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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) 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.
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