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Exactly. I wrote this as a top level post and then read your post, so decided to post it as a reply here instead: Imagine your server based app suddenly become

Exactly. I wrote this as a top level post and then read your post, so decided to post it as a reply here instead: Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me. I agree the method of enforcement and level of influence the industry has on our legislative process is extremely problematic. I don't agree that how industry execs are compensated is relevant. Intellectual property like the movie Avatar cost money to make and have real value. As consumers we are prepared to exchange money for that value, money which is worth less to us than the value we extract from the product. It's just that the laws of physics have changed and it's no longer possible to exchange one unit of Avatar for X dollars because once the first customer consumes it, it is free for everyone else, in a perfectly efficient piracy market. I want to live in a world where people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making movies like Avatar. So rather than telling the industry to just "get with the program, your goods are free like smells now", I'd like to see our community come up with a solution to this very very hard problem. Any takers?

abstractbill 15y ago
Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me. A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.
- loumf 15y ago
  Unless the result was no more software services.
  - wdewind 15y ago
    Why would we want individual software services when we have one software service that solves all those problems?
ctdonath 15y ago
Try this spin: if you release a program as FOSS with the GNU license, why should anyone respect the licence? Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway. It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  The GPL is a hack. If copyright goes away, you could just copy, disassemble, or duplicate the funcionality of a piece of sotware in order to learn how to tell your computer to do exactly what you wanted. DRM would go wild and hardware oriented, and a constant arms race would follow, but DRM may be an impossible problem. For example, I'm producing a closed-source, proprietary piece of software to make a living. I will aggressively defend my copyright. Do I believe in copyright? No. But I'm operating in a bad system and I need to eat. In a better world, I'd be doing the same thing as work for hire for a group of actors within the industry who would collectively benefit from it, and customizing for any who had particularly unique use cases. I'd be working to reduce friction for the entire system and to make the tools that computers are generally more useful, rather than reenforcing the oligarchies of the market leaders who can pay my price (which is almost completely unrelated to my effort, but rather to the value of advantage over competitors in an underserved market.) My software being proprietary is just limiting general productivity gains and distorting the market (from whence comes it's value), and my enforcement is just limiting everyone's freedom to use their own machines. another tl;dr, the GPL hack creates an island of freedom within a restrictive framework, and if the restrictive framework is gone there's no need to respect the GPL, a child of that framework.
  - eurleif 15y ago
    I think many creators of GPL software see it differently, and wouldn't be ok with people making proprietary modifications to their code, even if anyone was free to disassemble the modified code and try to make sense of it.
wdewind 15y ago
Your analogy of a server based app is not a great one. If Google shared all of its source code, it would be a huge security risk and embarrassing amongst other things, but it would not lead to the end of their business by any means. Google makes money because they create a massive infrastructure that is NOT simply copyable. The fact that you can't read the actual Java, C etc. code that is executing on the server doesn't really matter: even if you could there is so much more value in the business than just that. Duck Duck Go is a great example: it has roughly the same quality search results as Google, but if you just gave the Google source code to DDG they wouldn't all of a sudden eat Google's lunch. If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression. What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly. Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.
- sbov 15y ago
  You're trying to sidestep rather than confront the issue. s/google/some company that runs on AWS Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizzard-wins-court-case-against-world-of-warcraft-emulator-servers.aspx http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...
  - wdewind 15y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by sidestepping, and I'm also not sure what you are trying to say with that article. Blizzard sued and won based on current copyright law, which I'm arguing is FUBAR. Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.
noonespecial 15y ago
The world I want is a world where people don't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies like Avatar. They can make movies that good themselves in their free time as a hobby. Other people who like the idea can get on board and help. In the end the result is shared with everyone like telling stories around a big global campfire. (They may or may not then sing Kumbaya). That seems ridiculously impossible and utopian right now, but I'll bet that won't always be so. How do we get there from here? I'd really like to short circuit the part where everyone that believes this is impossible or undesirable economically has to die off before this can happen.

abstractbill 15y ago

Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me. A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.

loumf 15y ago
Unless the result was no more software services.
- wdewind 15y ago
  Why would we want individual software services when we have one software service that solves all those problems?

ctdonath 15y ago

Try this spin: if you release a program as FOSS with the GNU license, why should anyone respect the licence? Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway. It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.

pessimizer 15y ago
The GPL is a hack. If copyright goes away, you could just copy, disassemble, or duplicate the funcionality of a piece of sotware in order to learn how to tell your computer to do exactly what you wanted. DRM would go wild and hardware oriented, and a constant arms race would follow, but DRM may be an impossible problem. For example, I'm producing a closed-source, proprietary piece of software to make a living. I will aggressively defend my copyright. Do I believe in copyright? No. But I'm operating in a bad system and I need to eat. In a better world, I'd be doing the same thing as work for hire for a group of actors within the industry who would collectively benefit from it, and customizing for any who had particularly unique use cases. I'd be working to reduce friction for the entire system and to make the tools that computers are generally more useful, rather than reenforcing the oligarchies of the market leaders who can pay my price (which is almost completely unrelated to my effort, but rather to the value of advantage over competitors in an underserved market.) My software being proprietary is just limiting general productivity gains and distorting the market (from whence comes it's value), and my enforcement is just limiting everyone's freedom to use their own machines. another tl;dr, the GPL hack creates an island of freedom within a restrictive framework, and if the restrictive framework is gone there's no need to respect the GPL, a child of that framework.
- eurleif 15y ago
  I think many creators of GPL software see it differently, and wouldn't be ok with people making proprietary modifications to their code, even if anyone was free to disassemble the modified code and try to make sense of it.

wdewind 15y ago

Your analogy of a server based app is not a great one. If Google shared all of its source code, it would be a huge security risk and embarrassing amongst other things, but it would not lead to the end of their business by any means. Google makes money because they create a massive infrastructure that is NOT simply copyable. The fact that you can't read the actual Java, C etc. code that is executing on the server doesn't really matter: even if you could there is so much more value in the business than just that. Duck Duck Go is a great example: it has roughly the same quality search results as Google, but if you just gave the Google source code to DDG they wouldn't all of a sudden eat Google's lunch. If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression. What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly. Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.

sbov 15y ago
You're trying to sidestep rather than confront the issue. s/google/some company that runs on AWS Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizzard-wins-court-case-against-world-of-warcraft-emulator-servers.aspx http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...
- wdewind 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by sidestepping, and I'm also not sure what you are trying to say with that article. Blizzard sued and won based on current copyright law, which I'm arguing is FUBAR. Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.

noonespecial 15y ago

The world I want is a world where people don't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies like Avatar. They can make movies that good themselves in their free time as a hobby. Other people who like the idea can get on board and help. In the end the result is shared with everyone like telling stories around a big global campfire. (They may or may not then sing Kumbaya). That seems ridiculously impossible and utopian right now, but I'll bet that won't always be so. How do we get there from here? I'd really like to short circuit the part where everyone that believes this is impossible or undesirable economically has to die off before this can happen.