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I have an opposite fear: Sometimes I have to sit in an audience while someone who knows diddly squat about Open Source gives a speech about it (or even a keynote), and I would really like to engage them right in front of the audience and point out all of their mistakes, but in general that doesn't work for the audience. I just hate to sit through those things. About my most productive response was to write this in response to a completely clueless speaker.

But how did I become a speaker? I had a neurological deficit resulting in a speech impediment and coordination problems. Throughout 1-12th grade, I took at least 10 years of either instruction from a speech pathologist or year-after-year enrollment in the school's rhetoric class (which wasn't really addressing a problem in speech pathology). So, any fear of audiences was beaten out of me.

Most people hate and fear being in front of an audience. For some, the solution really is for them to one-on-one with a teacher. But for most, the solution would be early instruction that makes them more comfortable with the situation. The sink-or-swim method of just putting them in the front of the room is probably not the right way.

Crowdfunding is "also used to try and ensure that people get paid for the work they do writing software, making movies and other media." This was first envisioned in 1999 by Kelsey and Schneier as the street performer protocol and later implemented in platforms such as Kickstarter.

> People seem to have this reality problem, when they can't figure out that drudge is an aggrigator and posts news from all spectrum's of the isle. From Alexjones to Motherjones and everything in between. I guess reality has a factual bias for you.

According to this statistical survey of stories on Drudge from 2002 to 2008, the hard-right breitbart.com was the largest source of links at drudge with 14.45% - sources with mild-left tendencies like WaPo and NYT only make #4 (6.26%) and #6 (3.38%) - hard-right sites like motherjones don't even crack the top 10 list.

Viewing habits here, Facebook explains, are just a proxy for income bracket,, which will be used to categorize and target users. And, as this article on Digital Inclusion and data profiling notes, "Digitally dependent surveillant technologies do work differently in how they collect, categorize, target, and overall exploit users. As these technologies emerge as central to the current economy, old forms of prejudice and injustice can be grafted onto these new tools." Doesn't have to be that way, sure, but sometimes people have a hard time restraining themselves when big money is involved. :-)

“Push combs the online footprint of our targets to determine everything we can about them,” said Yaroslava. “We use social networks, we use search histories, we use cell phone data, we use gaming protocols. All data is useful to us. Not only do we find out exactly what our target likes to consume, but we also find out how they like to consume it. We see how they browse to determine their specific attention spans and intelligence. We scan their pornography habits to learn about their libido, their obsessions, and their fears. We aggregate vast amounts of data about the way they use the internet to create a complete psychological profile of our targets, and then we use cognitive behavioral techniques to triangulate patterns in this profile. We make as robust a model of their operating intelligence as we possibly can. And then we make little movies meant only for our specific subjects. We make movies designed to steer them toward our products, whatever these products may be. These movies are designed to make each subject breathless, pliant, confused, over-stimulated, and highly amenable to suggestion.”

Recently I came across this very interesting article:

Content is not king by mathematician Andrew Odlyzko.

You may want to read it, however since it is long, I'll summarize it for you:

1- the entertainment industry is small compared with the telecommunications industry;
2- people are more interested in communication than entertainment;
3- therefore entertainment "content" is not the killer app for the Internet.

As content company continue to shoot themselves in the foot by abusing consumers, they will need to learn this lesson soon enough or die.

It's a sad situationÂ: most larger companies' positions on software patents and IP in general are captured by their in-house IP professionals anyway, but both large and small companies (and individuals) generally don't have knowledge and insight sufficient to see through the prevalent patent system economic quackery and mythology - even though it's really as transparently bogus as any quack medicine pseudoscience. It's ironic - but also rather satisfying to my nationalistic instincts ;-) - that here in the UK it's our IPO and some of our most senior IP judges who've espoused a relatively rational and well-informed position on the matter of patent eligibility for software inventions.

 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1036/957

You're over-simplifying. In both the US and China, censorship involves complex relationships between government and corporate actors, and the censorship that actually occurs isn't coextensive with the censorship the law theoretically demands. Yes, burst.net was "operating under its own volition" and merely enforcing its own terms of service -- so are Chinese companies when they draw up internal guidelines regarding political speech, including extreme speech that incites violence, and censor their customers accordingly. The US and Chinese governments prefer things to work that way -- they don't like kicking in doors unless they have to, which in most cases they don't, because companies tend to be run by people who understand the parameters within which they actually operate, rather than those the law theoretically describes.

That's not to say that the US and China are identical, of course -- but neither is one simply oppressing its people and the other simply protecting them. 'US == China' and 'US > China' are equally nonsensical.

"Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their information."

"Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company anywhere," Clinton declared. "American companies should take a principled stand."

-- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, referring to Chinese internet censorship.

There's always been a long tail in the demand curve, and it always will.
What we need are useful recommendations that guide us from the head to the hidden treasures located along the tail area.

Also, I find very disappointing that none (Wharton, Anderson, etc.) uses the Long Tail model proposed by Kalevi Kilkki ( http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1832/1716 ). This model has a better formal definition of the Head, Mid and Tail parts of the curve (not based neither on absolute nor on %), based on how to split the (log) x-axis.

[shameless plug] I did a PhD named "Music Recommendation and Discovery in the Long Tail" http://www.iua.upf.es/~ocelma/PhD/index.html
So, I also did some boring analyses about the Long Tail in the music (recommendation) domain.

If I can see it from the road, it isn't private.

Manifestly untrue. From such public areas as roads and sidewalks, we can see through windows into people's houses and apartments and backyards, their private areas. In civilized areas, we don't have to black out our windows or put up high fences but can rely on other people to respect our expectation of privacy -- to take no more than a passing glance inside, not to press their face up against the glass.

The problem with Google's Street View is that it can take that passing glance, make it permanent, and publish it to the world. The folks who ran the Google car out of town may not be able to articluate it clearly, but there is a real problem here, and it cannot be glossed over by pretending that there is a clear separation between public and private areas.

Steve Mann's idea of Humanistic Property is relevant here (though his rhetoric is sometimes needlessly inflammatory).

the system exists primarily to support itself, compensating the artists is a secondary objective

And that's not just conjecture. Have a look at this study.

"In the Pew study "Artists, musicians and the Internet" (2004), 78 percent of 2,755 responding musicians had a second job, while 41 percent earned less than twenty percent of their income from musicâ"related activities. According to a GEMA (German collecting society) insider, only about 1,200 German composers can live from their creative output."

Now, how many people working in the German music industry in 1992 who were *not* composers could live from their work in 2004?

Nuff said.

I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn't understand what's happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around like this, it make them weaker and the darknet stronger.

Be that as it may, there is an inaccuracy in the BBC's reporting on this. They say:

"Apple pays an estimated 70% of digital music revenue to record companies which in turn pass on a percentage to artists [my emphasis]. It is that percentage that is expected to be changed on Thursday."

Actually, I think the National Music Publishers' Association pays this percentage to songwriters and composers of works via the publishers that the NMPA represents. And (surprise!) the publishers cream off between 3 to 15%. In many cases the composers are not the same as the artists that perform the works, and many will in fact be dead (the money goes to their relatives, estates or licensees, or nowhere if these cannot be found).

But who cares? The way the money works in music is - to say the least - opaque. With the exception of a tiny minority of super-stars like Cliff Richard and Simply Red, when you listen to your favourite band, you are listening to indentured servants. What will happen when we realise that the copyright system overall is completely iniquitous? In 1994 (MMC, 1996), 10 UK composers received more than £100,000 (from performing and mechanical royalties). How many people working in the UK music industry that year who were not composers earned more than £100,000?

I'm betting that it was rather more than 10.

The news is that this dude says he did the www, not Al Gore.

If by "This Dude" you mean Tim Berners-Lee, then it's not at all news.

Al Gore built the internet (in that he's responsible for legislation encouraging it being built), while Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Should anyone be unfamiliar with that distinction, it is discussed to some satisfaction at http://webopedia.internet.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp and a quick google search for, say, "internet vs. www" should give you more information.

Also, Al Gore's legislation encouraging the internet into existence happened around 1988, while TBL did his web-thing in 1991. The years are pulled out of http://www.firstmonday.org/ISSUES/issue5_10/wiggins/ which is not my ass.

Moore's law means whatever Gordon Moore means it does this week. It's more of a general idea or a visionary goal than an hard mathematical theorem. That said, Intel's darned good at delivering it, whatever it means. Except for those whole Itanium and Netburst fiascos. Nobody's perfect.

Moore's law has been the name given to everything that changes exponentially. I say, if Gore invented the Internet,[14] I invented the exponential.

- Gordon Moore (by way of .)

I think this old proverb is appropriate here: It's better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt. If you read any of the thread (yes, I realize this is /. and therefore no one reads anything...), you would have noticed that several people explained that Mr. Bill Gates did not declare that 640 KB nonsense. Here is the link that samkass has in his post: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/

No, he did... he just never claimed to have done so.

Perhaps you're right, but I hope you mean "free" as in not getting paid and not "free" as in DRM/copyright/whatever. There are good ways to PAY artists without the aid of copyright: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/

Do you have any sources for this, monxrtr? I'll pretend to take you seriously.

  Firstly, a mutual fund's "administration" costs are 100% of the actual costs associated with the fund. Counting the capital that the fund manages, and taking a % of that, is like counting up the dollar value of all the buildings and students, and taking the administrative costs as a % of that.

  Secondly, our private health care system has higher administrative overhead than any socialist system in the world. Privatization of services results in things like the Enron fiasco, it does not and never has resulted in higher efficiency or better quality of services - research that purports to show such is invariably either faked (which should be obvious, given those paying for it have a financial interest in the outcome) or woefully deficient.

  Thirdly, while I think that there are a lot of problems with the teaching profession, your suggestion is woefully inadequate. Anyone seriously interested in remote education should read digital diploma mills.

  If you are a fanatical adherent to some ultra-free-market ideology, all of this may be opaque to you.

It avoids racial profiling but creates a new form of profiling, which basically means some new class of legitimate travelers will suffer the pain of false positives. I really worry about this kind of "expression reading" because:

1. It targets members of society who have above-average social anxiety, or "deviate from the norm" in some other way. Geeks and Nerds could end up being "more suspicious" simply because they either have mild social anxiety, or because they are "aware" of the facial profiling, hence they appear nervous (because they're thinking "oh crap they're analyzing my face... try to look natural and calm... but don't look like you're trying too hard!" and thus appear to be hiding something).

2. Overall, as soon as you create rules for deciding who gets greater scrutiny, you create a weakness that the enemy can exploit. The enemy knows what they have to train to avoid/circumvent, thus enabling them to suffer detailed searches less often than average, instead of more often (which was the intention). It has been shown many times that the optimal security strategy is often the one that uses perfect randomness, since there is no defense against it (see Schneier's analysis and this paper).

So, really, coming up with new and fancy ways to profile people isn't all that helpful. (Of course, there's the dim possibility that they are publicly claiming to profile, but are secretly using a random strategy, hoping that the enemy wastes effort in trying to circumvent a non-existent analysis system, thereby making them easier to catch... but somehow I doubt it.)

...but nobody has come up with a better way to create incentives to put R&D into ventures which pay only IP rewards...

Sure there is, contract law, especially the subset related to trade secrets. Require anyone buying your drug, or buying a ticket to your movie, sign a contract in which you promise to not reverse engineer or otherwise analyze the drug, or to record the movie. Standard contracts will soon appear, as will more global contracts. You'll sign a stock contract with GlaxoSmithKline and Paramont and be able to buy their drugs and watch their movies simply by presenting your ID. A quick database check and you'll be allowed to buy your drug or tickets.

You can also use something like the street performer protocol. "We'll put a team of 10 scientists on AIDS treatment research for a year if someone or group coughs up 10 million dollars. Everyone who contributes will get a copy of all the resulting research." Or "I've got a great idea for a movie. Here's my previous movies to show that I have the skills. Here's the general premise. If I'm given 50 million dollars, I'll make it. Everyone who contributes will get a copy for the cost of production and shipping."

Have a bit a of faith in the free market. I want medicine that will extend my life, and I want to watch entertaining movies. I have money I can spend on those things. Producers can make drugs and movies and want my money. We'll work something out!

With absolutely NO IP protection then movies just won't get made.

I find your lack of faith in the free market disturbing. But even if you're right and we can't find some way to connect people with money who want movies to people who want money and can make movies, it's silly to suggest that movies won't get made. It will just change the cost of movies that get made. Blogs have made anyone who wants a journalist. (Not necessarily a good journalist, but a journalist none-the-less.) Bandwidth, audio compression, computerize mixing, and cheap recording equipment mean that people who never expect to make money are recording talk shows as podcasts. We've got very free music under a variety of Creative Commons licenses. As costs keep dropping, it's just a matter of time before free movies become common. Short form films are already common (you may have heard of a little site called YouTube). They may not be Hollywood blockbusters, but movies will be made. It turns out that people like creating content, but the barrier was the cost of entry. That cost continues to drop. Sure, most of the resulting content will suck, but some of it will be really good.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/spoerr i/index.html

This one is less pretty with colours, but way more informative...

Here ya go, 48 State Privacy Laws Regarding Library Records. Since the USA PATRIOT Act (and in the 1970s during the FBI's "Library Awareness" investigations), however, federal law (NSA letters, for example) can trump these statutes. So the OP is partially right.

Librarians learned in the 60s not to keep patron records like this. It turns us in to sleeper agents for a snooping government. Pre-9/11 this was the widespread sentiment too.

I guess that the 9/11 hijackers used library computers doesn't help, nor does the current "Library 2.0" movement to offer customized services.

"It seems like that if you are against software patents you must be against patents in order for it to make sense..."

It may seem like that but only if you have little if any knowledge of the patent system - its history, economics and law - and an extremely distorted view of what the opposition to software patents is all about.

http://eupat.ffii.org/vreji/cusku/index.en.html#iu ris http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2005/1 589.html http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =959931 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/kahin/i ndex.html#k7 http://www.researchineurope.org/policy/patentdirlt r.htm

It is also important to realise that the Patent Offices are not and never can be the arbiters of what constitute the great inventions of the day. The patent system is not some prize-giving system, only granting patents to the truly worthy inventors, and in order to be fair and objective, the P.Os can only - at best - reject the truly meritless or clearly unpatentable applications. It may be possible to raise the "inventive step" a little and improve patent quality a little but only in hindsight and in the subjective opinion of some is the 1-click patent a "stupid" patent. In fact a case can easily be made that it was more desirable from the point of view of the economic rationale of the patent system to grant the 1-click patent than it was to grant the RSA patent. The salient point though is that it was neither necessary nor efficient to grant either patent in order that society, the economy and the progress of the sciences and useful arts would benefit from those inventions.

There is a difference between information and food. You can share information and you still have exactly what you started with. You can't do the same for food. As for making the case for a different model, I'd rather not get wrapped up in the details. I simply made the assertion that it was possible and suggested that people might do things for reasons other than revenue that would make the point moot.

You and I disagree on the open issue. It's not really a matter of proof. It's more of a matter of worldview. Also, it is probably worth mentioning that there are people trying different models for news. I mentioned Indymedia, which some might say is a failure, but there needs to be some experiment for something new to be developed - and as your argument illustrates, developing a new model for news is not a trivial problem.

I do analysis and contract information for business organizations for a living. My experience is that access and the ability to use information is something even large firms often don't do well. Most aren't even aware what is out there and why they need it (which to be fair the products are continually changing and you do need someone that specializes in this sort of thing to provide the balance you speak of).

It gets back to metrics. How do you define "success"? If you define it as market share in a market where you can't even buy a free software system from many standard vendors such as Dell or as revenue when free software doesn't work on the software as product model, you have a point. I think free software is nascent and in the short term, it works as a skunk works that is building a foundation that will eventually eat proprietary software's lunch. You can disagree that free software doesn't contribute ideas, and it would be difficult for either one of us to make the case definitively.

I think the problem with metrics in evaluating success is that it is confined to the here and now. If I had to use a metric, I'd probably use something like awareness. How many people have heard of free software? Have used it (not use it primarily or exclusively)? Any new technology takes time to mature and achieve a high penetration rate - TVs, VCRs, DVDs, Internets, computers, etc. Free software is fragmented, so this penetration issue with free software will take longer.

You also keep making this argument about forced openness. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The GPL is using IP - namely copyright law - and it is licensing the work under specific conditions. If you don't like the license, you don't have to use or develop the software - just like you have the option not to use it when faced with another program's EULA.

Personally, I think the IP model is completely broke. I think the GPL is a stop-gap measure designed to restore the idea at the center of IP - which at least in the United States was "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The idea was to promote these things for the common good - not for the good of a few. There needs to be a complete rethinking of copyright, patent and other IP laws that puts the common good and promoting progress as the key considerations. In the meantime, GPL just creates a new concept of copyright within the current framework. It may serve as a spark for the larger discussion necessary.

Which brings us to your arguments about net benefits of openness. I think your arguments on the negatives are weak. The development of Linux and practically every other free software project is done on volunteer work that is given freely - and it is only given freely because of the open model. It's called cooperation, and it is something that is difficult to understand if you put your faith in the concepts of capitalism, the rational consumer and finance. These models tend to forget that people also do things for love (not to mention fame, joy of solving problems or whatever) and not just, prima

No, the world is bigger than that. True, the Linux kernel depends upon Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and a few other individuals. But there is also FreeBSD, which depends on another few individuals. And there's Hurd, which depends (or depended) on yet another group. Then there's Tannenbaum and his Minix OS, and hundreds of other operating systems. None of these people have a monopoly on genius.

Most of the work on these projects are performed by a small number of people and these people are not working in anonymity. Each person is enjoying a heavy amount of credit in their respective communities for their marginal efforts (and often for the secondary effects, e.g, Tannenbaum's connection with Linux). The presence of genius in particular projects, or lack thereof, says nothing about the necessity of individualism.

2002 Study: The median number of developers in the 100 most popular SourceForge projects was 4 and the mode was 1

Roughly 97% of the Linux kernel contributions are made by 100 developers -- most of whom are paid for their work and/or recieve great acclaim for their efforts. What's more, a little less than 50% of the contributions come from a group of 20 people

Same goes for science. If Watson and Crick hadn't discovered DNA when they did, one of several other groups very likely would have in just a few more months. And maybe some of these others did discover DNA first (Rosalind Franklin comes to mind), but Watson and Crick got all the credit, wealth and fame, and the Nobel Prize.

Franklin did not toil anonymously either and she is widely acknowledged as having played a role in the discovery. She was published several times in Nature and other places for her efforts; it is an over-simplification to say that she was "scooped". The Nobel prize could not have been shared with her as she died several years before the prize was awarded (Nobel rules forbid posthumous awards) and because the award was for their work on nucleic acids (not just for the structure of DNA).

Potential giants are all around. If only some of them choose to move towards a particular goal, that is not to say that there aren't a hundred times as many who could've reached those same goals if they chose.

This may be true in some cases. However, it is not feasible to make "What-If" awards. Devalueing scientists' and inventors' marginal contributions would be a far greater violence to progress. The majority of scientists' may live and breath by credit alone (which, in turn, benefits their careers), but the driving force behind commercial innovation is economic reward, which cannot be shared broadly without destroying the entire system.

I appreciate you pointing out the "giants" part of that quote. Maybe Newton should've said, "standing on the shoulders of a giant society".

But he did not say that. In fact, to the contrary, if you read the history on Newton's utterance of this quote (which, btw, variations of it existed long before) you would see that he was essentially crediting Descartes (a particular notable individual) and insulting one of his contemporaries that was trying to take credit for his work (Hooke, who was known to be ill/hunched over) "What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"

When corporations spread the wealth patents generate amongst the people who worked on a great project, then patents are working to the benefit of society.

No, patents are to the benefit of society when scientists and innovators innovate and in

CAN WE RELY ON THE MARKET SYSTEM TO PROVIDE THIS KIND OF INFRASTRUCTURE? WE CERTAINLY COULDN'T WHERE THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM WAS CONCERNED, ALTHOUGH PRIVATE INDUSTRY ULTIMATELY BENEFITED A GREAT DEAL FROM THE GOVERNMENT'S LEADERSHIP AND INVESTMENT. I BELIEVE THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MUST AGAIN BE A CATALYST, TO GET COMPANIES INTERESTED IN THOSE INFORMATION NETWORKS AND SHOW THEM THAT THERE IS A MARKET OUT THERE. CLEARLY, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SPINOFFS AND PRODUCTIVITY GAINS WOULD BE ENORMOUS, FROM A NETWORK THAT WOULD COST THE GOVERNMENT LESS THAN ONE STEALTH BOMBER.

How are content creators supposed to support themselves?

The short answer is, "have faith in the invisible hand."

Copyright was a government granted monopoly in the first place. If one really believes that the free market works it's silly to worry that an artificial market created by government intervention won't be replaced by something more efficient in the absence of that intervention. I have money and want the next Harry Potter novel. Rowling wants money and is capable of writing the next Harry Potter novel. We'll work something out.

In all likelyhood we'll work a whole bunch of different things out for different groups. Patronage. The Street Performer Protocol. Pledge drives. Asking people to be ethical and pay you. Sales of secondary items (t-shirt, etc). Sponsorship deals. Establishing yourself as an expert in an area and selling your expertise. Contract law. High prices for early adopters (before others make copies), then lower prices in line with the knockoffs.

SL should make it easy to hire creators on contract to produce new objects. Create an escrow like system where any number of players can commit to paying for a product that meets whatever contractural requirements the players and creators agree on. That way the incentive to create new objects will still exist without the economic drag of artificial monopolies.

This sounds like The Street Performer Protocol. Anyone know how sucessful this technique is? I've only heard of the guy who wrote The Circle trying it, but I can't remember what happend. Seems like it would work for well known authors at the very least...

although it's not an example of the long tail but of "Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law"
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_8/moglen/inde x.html#m1

Citation, please.

Here's an example study. As an artist and a member of a very large professional association of artists I can certainly vouch for the opinions I've heard expressed.

So is control over what you make.

No it is not. Speaking only in terms of natural rights, if you write a song and sing it, you have no natural right to stop anyone else who heard you from singing it as well. It is part of freedom of speech. The only justification for censoring that speech is practical incentives for the greater good. If laws censoring that speech do not serve the greater good, they have no purpose or justification.

A lot of the source material is gone, gone, gone.

Someone's written an article on reputation systems and it even mentions slashdot's karma.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/i ndex.html

DRM is a colosally bad idea. Think of it like this: today you alone have a piece of content (which you spent lots of time/money creating), the end state is that it's in the public domain, and how did you make money going from here to there? The fairest way to do it is the Ransom model. A similar but more formal arrangement is the Street Performer Protocol.

An idea I like is an incremental ransom model. You spend $100 million making a movie, say 7200 seconds (two hours) long. You chop it into pieces a half-second long, encrypt each with a separate 128-bit key, and publish the 14,400 encrypted tarballs with bittorrent. Now your problem is to make back a few hundred million dollars by selling the 14,400 secret keys. You can ransom them, just as Stephen King did with chapters of The Plant (but without his unnecessary condition that some minimum fraction of consumers be non-defectors). You can auction off others on eBay. You can donate some keys to charity. You can sell some keys to sponsors, e.g. Hershey might want to buy the keys for the sequence where somebody is eating Reese's pieces because Mars/M&M didn't want to invest in your movie.

Of course some keys will represent more interesting parts of the movie than others, and you'll want to think about how to reflect those differences in the prices you try to get for them. A few exciting bits, released for cheap, might make good teasers.

I would be really curious to see how it would work out if a major movie were released this way. It would be really interesting to see how the economics of that would play out.

Schneier described the same thing in his Street Performer Protocol paper. There are variations proposed by others, and wikipedia mentions some current implementations.

Having written a PhD thesis on the subject, my conlcusion was: use public funding. Collect levies on blank media/internet connections, or just plain old income tax, or some combination of the two. Pay it out to authors/artists/web publishers according to the amount of use that their works get. Do not give the government any control over this process: run it like a big online election.

Other solutions which people have discussed, such as getting people to pay in advance, don't work very well.

Well I guess I'll have to skip the "you have no clue" diatribe, too, then.

Copyright was never about the individual's right to copy, but always about the Author's right to monopolize for a time period. See here and here

Some of the recent problems with copyright are that the monopoly period of time has gotten longer, and it is no longer as tied to an author as it once was, but rather, to a corporation. This means that things are taking much longer to enter the public domain and our culture has gotten poorer because of it. Disney, for example, has made millions from characters and stories in the public domain, yet it is fighting tooth and nail to stop any of its works slip into the public domain.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko /

Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet

The idea of a world where things like money are obsolete? A simply amazing thing.

Haven't you been paying attention lately? We might already be at that world. Economists are speaking of the Economy of Attention (1, 2, 3) as the natural economic laws of Internet. As online human attention is a scarce resource, it may actually be more valuable than, say, a bunch of metal discs (or paper rectangles) with a face on them.

Of course, that can also mean that we will place the value of 15 min. of fame above the hunger of our neighbors. But it can also be a change on the way things are done nowadays. Gossip magazines point to the first, GPL to the second.

Depending on your viewpoint, it's rather creepy to "check in" with someone when you want to access "inappropriate" content at all. On the plus side, librarians, and the ALA in particular, are generally quite opposed to censorship of any kind. You can bet that they'll have something to say about this. Libraries already have all sorts of trouble being compliant with the very vague law that is CIPA, and this will only muddy the water further.

I found a very interesting article (linked to from the ALA website) that goes over the problems that libraries face with internet filtering. Make no mistake; they hate it. Particularly alarming is the librarian from Singapore that wasn't that concerned about censorship:

She casually replied, "Oh yes, we get overblocking all the time. Last week I was helping a patron look for motor vehicle forms but they were blocked, probably because it has a box to check for SEX 'Male/Female.'"

There was something about her casual tone that tripped me up. I usually hear librarians give overblocking examples in tones alternating between outrage, bitterness and amusement. I heard none of that in her voice. Just a relaxed answer, perhaps befitting our tranquil setting.

Nevertheless, I prodded, "As a librarian, doesn't that bother you?"

"No, not really," she said. Noticing the surprised look on my face, she continued, "You don't understand. Everything in Singapore is censored ... our books, our movies. You get used to it. Internet filters are nothing special."

This is purely redundant legislation to collect mindshare for an election year, and will only be used to restrict us further. Once people get used to it, they cease to care. It must be fought.

Yes, but that's a blog.

I hope people will read this site instead of (or at least in addition to) the Snopes article.

It's a much more complete and coherent explanation of exactly what Al Gore's legitimate claim is with respect to contributing to the creation of the modern Internet.

While I was serving in the Senate, I took the initiative in supporting the basic research necessary to create the Internet as we know it today.

Wolf Blizter: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now. Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

Which does seem to clarify that he was describing how his relationship to 'net compares to other politicians'. And it's not terribly absurd to claim that being a federal legislator who was advocating further development of the Internet in the 1980s does constitute being ahead of the game--for that particular game. I really don't think he was trying to convince anyone that he was Vint Cerf.

Some bloke with far more time available than I have seems to have gone into this in exhaustive detail, and in a way that doesn't appear to be especially biased.

*sigh* Yes, there is. If I have a hammer and you also want a hammer so you copy my hammer by manufacturing one yourself, just like mine, have you just stolen my hammer then? Even though I still have my hammer, right here? Because that's actually what you're saying.

You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.

No, but you can't realistically build a real movie theater at home either. Any way value is added, it can be exploited to drive sales of a good or a service. In Singapore, movie theaters have luxury seats and serve meals as an added value to the movie. Economically, there is no longer any added value in making a copy so it should not be used as the basis for value. Economics 101.

References:
Mindjack - Piracy is good?
International Herald Tribune - Imagine a world without copyright
A History And Possible Future Of Cinema
First Monday - Piercing the myths of p2p
TV Week - NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time
Stealing Music
Roderick T. Long - The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights

The fact that OpenOffice (an especially poor choice of OSS poster child, but whatever) is even within an order of magnitude of Office (with literally hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars behind it) is simply astonishing.

Not really: most of the development happened when it was a commercial product (which had a fairly large niche market in Germany, AFAIR). For me, the damning thing about the whole OO saga from the OSS point of view is how little truly revolutionary has happened since Star Office went open source.

And before all the OSS groupies throw a hissy fit, have a look here for Linus totally agreeing with the statement

One explanation for why the Linux model has worked best with developer-type software - Web servers, compilers, the OS itself - seems to be that in these areas, there is much intersection between the developer and user bases. End-users contribute, actively participating in the community. In other areas - office software such as professional wordprocessors - the Linux model has had much less success. (StarOffice doesn't count as a "Linux model" creation, since it is proprietary and backed by completely commercial software.) Isn't this because in such markets end-users tend to be completely passive consumers?