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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4715 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 33 of 52 07 January 2012 at 8:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I love idealistic debates. Let me show you guys how it's done.
Debates about facts must be kept separate from debates about morality. In other words, whether an action was performed or not has nothing to do with whether that action is morally good or bad.
Is it morally bad to attack someone here? In my view, it is morally good to attack someone here because it is morally good to debate for the purpose of changing your opponent's mind. We may have different definitions of the word attack, though. In my view, an attack should be grounded in logic in order for the debate to be idealistic.
Is it morally bad for someone to lock books away from the public? Does you answer depend on whether that person is making money off of them?
If we are having a moralistic debate (and we are), it does not matter what the copyright laws are. Is it morally bad for a person to copy your work? Is it morally bad for a person to make money off your work? Is it morally good to protect the authors of books?
If you wrote and published a book in 2050 and died in 2070, would it be morally bad for a person to copy your work to the internet in 2100? What if that person somehow made money off your work by doing so? You seem to think it wouldn't be morally bad because that would mean people value your work, but is it immoral for a person to use your work without valuing it?
Would it be immoral for a person to copy your work to the internet in 2060 and share it for free with thousands of people that value it but couldn't afford to pay?
Again, this could only be answered in a scientific debate about facts. A question more suited for a debate of morality would be "Is it morally bad for a person to search the internet for copyright infringement and report it to the copyright holder for free because he feels it is morally good?" If you can answer all these questions and give reasons based on what your ideal world would look like, and none of your answers contradict your other views, you would have a very persuasive position. My answers to those questions are based on my current belief that it is immoral to pay for mental effort as if it's worth more than physical effort because if everyone in the world only did mental work, nothing would be made and the world wouldn't become the utopia I envision. It is morally good to work hard, in my view, and that is its own reward whether the job is physical or mental. If I were to make a language course, I would put it on the net for free both because it is morally good to help people learn the languages they are passionate about, and because I can still pay my bills with my day job. It is immoral to not pay me for my strenuous physical effort because then I wouldn't be able to pay my bills even when I'm doing what I think is morally good. If I lost my job, it would not be immoral for me to find a way to pay my bills with the fruits of my mental effort, but only at a rate that's comparable to my current pay. It would be morally good for a person to "attack" my views and change my mind by looking for contradictions within them instead of just saying that I have strange, rare views. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5318 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 34 of 52 07 January 2012 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That may be true for some authors but there were several cases of unknown authors who were routinely turned down by major publishers and only got picked up when their self-published books took off on their own. In that respect self-publishing has become somewhat of an equalizer.
Only bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable in the USA. Scalable fonts are copyrightable in the USA. For more information see this article. As to the original question, IMHO, lawyers are paid for by their clients to protect the copyrights that they hold, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever. Nobody can force you to give away your stuff that you don't use anymore and nobody can force publishers to give up their property. It'd be great if more authors adopted Creative Commons licenses. AFAIK, there's only one new CC licensed textbook so far, Liberté, by Gretchen Angelo, but it's a start. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 35 of 52 07 January 2012 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
However, industrialisation has left us with a relative lack of physical labour to be done. And if we devalued intellectual endeavours, the intelligent choice would be to work on a farm, because thanks to technology, it doesn't take a particularly strong person to run a farm. We would end up with all our intellectuals performing manual jobs, and our non-intellectuals out of work.... And the value of intellectual work is often intrinsically higher than manual labour thanks to the amount of labour it saves. Going back to farms, a combine harvester does the work of dozens of labourers with scythes. The labour-saving value of the device is far greater than the labour cost of producing the machine in the first place. The cost of labour saved is shared between the designers of the technology and the farmer -- but the farmer gets the bigger share, which means we all get cheaper food. The intellectual endeavour has created a value that serves the public good.
But is it not immoral to deny someone else to earn enough to pay his bills by offering your work, whether physical or intellectual, for free? When there's record unemployment in many parts of the world, is any free work justified? And on the flipside, there is a tendency to put an amount of effort into an endeavour that matches the perceived value. When producing a language course, you have to choose between putting down on paper what you think should work, or you can spend a lot of time finding out what does work. The production of a truly useful, effective language course is a very big job in terms of the hours that have to be dedicated to it. Most of the free stuff I've seen on-line have been written on pure principle, not on experience. They have not taken the time to create value -- so we must reward those that do take time to create value, to encourage tham to do so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4715 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 36 of 52 07 January 2012 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks for your well thought out reply, Cainntear.
What you basically said was, "Technological development has increased the efficiency of labor." This is a claim that would usually need to be proven in a separate kind of debate. Such a scientific debate would require us to define what we mean by development and efficiency, but luckily we already agree on this point, so let's move on.
What you seem to be saying is, "It is morally good for a person to reduce the cost of everyone's food through the mental effort of imagining new technologies." Remember, though, that not every rational person has to agree with this view. This statement seems to be a subset of what I already said I believe, namely: It is morally good to work hard, in my view, and that is its own reward whether the job is physical or mental. The difference between our views is I would pay the person who imagines the new technology the same as the person that makes the new technology, as long as they are both working hard. My statement is more general, however, and I wouldn't necessarily say that it is morally good to lower the price of everyone's food.
If you were to say, "It is immoral for a person (Mr. A) to take away another person's (Mr. B's) only means of paying his bills," I would agree as long as Mr. B is a person that does morally good things like hard physical or mental work. My goal is to turn the world into my vision of utopia, not to meerly lower unemployment rates. Increased efficiency caused by new technology should mean, by my definition, that everyone's hard physical effort will go that much further in creating that utopia. In other words, it is immoral for a person to work less strenuously because efficiency has increased. By the way, would it be against the forum rules to translate the things I write here into Japanese? I love idealistic debate, and Japanese. I want to learn more Japanese through debate and get feedback from fellow Japanese learners. Would it be immoral for Japanese learners to help each other here even if everything said was also said in English? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 37 of 52 08 January 2012 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I said it serves the public good (whether the public good is a moral good or not is a completely different question!) -- the thing is that technological efficiency in food production has practically eliminated famine in developed countries. So (although I did not say this before) the increase in agricultural efficiency is a moral good because it prevents suffering.
Then can I ask whether you would refuse any wage higher than your state's minimum wage? Because you seem to be saying that you believe all wage differences are immoral, and that all work is of equal intrinsic value.
You start off talking about "hard physical or mental work", but then you return to talking about "physical effort". So I would say you are denying moral value to something that does a lot of public good. Consider the two careers of pharmacologist and doctor. The doctor does the physical work of saving lives. But he only does so by applying the fruit of the intellectual efforts of pharmacologists who invented new treatments for previously fatal diseases. The pharmacologists are currently paid more than the technicians in the factory that physically produces their drugs. Why is this morally wrong? The pharmacologists have created something of near infinite value -- a replicable formula or process -- while the factory technicians have created something of finite utility -- a batch of pills.
The rules as I understand them state that everything must be in English, but it's OK to post in English + another language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5781 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 38 of 52 09 January 2012 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Someone wrote that publishers do a valuable job: well I'm all for proofreading, but I'm not convinced that the same can be said for (e.g.) marketing. Some of the worst courses are everywhere (e.g. Rosetta Stone). Some of the best courses are unknown outside of circles like this forum (e.g. Assimil). Where good courses are well known the marketing gives a very, very misleading impression and even leads people to use them incorrectly (e.g. Michel Thomas). I don't think the marketing side of the industry is doing a good job at all! Leaving aside political arguments I think most people would agree on 3 things. 1) Authors (and some others such as proof-readers, printers etc) need to be compensated for their work. 2) When it comes to education (as opposed to entertainment) it is vitally important that poorer people and people in poorer countries have some sort of access. 3) The current system is doing a bad job of both these things. On a personal note: as someone who does a manual job and hates every minute of it (because it is soporifically boring, not because it is strenuous) I consider it a an urgent goal to get a job that allows me to do intelligent creative things that actually help people. That's why I spend much of my free time and nearly all my meager disposable income trying to learn things. If you accept that we are all capable of such things then the current situation in this world outside of the western middle and upper classes can only be seen as an enormous tragedy. It is this personal experience that makes me insist on the importance of access to educational materials, and it is this personal experience that makes me skeptical about claims that creators should somehow get enormous rewards for doing something that is intrinsically more interesting and rewarding than washing other people's dishes for them (what I do) or similar low-level jobs. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 39 of 52 09 January 2012 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
But then we've got to start drawing a distinction between classes of intellectual endeavour, because some intellectual work is really very boring indeed..... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5781 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 40 of 52 10 January 2012 at 3:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
True. I'll give you that. Proofreading, for instance, is vitally important, demanding, highly skilled, requires great concentration...and is boring as hell. Equally being (for instance) a master stone-mason is manual, yet perhaps even more highly skilled, just as valuable and not at all boring. But then access to the (different kind of) education that leads to highly skilled manual jobs like these is also severely restricted. Perhaps a better distinction would be between those who have a job that challenges them and allows them to develop their humnan potential...and those that don't. Trying to maximise the former and minimise the latter is part of what makes access to educational resources so vital (the other part being the opportunity to challenge and develop yourself outside of work, of course). Edited by Random review on 10 January 2012 at 3:18am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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