I get your point, but promoting a tax to get the most out of the market is doublespeak. A carrot ("This is better because... and you can use it!") is more "free-market" than a stick ("Don't do that.") - even if I would prefer not to be tempted (or threatened) by either.
It's not doublespeak, it's actually a fairly widely accepted solution to externalities amongst economists.
The basic idea is that some actions you could perform impose costs on people who aren't consenting parties to the transaction. E.g., if Widgets, Inc. dumps the waste from producing widgets into a river, this imposes a cost on everyone downstream.
This would make their widgets cheaper—they're only paying part of the cost of the widget (the folks downstream are paying the rest). With a lower price, they'll sell more widgets.
Markets thus tend to overproduce (vs. what is socially optimal) things with externalities.
There are a couple of ways we take to solve this problem. When the externality is high enough, we prohibit it. E.g., we prohibit murder.
When the externality effects few enough people, and is of a suitable size, they can actually negotiate and resolve it themselves. E.g., if Widgets, Inc. wanted to take water from that river instead of polluting it, thus depriving the downstream farmers of some irrigation, maybe they'd be OK with that for a payment of $X/mo. By making them consenting parties to the transaction, it is no longer an externality, and Widgets, Inc. is now paying the full cost of producing widgets.
Of course, when the externality hits a lot of people, each for a small amount (e.g., air pollution), negotiation is impossible. That leads to the final option:
Do your best to calculate the size of that externality. Then impose that cost as a tax. This is called a Pigovian tax, and also has the effect of making Widgets, Inc. pay the full cost of producing its widgets.
Externalities do not have to be negative; they can be positive as well (e.g., you could clean up a public park). Markets tend to under-produce these, and a similar argument suggests offering a Pigovian subsidy.
Obviously, administering and complying with taxes is not free, and that limits the applicability of Pigovian taxes and subsidies.
Not to disagree with the idea, but I would add that any such tax is at the discretion of the taxing body making it susceptible to difficulties like abuse or negligence. (That makes me wary.)
I would prefer a mechanism without such a centralization of moral authority (ex, Kickstarter rather than taxes). That's the big conflict in free societies: the cohabitation of different moralities. (What is a benefit and what is an externality are decided individually rather than by decree or in the average. I think our desire to average things leads us to think we can work backwards from an average to collective behaviour in cases like these, when not everything is a bijection...)
If we are only interested in punitive measures, Kickstarter is just as able to fund prisons and buy guns and pay for legal offensives as any government program (I don't think most forms of damage need a new law as such). (My point from another comment though was that government actions have a strong tendency to be a punitive, and I do not consider that leadership.) Ideally, governments would see no money whatsoever that people didn't voluntarily commit to specific ends. When record-keeping and communication were slow, the current system made better sense - but now that those things are fast and easy, taxation feels like an anachronism.
To your comment below:
> Those 100 people have nowhere near the resources required to take on the company.
I don't see a big difference between appealing to the public for the resources to mount a legal offense and lobbying campaign to revise the law to better support a cause, vs appealing to the government for the same ends. In the former, the individuals affected retain the moral authority and in the latter, the government is cast as a parent figure which I find patronizing and undesirable (not to mention highly susceptible to corruption and self-interest of officials, with access to a bottomless purse). While we may need the latter in times of extreme duress (war), I wouldn't recommend using it that way unless we actually want government interference to be the norm. (IMHO governments should not even have the capacity for selfish behaviour, so I am trying to think of ways to minimize it.)
Oh, well I jumped to conclusions then. The stuff about dramatically reducing taxes (and thus government) and privately funded prisons and gun ownership and individual control over public money is basically economic libertarianism. I was assuming by that point that you believed in private police forces too. Another key feature is the primacy of property rights (which you didn't mention), although that also gets you into social libertarianism.
You made a remark about the government being like a parent figure. For me it was always too easy to focus on government waste and abuse because I grew up with abusive parents. As I learned to separate myself from them as much as possible and heal from the damage, it was easier for me to make some kind of limited peace with the current system, as non-ideal as it is. I now see it as the least bad viable option.
I don't know if that makes sense, but I guess that's why I personally don't really want to go down the road of debating highly alternative societies, libertarian or not. I guess I'm just tired of it.
Weird. Most free market folks say the problem with air quality is no one owns it, so there's no incentive to protect it. A tax like this is about as close as you can get to saying, ok, we collectively own the air, and there's a $1.50 fee/gallon of gas for use of the air in your combustion engine.
Collective ownership might be an uncomfortable topic, so i'll go further and say, you're using my air in your car, and I expect to be paid for it. I suspect any feasible plan would look a lot like some large organization charging use fees. But maybe there's some simpler structure I'm overlooking.
While I think it's somewhat natural for society to talk about "collective ownership," since the ownership model is what we use for individual transactions, the idea of "public goods" implies that they are "owned/managed by the public" - and that degenerates into "stewardship" by the government "for the public good" (for my/our benefit, even if I disagree, for my part). I definitely don't enjoy the "for my own good"/parental logic - so I don't like the "collective ownership" language we seem to be working with.
I think it would be better if individuals (and governments, to the limited degree I can rationalize them) acted pro-actively/responsibly, rather than defensively (tax, tax, tax...). IMHO, a better model would be to grow (to "invest" not "subsidize") what the public deems worthwhile, driven by intelligence and creativity ("leadership"), rather than perpetually trying to put out fires through punitive intervention (tax, tax, tax...). (Why centralize decision-making if not to aid leadership?) Bringing something to the market through collective action doesn't diminish the market - it is the market. I'm not saying punitive measures are ever off the table, but they should be the last act of a desperate will.
This could be as simple as using approaches like Kickstarter more (instead of taxes), but that depends on people keeping the money they already have.
IMHO government is mostly the sum of our negative/fear-based responses (digging in our heals against "threats" leading us to tax, and inspect, and...). That governments are as large as they are - and that we are taxed as much as we are - reflects a culture of fear.
I have a working solution for getting to work - i drive my car. Over the life of that car, i expect to pay about 25 cents a mile.
The investment approach assumes there is some technology that either can be added to my car, or replace my car. This technology would need to lower the cost of ownership, and do so at a profit. In my specific case, you've only got about $10k left to work with over the remaining life of the car, and that's coming from gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs budgets.
I'm just skeptical that that much room for improvement exists. Cars are a very mature technology. They have an (unfair?) advantage that a whole bunch of infrastructure is in place to support them. I would guess at least a trillion dollars has been spent optimizing cars and car manufacture. An alternative would need to overcome some pretty big obstacles.
Self driving cars provide enormous potential for underutilization of existing cars, but it's really hard to get around the problem of requiring millions of cars from 8-9 AM and 5-6 PM. There are gains to be had, and all those incremental 1-2% improvements over a hundred years have improved efficiency greatly. The point here, you can use fewer self driving cars to serve the transportion needs - just as much gas would be used, but the environmental savings come from less metal and glass and energy to shape the materials.
I'm just skeptical of even a billion dollar kickstarter moving the needle very much. Your optimism is commendable, but the only solution available to us today is using that billion dollars to somehow discount the purchase of slightly more fuel efficient cars. Even that is only a few percent improvement. Cities like Huston need to move the needle a lot, if they want kids to be able to play outside.
I was specifically trying to counter "promoting a tax to get the most out of the market itself seems like doublespeak."
The parent is being Mr. weasel word with "seems like" but I'm guessing that's just sloppy writing.
Also, I agree with you. Tax on pollution is probably the best solution. I couldn't think of a way to put pollution tax into a short argument. Fee for "storing your waste" doesn't have quite the same punch as "using my air"
Part of the issue here is that to describe such entities there needs to be a means of standardization.
We saw 'carbon credits' devolve in to specific-exchange linked, unique entities that were not interchangeable across borders. That made meaningfully adopting them as environmental units to stake a claim for the value of environment in the present-era systems very difficult. That situation perhaps evolved partly because nobody could otherwise agree on an appropriate level of auditing, and partly because .. well .. established interests. (Without nationalizing and centralizing these things, their potential for decentralized issue versus centralized government fiat issue poses a threat to both sovereign currencies worldwide and the vast profits of connected financial services industries.)
Historically, part of the control effected against change within the financial environment is that SIX in Switzerland on behalf of the ISO has controlled the major ISO4217 global currency and commodity registry, locking out innovation and essentially refusing to issue new codes. People have been avoiding that gridlock by making up unofficial codes like 'BTC' for Bitcoin and such. I recently proposed registry of these values via the IETF at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stanish-x-iso4217-a3/ however it's expired pending a new release at the moment (adding Litecoin, etc.)
(On the off chance anyone's hitting OHM2013 later this month in Holland, I'm planning to give a talk there on this subject and related matters at the intersection of politics, finance and technology.)
A tax isn't really central planning (except in a very blunt way, which governments aren't horrible at doing). It's when governments get into the nitty-gritty (put wind turbines on buildings, because it looks good, despite any turbine with blades smaller than a jumbo jet is inefficient due to the quadratic relationship between blade length and power) that they screw up.
Do you have a bigger problem with central planning, or with taxes? Because taxes aren't going away any time soon, and at least "sin taxes" can reduce bad behavior (while not discouraging hard work and investment). And industry standards are arguably a form of central planning.
I have a bigger problem with taxes. Central planning is fine IMHO assuming everyone involved is onboard - otherwise the ship should stay in the dock to the degree people still want off. For what it's worth, I am fond of industry standards when they are documentary in nature and not prescriptive (the difference between designing something to be perfect and picking a winning technology to distill).
It's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game. When they patch Starcraft to increase the damage that a spore crawler does to biological units, that's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game.
I can't think of any rules that aren't enforced by threat. (The equivalent of patching Starcraft in the real world makes you rich or lands you in jail for tax evasion. The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.)
Even if we all believe taxation is theft, we can still talk about which taxes and which expenditures are better than others. Given the choice between the state coercing you using the threat of violence and the state coercing you using the threat of violence in such a way that some public good is achieved, it seems natural to prefer the latter.
> The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.
Uh, some of us accept the government's patch because we agree with it, or because we want to play the same game that everyone else is and the government happens to be a conveniently centralized entity for deciding which patches go in and which do not. Like Blizzard. We also accept that hacking your own patch in either means you can't play on the ladder with everyone else or that it's an action worth of receiving a ban in response.
I'm sorry - I used "accepted" when I should have used "chosen," since self-determination was implicitly my end. With that in mind: eagerness does not mean you had a choice (though perhaps that's unimportant to you).
There is only a choice if the alternative was actually an option. When the government can force you to eat cake, it hardly matters if you may have enjoyed that first piece. What matters is that you will be eating it one way or another. (That is not what I would call "establishing a free market" - that's not even a free lunch.)
If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).
> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."
The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)
This is where saturation flooding of meaningless garbage can play a role in anonymization. In addition to making timing attacks more difficult, bulk garbage data provides a cheap smokescreen for the anonymized traffic and participants, increasing the burden for storage and analysis.
I'm pretty sure even the NSA would have a hard time storing and sorting through the collective output of everyone's /dev/random or /dev/urandom.
It's also a very low-risk thing to do - less so than even routing. If routing, one can just top up a channel with garbage to whatever rate both sides agree upon. It needn't affect speeds for others.
And there is a simple solution to that (poor multi-core utilization): go back to a one-window, one process model (go back, as in delete a lot of unnecessary code); forget the browser tabs - let the OS handle multitasking and let the window manager handle the windows.
The hard stuff isn't the window system/widget integration, it's having multiple processes open for the same domain (or iframes in different processes) and mediating access to local storage/IDB/cookie jar/network cache/etc.
It was only very recently that WebKit2 handled most of this stuff -- up until then they just had a single WebProcess (I think Safari on Mavericks is the first multi-WebProcess browser Apple have shipped). So it's a hard problem and isn't due to some lack of competence that Mozilla have been slow to adapt. FxOS is fully multiprocess afaik.
Actually getting the rendered page image into a window owned by another process is easy: windows and X let you host HWNDs and Windows from other processes (if you choose to allow your WebProcesses access to the window server) or you could draw into a shared memory segment. The hard stuff is all of the regular browser hard stuff.
I can't accept your complicated worldview. Iframes, for example, don't need to be new processes. One process - one window - one DOM. The only new process should be the rendering canvas/window. An iframe, or any nested resources can re-use cookies associated with a window/process, including caching. In order to persist tokens/cookies/cache between processes you hand them their own copy when you spin them up and write them out to a common, re-usable place when you close, but for the most part I consider browser statefulness to be more like a flaw than a feature (I constantly clear my cookies, form data, and history). how about a "save session" button, rather than the default being to cache objects and cookies in some common blocking profile that only allows one session and that, when it crashes, it all comes down... If you really want to share, you wrap those services up in a library - which is closer to the present model - but you have to know that in doing so you are making it harder to isolate things when they fail... And isn't that what's wrong with most browsers?
I don't see developer convenience and user experience as mutually exclusive. If an application is simpler and more consistent, that can save time for both users and developers.
(I also don't see how a one-process-per-DOM model prevents any other forms of sandboxing inside the browser. The OS doesn't understand webpages and cannot isolate them from each other - the browser does - so sandboxing pages is the browser's responsibility...)
Ah, the "if you don't like it - move to Russia" doctrine. Rather than racing to the bottom, why shouldn't the glaring problems simply be addressed?
Being grateful for health and freedom is one thing - being so grateful as to not put them to use, or let them slip away, is another. If Facebook has made a change for the worse, it's worth talking about.
How can I reason and speak about something I can't look at but for second hand testimony? Why should anyone limit his or herself to the second-hand testimony of people who could afford to look at the facts when the only obstacles are social? Why are facts, cultural or otherwise, even behind a gate? Why should I be a second-class human because I can't afford to license the means to think?
To put it differently: reduce, reuse, recycle. Once a work is made, why should anyone pay for it again beyond the cost of transcription? If investors can't cope with the product being the dividend, maybe the effort wasn't worth it...
Wow, amongst other things, that makes a good case for giving law enforcement agencies direct access to our private information. You're right: why have "second hand testimony" if you can get it firsthand? After all, the NSA is only making copies of all our information, so we are not deprived of anything either.
On the contrary, privacy has nothing to do with copyright, or rather: they are at entirely opposite ends of a spectrum.
Privacy is an extension of one's right to be secure in one's body, and free in one's thoughts. It is non-transferrable. Disclosure is boolean: it was either voluntary, in which case it does not impose any obligations on those who would reason about it (and copy it, and...), or it was involuntary, in which case it is damage (as in the case of NSA spying). Money doesn't enter into it.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it is typically transferable, and it typically imposes obligations even when licensed. It is about monetizing copies at the expense of free expression and thought, and that expense can be bought, sold, in any measure, at the discretion of the holder. It is intended to be a tool to meter out copies for as much remuneration as possible, not to keep them to one's self forever with no intention of ever monetizing them.
My point (that is admittedly not really clear) is that privacy and copyright are just restrictions on what you can do with information. But allow me to address your points in a wall of text nobody will read:
> Privacy is an extension of one's right to be secure in one's body, and free in one's thoughts.
Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided by their labor. Only, in this case, the labor is of an intellectual nature that can be infinitely replicated without recompense. Significantly, each copy of that labor provides substantially the same amount of value regardless of the number of copies, so N copies provides almost N times the value. I don't understand the argument that the remuneration for that value should be anything other than a function of the value provided; anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like communism. Not to mention that "Once a work is made, why should anyone pay for it again beyond the cost of transcription?" is a direct corollary to the "you should get an A for effort!" fallacy.
> It is non-transferrable. Disclosure is boolean: it was either voluntary, in which case it does not impose any obligations on those who would reason about it (and copy it, and...), or it was involuntary, in which case it is damage (as in the case of NSA spying). Money doesn't enter into it.
Two things:
1. Copyright has to be transferable else its economic value would be severely restricted.
2. Privacy may not be "transferrable" (the term does not really make sense for "privacy"), but it absolutely is tradeable, and it's hardly as boolean as you make it out to be. As Google and Facebook show us so clearly, people will gladly trade their privacy in exchange for services that would otherwise have a monetary cost. So it definitely is tradeable. But is that really "voluntary"? Well, if anyone dug into Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, it was inspired by a survey where the surprising finding was that a large fraction of users did not know that their private information was being mined by Google, and a significant portion of them said did not like it. (I'd like to say the numbers were 45% and 70% respectively, but I can't be sure.) Now: Is that voluntary? What if they didn't know, but did not mind; is that voluntary? What if they knew and didn't mind, but hadn't considered the implications; would you call uninformed decisions like that voluntary?
3. And that's also a clear example that privacy is, in fact, monetizable, so money certainly enters into it.
> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it is typically transferable, and it typically imposes obligations even when licensed.
Just like money is a government-granted monopoly on a unique serial number. It's not licensed, but it does impose obligations on whoever owns a hard copy at the moment (no copies).
> It is about monetizing copies at the expense of free expression and thought, and that expense can be bought, sold, in any measure, at the discretion of the holder. It is intended to be a tool to meter out copies for as much remuneration as possible, not to keep them to one's self forever with no intention of ever monetizing them.
Yes it is about monetizing copies; or to put it in Psuedo-economical terms, it is about ensuring economic compensation for the value provided by each copy to the consumer. "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces. What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive value without paying for it.
But, no it is not at the expense of free expression and thought.
1. Free thought is not affected at all. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you from profiting from copies of other people's expression, which is in no way related to restricting what goes on in your head.
2. It only restricts your "free expression" to the extent that your "free expression" exactly matches somebody's copyrighted expression, or aspects thereof. Unlike patents, it is almost impossible that two independently created works will match exactly in any significant aspect.
3. True, some derivative expression is unfairly caught in the copyright web, especially when there is no clear way to extricate the creative aspect from the original work. The one example that I personally lament are Anime Music Videos; there used to be a ton of awesome work with very original and meticulous synchronization of music to completely unrelated videos that suddenly had their audio stripped on Youtube. However, if you look at the bigger picture, almost all copyright infringements are simply copying original works to avoid paying for it, either with money or patience.
4. Even then, tons of derivative work gets through just fine, simply because it makes no economical sense to stamp it out. Literary fanfic is one example.
5. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the US alone; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit. It's just the "expression" of the "thought" that somebody else's work should be had for "free".
The image you seem to have of copyright restricting "free expression and thought" is based on a focus on a secondary effect of copyright laws that is actually a very small edge case in reality.
> Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided by their labor.
No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.
> anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like communism.
McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.
>> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly...
> Just like money...
OK, this is part of a larger tangent, but this is worth setting apart and responding to. No, money is not a government-granted monopoly. Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a government of one is hardly a government). (As for more conventional forms of money, we all together gave our respective governments monopolies on that - only in a different sense than you mean - not the other way around.)
> "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces.
That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge via the Internet. You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the Internet, but there is nothing supporting that. Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean toilets - and thus should be paid for it.
> What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive value without paying for it.
Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").
> 1. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you from profiting from copies of other people's expression, which is in no way related to restricting what goes on in your head.
Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.
> 5. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the US alone; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit.
It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the ability to make copies.
Well, somebody read my wall of text after all! Here's another!
> No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.
I don't understand. How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided? Value is everything. Or do you think people should be paid for their "work, effort, and time" for just digging holes up and filling them up again?
> McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.
I'm guessing you haven't lived in a communist regime, but know anyone who did? I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard.
> Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a government of one is hardly a government).
The point was, information has value of varying, contextually-dependent amounts, either inherently or artificially through monopolies, and uncontrolled duplication can have very bad economic effects. Money is just one example. Copying information is not just copying bits. Ask yourself why printing money is restricted. Ask yourself why bitcoin works the way it does.
> That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge via the Internet.
Distorted, how? If something gives you value, be it physical or intellectual, charging for it is in no way "market distortion". There are various distortions that can come into play, but they are exactly the same as with physical goods.
> You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the Internet, but there is nothing supporting that.
You really should talk to some musicians. For many, to make a living, they have to work a day job and/or do live shows (which is not an option for many), which takes time that they could instead used to create new stuff. If you searched for threads on this topic on HN, you'll hear this lament frequently from people who actually are musicians. So yes, there is support for that.
> Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean toilets - and thus should be paid for it.
No, humans are not creative by nature, some are. And of those, vanishingly few are good at it. For every billion of amateur artist videos on YouTube, you only get one phenomenon like Bieber(!!)
What humans are, however, is greedy and willing to take advantage of others the moment they think they can get away with it. Ask yourself why we have so many laws.
BTW, do you like coding? In that case, I'd guess your a coder by nature. I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free.
> Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").
I don't really get this point... Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?
And if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details? Just information after all.
> Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.
I meant selling. Copyright law specifically applies to distribution, not downloading. So you agree "increased capacity of thought" is "profiting"! Wow, that sure sounds like you're deriving value from something, and should maybe, you know, kinda, like, sorta want to pay for that benefit if remuneration was asked for? No? Not the least bit? You just want people to put in labor to create new information so that you can benefit from it without paying? Simply because you can get away with it?
Hmm, I can guess why communism failed.
And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?
> It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the ability to make copies.
It's almost as if you're deliberately trying to avoid addressing my point that information is more than just bits and making copies can have economic consequences.
"if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details?"
(Repeating myself) Privacy != copyright.
"And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?"
Sure, why not? A specific case like Iron Man 3, is frankly irrelevant when trying to formulate a general rule though - unless it provides a contradiction. The case of Iron Man 3 does not contradict my general rule - namely, that restricting copying for the sake of copyright is immoral (and my mom's rule: "sharing is caring"). Iron Man 3 is not worth copying IMHO, but just because I don't want it doesn't mean I care if someone else does. I cannot know how watching Iron Man 3 might help someone, and I'm not about to guess. But, it would be immoral IMHO to prevent them from copying it, since they are the ones paying for the process (ISP, HD, PC... It's all on their dime), and since copies are not held exclusively.
The work that went into making Iron Man 3 is done. The copies should have nothing to do with the economics: if the product of the process was not viable - without basing that viability on artificially impeding others' private computing and thinking actions - it should not have been done. I have no obligation to subsidize any wasteful endeavor.
Similarly, I do not keep Justin Bieber from charging for his time, in advance (like kickstarter) or afterwards (like most jobs), or accepting gratuities at any point. However, I do not support forcing gratuities with copyright. Copies are as good as thoughts to me, and IMHO it is simply too far past the line of reasonable for a society that claims to value knowledge to willfully prevent access to it. Paying for copies should be optional IMHO. Not everyone tips the same, and I am not breaking the law if I walk out without leaving anything.
"How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided?"
It is paying more than once to pay more than the time and resources that go into a thing. Don't get me wrong - I am often willing to pay a premium (more than once) for physical goods rather than go without, or roll my own, but my good will only goes so far and I will generally not buy something terribly overpriced. In the case of physical objects, it is immoral to keep/take something without paying. In the case of copies, it is immoral to restrict copying for lack of paying. The difference is stark, and has everything to do with their respective natures and respective exclusivities. A physical book can only be in one place at a time - holding it deprives everyone else. Copies, quite to the contrary, can be made freely and each new copy does exactly zero damage to anyone. Again, do not confuse copyright for privacy. I will defend privacy. I will not defend copyright.
Your use of "value" is revealing. How "valuable" an idea/copy is to me is known only to me, and dies with me - you can have no insight into my mind other than what I reveal to you, nor should you (privacy!) - that's precisely why gratuities are optional, and why the copyright is pure fantasy (copyright and privacy contradict). Your economic rationalization of copyright is based on an insight you have no access to, and which there is no exclusivity to leverage me or anyone into revealing, since obligation is proportional to exclusivity. Since copies are not exclusive at all, obligation is negligible and payment ("should be"; de facto "is") 100% optional.
People share things they have with people they like. It makes sense that in the case of digital copies, without the exclusivity property, people will share liberally and anyone arguing against it will go blue in the face. Fighting that is fighting human nature...
"I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free."
I do not work for free and do not expect anyone to, however: if I have already made something digital, anyone is free to use it.
"Ask yourself why printing money is restricted."
Money is not simply a copy, money is a unit of obligation embodied uniquely in an object or number. It retains exclusivity. A new unauthorized bill is a lie about an obligation, and an obligation that can be used for real goods, amounting to theft. Someone listening to Justin Bieber is not claiming to be Justin Bieber, and in no way harms Justin Bieber and is in no way "theft" since you cannot "trade" a copy as you would trade money because of the lack of exclusivity (even though copyright proponents really wish they could). Saying a copy reduces Justin Bieber's income because it represents lost income is like saying "because I said so." It's circular. Copyright is the only reason people expect payment for copies, and forcing payment is the reason people keep promoting copyright. (Fallacies 101) People were able to get away with it with books and CDs other other physical things, and now they expect to keep getting away with it, even though the physical bottom dropped out and it's 100% digital without any of the exclusivity, and there is no logic left.
"making copies can have economic consequences."
Correct, since making copies can empower someone, regardless of his or her economic background. You may call that communism but it has nothing to do with economics. In fact, I strongly value physical property and ideas, but I'm only willing to pay to own the former since ownership doesn't apply to a copy. You cannot own a sunrise. You can own a photograph or a painting of a sunrise, but you cannot own the meaning, aka: the information. I own my computer, but I do not own copies. Privacy is the line in the sand, and copyright exists beyond the need for privacy - at great expense. Why would I feel obligated to pay for a copy - something I cannot own? If I can't recognize any obligation to pay for copies - why are there laws enforcing payment (monopolies)? It is possible to wash off this muck and move forward.
To say it differently: copies are not worthless... Copies are priceless. A sunset is a thing of beauty. Charging for that is immoral. Charging for the creation and upkeep of a lookout area may be necessary for a popular spot, but the sunset itself is priceless and not the subject of ownership. Do governments charge for pictures of the landscape on copyright grounds? (Similarly, I would not privatize roads, even if that makes me a communist.) Copyright doesn't enter into it. People need privacy, not copyright.
Back to Communism - since it always comes back to that. Communism is simply the largest monopoly possible - a total government monopoly - therefore capitalism and communism are identical in the extreme, unless lines are drawn where necessary (and monopolies broken). (The price of liberty is eternal vigilance... Or something.) Promoting copyright (a monopoly on thoughts) seems to me to be advancing that end (going beyond a reasonable limit in order to inflict a monopoly), and I seem to recall you saying you were against communism (pardon my FUD).
"Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?"
Why does it have to be about insults? People who know how to do a thing should simply be free to, and not be held back for fictional reasons like copyright. Copies do not cause harm or deprivation. 1+1=2. Nothing is lost besides the malice associated with watching someone starve to death. Similarly, people who have a surplus and the desire to give, should be free to. People who leave tips are not stupid.
"I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard."
I'm not promoting communism (you brought it up), I'm saying the very comparison is a tangential emotional appeal, as it was with most of McCarthy's accusations. (Also, FWIW, my friends tend to agree with me too.)
But that is not a feature of NAT, that is a feature of a firewall (for example, it is possible to route incoming packets via the WAN as well as masquerade outgoing ones from the LAN - most people wouldn't even know their pants are down). It is a coincidence that home routers sometimes provide both leading people to conflate their firewall with their NAT system - but if a firewall is what is wanted (and is arguably the only valuable component), NAT is not the thing to ask for. Conflating NAT with firewalls also promotes the idea that NAT has a place in any network with abundant addresses. IMHO, it does not.
NAT will always have a place, because not everyone wants to expose a uniquely routable address for every device they own (probably based on a device's MAC address) to the world.
The simple and much more flexible answer to this is to have a firewall rule on the edge router that simply drops all packets to and from the hosts you do not want visible. Note that this is more flexible in that if you want some hosts visible and some not, you can do that. You cannot do that with NAT: you only have one port 80 and several servers for example.
In general, use the right tool for the job. NAT provides some blunt security features incidentally. It does not, for example, prevent your server from making connections to the outside world. The firewall is what is meant to be used to restrict traffic. That is its only job and it does that well.
Can you give an example that isn't based on security (since the NAT isn't providing that)? I can only think of short-term (undesirable) transition or load-balancing mechanisms - all of which have better long-term solutions (anycast, multicast, and dynamic service discovery, etc)...
What's with the widespread fixation against attributing any positive security attributes to Network Address Translation? It's like the old warning about NAT not being enough to protect a private network got cargo culted into a universal anti-NAT maxim.
What would you call it when a router at the edge of a private network presents a single IP to the world no matter how many devices are behind it, for privacy reasons?
"What's with the widespread fixation against attributing any positive security attributes to Network Address Translation"
It probably has something to do with NAT being a huge obstacle later, when needs change. For example, while it might make sense at one point to have multiple hosts appear as one, it is at the expense of direct addressability, and the workaround - having a unique address+port combination - makes less sense than having a unique directly-routable address.
"What would you call it when a router at the edge of a private network presents a single IP to the world no matter how many devices are behind it, for privacy reasons?"
The wrong tool for the job. :)
The privacy is gained not by translation but by blocking direct connections (which is a feature of a firewall - not of NAT). While there is some value in NAT's ability to falsify the origin of data - ie, to take credit for non-local flows - but if those applications ever grow they will be fighting to escape the single address of NAT and are thus only suitable in the short term. Ideally, NAT would go unused because every element is uniquely addressable and fully independent... Most people would not consider someone else who continually takes credit for their or someone else's work to be a feature, and so it is with NAT.
I'm thinking more in terms of consumer networks. I really don't want my ISP to know exactly which devices I'm using or how many, nor do I want to have every web site be able to track them by globally routable IPv6 address everywhere I go. Simply blocking incoming connections doesn't solve that.
Taking credit for someone else's work is not a useful analogy for NAT, nor are the corresponding moral implications relevant.
"nor do I want to have every web site be able to track them by globally routable IPv6 address everywhere I go."
So, you would rather use one address for everything, making it easy as pie to track you? You can pretty much pick IPv6 addresses at random (under your router prefix), and you have (many many many) more addresses than the whole IPv4 address space to choose from (it's a 128 bit address space and providers typically give a /48, /56, or /64 prefix at worst... that's 128-64=64 bits... that's 2^63.9999... more addresses than IPv4). In short, you don't really "map" the IPv6 space the same way you do the IPv4 space.
Taking credit for someone else's work very much is a useful analogy: if I can only speak through a third party, and I need that third party's permission to speak, let alone be spoken to, I quickly resent him or her. This is quite the case with current NAT solutions, with system administrators restricting "their" networks, making communication difficult for everyone else (by holding the only globally-routable address or "allocating" only a few; everyone else is second-class).
I agree that the probability of Canadian communication getting swept up in the NSA net is high, but I don't think I can agree with your portrayal of the government of Canada's interest in surveillance as low.
First, the article says: "And where Washington has demonstrated its commitment to the NSA with the construction in Utah of an immense $2-billion base said to be capable of processing a zettabyte of data, the Canadian government is building CSEC a gleaming new $900-million, 72,000-square-metre compound in Ottawa" - that's $900 million/35 million citizens, or more than $25 per person. The US figure is $2 billion/319 million, or approximately $6 per person. That's 4 times the money per capita at the current exchange rate.
Second, just months before the PRISM controversy the US government began considering requiring interception capabilities for service providers ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/caleatwo ), among other requirements... Sadly, Canada beat them to the punch. We (our government) tried to push something similar a year ago (called C-30, which caused quite an uproar) and our government still wants to bypass warrants to snoop with a bill called C-50.
