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I just finished reading Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig's latest book. That was an interesting read, and I found it remarkably similar on some points to thoughts I've had on the subject lately.

The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.

He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons. I remember reading the philosophy section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.

I wonder if we'll see SCO-like attempts to quickly produce as many databases of as many facts as possible. Anyone using any facts whatsoever could be extorted for license fees or subject to lawsuits by rabid hordes of attorneys.

The bill is for copyright-like protections, not patent-like protections. The scenario you described above is more like a patented database situation - where the facts are protected regardless of their use (much as patents apply to alternate implementations of the same idea). Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.

But this underscores a serious problem with modern notions of "intellectual property." As MarkusQ said earlier today:

"(Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bull*, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo)."

So what do we DO about all of this? I attended a lecture given by Lawrence Lessig at my university's law school last fall. He seemed rather pessimistic about the prospects of legal reform - going about making changes from within the system (mainly due to his defeat in Elred Vs. Ashcroft). He spoke quite a bit about his work on the Creative Commons, and his views on the "Some Rights Reserved" middle ground. I think he's right, for the time being. The system is failing in many ways to serve the good of the people. Contributing to a copyleft commons is an important way to stand up for freedom of information, whether your contribution is sotware, music, the Creative Commons Logo rendered in SVG, ad infinitum.

I was startled by one point that he made, mainly because I had recently been thinking along the same lines. My version is here. The point is that the trend of increased scope an enforcement of intellectual property has the potential to create a new feudal system based on the perpetual ownership of information and ideas. The old European feudal system was based on perpetual ownership of land. The implications of such a system for those who are left out of the ownership are easy to see, and are well-documented in the pages of history. There is a reason those years are known as "The Dark Ages."

I wonder if we'll see SCO-like attempts to quickly produce as many databases of as many facts as possible. Anyone using any facts whatsoever could be extorted for license fees or subject to lawsuits by rabid hordes of attorneys.

The bill is for copyright-like protections, not patent-like protections. The scenario you described above is more like a patented database situation - where the facts are protected regardless of their use (much as patents apply to alternate implementations of the same idea). Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.

But this underscores a serious problem with modern notions of "intellectual property." As MarkusQ said earlier today:

"(Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bull*, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo)."

So what do we DO about all of this? I attended a lecture given by Lawrence Lessig at my university's law school last fall. He seemed rather pessimistic about the prospects of legal reform - going about making changes from within the system (mainly due to his defeat in Elred Vs. Ashcroft). He spoke quite a bit about his work on the Creative Commons, and his views on the "Some Rights Reserved" middle ground. I think he's right, for the time being. The system is failing in many ways to serve the good of the people. Contributing to a copyleft commons is an important way to stand up for freedom of information, whether your contribution is sotware, music, the Creative Commons Logo rendered in SVG, ad infinitum.

I was startled by one point that he made, mainly because I had recently been thinking along the same lines. My version is here. The point is that the trend of increased scope an enforcement of intellectual property has the potential to create a new feudal system based on the perpetual ownership of information and ideas. The old European feudal system was based on perpetual ownership of land. The implications of such a system for those who are left out of the ownership are easy to see, and are well-documented in the pages of history. There is a reason those years are known as "The Dark Ages."

There were places to get indie music before iTMS (like mp3 com). Their (lack of) success ought to tell you something.

I don't think the downfall of Mp3.com can be explained away so easily. To say that their demise was purely a result of their hosting indie bands is just plain wrong.

I'm an oldschool Mp3.commie. Do you remember Don't Eat Pete and the DeCSS song? I was a member of that band. We were just plodding along, trying to get a playlist and get some local gigs. Then Joe announed to the band that he had written the DeCSS song and that it was world-famous in geek culture, all over the internet. He put the song on Mp3.com (as well as a few of our other recordings) and we had several hundred dollars of payback-for-playback accumulated within a couple of days. Then Mp3.com pulled the song because they were scared of litigation (and who could really blame them, you know?). Then Joe got interviewed for all kinds of tech magazines, a clip of the song was on 60 minutes, we got invited to play at GeekFest (which was cancelled, unfortunately), etc. That was a golden time. Mp3.com (and Slashdot) had a lot to do with it.

That was in the golden age of Mp3.com. Their big problems came with the big lawsuit over the my.mp3.com thing. It just went downhill from there. The resources and opportunities for free artists were slowly eroded. First it was no payback-for-playback, then it was no tech support, then it was waiting weeks to get new songs approved, etc. I stopped maintaining my page there and built my own site.

No matter how specific I made my search query, my Mp3.com pages would NEVER show up in the results at Google. That was a fundamental problem. One of the tenets of web design is that content is king. If you have useful content, you will get traffic, links, and pagerank. That didn't work on Mp3.com because search engines couldn't find you there.

Supporting indie musicians was not the reason for the demise. It was bad decisions and poor site design. Yeah, there was a lot of rubbish there. But have you ever read Slashdot at -1? Yet Slashdot is one of the most useful sites on the web for getting tech news and commentary. Mp3.com, designed properly, could have been the same for indie bands. I think it used to be, but fell from grace.

Better luck to MuSeeks.com and the other sites trying to succeed where Mp3.com failed.

How do I know whether I'm stealing or whether I'm assisting someone to express their free speech rights?

There is plenty of music out there where the band is more than happy for me to download it, but I can't tell the difference. It certainly isn't the responsibility of the band which wants to be heard to give notice. This would be an intollarable imposition upon their free speech rights.

If you take, for instance, Joesph Wecker's descramble, how are you to decide whether you are helping him or hurting him?

Well, you'd think that what you're suggesting is a novel idea, but consider this A guy already did that. Apparently, the song was removed from mp3.com though, as they wanted to avoid any legal issues.

Agreed. As a greenie geek I spent a lot of time just getting up to speed. To save you some Googling (which is a great way to learn about OS/FS), let me post some links for you. These were articles that I've found particularly helpful.

• GNUWin II Articles Directory - A good collection of famous FS/OS articles.
• Philosophy section of the GNU Project - This is the extreme left wing of free software. I personally prefer a more moderate approach, but the ideas are engaging.
• Interview with Andreas Pour of the KDE Project - This interview did much to convert me to open source philosophies.
• Legal Concepts section of CreativeCommons.org - Masterminded by Lawrence Lessig, the legal champion of the public commons. One of the greatest minds working for the cause of FS/OS. He also has a couple of books that you might consider reading. I've read the first one and found it quite interesting.

Some of these weren't around when I was getting into things. Creative Commons came a bit later. Most of my earliest reading was from GNU. You've already found Slashdot, which is one of the best resources for learning about FS/OS, especially as it relates to current developments.

One word of caution: FS/OS is a religion. People can be very zealous about their views on it. Be careful as you formulate your own opinions, which will likely change over time. When in doubt, choose a more moderate approach. (If you're interested, my personal views can be found here.)

I hope this is helpful. Well, off to more reading myself...

And a follow-up question: If posting is allowed during the window, who will be moderating during that time? If only trolls subscribe so that they can get FP, then only trolls will be moderating. The rest of us will see a new story 20 min later with half a dozen +5 comments that are all FP flaming, goatse, Natalie Portman, or SOVIET RUSSIA (with an occasional death of Steven King).

This is an unlikely scenario, I admit, but a possibility. I suppose CmdrTaco would just null the 'feature' if it turned out that way. I think it's more likely that subscribers will be mostly responsible folks who post decent comments. There's not really a basis for supposition that the population of subscribers will be skewed one way or the other.

(Read more about Slashdot trolling phenomena here. It's a good laugh and explains a few quirks about this site that may have perturbed you if you're new around here. Also click the link in my .sig if you want free music.)

That said, I am a bit disappointed to see this kind of subjective judgement used when deciding what to host or not. I'd rather they said "Damn, we don't want to get sued over this." Then we could call them paranoid and get on with our lives. :)

I swear, does anyone actually read the linked text before posting? Quote from one of the letters on Joey Smith's page, sent after the initial form letter and reply:

As you know, this is a hot legal issue right now. We're sorta being sued by enough people right now, I guess we'd like to keep out of court for a while, if that's okay....you'll need to fight the first amendment fight on your own on this issue, if that's okay.

Here.

Enjoy the music!

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Sep 1 2000: After the recent U.S. District Court ruling banning the distribution of DeCSS, the DVD-decrypting program, several mariachis decided to support the ruling by playing the DeCSS song on every wedding they're invited to.

Asked about the relationship between a DVD-decrypting program, and the traditional mexican music, they responded: "Well, there ees notheeng in common, but we decided to support our hacker amigos in their fight against the eevil gringo corporations".


Now, can we move on to some _real_ news?

I'd like to nominate the guy who thought up the idea of a DeCSS code song. He should get at least an honorary award...

Somewhere Out There (I lost the link, but somebody 'll find it) is a guy who posted on his site a song about DeCSS

I just checked, and it's still available at the original site (D'oh! I guess I'm a criminal now!!! :-). There's a brief comment about having been under a DOS attack, tho.
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I doubt that the MPAA has the ability to take every joe schmoe to court, just link/mirror DeCSS and ignore any shit they give you, the only people they will go after are people/organizations that are well known (2600, etc.) Oh, and sing/play the DeCSS Song in public, you'll get weird looks, but its worth it :)

It's already been made into a song.
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As is often noted, "one who intentionally shoots a bullet into a state is as subject to the judicial jurisdiction of [that] state ... as if he had actually fired the bullet in the state."

What about this? It's link to a song with the code for descramble.c (the same as on the back of the t-shirts) as the lyrics (only englisised a bit) that I wrote. The originally written DeCSS was GPL'ed. I would encourage everyone to download the song and swap it around on Napster. Maybe we can merge these two cases into one- so /. can post half as many articles regarding the two subjects. "Update on the MPAA vs. Napster proceedings"...

Professor Touretzky told me jokingly in an email a while back that if he had a better singing voice, he would have sung the source code in front of the judge. All joking aside, though, technology is already far enough that the DMCA is meaningless (as has been pointed out). Forgive me for giving the ultimate example:
I wrote a song about DeCSS. The lyrics are the source code for deCSS in plain english (descramble mp3). If I perhaps was a little more technical in the rendering of the song- If I had actually sung the hex for a tar'ed source code, it wouldn't be that big a deal (at least for our friends at MIT) to write some software that would read it and then run it. The song is then illegal, right?

OK, but really worse case scenario. I remember reading (here on /., I think) about a brain implant that is allowing a paralyzed man to move a mouse cursor around on his monitor. Well, in singing the DeCSS song, I've started to kind of memorize it. It's a pretty easy algorithm (nothing like an md5 hash or anything). So, if I get one of those implants, am I not even allowed to think about how to decrypt a DVD? The scary thing is, the technology is already here! (I know this scenario has holes, but I think it demonstrates the unusability of the DMCA in my mind)

I really didn't appreciate the judge's comments "Computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement."

(I know this is going to sound like Katz a bit): Since when was assassinating someone on par with a corporation losing market value? That's wrong.

Joe