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It's interesting that one of the ideas this article criticizes is a harebrained combination of closed-circuit television and a "pneumatic page turner", intended
by HillaryBriss 8y ago
It's interesting that one of the ideas this article criticizes is a harebrained combination of closed-circuit television and a "pneumatic page turner", intended to allow readers to study a book in a library many miles away so that only one copy would need to be kept.
Yet, I think this basic idea was implemented in the digital realm by iTunes (or someone else) in recent years so that each person would not individually need their own copy of some music file. Instead, they would just stream it from an iTunes server.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIronically, out of these two, it's iTunes that's more harebrained. Considering that digital storage is almost free, and it's wasteful to transfer bits across half the planet each time you want to listen to a particular song again, streaming is a... pretty suboptimal solution. Especially that you essentially relinquish ownership of your own media, being instead at the mercy of a service provider. Alas, this was the way to work around the huge mess that is IP laws.
- c4h8o3del 8y ago> Alas, this was the way to work around the huge mess that is IP laws. Or, and I realize this is a long shot, we could come to the realization that "intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Small hope, I know.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI would love that too.
- c4h8o3del 8y agoThis post contains most of what I would want to say about it. http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/
- err4nt 8y agoI'd love to hear more about why intellectual property is an oxymoron - you have piqued my interest :D
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIt's in the sense that the current implementation of idea ownership is mostly a ham-fisted exercise in rent-seeking. Ideas work best when left to spread, mix, and be freely used. It's a complex topic, really - on the one hand, you have the boneheaded stupidity of software patents, or of music and movie licensing (that have little to do with compensating original authors and performers, and is instead about middlemen getting rent); but on the other hand, you have drug research and $manybillion silicon fabs, which kind of require IP protection even exist.
- dredmorbius 8y ago"Copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge". Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson. http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-access-to-knowledge-4224697.php http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-a... Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...
- c4h8o3del 8y agoThis post contains most of what I would want to say about it. http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/
- emodendroket 8y agoWhat about the storage space? How efficient is it to have the same music duplicated on countless hard drives, in most cases not having been listened to anytime recently?
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe cost of storage has been falling by an order of magnitude per decade for at least the past 50 years. Digital storage for all of the US Library of Congress would be about $2,000 last I checked. In ten more years, one tenth that. (Organising and managing the data, and backups would be somewhat more, but I'm just ballparking here). Storage is becoming cheaper than any sort of management.
- emodendroket 8y agoAn album is probably for the purposes of discussion somewhere between 70 and 700 MB. Is keeping millions of copies of it in storage really cheaper than streaming? The "management" has to be in place either way, or how do I get them on disk in the first place? The costs of each individual steam are not, I suspect, very large
- dredmorbius 8y agoWhy download it twice?
- emodendroket 8y agoWhy store it for an eternity when it'll only be used a few times? Most streaming services use a cache.