| Thursday,
March 29, 2007 There is a long discussion on the future of ebooks and
copyright at
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
2007/03/why_the_commercial_ebook_marke.html
and it's a good example of why I almost never read blogs. The
discussion is in chronological order, but there's no order to the
discussions. Stross's original essay takes my column on DCMA
http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-317-c.php
and uses it to derive positions I don't have and don't defend; my answer
to that appears as item number 39 or so in a long list of comments, most
of which are not unintelligent but aren't really a good investment of
time.
The subject is important.
Stross says that ebook piracy won't be important because ebook readers
will cost a couple of hundred dollars, and people won't pay that, so
-- well, you can read it yourself if you like. It's fairly long and my
summary is not likely to be any more fair than his parody of my position. Of
course he's dead wrong on the readers. You carry a cell phone which is a
reader of sorts, most of us have laptops, my medico friends tell me that
TabletPC's are becoming very common in that profession, and no one has
repealed Moore's Law.
Stross uses my column as the horrible example. In it I said
For instance: I recent came across a web site that offered nearly
every book Niven and I ever wrote, along with Asimov and Heinlein and
many others, free, in .doc format. His defense was that he was making
these works available to those who couldn't afford them. And of course
he was taking advertisements. The only content that would attract people
to his site was the copyrighted works of others.
He never commented on that. He says the reason ebooks don't sell is
that they are priced too high. If they were priced reasonably people
wouldn't steal them they would buy them. I could say the same about BMW
and Ferrari automobiles, but perhaps that's unreasonable. On the other
hand, if pirate sites are advertised -- and they are -- then publishers
who charge any price are competing with them.
I don't like DRM schemes that inconvenience paying customers. On the
other hand, I make a living at writing books. In my column I invited
discussion of the matter. There hasn't been a lot, and I am not sure that
the Stross parody of what I said qualifies anyway.
The matter remains important. I don't know what to do about protection of
intellectual property. I do know that forcing writers to be performance
artists who make public appearances for money is probably not the optimum
way to get great books written. Writing songs is tough, and there's little
money in it; that's the performance artist model. Writing books is, I think,
a good bit harder than writing songs.
And on that score I am going to go write on mine. If any of you care to
read through all the comments to Stross -- I didn't have time -- and tell me
if there's anything new and important, I'd count it a favor if you'll let me
know. The matter is more important than most people know.
==========
There is mail on Free Trade and
economists
=======
Greg Cochran in the news again.
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/070326_evolution.htm
Human evolution, radically reappraised
March 26, 2007 Special to World Science Updated March 27
Human evolution has been speeding up exorbitantly, a new study
contends--so much, that the latest evolutionary changes seem to largely
eclipse earlier ones that accompanied modern man's "origin."
======
A reader asked his Marine son about my comment on 300 as being popular
with the USMC. He got this reply:
I know all of us have seen it. We have even renamed a few of the
things we do "Spartan Training." You can just imagine what that is.
Three hundred unloved warriors fighting thousands on a beachhead... what
could be more Marine?
=================
The Wall Street Journal had an article about Free Trade yesterday: some
economists are beginning to realize it ain't all that good for the country.
No one has yet understood the remedy, which is an across the board tariff
on imported goods and services; but they'll get there. A 10% tariff sounds
about right to me, but I think that needs experiment. The point is that a
tariff on imports falls on those who get the benefit of the lower import
prices; the revenue can then be used to ameliorate the effects of job
exports.
Blinder also makes the point that college education isn't the answer
because many of the jobs that are done by college grads are now being
exported. He has suddenly discovered the flaw in Ricardo's analysis.
That flaw is in most simulations. I had to do models for a living; that's
what operations research is. And the flaw is time: there are phase shifts in
the real world. Processes that take a while work differently when you make
things more instantaneous. We can now export a job instantly but retraining
takes time; by the time you have retrained that job can be exported too. In
military operations this is known as working inside the other guy's
operations cycle. It can work in economic warfare too.
====
I am going down to the beach to work on Inferno II. We're in the 8th
Bolgia. If you have th9ughts on Evil Counselors who work in secret and ought
to be roasted in Hell -- make sure they are dead, you cannot libel the dead
-- I will listen to suggestions. I hope to finish the first draft of
that scene before the weekend is over. Palm Sunday in Hell...
===
Safe in San Diego. We're at the beach house and I'm working....
Thanks for the suggestions. I will use a couple of them.
Thursday TOP
Current Mail
|
