Another solid argument for serious copyright reform.
It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over and over in recent years.
I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just an also-ran.
Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets then many are deprived of access to the information they contain. I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that price and I know many others can't either.
I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing of the country.
Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge.
I've first studied in Germany, then later UK and US. The prices of textbooks in the latter two shocked me.
In Germany, as a general rule, you didn't need to buy any textbooks. The professor would lecture, the exercises were handed out printed and were fully self-contained (not "Exercise 12.3 on page 114"), and there were any number of relevant books available in the library. If the professor sold his own book, people in class would get a "Hörerschein" and get it at a further discount from the already low price (say $20 instead of $30). Student clubs would sell "scripts" containing the lecture material, summaries, and formulae.
A 2006 article [1] suggests US students need to spend around $1000 per annum for text books. (The article compares the text book market to the prescription drug market.) In Germany, $1000 covers tuition including the "Semesterticket" (pass for the entire public transit system, state wide), and probably all the books you need.
I mean, if even The Economist complains about textbook prices [2], then you know there's a problem.
Right. The cost of textbooks is outrageous and any scheme that can reduce their cost should be tried.
The most objectionable and outrageous trick major publishers do is to regularly bring out new editions wherein they deliberately change the the chapter and exercise numbers, this then almost renders older editions useless for any student who has one cannot easily follow what's going on. When the teacher says go to exercise number '123' and their book says '89' an inordinate amount of time is wasted chasing up fellow students with newer books to help identity it.
This not only seriously disadvantages poorer less well off students but also it's wasteful on resources as older books are just dumped as the consequence and become landfill.
In my opinion, publishers who are caught doing this ought to be blackballed by universities, educational institutions, etc. in
that they not recommend those textbooks for their courses.
Yeah, textbook prices have risen following tuition prices to absurd levels.
I didn't buy a single textbook during my education in Germany (well maybe one for the language exam). Everything given to read seemed like it was taken from the doctor's' notes. My ticket could get me to Berlin from Saxony for free I recall. And the penalty for schwartzfahren in town was more of a joke. I think I had to pay the whole price to visit Czechia though...
On topic, I can believe that lax IP laws were a factor in the rise of Germany as an industrial powerhouse. And I'm far from convinced that America's strict laws benefit more than a very few.
"...the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights until the 1890s."
That's very true, and it's only in recent decades that the US has been a signatory to the Berne Convention, however that's not true for patents. In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity.
BTW, you're right about other countries ignoring copyright but I only mentioned China because of its huge impact, essentially it's the quintessential example.
> In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity.
Which probably had more to do with the US officially endorsing patent theft and even paying out premiums to people who brought them stolen technology/knowledge.
Not because the US was so respecting of other countries patents, quite the opposite was actually the case [0].
It's even more true for patents: not only did the US not enforce foreign patents before the 01890s, it didn't enforce them after the 01890s either, and still doesn't today. Neither do any other countries. The PCT doesn't work like the Berne Convention.
Those who've signed it are supposedly bound by its framework. Alternatively, they wheel the fact out when it suits them/it's to their advantage in trade negotiations, etc.
He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt. Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
There is absolutely no problem getting a higher degree—say in literature—and also becoming a plumber.
You can study history and become a bricklayer.
What is definitely wrong and abhorrent is the expectation that:
1) one is worthy of a so called “white collar” job
2) that a college degree requires full-time study and a campus.
May I also note that there are such a thing as higher trades—for example, engineering, architecture, medicine and law.
You are not studying some abstract concept when you study the above 4. You are preparing yourself to take an exam and be qualified to practice a trade.
The rest of the degrees? Open them up. Wish all of us would study minimum history and had awareness of different structures of government. To me, its so sad that Americans can’t place the specialness of their country in context and protect that which makes it unique in this world—jury duty. A plumber, a bricklayer and a cook need to know that as well as everyone else.
You seem to be under an illusion that most people would attend university for fun if given the chance, whereas coming from a country with free university degrees - isn't the case at all.
The bottleneck in countries with "free university degrees" is not the cost of university, it's the cost financing your live while studying.
For young people with no real financial obligations that's somewhat easy to accomplish.
For people in the midst of their lifes, working a regular job, taking care of a family, it can be very difficult to juggle all these obligations at once.
Because even when university is "free" it still requires you to invest time.
"Because even when university is "free" it still requires you to invest time."
That's ever so true. I've been to university over several periods earlier in my life. The first time there were fees but they were manageable by most students (as the Government provided reasonably heavy subsidiaries). By the next time the government had changed and a more enlightened one came in and made all fees (except student union fees) free.
This was great for a time until work commitments forced me to stop before I'd finished. Then a little later another government reversed it all and it even went much further - the new fee structure went from free to like $50,000 or even double that for some degrees. Thus, my lack of time caught me out big-time.
That said, had I had the slightest notion what was going to happen then I'd definitely have managed to find the time. That's for certain! (I'd not learned the old addage don't put off until tomorrow what one can do today.)
A university or college degree for topics such as literature, history, gender studies, etc should not be available to you until you have done been certified in a trade (be that bricklaying, medicine, law or engineering)
This is why I highlighted that these sorts of degrees don't need to be done on a campus, full-time unless you're willing to pay for that or have been deemed worthy of a scholarship AFTER having completed a vocation.
I do think it would be quite awesome to have these available for free again after having achieved skills that are very valuable in the workplace. Kind of like going to a museum or the way Jews can go on a birthright trip.
Education is to build the person. It is to build a society of more refined members, which means, to reduce the collective damages that come from ignorance. It is both personal elevation and social duty.
The cancer of ignorance is fought also so that people are able to do their own job, the cognitive structure of which does not just stand up on its own isolated supports. Only hours ago I had to find myself in front of somebody who could not do his job owing to underdevelopment.
What is the purpose of "society with refined members" when majority of these members need to do thinking-free, menial jobs? It only builds up discontent. Result is that the government needs more violence applied against people to keep them in check, or the society blows up in endless, unfixable conflict where people just ask for the impossible and won't settle on less than that. Especially in a democratic society where applying violence may be impossible or hard to push through (catch-22 of people having to vote for it), it can simply end the country - any country.
This is how Soviet Union ended. "Workers and peasants" were 100% OK with Communism. It's the educated masses who were too educated and did jobs that did not justify their qualification, and lived in deep poverty, ended it.
> What is the purpose of "society with refined members"
To enable democracy, which depends on a population endowed with well developed judgement to work properly.
And to enable society, which depends on counting a large amount of members the individual will trust, professionally and personally, to be hold as a value triggering synergy.
So, to enable widespread civilization, which is required to achieve the basicmost goal of a liveable environment.
Cultivation is one of the tentative ways to increase civilization. Education shapes the person; the impacts from the environment may be random in gain or loss, while education comes out of a positively progressive effort. It shapes your neighbours and the professionals you rely on.
as it should, we humans arent here to do menial task but to solve problems both personal and societal and MAYBE we should give more value to people as factor of production?
> What is the purpose of "society with refined members" when majority of these members need to do thinking-free, menial jobs?
Enough culture to recognise a demagogue when they see one? Enough basic scientific knowledge to avoid falling into wellness scams and understand how climate change works? In a democracy, a well-educated people is absolutely required. You don’t need to apply all of your knowledge in your daily work; it does not mean acquiring it was a waste of time.
> This is how Soviet Union ended. "Workers and peasants" were 100% OK with Communism. It's the educated masses who were too educated and did jobs that did not justify their qualification, and lived in deep poverty, ended it.
The problem with the Soviet Union was not too much education. It is also a strange example to pick when arguing about democracies.
In a democracy, people who don't depend on the government, but other way around, are absolutely required. It doesn't matter if they are much educated or not - when they vote with their money, NOT for "free" money they get from government, everyone gets very rational. And universal higher education doesn't help with that.
And Soviet Union is a good example because a democracy would fare worse in same conditions. Soviets could apply unlimited violence to keep people in check, democratic government can't do that.
It's the same argument that was used to restrict voting to landowners. It's a fallacy. Lots of people are careless or misguided even with their money and there is no indication that rich people, who are those that can afford unsubsidised higher education, are better at running a country than poorer ones. And even if that were not the case, you don't spend public money like a family budget.
I am not quite sure how rewriting history somehow validates your argument. The USSR was in a very specific situation and you'll never know how a democracy would have fared. In all likelihood, a democracy would not have ended up in that specific situation anyway.
I think you need to realise that people don't exist just for others. Why would you want to stop someone from pursuing their passion for literature or philosophy? Why does everybody need to maximize their utility for society? Yes we need plumbers, but why not allow a young person to study literature for three years and then become a plumber? Plenty go this or a similar route.
In my view the world you (want to) live in looks bleak and sad.
"...society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology."
Society needs both but I'm in full agreement that in recent decades that the trades, woodworking, etc. have been terribly denigrated and they need to be restituted to their former position in society. Even with modern equipment that's taken much of the menial work away we still need people with the skills to use those machines properly.
Also, we need creative people who are best skilled with working with their hands. We cannot lose sight of the fact that many are most suited working this way and to force them into doing a desk job is both unfair on them and on society generally. By saying this I'm not implying that they're any less intelligent - in fact I know some very smart and intelligent trades people who I'd trust with almost any work with training.
I say this as person who has been a professional/desk worker for most of my working life but also as one who also had the privilege to be trained in metalwork and woodwork and for a time working in those trades. I understand that mentality, and there's absolutely nothing wrong or demeaning about it.
So if I put my chemical hat on and suggested that a solution using a solution of HOOC-COOH/C2H2O4 would help shift the rust then I'd be in the wrong ballpark. Right?
Like the Mikado, maybe we need a little list of society offenders who've perverted the language with stolen nouns. As the Mikado would claim, to not only steal nouns for illicit purposes but to then morph them into proper nouns is the most heinous of crimes - a crime that could only be committed by those with absolutely no imagination. As wasted space, they are deserving nothing less than the axe!
Arguably, there are acids that are more efficient but oxalic acid is specifically sold for the purpose of rust/stain removal. In fact I have a large 2kg container of crystalline (100%) oxalic acid that I bought at the local hardware store and it's labelled 'Rust and Stain Remover'. It's one of the chemicals that I deem essential to keep around my house.
One of the advantages of oxalic acid is that it's a sufficiently strong acid but still mild in comparison to many others, notably the common inorganic ones. I've not thought much about alternatives as its cheapness, easy availability and its suitable chemistry makes it a suitable choice (someone else's already done the hard thinking ;-)). Being a dicarboxylic acid—here the simplest, just two carboxyl groups bolted together—it's reasonably strong, stronger than say acetic acid but mild enough that it doesn't suffer the drawbacks of the easily-available inorganic acids. For instance, if you forget and leave the work in solution too long then not much damage is done. For instance, compare it with phosphoric acid that one often finds in vehicle rust-removal kits. I once left a large collection of rusty twist drills in a phosphoric acid solution and although it removed (converted) the rust admirably, it actually changed the crystalline structure of the HS steel in the drills to such an extent that they became brittle and broke easily (that's sort of obvious, had I bothered to think about it I wouldn't have done it). So one leaves the phosphoric for heavy-duty rust removal like when you can't tell any difference between the metal and the rust in the floor of your car (and besides technically it's more a converter than a remover).
Being comparatively mild, oxalic is also reasonably kind to other organic materials such as wood and you won't get the 'charring' damage of say sulfuric acid (no self-respecting woodworker would be without some oxalic in the workshop). For instance, the ugly bluish-black stains wood gets from being near iron, nails etc. can often be completely removed with oxalic acid. It's often combined with chlorine bleach/Na hypochlorite when there are stains from multiple sources, mold for instance (Cl works better here).
You're right about oxalic acid being toxic but one would have to be damn stupid and careless to get an LD50 dose of it, which if I recall, that figure is in excess of ingesting somewhat more than 10g. That would be rather difficult unless one did it intentionally. It's important to realize that we have a tolerance to small quantities of oxalic acid as it occurs naturally in most of our vegetables, spinach and rhubarb for instance (that's why one's told not to eat rhubarb's leaves as the acid's concentration there is much higher than in its stems, also those prone to kidney stones are told not to eat foods high in oxalic acid due to the formation of solid oxalates).
I've been using oxalic acid for years without any trouble and don't take anything other than sensible precautions when using it. In fact, I have a 500ml bottle of saturated solution (at room temp.) with a trigger pump on it that I squirt onto rusty things as well as wood stains. I'm just careful to ensure that I wash everything afterwards. Incidentally, if you're preparing an oxalic bath (say several liters of warm water with oxalic in it to remove rust off an object), then unless you do it outdoors you'll likely notice a tiny amount of bitterness in your mouth and your teeth may feel like when you bite into a lemon from the slight 'volatility' of the solution (you've probably notice the same effect when working in the lab with sulfuric and hydrochloric acids). At most, you are unlikely to be getting more than a milligram at most (which is about the amount of oxalic acid in a reasonable helping of spinach and it's not likely to be harmful unless it's a regular occurrence/part of your job etc.). If this is a worry for you or you dislike that acidic taste then wear a chemical-removing mask (the charcoal type should suit).
(BTW, it's important to note that ethylene glycol (antifreeze) is very toxic because it's both sweet and it's metabolized by the body first to glycolic acid finally to oxalic acid. I've used this oxalic acid example (along with the ethanol/methanol one) to explain to people why one shouldn't make simple assumptions about the toxicity of a chemical based on a closely related one. Here for example, its close relative propylene glycol is essentially harmless; it even has a food E number. If one came at it from only knowledge of propylene glycol and made similar assumptions about its simpler ethylene cousin then one could get into very serious trouble (unfortunately, it's happened more than once.)
>main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications
Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
I advised a friend to skip the "weeder" classes in college and take the "honors" version. The reason was the profs in the weeders were only there because they had to be there, and the same with the students.
In the honors classes, the students were there because they wanted to learn, and the profs were there because they wanted to teach.
He tried both, and discovered that while he had to work a lot harder in the honors class, it was a lot more fun being in that environment.
> society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
There's no reason why someone can't be both. Universities weren't originally designed to be job centers, that's what vocational education was for. This is also one of the problems that I see with the current system is that universities are just seen as a way to get a job rather than to be educated. The issue of people feeling shit about wasting their time or whatever also stems from this issue - they came to university to get an easy job afterwards, not to learn, and this belief is misleading.
I really don’t see any reasonable scenario where this could be true.
> main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough
If one believes that having a degree (which is 30% of the population) makes them part of the elite (which is 1% of the population), they should have spent more time in high school studying statistics. People with a degree don’t see themselves as “the elite”.
In the USA, free can be used to mean free to the consumer, but paid by someone else.
The US has uncontrolled education costs, a surplus of irrelevant college degrees, and many object to taxes to pay for others.
For example, If someone can't afford to buy a house and support a family, in part due to taxes, they understandably wouldn't want to pay more taxes to so that someone else can enjoy some fanciful degree.
There is an abundance of very good low cost colleges, but many advocate that elite colleges with marble walls that cost 1-200k+ should be payed for with public funds
I know. I've heard exactly the same myself. It's a mindset that I think I've figured out after hearing it on multiple occasions but it makes no sense for a society to think this way, nor does it in anyway benefit the country.
>In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.
Not only that but there would be incentive for every printer to print everything they could get their hands on, in quantities enough to saturate the markets, with the quickest to act at scale gaining the market share advantage.
Knowing people, this could give an exponentially unfair disadvantage to cultures which restricted this type of activity beyond a certain extent.
>The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself. Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country.
It was like they got the "information superhighway" of the horse-and-buggy era exclusively without parallel, and new scientific data (always controversial in some way) was heavily involved consuming significant bandwidth, plus an ever-increasing multitude of users rapidly consuming information & new sources arising (so things could go viral) like never before. Maybe even allowing for some deeper kind of echo chamber to have more widespread resoundment.
It would also seem like any division between the well-informed and the badly-misinformed could be magnified.
What could go wrong?
Then when copyrights did become established, the flow of new scientific information was badly choked so people just had to make do with the old stuff. Still that might be a more informed (or misinformed as the case may be) position than others who had never had any period of information freedom at all.
There are many instances and they take many forms. It's a subject too big to do full justice here so I'll give a few instances/headings to start things off.
- Treaties between nations that either extended copyright law or force the nation with the most liberal copyright laws into doing a back flip over copyright liberalization.
- Changing copyright law as in the US where stuff in the public domain went back into copyright (complicated, read Wiki, etc.) This was the result of corporate lobbying.
- The recent scouring of stuff that was effectively in the public domain and clearly reclassifing it into a copyrighted domain. For example manufacturer service manuals that were once made readily available
were withdrawn, or restricted to authoritized service personnel only, or were reissued after being heavily redacted. This is part of the Right to Repair argument in that an unstated right to repair had always been in existence but when manufacturers withdrew once freely available information about products we now have to fight for a new right that not long ago no one would ever have thought as a right.
- Copyright owners lobbying government to tighten/change the law on ophan works - those ones where there's no known copyright owner so they would have less competition. If I recall about 70% of all works fall into this category. BTW, there's a lot more to this than I'm mentioning here.
- Iteas and stuff that's been common practice and thus not documented gatherered up and put into the private (now-copyrighted) domain by unscrupulous carpetbaggers.
- Programmers using public domain information, modifying it in trivial ways then claiming copyright over it. Obfuscation through copmliation makes it difficult to unravel these tricks.
It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over and over in recent years.
I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just an also-ran.
Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets then many are deprived of access to the information they contain. I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that price and I know many others can't either.
I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing of the country.
Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge.