In her speech, she [Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda] called for:
- Applying the same tax rate for ebooks that paper books get (ebooks are taxed at a higher rate in most European countries)
- a copyright system that balances the rights of all parties (not just the major media conglomerates)
- greater support for open and common ebook standards...
These a really very sensible wishes on the part of a politician. Not the least the copyright part. It is really only big media conglomerates which have the power to force through changes in copyright, which leads to absurdities like copyright extinction being extended from 50 years to 70 years, magically happening around the time when the earliest Mickey Mouse movies were pushing 50 years after Disney's death...
And of course the Public Good, which copyright limits were really designed to protect (so we wouldn't get into a situation where eventually every idea every used is tied up by copyrights), does not have too much money or power behind it.
And while perhaps great for Amazon, it's unfortunate that the Kindle format, by far the most popular, is proprietary. It's absurd that a Kindle can't read ePub format for example. Thank goodness for the idealism of Tim Berners-Lee, who could have been a multi-billionaire, but instead chose to make the World Wide Web open for all.
5 comments:
Thank goodness for the idealism of Tim Berners-Lee, who could have been a multi-billionaire...
Selling what?
According to his book, he was being contacted all the time about how much they should pay him to use the WWW technology.
(Damn, I knew you'd chime in somehow. I can't write about anything PC related without you having a differing viewpoint! :-)
WorldWideWeb was successful specifically because it was free. I.e. there was nothing to license.
The University of Minnesota made a strategic mistake in 1993 when it started to ask money for its popular Gopher software. This pissed off a lot of users, and opened up a void for a similar but free tool. It was at this point that WorldWideWeb started to gain traction, and Gopher started to go out of favor.
Don't forget that Berners-Lee's software only ran on a NeXT computer. But even if he had written versions of it for other machine architectures himself, as a commercial product it would have had absolutely no chances of success. Someone would have simply written a free tool to replace it.
Internet protocols are all open and free. Even the control freaks at Apple know this and have made all the Internet protocols they've invented (Bonjour, etc.) open and free.
An HTTP server can be written in about 100 lines of code. A web browser is a very complex piece of software, but all the real development on that was done outside CERN. (The first web browser for machines other than NeXT was actually written at Helsinki University of Technology.)
Contrary to popular belief, WorldWideWeb was in no way a novel idea. HTML is an application of SGML. And there were many precedents of notation schemes similar to URL. And I hope that I don't need to remind anyone that hypertext had been around at least a decade before WWW.
TBL did, however, coin the name WorldWideWeb. He could have commercialized the name if he had wanted to (only allow its use under a license), but that almost certainly would have killed it at the same time.
If TBL or CERN hadn't existed, the world would still be currently using a distributed hypertext system just like WWW (minus the design flaws). It would simply be called something else.
... it's unfortunate that the Kindle format, by far the most popular, is proprietary. It's absurd that a Kindle can't read ePub format for example.
I agree. The only reason Amazon can do this is because they control the content. But still, history teaches us that no one can hold users captive forever. Bezos too will eventually have to cave in.
The present EU campaign is paving the way.
Yeah, see, that's what I hope. But I'll believe it when I see it, so far the resistance is nominal.
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