[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 @ 16:25 -0500, Micah R Ledbetter said:

> On Apr 17, 2007, at 13:35, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> > I don't want the hassle of licensing and locked data, even if they  
> > made
> > it 1 penny per year.
> >
> > None of them seem to understand that, they think it is all about the
> > price.
> 
> The price is important, though. Not just for e-libs, either... so  
> many academic journals are $1000/year or somesuch.

It is important if you buy and it is yours, yes.

But if you buy it, and then have to rebuy or maintain license
information and maybe special software to access it, then price isn't
the primary problem.

> > I once used a service that was decent, but you had to pay to
> > download what it found.  It was cheap so I tried it.  Then I found
> > out that  what you downloaded was encrypted with an expiring key!
> 
> Ugh. At my school (University of Texas), at least one of the online  
> "libraries" that we subscribe to does the encryption thing... it's so  
> they can recreate the whole delightful experience of checking out  
> books and then not being able to read them after a certain period of  
> time - just like a real library! I think you could only get them for  
> 24 hours at a time, and then you had to go back and do it again.

You know, it has to be miserable to go through life being that stupid.
If we just took them out and shot them, it would be merciful to them as
well as the rest of us.

Anyway, it would be funny if it were not real.

I won't even try to decipher the "logic" behind the idea of making
something electronic have the limits of something physical.

Similiar issue: I bought content on a CD once years ago, and the
software was proprietary.  I finally found a way to read it, only to
find the encryption on it also expired.  

Yes, I could set my clock back, but that's pretty annoying.

IMHO, any business model that depends on crippling the free exchange of
information, is broken by design and cannot survive, and indeed must not
be allowed to survive.

It might suck for businesses in that market, but the fact is that lot's
of businesses eventually become irrelevant.

One basic fundamental of capitalism is that when the market dries up,
you move on to something else.  There is no rule anywhere that says you
have a right to survive after you've become useless.

If business wants perpetual income from outdated ideas of publishing,
then I want a law that allows me to force car makers to supply my custom
made buggy whips!


-- 
shannon / There is a limit to how stupid people really are, just as there's
-------'  a limit to the amount of hydrogen in the Universe.  There's a lot, 
but there's a limit.  -- Dave C. Barber on a.f.c.