It's "Computer, lights!" and we're still not close to Star Trek, because our computing is ridiculously fragmented. Instead of a unified, configurable system doing our bidding, we have a whole ecosystem of apps that try to be everything but helpful. Can you imagine captain Picard saying, "computer, tell Hue to turn on the lights", or "computer, tell Northrop Grumman® Unified Weapons Platform™ to charge Phasers™"?
My piano has 92 keys. (Bosendorfer 225). 85 keys was pretty common until the 1920s. And the third pedal is relatively new. Some pianos (Fazioli) have 4 pedals.
I just stopped working. Between state and local taxes, I only got to keep 46 cents of every additional dollar I earned. I shut down my business, let 6 people go, and stopped.
Of course there are instances where copyright and/or patents have helped an economy.
You don't think that popular books and movies like the "Harry Potter" series helped the economy? People pay for the licensed content and entire industries are born that don't hurt anybody, and nobody is coerced to partake in it.
Trademarks as a consumer protection are also fine.
Copyright, for a LIMITED time (say 10 years without registration, and renewed in 10 year blocks //with// registration and steeply increasing fee) sounds like it'd be helpful to the economy as well as encourage creators of high quality content to register.
The exponentially increasing fee would also be a way of keeping actively stewarded and relevant properties under maintenance.
I also think that, similar to song covers, a maximum compelled fee for reproduction should also exist (to prevent with-holding content from the public).
Putting up more barriers to protection would do nothing to protect authors or encourage their creativity. Most works protected by copyright have no value and aren't even worth registering. Of those that are registered, most aren't worth renewing. But if those works weren't protected, non-authors could exploit high-quality, unrecognized works instead of expending resources to create something new.
An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics. If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful one is protected.
There was a recent HN thread about Germany's economic boom in the 19th century being largely due to no copyright law - and a huge proliferation of technical books of every description.
In the US, Hollywood was started to evade patent enforcement. Isn't it ironic how they aggressively defend IP protection now?
There are some very popular consumer products like Dyson fans and vacuums that enjoy patent protection. They've expanded the market and spurred new innovation in a stale market.
PDF is great for electronically created documents. DjVu is far superior for scanned documents, though. It compresses much smaller and DjVu viewers are far more performant at scrolling through large scanned documents.
I still prefer Adobe Acrobat Reader despite everything, and absolutely hate PDF.js because it seems to take like few seconds to render a page when jumping around, whereas Adobe Acrobat Reader is pretty much interactive. Nevermind the fact that pdf.js has still problems rendering quite many documents I encounter, while Acrobat is basically the de-facto reference implementation for PDFs.
They also do DjVu, so you can see the size difference there. For that particular book, its 58M for the PDF vs 31M for DjVu. So basically half the size.
In what circumstances does it actually matter to be able to get better compression than CCITT Group 4? For example, when is size such a deciding factor that it makes sense to forgo the compatibility of CCITT Group 4 in PDF and to use something else like JBIG2 in PDF or DjVu [assuming the latter actually is smaller; I didn't measure]?
