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In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis:
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Copyright rules are made with the needs of the entertainment industry in mind, designed to provide the legal framework for creators, investors, distributors, production houses, and other parts of the industry to navigate their disputes and assert their interests.
A good copyright policy would be one that encouraged diverse forms of expression from diverse creators who were fairly compensated for their role in a profitable industry. But copyright has signally failed to accomplish this end, largely because of the role it plays in the monopolization of the entertainment industry (and, in the digital era, every industry where copyrighted software plays a role). Copyright's primary approach is to give creators monopolies over their works, in the hopes that they can use these as leverage in overmatched battles with corporate interests. But monopolies have a tendency to accumulate, piling up in the vaults of big companies, who use these government-backed exclusive rights to dominate the industry so that anyone hoping to enter it must first surrender their little monopolies to the hoards of the big gatekeepers.
Creators get a raw deal in a concentrated marketplace, selling their work into a buyer's market. Giving them more monopolies – longer copyright terms, copyright over the "feel" of music, copyright over samples – just gives the industry more monopolies to confiscate in one-sided negotiations and add to their arsenals. Expecting more copyright to help artists beat a concentrated industry is like expecting more lunch money to help your kid defeat the bullies who beat him up on the playground every day. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, all you'll ever do is make the bullies richer.
(Score: -1, Troll) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:49PM (13 children)
Use it or lose it - and that includes registering your copyrights.
Copyright that isn't registered is like a gun with no bullets. Someone removes your copyright notice on your code and puts theirs, even if you go to court you will only get provable damages - and if you published it under any sort of permissible license such as the gpl, you didn't lose any money, so you get nothing except a big legal bill.
Registered works don't have to prove financial damages - you can claim up to $150k per infringement, same as the big boys. Odds are you get an out of court settlement.
There is NO downside to doing this.
The EFF agenda is that all software should be free. We've seen where this ends up, with the current situation where small developers can't earn a living selling their work because the market is awash with free shitty products.
Anyone who says that the gpl encourages innovation is full of shit. It hasn't. 1,000 free Linux distros, all with their own quality bugs, is not innovation. Everyone has to distro hop as each distro goes through the same life cycle - people get interested, it attracts users, fails to reach critical mass, goes off on some tangent to "be different " and turns to dust as people look for the new next better one.
Free software means that the only way to monetize stuff is to lock it up on a server and turn it into software as a spy service. To continue doing this, end user software needs to stay of inferior quality, so that it can't compete. 20 years ago the talk was about every person running multiple agents on their computers that would communicate directly with other users computers to search for information. That would put google out of business. Software agents that would form self-organizing groups with others around your shared interests. That would put Facebook out of business. That would connect buyers and sellers directly, putting Amazon out of business.
So we've wasted two decades doing the wrong thing; any organization that supports free software even indirectly is a "useful stooge " , whether it's the EFF, the FSF, or whatever. We've seen how it's played out - we have the same big players as 30 years ago still selling THEIR software for a profit IBM, Microsoft, and Apple. The free software system is financially simply not viable. That's why you're seeing projects closing off their source to survive.
It's like War Games - the only winning move is not to play. People still buy games, so obviously if you have a product people want, they will give you their money. But the market has spoken - give somebody a computer running Linux and a week later they're running Windows. They want their multifunction printers to be able to scan, their sound chips to work, their video cards to run at the performance levels they paid for. When you can't even give your product away, maybe it's time to examine the process that led to this?
Paid closed source products can afford to do the development and improvements that aren't being done in or by the free community. That's the beginning and the end of the story.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:55PM (7 children)
That depends almost entirely upon the person and environment they are in. If there is only one computer, yes, it runs Windoze because there are certain things that only Windoze does, and being locked out sucks.
What I have found is: if you have two computers (or can manage to teach someone how to dual boot) - you can easily run non-Windoze 97+% of the time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:48PM (1 child)
I never found Windoze to be indispensable to my computing.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:58PM
Apart from updating
mygarmin's satnav.It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Troll) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @05:22PM (3 children)
Just look at the new Linux-only games. Oh, they're the old Linux-only games, development stopped, and just as crap today as when they came out ... oh well, maybe you can find a 15-years-old game that runs under Wine, because even a 15-years-old Windows game is better than a new Linux-exclusive game.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday January 26 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
Business wants real work getting done.
The Ernie Ball company does just fine without Microsoft. [cnet.com] They make the world's finest guitar strings; ask any guitar player. I like the Super Slinkys.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday January 26 2020, @10:03PM
What Ernie Ball went through was the prime driver for me making my business computing GPL only.
Although, if I wasn't now retired, I would also be seriously looking at BSD.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:01PM
Which is why my real work gets done in Linux.
My bullshit training, outlook e-mail, and interfacing to the document control system - yeah, that crap happens in Windoze, not because Windoze does anything better, or cheaper, but because our IT drones can't be bothered to guarantee anything works in more than one version of one browser. Amusingly enough, our Colorado location's doc control center (because IT can't be bothered to merge the two systems, even here 20 years after we've been working together) has a system that's "certified in Edge" but actually works better in Firefox - whether on Linux or 'doze.
15 years of trying to get audio to stream seamlessly from an 8 channel acquisition system, through custom processing algorithms into the Windoze sound system has resulted in 99.9% success - meaning, 0.1% of the time, or about 5 seconds out of every hour of surgery, the audio glitches for some reason or another. Then we can talk about the thrill of constant mandatory security updates. Meanwhile, the other side of the business used to use a dedicated DSP to get smooth real-time audio, but we just re-implemented in Linux and so far have not had any glitching at all - first try - oh, and the DSP C code re-compiled and deployed under Raspbian on a Pi, and also under Ubuntu on an Intel chip with virtually zero porting effort.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:33PM
Crash? BSOD? Spy on you? Steal telemetry? Attempt to keep you from meeting new people? Not letting you out of the garden? Requiring that you wear silly outfits during sex?
This sounds like an abusive relationship, not an operating system!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 26 2020, @04:09PM (2 children)
"Can afford" doesn't mean "will do". Instead, they often don't do the development and improvements either because they're just as disinterested in them as the free community is. It's ridiculous how much you're talking up closed source products when they don't even show the advantages you claim they have.
(Score: 1, Troll) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @05:09PM (1 child)
Like I said, give someone a Linux computer, they'll run Linux for a week. Then wipe it because the free software is not competitive, and they can't run their software that they already bought and have time invested in.
This has been the problem for decades. With fragmentation continuing to roll along it will never be fixed.
When people buy a printer they want it to work. I bought a colour laser that said right on the box that it worked with Linux. It didn't. It required a specific version of RedHat and the driver disk only worked with that version, so can't upgrade. Everyone has stories like that.
The point is still true - most free software is massively uncompetitive, will never be competitive because paid software has the money to keep improving, so Linux is a dead end for users. Cheaper to buy a Mac and pay the Apple hardware tax because at least you can get your work done. Even running WinXP In a VM is a step up in terms of software availability compared to the latest Linux. Too many forks means too many cooks and the soup doesn't get more than half-assed made.
If shuttleworth har any brains he would have done like Apple, forked FreeBSD and made a proprietary OS. It would have still run free software, but also proprietary without the gnu crew bitching.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:11PM
Depends entirely on the use profile. In the '90s I had a pirated CD of Photoshop that I would load up about once every 6 months when I needed to edit an image for some reason or another. These days I have GIMP, which sooner or later gets installed on just about every machine I use because sooner or later I need an image editor of some level of competence. I don't edit images every day, it's not my primary job, but when I do need to edit an image loading GIMP and just doing it is a hell of a lot more efficient than engaging an image editing professional, communicating my needs, getting the job queued while they work on higher priority tasks, iterating with them because communication is imperfect, etc. No way in hell is a multi-hundred dollar piece of licensed software superior for my needs, ever - just the time spent screwing with license updates would double my workload as compared to google searching for GIMP and doing the download-install one-time on every machine I work on.
Now, if you are a pixel jockey, sure, Photoshop et. al. are optimized for your needs, they listen to the people in industry who pay for their wares and improve things like workflow automation, etc. to make their lives easier. Hell, I even knew a shareware photo editor back in the late '90s who did the same thing for his niche market - doing things that other software doesn't do to make his niche users' lives easier was earning him $80 per copy for a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth, until his market dwindled because he didn't have a machine like Adobe promoting it.
$800 per copy for Photoshop when your workstation is generating $100K+ per year income - no brainer, even a 1% increase in productivity is worth it. When you're just an occasional user, it's completely fucking insane to even deal with the licensing busywork, nevermind the money.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 26 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
Step away from the Desktop and look in the Server Room. Linux is king.
IBM doesn't much sell software anymore, certainly not to end users. OS/2 is long dead. AIX couldn't beat Linux, and has instead joined it. Yes, IBM is now a big contributor to Linux. IBM's whole strategy these days is selling massive hardware capability to enable their customers to grind through more Big Data than the competition can. They need a decent OS to support this program, and they've turned to Linux to be that OS. Even the massive resources that IBM still commands was not enough to stand apart and maintain an edge over Linux. They make their money selling hardware and service.
The only reasons I have any need at all for Microsoft is 1) Office file format lock in, and 2) games. I wouldn't need MS Office, if the rest of the world would free themselves from it. It's only so that the recipients of office documents can read them in MS Office that I use MS Office formats at all. The other issue, games, yes. A big part of the problem there is Nvidious and ATI/AMD refusing to cooperate with the open source community, so that we can have decent open source graphics drivers.
MS has always tested the waters to see how much lockdown they can get away with. You can't trust them not to screw things up with a fake security patch or change that is actually some crazy anti-piracy effort. They've been sleazy about it, and only a little shy about the sleaze. Windows 2000 did not have product activation. They added that in Windows XP, and the public didn't object strenuously enough to make them back away. Windows Vista, however, was too far, and they did back away from the dumbest things they tried. People are not willing to accept huge hits to performance so that their computer can constantly scan for pirated items. I particularly enjoyed the idiocy in creating a totally unnecessary chicken-and-egg problem when, around that same time, they decided to block access to security patches to all except registered copies of Windows. Unpatched Windows could not connect to the Internet long enough to register and patch before malware pwned it, and users could no longer download patches through other means, and apply them before connecting. That lasted about a month before MS backed away.
Any time any government anywhere tries to switch to open source, MS is all over it. They bribe, corrupt, threaten and scare people into coming back to the fold. FUD. It's not ultimately a winning strategy to have to rely on force to maintain power. Much, much better to have informed, uncoerced, willing and wholehearted support.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 26 2020, @07:23PM
The server-centric software as a service is a big part of today's problems, so I wouldn't be boasting about linux's complicity in the software-as-a-spyware-service fraud that's being pulled on people.
We could, and should, get rid of the server room. Peer-to-peer is both more robust and less open to abuse by the likes of google, amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.
But keep drinking the kool-aid. A really robust market would have kept Microsoft in check. It didn't happen The dream was distributed computing among users. Any operating system. With a robust market for user software agents to do our bidding, going out there and finding the software components we wanted and negotiating the best prices for them, so each person could build their own version of a word processor or web browser from individual components, or buy them pre-assembled. Competition for customer's money would have assured continuous improvement.
So screw the server room. After all, it's screwing us over 100 ways every day ...
Look at the poor quality of linux user software and tell me I'm wrong. Look at the massive fragmentation of linux and tell me this is sane. Look at the roadmap for the future and tell me systemd is a needed improvement.
Or just do a ps ax | count (oops, count is no longer installed as a default app, you stupid, stupid motherf*ckers) and tell me that a machine with no servers running needs to have more than 200 processes going at the same time.
We need some new operating systems. Not clones that that were inspired by operating systems of the early 80s. The future is not linux, bsd, windows, or osx. Or if it is, we might as well abandon computing altogether.
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