML pages/other formatted text.
No it isn't that at all, this idea of "millions of new jobs" is baseless, if you provably can make the case for it then obviously that will get significant attention...so the question is: did you?
Just look at the ridiculous amount of money spent every year on patent litigation. When you take away the ability to harass competition through patent trolling, tech companies will need to put most of it into innovating in order to stay relevant, with the biggest threats coming from small startups. I rest my case.
...and learning how to use SMS or SCCM or App-V gives you skills that translate to HP or BMC. Learning Hyper-V gives you skills that translate to Citrix and VMWare.
You can't be a certified Ford mechanic without picking up some of the skills to be ACE certified...
Not really. Vendor-specific certification courses mix up the common basics with vendor-specific crap and focus a lot on the latter in exams. The point is to rush students to mastery of the one tools covered in the course. As a result, students don't know what to look for in other tools because they can't tell the difference between the basics and vendor-specific crap from the certification course.
An MCSE certification is only useful in one particular field, under very particular circumstances.
And those circumstances won't exist anymore by the time they graduate. Way back in 6th grade, we were first taught DOS and Windows 3.11. By 8th grade, my elementary school upgraded to Windows 98. At high school, we were mostly taught programming and basic system administration on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. While I went to university, Vista wooshed by without leaving much of a trace. Before I graduated, even the biggest and most conservative corporations started switching from XP to Windows 7. And shortly after I got my first job, Microsoft released Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the latter of which drives me crazy every time I have to touch it at work. Now tell me, how exactly is my knowledge of DOS, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 relevant today?
No, democracy depends on everybody having the same freedoms as everybody else, including unrestrained freedom of speech. Somebody who is a gifted communicator or a clever graphic designer may have a greater voice than others in a sense, because they can craft a really compelling statement of their opinions and convince a bunch of people of their view. Whereas nobody cares what Joe Blow in the bar has to say, because he's a flunkie. Should the government take steps to reduce the voice of the gifted communicator or the graphic designer? No. It doesn't hurt Joe Blow that others are better communicators than he is. He has less of a voice because he just happens to. The government isn't censoring him just because somebody else is better at communicating.
If you read my previous post again more carefully, you'll notice that the part that says "the exact same voice as everybody else" is about a private person speaking directly to an elected representative. Anybody is absolutely free to present his ideas to the public by whatever means he has. But elected representatives must not be allowed to listen to Steve Balmer or any other private person any more than they listen to Joe Blow. Even if there's no provable corruption involved. Elected representatives represent the millions of people who voted for them and not Microsoft's shareholders.
Look at it from the perspective of those running the country, IBM and MS support the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of their employees, they contribute billions to the economy and have hundreds of thousands of shareholders which includes active traders, long term investors and retirement funds. It isn't 4 "persons" involved because corporations are not people, but they are often representative of many people.
In other words, let's sacrifice millions of new jobs so that a handful of megacorporations with a few hundred thousand employees can keep their ridiculously huge profits. "Too big to fail" at its finest.
The cool thing about a free democracy is that neither you nor the government gets to decide who "deserves amplification". If the speaker spends his own money to get his message out, then only he gets to decide whether it's a worthwhile exercise or not. Isn't freedom great?
Democracy depends on everybody having the exact same voice as everybody else. The democratic way to get the laws you want is to spend money trying to make the general public see the world your way and have them tell the representatives to pass the laws you want. When a handful of individuals can go straight to the representatives and get them to do something disregarding the voters, the democracy is dead.
Natural laws have no pity.