rdm

That's a cute writeup, but the author overlooked some important bits of history.

For example, the original use of APL (before it was called APL and before anyone had implemented it as a programming language -- the reason Iverson joined IBM) was to specify the IBM 370 machine architecture.

In other words, it was being used to document how the CPU worked. And it was impressively successful there, distilling a large body of documentation into 2 pages.

This reduction in cognitive load, describing machine structure, is what made it popular back then. And this is what motivated the effort to implement it as a programming language.

(Also, if I understand correctly, there's also a relatively short and direct step from APL to the initial implementation of SQL.)

That survey feels like the sort of thing I've filled out to get a temporary free trade publication subscription.

But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting choices on a number of those questions.

So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.

If <<The "Constitutional problem" copyright seems to create with respect to music is "inability to listen to newly-released songs by favorite musicians without paying for them".>> was the idea you got from my writeup, I clearly failed to present my concepts adequately.

Ok, yes, it's true that this can be an issue for some people. But that does not make it a constitutional problem.

The constitutional problems have to do with the purpose of copyright (it is supposed to foster creativity) and its character (it is supposed to last for a limited time). [And, if you are going to try to bring up Eldred v. Ashcroft, note that the facts of that case included no mention of human lifespan and the court does not rule on facts which are not contested. But there are other complications also, and we should be demanding Congress to write better laws... if only we could figure out what those laws would be.]

Anyways, I was commenting on what might be some reasons for widespread adoption of the mentality you are talking about. (And note also that I believe I said nothing in opposition to iTunes Music Store.)

I think this article is interesting, because it casts some shadows that help me see some of the current intellectual property issues, and the associated "creative value" issues.

For example: copyright currently is horribly flawed, from a "USA Constitution" point of view. A constitutional copyright would expire after a few years. Current copyright law explicitly states that copyright lasts longer than a human life time. But copyright is a social thing -- each community of media has its own concepts for what is acceptable use of copyright, and these issues get written into law and respected by courts. The copyright rules for theatre performance are different from the copyright rules for an industrial faucet design. And I think that this kind of variation is necessary, because copyright is protecting symbolism, and symbols are at least partially a construct of the mind. So, anyways, when the rules become outrageous the communities need to structure their behavior so they can still function...

But, on the legal front, copyright laws are based on treaties, where numerous countries have agreed to implement the same laws. So changing copyright law is a Big Deal, and not something that can happen quickly.

But, back on the social front -- when the laws are outrageous, this devalues the laws themselves. Either people ignore the laws, or laws get enforced which causes damage to the country and its communities and economies.

Copyright itself doesn't expire, this causes problems, but it's dealing with symbols, so people either ignore the copyright or abandon those symbols or whatever else.

(And then there's patents which have a different "guilty until proven innocent" problem, which in the U.S. favors patent trolls.)

So, anyways, back to music... copyright creates problems for people, and it does not have enough good going for it to make up for those problems, and we see various communities doing things to ignore copyrighted works. Some of this is piracy, but the economy has had a lot of problems recently and people have been changing their spending habits as a result. This is important because if you fix the wrong problem you do not get good results.

Another issue has to do with how music achieves value. And, with why music needs to have value. In simplistic form: Musicians need to eat. So music needs to make the lives of people who provide food better. So, how does this happen?

One mechanism used to be: people would create lp records, and singles, composed of tracks that are several minutes in length. Some of these would be broadcast, which let people know about them (and which had its own financial arrangements) and people that liked records would buy them (which was a different financial stream). This was great for people with the right connections.

Nowadays, that system's inefficiencies are creating opportunities for new arrangements. This leads to different financial arrangements. Youtube is the rough analog of radio (but distribution costs are much lower now, so radio financing models do not work). Bandcamp, Apple Store, and band websites and so on are the rough equivalent of record labels -- but, again, the details are much different now.

The decreased risks mentioned here correspond to decreased costs. Decreased costs correspond to broader potential audiences, but also correspond to increased competition.

Anyways, my long-winded point here is that yes the things being talked about in this article are real, but they are not purely copyright issues -- there are other problems also. And, I think that the copyright issues are, to some degree, caused by the current copyright laws. Copyrights are a bigger sledgehammer in a situation where we need sharper needles.

If I were designing copyright law, I would give some initial period of free coverage, but after a certain point I would bake fees into the copyright. Those fees would go up over time, and would be collected by both the government where the copyright holder lives and the government where the copy recipient lives. Copyright would also have increased costs based on the copyright value being sold.

The idea here is that we want to encourage small scale use of copyright, but we do not want copyright to be any kind of permanent or long-term condition. And, at some point the cost of maintaining copyright will exceed the value of copyright and the content becomes public domain.

This of course would create a whole new set of problems (especially the end state -- that needs a better design than what I have describe here -- but it's an essential part of the plan -- the end state is the justification for this plan.)

So my plan is a bad one, but if copyright is the problem then copyright is going to have to change.