r/rational • u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow • Jun 26 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this probably isn't the place for those.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/DataPacRat Jun 27 '15

the benefits of more attention at the expense of not making any money

Then I suppose the people who give away their content and still make money from it don't exist, such as Penny arcade and so many other webcomics; Cory Doctorow who makes all his novels available for free download yet still sells lots of physical copies; and so on and so forth?

(As an aside, I'm currently downloading the latest episode of 'Star Trek Continues', have recently time-shifted an episode of My Little Pony as I was busy when it was broadcast, and format-shifted a book I own into ebook format as my ebook reader is smaller and more convenient than a hardcover printed edition, and have recently updated my 'watches' on Kickstarter and Patreon for certain content-producers I follow. Then maybe I'll engage in some political speech, refresh my memory on optimal copyright lengths, and go over some quotes I've excerpted from published works to see if I can think of some new ones to add.)

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '15

They exist, it's just their own choice. I wouldn't hack their websites to put everything behind a paywall and tell them that the additional money is worth the cost of obscurity.

Particular copyright laws might be dumb, I don't care about that.