
How Silicon Valley is Hollowing Out the Economy (And Stealing From You To Boot) - Libertatea
http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-silicon-valley-is-hollowing-out-the-economy-and-stealing-from-you-while-theyre-at-it/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29
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opinali
Well, this article is retarded, where shall I begin? Kodak killed by Internet
companies, what a joke, Kodak died of its incompetence to transition from film
to digital tech -- Nikon, Canon & co. are still doing pretty well selling
expensive camera gear. If anything, lots of people are buying these cameras to
shoot their Instagram photos -- or at least, buying expensive smartphones that
contain optics from traditional camera companies (Carl Zeiss is around since
1846... I guess old dogs can learn new tricks when they are smart).

Translation software from Google/Bing "stealing" work from human translators??
That work was paid at some point, and if it was reused and repurposed, that's
because it was made freely available by their copyright owners. For one thing,
many of the training materials used by machine learning-based translation are
official documents, e.g. from the United Nations and EU, because these are
often long, complex, and their translation is both high-quality and focused on
precision (which often doesn't happen with literature -- "traduttore,
traditore").

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tixocloud
Very interesting discussion and timely in the sense that I spoke with a co-
worker yesterday about how Google is obtaining free market research on
businesses through the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Essentially, it's a
competition where students consult with businesses, produce a report on the
company, industry, etc and implement an Adwords campaign for them. No doubt I
gained a lot of experience from doing this but submitting all the reports to
Google and with them being able to aggregate everything, I'm sure they would
find some value in it.

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eli_gottlieb
The problem is even deeper: _information is non-scarce_. The marginal cost of
production for any unit of information is _zero_ , and thus the natural market
price for a piece of information is _zero_.

The problem being that while the creation and copying of _new_ information is
_obviously_ massively valuable, we've not yet invented any effective and
sensible way to trade information for physical goods like food and land and
medicine.

The more information-based our economy gets, the more blatantly neo-feudal it
gets, _because our property laws for information are blatantly feudal and have
been for decades._ Popular examples of the problem include patent trolling and
Mickey Mouse's regular copyright-extension bills.

Free Culture was a marginal movement in the past couple decades. It's going to
quickly become the next big question of the world economy. When data is what
makes the world go 'round, how do you compromise between compensating the
original creator of the data, making use and extension of the data as
widespread as possible, and not allowing "intellectual property" to expand
into feudal-style veto or rent on everyone else?

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snowwrestler
> The marginal cost of production for any unit of information is zero, and
> thus the natural market price for a piece of information is zero.

The cost to reproduce an existing piece of information is very low (not zero;
you still need computing technology).

But the cost to produce an original piece of information is often still quite
high. Look at how much it cost to make Star Trek Into Darkness, or for George
RR Martin to write his next "Game of Thrones" novel, or Apple to produce iOS
7. These take huge investments in time and technology.

Even the premier product of free culture, the Linux kernel, receives millions
of dollars of investment every year in salaries and supporting technologies.

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eli_gottlieb
Yeah, but the point is that the resulting product (like the movie, code,
whatever) is a tradeable product. The act of creation itself is not something
we can sensibly trade. People are trying with stuff like Kickstarter, but the
core problem is still there: how much should you pay to _maybe_ get something
later that _might_ match the description you _thought_ you liked?

Market economics doesn't work without excludability.

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snowwrestler
The solution to that core problem is to move your transaction to after the act
of creation, so that you can see the final product before you decide whether
you want to invest in its creation.

And that is where the concept of copyright came from in the first place.

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unimpressive
Is "stealing" really the right word for this?

