dexy

CS was likely the most demanding major at my university in terms of workload outside of class. Depended on what classes you took, but the toughest demanded ~30hrs per week of problem sets + coding assignments each. Made being a D1 athlete in a top national program very tough to pull off.

Ah, totally missed that when I watched the first time. Thanks!

Why is it important to call the green die 'olive'? Both 'olive' and 'green' have 5 characters... I suppose it's because you can spell out MR. BOY with the dice in winning order if you use olive :)

Landes & Posner also never advocated abolishing copyrights altogether... They just advocated moving to renewable terms instead of automatic 70 years to life.

Regardless of whether there is a decline in production, there would be a certain decline in production of high-quality, expensive content. If you think expensive to produce != high quality, you're wrong. Expensive content is only produced because it earns more money, and thus is better liked by more people. That's the only objective measure of quality I know.

There's also a huge demand for flights to the moon. Nobody supplies it because it'd be too expensive. Same thing for a LOTR that you couldn't charge for.

Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.

I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?

I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.

You should realize that what you're advocating is much worse than the current copyright system. You say that movie studios should produce a movie, lock it up extra tight and only show let theaters show it in high quality. If the movie is never leaked, then you're hurting everyone who would rather have paid to watch that movie on DVD, or through paid digital download, or off of Netflix. You're saying people should hide information and limit how it's disseminated even more instead of sharing it for a price. Yes, with contracts you could still have DVDs and require purchasers of them to agree to the contract and pay if they're caught sharing it. With contracts, you can do everything that's possible under copyright EXCEPT punish the freeloaders. Once something gets leaked, everybody who shares it from then on is free of any culpability, because they never signed a contract. This leaves us in essentially the exact same place we started. Either everything will be locked down tight and less useful to the public or else it will instantly be leaked, and then the leaked information will be sold/distributed legally where now it cannot be and the system will break.

Freedom of information is only useful to those who can use it. Most people do not gain much from free information, as they can't make money with it and they're not interested in learning from it. They gain more from the entertainment Transformers provides. In the world we on Hacker News live in, freedom of information is much much more valuable than it is to the vast majority of mankind. Because of its value to us, things like open source and wikipedia exist, where people share things freely because everyone benefits so much from that ecosystem. I'm commenting here right now because I benefit from this ecosystem and want to do my part to keep it going. The beauty is, as I said before, that this can all exist in spite of copyright. Louis C.K. can make a ton of money without needing to use DRM or enforce his copyrights. People can choose not to use the system, and do so to great success. But some things require the system to exist, and those things don't need to be sacrificed. Vote with your dollars not by pirating but by supporting content that is open source, or that doesn't use DRM. Pirating more convinces the powers that be that it's a growing problem, supporting content made by people who aren't draconian hoarders of information will encourage more to be open with their content.

Would people still create cave paintings without copyright? Absolutely. Songs? Yes. Books? Fewer, but probably yes. Multi-million dollar movies and games? Absolutely not.

Art would still exist, but it would exist much differently than it does today. Free copying does allow for more creative freedom in many respects, though I would argue many of those benefits can already be had through current fair-use practices, which are quite extensive.

I've often heard the argument thrown around that "the world could live without another Transformers 2." I don't know if you fall into that camp, but many people really enjoyed that movie. In aggregate they were willing to pay more to see it than ~99.999% of individuals globally produce in a lifetime. If big-budget movies, pop stars, and games cease to exist, other things will surely take their place, but they won't be the same and most media will start to look a lot more like youtube and less like hollywood. Most people probably don't want that.

People need incentives to do things. Incentives are probably the second most powerful force in the universe, after compounding interest :), and a lack of them is why communism fails. People are not benevolent. They do derive utility from things other than money, but money is able to coordinate the interests of many individuals from disparate backgrounds under a common goal. Other things can too, and the Linux OS I'm running right now is a testament to that, but Linux can exist in a world with copyright while Transformers 2 most likely cannot. At least not until everybody in the world is a lot richer and making Transformers 2 is a lot easier.

Unfortunately, I've yet to hear a convincing alternative incentive scheme to that of copyrights and patents. The necessity of copyright and patent law varies widely from industry to industry, and the limited expertise (and interest) of legislators keeps them from taking any bold steps adjust the law to better fit the intricate needs of the people (ie, short/no patents in industries that move quickly and communally, like software, and longer patents for industries like pharmaceutical development, that are immensely costly and provide limited network effects to the first mover (a drug's prices decline by 90% in the US when it goes off patent).

People view copyright as less essential than patents, but the truth of the matter is that without copyright laws, there would be a significant decline in the production of movies, music, games, and many other costly mediums. Without copyright, I could legally create a competitor to netflix that paid studios nothing and played every movie ever made on any device for close to nothing. I could create a competitor to steam that distributed games and was every bit as useful and integrated, and I'd pay nothing to developers. Even if you think online piracy isn't as big of a problem as studios claim it is (and you'd be very right), the laws that keep it illegal are all that stand between today and a collapse of the content development ecosystem.

Even if copyright doesn't maximize for society's benefit because of the monopoly it creates, every copyrighted work sold is a net plus to both the consumer and the producer. Without any copyright framework, there's a significant chance that the producer could never afford to make that beneficial product in the first place. Even if you only eliminate prosecution of people/entities that don't make any money from what they're doing and allow non-profits like wikipedia to host full movies, you still irreparably break the incentive system that exists today. Maybe we don't need new movies and games, but people want them and as long as that's the case they'll want to keep protecting them with copyright.

Maybe someday, systems more like kickstarter could replace copyright, but I highly doubt it. They don't do nearly as good of a job.

That said, I'm all for much shorter terms for copyrights and the elimination of software patents.

This falls exactly into the scenarios I talked about...

Given how much randomness was involved in our creation as a species, let alone our technological ascendance, it is highly unlikely that other intelligence would develop in exactly the same amount of time elsewhere. It's astronomically unlikely. If they didn't develop at the same time as us, they're either still incapable of radio or have had radio for a long time. A long time in the life of the universe certainly doesn't mean 100 years, it means much longer. Even if it's only 1000 years, if they progress at anything like the rate we do, they'll be massively more advanced than we are.

If a species only has radio for a short period of time (like 200 years) and then disappears or loses it, the odds of overlapping with them are virtually nil (if they die out after getting this far, it says we're much more likely to die out soon too).

And I don't know if they would talk to us before we'd talk to them. Stephen Hawking has a lot to say about why trying to communicate with other civilizations is a bad idea, and they might be smart enough not to try.

Not quite.

The actual reason is that we have invented radio technology only very recently. Because we are so new to the technology, odds are that our communication partner has had radio for much longer than we have (millions of years probably, given the age of the universe), and thus is far more advanced.

This logical step requires a few assumptions. First is that societies don't destroy themselves soon after the advent of nuclear weapons, which would limit them to a very short window of radio capability (measured in hundreds or thousands of years).

The second assumption is that other forms of intelligence progress their technology at a similar rate to that at which we progress ours.

If the former assumption is wrong, it's extremely unlikely that we will ever talk to any intelligence, even with relatively plentiful life in the universe, because it will kill itself too fast. The latter assumption could still be wrong though, particularly if the method used for interstellar radio communication was in any way evolutionarily derived.

This is my understanding of the topic at least.

Amazing how curriculum focus has changed--in no small part due to the invention of the computer. These topics have almost nothing to do with what most Harvard students study today. There's been so much new knowledge generated since then...

Exact same thing happened to me when trying to do my first cs problem set. It was some filename that I was sure had a 1 in it but it was an l. It's almost as if courier tries as hard as possible to make the two look the same.