Uhm, yeah. There's clearly some ax grinding going on here, but in the guys defense I don't think he really thinks that modern day midwifery kills babies. It might be more along the lines of "The evil doctor patriarchate will pounce on this guy for taking an active part in his own treatment, just as they once pounced on midwives." Now, that's still pretty far out, but not nearly as bad as believing both those things and approving, which is what it looked like to me at first :)

I'm sure that's true, I worded myself incorrectly. I didn't explicitly mean that musicians created copyright from scratch to serve their purposes, as much as that the protection of music has been a powerful motivator in shaping copyright law as we know it today. The process took (is taking?) quite some time, following technological achievements. In the U.S, music was not protected at all until the introduction of the Copyright Act of 1831, which forbade the unauthorized reproduction of printed sheet music. Compulsory licensing of mechanical reproductions of musical compositions was introduced in the Copyright Act of 1911./p

You say that like it's a lot. It's really, really not.

An interesting question to ask an economist on a festive occasion is whether they, upon receiving advice from themselves, would trust that advice if it appeared not to maximize their own personal profit.

True. What complicates the matter is that under the current regime of contract law and copyright transferal, artists don't really have a say. Their opinions on pricing or distribution channels have no impact, because they're not the copyright holders. The labels, who are, can comfortably continue to chase their lost profits without being hindered by consideration of existence value (Hey, there's another one) of the music itself. Increasing artist profits could in fact worsen the situation in the short term by strengthening their ties to the copyright cartels.

Your understanding of economics is clearly poor if you believe economists are not aware of use value, or believe that it is not related to market value. However, you have stumbeled upon an interesting point.

The concept of use value is, through various methods of measurement, commonly applied to the problem of calculating the value of a public good, a term that describes a good that is non-rivalrous (Meaning that my consumption of the good, if provided, will not reduce the amount available for consumption by you) and non-excludable. (Meaning that it is hard or impossible to effectively stop people from consuming the good if they wish to do so) The classic example is a lighthouse; If available, it may provide the same amount of light to any number of ships. However, excluding any one ship that does not want to pay while remaining operational for other ships is impossible.

You could argue that music is increasingly becoming a public good. Its non-rivalrousness is quite obvious; if you buy it and play it in my presence, we can both enjoy it fully. Its excludability has been effectively eroded by file sharing and fast internet connections, so neither you nor one of your friends need to purchase a CD in order to hear the music on it. In fact, in theory, only one person needs to purchase each CD for its contents to be readily available to most of the world in a proverbial instant.

This, clearly, affects the marketability of music and is quite detrimental to the classical price-per-unit approach to selling it. While, presumably, quite a lot of people have a nonzero willingness to pay for music, availability at a price of zero is obviously going to attract many. Interestingly, musicians have faced this problem before, when they discovered that anybody that heard their song could just go somewhere else and play that very same song themselves without fear of repercussions. This fueled the invention of copyrights.

How musicians will approach their newfound status as providers of a public good is up for debate. More legislation is one option, but it's not working very well so far and there's always the chance you're just postponing the problem. Voluntary subscriptions or advertising based streaming solutions might give some relief, as they are often easier to use than file sharing networks and thus more valuable. (Then again, revenue generated from these is currently quite puny) Involuntary contribution through taxes is used for many public goods, but this approach has its own unfortunate implications when applied to creative works.

TL;DR: Economists understand a lot more than you think.

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Kudos to you and your employer. May you succeed beyond your wildest expectations!

While I kind of agree with you on several points, I have to point out that physical ownership of games isn't really a walk in the park either. Through deterioration of physical media and hardware becoming obsolete, the vast majority of games purchased over the last 30 years are not in a playable state today [citation needed]. In terms of the odds of being able to pick up your game and actually play it in 10, 20 or 30 years, I think they increase rather than decrease as a result of systems like steam.

Indeed. In fact, I'd say the average android user is a lot smugger than the average iphone user these days. I should know, I'm one of them now with my nice new Desire.

Mod parent up. His analysis is excellent.

That's largely a myth. The mathematics of playing poker usually involves making simple calculations of pot odds or making rough estimates of the probability of your hand being a winner or your opponents folding to a bet or raise. You can be an excellent poker player with no explicit awareness of the mathematics that are the basis of your actions. The key traits common to most great poker players are situational awareness and pattern recognition.

Your comment inadvertantly cuts right to the point of this matter.

What the hell is "bringing OS/2 back" going to acheive? It was a great operating system in it's time, and offered multitasking and a file system that at least wasn't completely defective during a time when the viable alternative for PCs was shitty. Today, however, those problems are long gone. Every operating system in common use offers everything that OS/2 offered, and much, much more. How does "resurrecting" OS/2 on top of a linux kernel and a modern file system even make sense? What are you actually resurrecting? The mediocre GUI? The bundled utilities? Were there any?

Even acheiving flawless source or binary compatibility with a 10 year old deprecated OS seems like an impossible pipe dream, so it's unlikely that the few nutbag holdouts will even switch. Apparently they must be happy with what they have, and hopefully they're thoroughly firewalled away from anything else, so why would they even care?"

If this is a marketing effort intended to bring the OS/2 brand back, then go for it. An effort to build an OS/2 layer on top of something that is nothing like OS/2 seems pointless..

Yeah, that might take something like a minute to be ready to read on your device. Given wlan, ofcourse

Well, duh. Thing is, while books are likely to have a page count average in the several hundreds, PDFs are in most cases shorter. Even when they aren't, you might not be reading them back to back, in fact you said yourself you were referencing them.

Look. I'm sure that in your highly specialized scenario of reading hundreds of pages a day while walking around in the sunshine outside wireless range, the ipad might not be a great device. In a more general PDF reader usage scenario, I think it would be excellent. With or without a USB port.

Surely there's some iDisk support with drag and drop goodness? Perhaps even caching on the device? Yeah, that doesn't solve the uploading/downloading issue, but how big are your PDFs anyway?

See, I'd agree that those are all perfectly cromulent arguments in support of the ipad being a terrible book reader. For PDFs, where you're likely to be reading inside, at home or at work, for a shorter period of time, they just don't seem to matter much.

If they're not, then put them there. How is that harder than coping to an external device?

Oh, please. Be serious! I actually use the kindle myself for reading PDFs, and it is terrible. It's slow, has no color, no wlan, and if you want to view a whole page at once it is as expensive as the ipad. Internet only works in the US, too.