Posts by Matthew Poole
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I don't think people like being irrationally scared, per se, I just don't believe many people step back to evaluate their feelings against empirical evidence.
Hence my comment about "want[ing] to believe that crime is on the rise". Nobody wants to believe they're irrational, so feeling unsafe and believing that crime is going up tie in together. One feeds off and validates the other.
Craig, my comment was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but a number of the people I know who like John Key insist that crime is totally out of control regardless of the evidence. Similarly, they honestly believe that National will do something about it. I'm far from convinced, not least because last time National promised to do something like increasing police numbers we ended up losing dedicated traffic cops. I expect solutions to crime to be just that, solutions, not simply acts of listen-to-the-fascists wankery that do nothing to actually address the problem but everything to help the politicians get reelected.
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A more appropriate comparison might be building a house. If you decide to do that, and then rent it out, you would expect to continue receiving benefit for that, essentially forever.
Yes, you would. But the supply of land is finite. You also can't stop someone else building a house that's kinda like yours (case law says that copying as little as four bars of a song can be infringing), for a period measured in multiple decades, or at all for that matter. I'll ignore copyright in building designs, which is a whole different story.
Given that copyright terms have extended every time Mickey's been about to come into the public domain (twice now, and counting, and retroactively both times), how much culturally poorer would society be if Shakespeare or Mozart had had bodies like the MPAA to push their case for (at the time non-existent) continued copyright term extension?
That's the real problem. Copyright isn't meant to be about ensuring a lifetime income for the creator. It's about ensuring that they get some form of remuneration for their work, to encourage them to create things that will become available to all of society to utilise at a future time. And if you look at creativity in the historical context of centuries, not just the narrow lens of the last 100 years, artists created regardless of the money to be made. People invented shit before patents existed. Books were written, music composed, artworks produced, etc. Money wasn't the reason - it was incidental at best - instead it was creating for the love of doing so. -
People want to believe that crime is on the rise, at least in part because they want "that nice Mr Key" to swoop in and render unto us the rose-tinted utopia in which the media is trying to convince us we existed prior to the rise of Helengrad. I had someone trying to insist the other day that NZ has a murder rate 2.5 times higher than that of the UK. Apparently if you take a 15-year perspective it shows up, but since the best I could find was data going back 10 years I just cannot see it. However, if you were to go by the reporting we get it's entirely believable that we're on the verge of turning into Washington, D.C. (which, for the uninitiated, has just about the highest murder rate of any city in the US). Of course the reality is that one has to look at US cities with populations under 500k before anywhere in that stupidly violent country has a murder rate as low as ours.
The Libz are a funny lot. Many adherents to the faith would be utterly fucked if their desires came to pass, since they frequently lack the kind of unique skills that would allow them to command an income necessary to be able to afford life in a libertarian dream state. I'm even more amused by the Libz voters who work in the public sector, since in the event that they got their way they'd all be getting paid far less than they are now, assuming they had jobs at all.
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And what makes your work so much more important than creative work that you should get paid and copyright creators shouldn't?
I don't recall saying that the creators shouldn't get paid. My objection is in no way related to their remuneration. Goodness knows I wouldn't do my job for free. But I don't expect to get paid for it forever, unless I do it forever. I definitely don't expect my grandchildren to be getting paid for the work I'm doing today, but that's what's being demanded every time a term extension is granted.
Once upon a time, copyright was for 14 years, with a renewal right of a further 14 if the author was actually still alive. That's fair. That's reasonable. I can live with something being tied up in a monopoly that's a fraction of the average human lifespan. What riles me is this insistence that a) artists have a right to be paid forever, when no other occupation offers such a luxury, and b) that it's not the creators like Islander who actually benefit from the ludicrous terms currently on offer. The big-time artists, like Metallica, get zero sympathy from me if, in 20 years' time, they've spent all the millions of dollars they currently earn. Likewise John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. They're wildly successful now, and thoroughly raking it in, so why should copyright be the pension plan for them that doesn't exist for other sections of the modern workforce?
For the minor creators, if they cannot survive on what they make now, what would suddenly change in 30 years' time to make a work a viable income stream? It's a rare painter who's getting large sums while they're alive, and the few who make it in their lifetimes are subject to my caveat above regarding financial (mis)management.Short version is, if they can't live off it now they're unlikely to be able to live off it in 20-30 years, which was the original duration of copyright. If they can survive on their earnings now, why should they be placed in a better future position than minimum-wage earners and others who can live on what they earn now but cannot accumulate any kind of buffer? For the ones who make it big, society doesn't owe them any kind of future duty if they're incapable of managing their money wisely. We expect everyone else to look after their finances.
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I've made far-reaching decisions to avoid one or two people I'd never trust around kids. And it's still hard to do, without feeling like maybe you're paranoid.
It's less paranoid than taking the view that there's a paedophile hiding around every corner and behind every bush, which seems to be where the media's trying to push things. The reality is that most molestation occurs at the hands (if you'll pardon the distasteful pun) of family, or friends-of-the-family. The stories you relate bear that out.
You're taking a prudent position. You don't feel comfortable about those people, and statistically they're a far higher risk than anyone except your family. Stick with your gut. You can't prove a null hypothesis (that they're not a danger to your kids), but the cost of disproving it is too high to bear contemplation.
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Islander, I'm curious why you think one work should pay you for life? For those of us who aren't in the creative sphere, if we want to keep earning we have to keep working, or we have to manage our money. What makes creative types so much more special than the rest of us?
If a doctor cures your terminal illness, do you pay them for the rest of their (or your, if it comes first) life? No. You pay them once, for doing that work, and call it even. Given that methods for treating human illness cannot be patented (yet! Long may it continue), if they used some never-before-seen technique to treat you they're still not getting a lifetime pay-cheque out of it.Not dissing you, just curious as to why creative people feel that society owes them a life-long income that is denied to all others unless they've got some financial nous.
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Russell, does "it totally works" extend to condoning the totally ridiculous situation that the words you write today won't become public domain until your grand children are coming due for retirement, assuming current statistical lifespans for all involved? Because, for me, that's just a total fucking nonsense.
I accept the need for copyright. I'm one of those hippy, commie, OSS types (BSD, not GPL, but don't get me started), so I do understand that even stuff released for the world at large to do with as they see fit gets some benefit from things such as moral right of attribution. Hell, I even accept that creators should get paid for their endeavours if they so wish. What I can't accept is that somehow it benefits society to have those works locked up into a monopoly for one-and-rather-a-lot lifetimes (and that's just until Mickey is next due to enter into the public domain, at which point it'll probably become something like twice-the-lifetime-of-the-author-plus-some-arbitrary-high-percentage-of-100 years). The Sonny Bono Act was pretty much the confirmation that copyright as we know it is horribly, awfully broken. Fine, we're only life-plus-50, but you can be sure that it'll be forced up to life-plus-70 (or such other longer duration as exists in the US when the time comes) in the event that we become signatories to an FTA with the Yanks. Alternatively they'll buy WIPO again and make life-plus-whatever a requirement. That ain't something that's working in my book.
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That's a pretty dramatic incident, but sadly not that surprising. I have a recent ex who, at 18, has been an active (she doesn't accept the "once an addict, always an addict" line, but she still has the odd patch where she hungers for one or t'other) heroin and cocaine addict, had to drive a car at gunpoint before she'd even got her licence, had to drive away from a Russian Mafia house at speed with her dealer/friend hanging half out the door after he'd been thrown from a balcony onto another car, and experienced various other things that, when she's told me, have made my hair stand on end. She's also burying her diabetic, in-end-stage-renal-failure father by inches, and has been since she was 11.
I was fortunate, and other than having my father die when I was 14 (which was hardly a picnic, but compared to my ex's experiences, or to this account of part of Emma's history, was a total walk in the park) I had a pretty blessed adolescence. I was in a good group of friends, who stuck with each other and helped deal with the less-pleasant elements of teenage life, and I just wasn't attracted to the kinds of activities that encourage trouble. "I was a pretty boring teenager," as I put it to a new flatmate last night, and when I see how it could've been I'm quite glad. Others from my school have extensive criminal histories, kids who're not far off starting high school themselves, and the usual other litany of sins.
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Trots the old lawyer joke out once more:
Q: Why are researchers performing experiments on lawyers these days?
A: Because some of the researchers were growing too attached to the rats.
A: Because there's no PETL to bust out the lawyers.
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I loved this story about cycling anarchy. Big ups to those cyclists, and also to the cops for not getting heavy with them. I'm kinda jealous.