Well said. One of the big problems with databases and automated decision-making by computers (or semi-automated decision making by bureaucrats) is that often the isolated facts observed in the decision-making process don't tell the whole story.

A few months, I decided that my relationship with my then-girlfriend wasn't as satisfying as I wanted it to be. Being a geek, I naturally started looking for someone on the Internet, and then started spending time with another charming young lady I met on-line. I lied to my ex-g/f about what I was doing on the weekends, or sneaked out during the day while she was at work. Obviously the other young lady and I stayed out of public view as much as possible, and not even my closest friends knew about her. I did meet a couple of her friends, but they were sworn to secrecy.

In the end, that relationship ran its course. I gave that young lady a lot of money and she went away, promising to keep our meetings between us. However, if anyone I knew had spotted us during the time she was around, it would surely have led to some awkward questions I didn't want to answer, and it would have put any friends who also knew the other half (still my girlfriend at that point) in a difficult position.

A few weeks later, I met the young lady one more time. She gave me the engagement ring I had commissioned, which she and her colleagues had been making for me. My then-girlfriend (now fianceé) doesn't mind at all that I kept this secret from her, and it was worth all the effort just to see the smile on her face when I proposed.

Everyone has secrets, sometimes even from their closest friends and family. That doesn't mean everyone is a bad person, and it doesn't make it in society's interests to surrender privacy on the altar of corporate profit. In a world without privacy and secrets, I wouldn't have seen that smile.

Please don't mix privacy/data protection issues with intellectual property/copyright issues.

There is a new world of possibilities, and accompanying dangers, that come from building and mining huge databases containing data that can be associated with individual people. The law needs to reflect the ethical issues that arise in that world, which are only coincidentally and occasionally related to intellectual property issues.

[citation needed]

There is no law in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar that requires corporate entities of any type to maximise the money made for shareholders no matter what acts may be necessary to do so. Indeed, there are companies who make a point of being ethical in some sense, and this is typically part of the attraction of those companies to their shareholders, employees and clients/customers alike. And of course it is by definition illegal for companies to increase the profit they make by breaking the law, which is one reason why real privacy and data protection laws are long overdue in most places.

Well, sorry, but that's not the game we're playing. The mantra that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear does not often come with the rider "unless you have good reasons for keeping it secret, in which case that's OK and we'll let you off".

People like Google's Schmidt (if his statements are faithfully reported here, which seems to be in dispute) and Sun Chairman Scott "Privacy is dead; deal with it" McNealy don't give a damn about anyone else's privacy when it serves their business interests to view the world in black and white. For them to argue that it's OK to do something the public would disapprove of, because someone or something or some rule made it the only practical way to run their business, would be hypocrisy.

I understand that this is what you are proposing. What I honestly don't understand is how you expect it to happen in the case of relatively expensive works with large audiences, where the work is worth only a modest amount to any individual.

I would be genuinely interested if anyone has an alternative model that has proven to be effective, but to my knowledge, so far it's near enough all talk and no action. People have been suggesting pledge-based systems for years, and nothing in the current copyright system precludes taking such an approach if it is a better incentive to create and share, yet almost no-one does.

Copyright, for all its flaws, currently supports millions of people producing and distributing goodness knows how much creative content, certainly vastly more than was produced and shared so widely under any other historical system. I have no reason to believe copyright is the best system, but on the basis of this evidence, I have no problem accepting that as an incentive scheme, it works.

Let us say "charitably" then, for the avoidance of doubt.

The point is that those people who currently work a 9–5 job doing not particularly enjoyable but practically useful work on things like software probably do it only because it pays reasonably well. They would therefore be unlikely to continue doing it, producing at the same rate and the same quality, if they had to work a different 9–5 to pay the rent and then put in the other 8 hours on top to write the software without compensation.

...and one of them is that FORTRAN is still the best tool for some jobs.

And for other jobs, people pretty much have stopped using it.

I'm afraid while we may not be too far apart on the copyright issue, we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on FOSS. I have nothing against those who build FOSS products and are kind enough to give away the fruits of their labours, but to me the claim that OpenOffice is actually superior to MS Office, or GIMP to Photoshop, or MySQL to Oracle, is just so obviously, comprehensively wrong that it is hardly worth debating (though if you want numerous specific and detailed arguments, I have posted on these subjects at some length in previous Slashdot discussions).

In any case, the kicker for me isn't even the technical arguments, which could be debated. The point isn't that not everyone has moved to Ubuntu, it's that almost no-one has moved to Ubuntu. If you only get a 50% take-up, you can contend that there are non-technical issues blocking adoption, or cultural issues to overcome. If you only get a 0.5% take-up after years of advocacy, and you still argue that you are right and almost the entire world is wrong, you lack credibility. There's an old poker saying: if you can't tell who the weak player at the table is, then it's you.

What a horribly arrogant, patronising thing to write.

I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have, and the empirical evidence and economic theories supporting various possible alternatives. I have written Masters-length reports in the course of lobbying for change, participated in government reviews, and spent a fair few hours debating with folks on-line to cap it all.

My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.

I completely agree. But the OP to whom I responded initially was openly saying that he was ignoring even the basic idea behind copyright and just ripping whatever he felt like. He wasn't saying he was breaking DRM so he could use something he already paid for, or format-shifting a legit copy of something for personal convenience, or downloading music that would have fallen out of copyright but for the Disney lawyers. He just doesn't like paying for stuff, so he freeloads and rips whatever he likes, because he can.

No it doesn't. But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work. No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion. The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily, but this seems a very dubious assumption: in the "fun" creative arts, people could do that anyway today, so I see no reason to assume that more people would do so if they didn't get paid for it than do already; and in the less "fun" but more practical arts, as in much of contemporary software development, I hardly think thousands/millions of people are going to spend basically all of their spare time after finishing other day jobs working on boring but necessary code.

That's the best you've got? Most of the arguments in that book seem to be against patents, rather than copyright. In the case of software, the main argument against copyright seems to be that competition leads to thriving innovation as demonstrated by the OSS world, which is just funny. The big name OSS applications are almost all second-rate rip-offs of established products from the commercial or academic spheres: OpenOffice, the GIMP, Thunderbird, MySQL. Programming languages seem like a strong area for OSS, but in reality much of what it has produced in recent years is all variations on the same theme, and the serious innovation is happening in academia or industrial R&D labs at Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the like. Heck, even Linux itself is obviously based on UNIX. I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already? Maybe the allegedly superior technical grounds aren't enough, and all the usability research and user help that Microsoft and Apple can fund with their copyright-driven products actually makes a big difference to non-geek users.

That's rather a severe over-generalisation. For one thing, the basic capitalist structure advocated by plenty of economists naturally leads to monopolies in the long run, so in practice we break out of pure capitalism and introduce other mechanisms to ensure that any legal monopoly status is in the public interest. Now, there are plenty of things about today's implementation of copyright that I do not think are in the public interest, but that doesn't mean the basic principle of copyright can't be administered in such a way too.

I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.

Please don't equate my support for the basic principle of copyright with supporting copyright for excessive durations, supporting wholesale transfer of rights from the authors who deserve them to middleman corporations, or any other screwed up aspect of the current implementation. I am all in favour of copyright reform. I just haven't seen any real evidence that getting rid of copyright entirely would improve anything, other than the feelings of a few people in this discussion.

With copyright, there is a motivation for investors who think they have good judgement of likely success to back a new artist, for example by arranging advertising for providing a cash advance set against any future earnings. They do this in the expectation that they will make a net positive return on their investments, winning more often than not, because they are good judges of what the market wants.

We tend to be critical of "middleman" organisations like publishers and record labels for their abuses of copyright, and I certainly would support reforms that shifted power back firmly toward the artists, but in this respect these organisations do serve a useful purpose.

Without copyright (or some other system to replace it) there is no such incentive, because as soon as the artist's work is out there is no longer any expectation of income for an investor.

It's amusing to see someone mention FOSS in one sentence and then equate copyright protection with corporatism in the next.

Do you? Civil disobedience involves publicly breaking the law and accepting the consequences. The key point there is the "accepting the consequences" part. Are you making a show of infringing copyright and accepting the full consequences of the law to make your point?

Because if you're knowingly breaking the law without that, it's not civil disobedience, it's just illegal.

Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.

It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.

And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?

This idea is a common proposal in these discussions, so let me ask you a few basic questions about it.

Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start pledging to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result? There is nothing to stop someone adopting this approach today. How many artists have successfully started a career by doing so?

The copyright system lets an artist who thinks they can make a good product do so, and if the product turns out to be good it can be its own recommendation. The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have. (I appreciate that in reality Big Media get in the way of this, and I have no problem with changing the copyright structure to keep the rights with the artists and other creative people where they belong, but this does not undermine the fundamental idea behind copyright.)

And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?

How many million-lines-of-code software products?

How many detailed, fact-checked, well-edited 1,000 page textbooks?

For that matter, how many good books did it produce per year, and how many people got to read them?

I've never disputed that valuable works have been or would be created without the benefit of copyright protection, but the scale matters. You can't just extrapolate from the fact that some good works were produced and some people benefited from them before copyright to the conclusion that copyright has not encouraged the creation of more or better works.

Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?

If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?

Ah, the FOSS argument. How wonderfully Slashdot.

You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right? And that even the big name FOSS projects are not exempt from this? So much so, in fact, that even though the FOSS projects are free, most people still prefer to use commercial offerings.

I've never disputed that there are serious flaws with the current implementation of copyright. Arguments about not extending terms to crazy 50+ year durations are all very reasonable. But if you look at what's being swapped on filesharing systems, is it very early Disney cartoons and back-catalogues for old bands, or is it the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters?

Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not, that producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days, and that producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.

Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator. Notice that this applies on many scales, whether we're talking about excellent textbooks with limited markets and relatively high prices, or cheap paperbacks that are read by many people for a relatively low cost, or crazy expensive Hollywood movies that are viewed by millions. If the artist can only control the first copy, then the price of that first copy becomes so high that in many cases no-one would buy it, and with that recognition, the work will not be produced in the first place. You're basically back to a patronage model.

Citation requested. If you can show me evidence of even a single successful Hollywood-blockbuster-scale movie being funded through another mechanism, I will be impressed. I will be even more impressed if you can show me evidence (not just hypothetical argument, something verifiable) that the same model would sustain production of the same number of big budget movies as the big studios manage, the same number of major software products that the commercial software industry manages, and so on for other industries supported principally by copyright.

I find it doubtful that you will manage these things, because of course nothing about copyright prevents people from releasing their work and trying to make money through other models instead if those other models were superior incentives. The fact that almost no-one does this is quite telling.