I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses.

I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367

Actually, IBM and its mainframes/midrange have continued to prosper along with all of the newer growth markets in business computing. That's not just a correction about IBM, it's fundamental to noticing that job growth in these sectors was not "created by the decline of" anything. It was created by a huge expansion in the total amount of computing value that businesses found needs to consume in the marketplace.

When zero-sum your ideology is, 900 years-old you will not reach.

And not stray too far OT, but this is what I dislike about the "kill hollywood" meme. There isn't anything inherently hollywood-killing about the project of expanding the meaning of media production and delivery to include new (and great!) films that aren't produced by traditional studios...and there probably shouldn't be.

I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve.

I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.

In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of an internet service, it should be free. Unlike Stallman, I do believe in a bit of capitalism, but a majority of freedom.

The only one that I think is different is the development of the mobile phone and tablet computers. These are devices that are sold with locks on them and legislation that discourages tampering. I don't think we've seen this kind of thing happen before and it sets a bad precedent. I've got a Kindle and I don't really believe that I own it -- Amazon can remotely remove content from it and brick it if they wanted to. I've got a phone that that has the capability to spy on me. If I modify any of these devices to serve my interests I risk "bricking" them and voiding any warranties that they came with.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik that's a first for us.

"At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy has been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."

I would extrapolate this to progress in free societies at any given point in history.

Oddly, this evokes a strange feeling of comfort in the inevitability of disruption.

I see 2 ways of fighting this:

1) Civil disobedience - Pirate everything and share while willingly accepting the consequences. 2) Shine lights on the evil doers. Support wiki leaks. Publicize. Organize voting drives.

I have bills to pay so I support number two. Great social change requires number 1.

For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way.

Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrelevant. It is, however, infectious. Facebook is following suit and (I hope) it won't be long before we all realize that the doze of benevolence will get you far. And by that I don't mean philantropy.

1) Don't charge people more than you have to. Make money, by all means, even get rich, but don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition.

2) Pay your employees well and create positive work environments. Happy people remain working hard and make you more money at a nice and organic rate.

3) Loyalty is no longer a virtue of an employee. It is a privilege earned by an employer. Don't be a DB and expect people to stick around and work hard for your just cause you are putting bread on their families tables. That worked in the 50's. Get on with the program.

4) Share the profits with your employees, share the innovation with your customers and don't be afraid to try new things even if they appear to hurt your bottom line. You will never know until you try it.

5) Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires (I intentionally did not use a word needs here. (This is where I will exit on this one.)

I could go on. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but something (my gut) tells me that if we are in Act III, the good will win in the end. Doesn't it always?

It's either that, or this rebel will need all the force I can get.

It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists.

Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game.

America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it.

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To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand.

Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.

Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.

"At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."

And I recall still using/seeing them in the early 1980s here in UK!

They were still heavily used at that time in the Market Research industry for recording data entry (of surveys). In fact the term punching is still used in the industry to this day in reference to data entry.

Who are the ewoks in this analogy?

As though you can really have your cake and eat it too when it comes to a big government. Big enough to break up AT&T, regulate IBM and Intel and Microsoft - big enough to take your freedom, silence your speech, regulate your Internet. Good luck getting something that big and power hungry to not keep getting bigger and more powerful and eventually wiping out your liberty. You give a government system $7 trillion dollars to spend regulating and growing itself, what do you think is going to happen? They're just going to be selectively hands off? You think you can negotiate with that?

Of course, I have worked for wall street, nuke plants and dot com or dot boombs, but aint rich.

1.on the final rocketship ride the robot sacrifices himself in the position of 'rear gunner.' The death star is stopped.

2.diverse, strange discussion is helpful. 3.Confucious saying I meet three class of persons: one I learn from as role model one I learn as ANTI-model, to avoid his bad character one I learn from to be amused and just happy - that is C3Pio

4.of course, my character is resurrected in the MATRIX

5.unlike the droids that lack COURAGE, COURAGE is the universal PROTOCOL. Call it faith, hope, being a small bit player on the SHAKESPEAREAN stage of life.

Shame on you! Without your early pathetic experiences with phone MODEMS and secretly reading '2600' and MEETING CAPTAIN CRUNCH at the germany rave you would not be the DROID...errror MAN or human that you are.

My the BUDDHA be with you! and may you be re-incarnated as a small insect flying droid. One that takes down the preadator drones. The battle of empire continues.

afterword: thats to my Czech cousins. RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. Many think C3pio is talking in modem. WRONG again. He talks in protocol-hybrid-neo-Czech.