On 21/09/2012 10:29 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> One irritated commenter posted this link:
>
> http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/anew.all.pdf
>
> It's going to take me... a while to read all that. But it seems quite
> interesting.

I said it would take me a while to read it all! I only just finished. 
Man, that was *a lot* of text...

While many of their arguments make a great deal of sense, I'm still not 
completely sold on a few things.

The argument against patents seems clear. They should go.

The exception is the pharmaceutical industry. That's because 
pharmaceuticals require absurdly expensive testing before you're allowed 
to sell them. But, as the authors point out, the purpose of testing is 
to find out *if* a new drug works. If that work is funded by the company 
that just spent $$$ inventing that drug... well, can you spell "conflict 
of interest"? So perhaps we need a system where somebody else funds 
clinical testing. If we can sort that out, then making new drugs becomes 
about as expensive as making new anything-else, and the argument for 
patents vanishes in pharmaceuticals as it does everywhere else.

The one that gets me, though, is copyright.

They claim that authors writing in England (which had copyright laws) 
made more money from American customers than from their native England. 
(And, at the time, America had no copyright laws.) I cannot wrap my mind 
around this. I am not saying it is untrue - but rather, that I cannot 
comprehend /how/ it can be true. If in America it costs nothing to copy 
an author's work, HOW ARE THEY MAKING MONEY??

Similarly, a later chapter comes tentatively close to saying "You don't 
need a multi-million dollar recording studio to make music any more. All 
you need is a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of other stuff." 
This is not true, of course. High quality microphones still cost a 
crapload of money. Sound-proofed rooms are still extremely expensive. 
Professional recording engineers aren't cheap. And so forth.

But really, if music did not have copyright, I'm pretty sure we would 
see an army of backroom musicians putting out some great stuff. I'm a 
little worried that, like YouTube, most of the cool stuff would be 
droned in an ocean of stupid musical burping and other nonsense. But 
there would be a lot more music out there. (I could show you some of the 
music *I* made, for example...)

What I really cannot figure out is this: It apparently cost $225,000,000 
to film Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not just that it has famous 
actors in it and there are some big explosions. If you watch the 
documentary DVD, you'll see that they took an entire container ship 
loaded to the max, sailed to a tiny tropical island, and terraformed 
half of it. Seriously. They built an entire town. They cut down jungle. 
They built new roads. They created whole buildings. They build brand new 
infrastructure that didn't exist there before. Just so they could film 
the few scenes in the movie that call for a jungle setting.

And you're seriously telling me that somebody is going to spend 
$225,000,000 of their own money, knowing that as soon as the first DVD 
is minted, the entire movie will be available globally for $0, and the 
studio will never make a single penny back? Like, seriously??

Post a reply to this message