Hi Simo,
On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 11:16:51AM +0200, Simo Sorce wrote:
On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 13:03 +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
I agree, but there are limit where the compromise in the other direction actually helps the freedom in the society.
The perfect compromise would be to say: "As long as you preserve the meaning you can modify the work to fit technical needs".
I expect a different compromise for each category of works to be a good solution. For software, the four freedoms seem to be a good compromise to me, for literature, music, law texts or instruction books I am missing this. There are examples where meaning and technical needs are intervoven and there are examples where I believe that the right to change the meaning of the author is a good thing.
Except that we have a problem in defining both "meaning" and "technical", so to ease things we should try to simplify b categorizing things and proposing license for each category.
I agree.
You to throw the motivations of the authors into the ring.
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Each bit of information needs to be written or assembled which is effrot. If we want quality works we need to compensate for this effort.
Are you sure? It's true that compensation give someone a chance to dedicate more time to a matter, but are you sure there's a direct link between compensation and quality?
I am sure there is a connection, though it is not a simple relation. Note that I have deliberately not wrote "paied" or "money" as I wanted a more neutral tone.
I'd say no, the link is between motivation and skills, and quality. Now granted you have the right skills, in some cases compensation can be the right motivator. But compensation is not enough in most of the cases, and does not matte at all in many cases.
Your "motivation" seems to be similiar to what I called "compensation". In admitting that money can be the right motivatior in a fraction of cases, you admitted a connection. Also I am not ready to completely throw away the benefits of competition and a market. It has its limits, but also its advantages.
A lot of the high quality "content" that I make use of is done by professionals which are in a competitive market. An example are the newspaper I read. Of course there is also other high quality "contents".
I remember an article that claimed that around in the French revolution, copyright was completely abandoned and the quality of publications went down significantly. Unfortunately I do not have the reference on this one. It was a few years ago.
Even if such data exist I would like to see how they have been put in relation to each other. What kind of measure for quality have been adopted, how the general economical and political status have been weighted and so on, it is to take to set of data and link them together through a time relation (they happened at the same time so they are linked), but timing is not enough to explain most facts.
Probably this is a broad subject and I would love to find that article again.
To make realistic suggestions for the politicians, we need to accept that many people accept the idea of economic reward.
I do not see the link, under this line of reasoning you just advocate the status quo as that is accepted by most people ...
No, I recommend that our recipe should include an answer for those people that have accepted the idea of the economic stimulation. Anything we propose will not be heard until we have a good answer to them.
Bernhard