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I have found no better illustration (of how our rights have been eroded) than the one given by Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002, captured as flash presentation here: http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html (sadly, the sound quality isn't too good, but the content of the presentation is well worth it).

For some examples of excellent slides, watch this presentation by Lawrence Lessig: http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html
He uses many, many slides, but they are often very short, a single sentence, frequently less. His slides punctuate his speech and help keep you from getting bored. They would not really be meaningful in printed form, but that is fine. He has many

For another good style:
any one of Steve Job's keynotes. Again though, the slides are not really worth much without the speech, but in this case it is fine,because several dozen blogs will have their own summaries of the presentation available within only a few hours after it ends.

All of Andrej Bauer's SOMADS had achieved sentience and distinct personality profiles 10 years before this at the SAME UNIVERSITY. They were fed a steady diet of Usenet and Objectivist and Existential philosophy, and as such were able to interact not only with humans, but each other, leading to some elucidating exchanges that could not help but further the art and science of artificial intelligence design.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/andrej/www/quadratic.html

http://randomfoo.net/junk/200402/xalton.forum2000.org/matrix/forum_hof_questions.html

"I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee of the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the Declaration of Independence 220,000 books. They have all gone. They had all perished before they were ten years old. It is only one book in 1000 that can outlive the forty-two-year limit.

Therefore why put a limit at all? You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children. "

Which is interesting, since, our problem now is the many many many works that have not disappeared, that cannot be used by new authors.

That and concept of corporate ownership which he didn't seem to really be concerned about (Disney).

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html

...you really should give it back.


The western world's "Intellectual Property" rules are Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. When you've got a couple free hours, watch, listen, or read what Lawrence Lessig says.

If I just set aside whatever I think the IP rules say, and just think about whether it's moral/ethical to utilize example code somebody posted in a public forum, I can't imagine this act hurting anybody at all.

Copying proven technology is what engineers are supposed to do. This copyright hogwash is just a lawyerly game.

...you really should give it back.


The western world's "Intellectual Property" rules are Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. When you've got a couple free hours, watch, listen, or read what Lawrence Lessig says.

If I just set aside whatever I think the IP rules say, and just think about whether it's moral/ethical to utilize example code somebody posted in a public forum, I can't imagine this act hurting anybody at all.

Copying proven technology is what engineers are supposed to do. This copyright hogwash is just a lawyerly game.

You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.

(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)

If you'd like an example of how current culture always makes use of the past, and how that past has been taken out of the hands of creators, there's an excellent presentation by Lawrence Lessig.

If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)

If you'd like anecdotes, you can start with Save The Music's overview, then read anecdotes from researchers who had to change or abandon projects because there was no way to clear rights for orphan works, archivists and documentarians who can't use materials from companies that went out of business many years ago, or old folks who can't get their wedding photographs repaired if their kid tears them, or the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America--hardly a bunch of Napster-licking college students--collecting anecdotes where the early pulp heritage of SF can't be reproduced or even preserved because early magazines folded, and no one knows who owns the copyright.

An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.

So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)

(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan

Well, yes. Yes, copyright does revert to the public domain after a period of time. Says so in the Constitution, and with good reason. If culture can't build on what came before, it's going to be a mightily controlled, impoverished culture. (Lawrence Lessig explains here.)

You're equating intellectual property with actual property, which is a common but unfortunate mistake, encouraged by the dishonest lobbyists we're talking about. See, there's nothing inherently property-ish about knowledge. If I teach you a song, I don't stop knowing it. If I give you my fire, I can still keep my own. Intellectual property is a virtual sort of property, invented specifically to encourage people to create by giving them a government-created monopoly for a limited period of time. There is no natural right to intellectual property; the government is not taking anything away. It is giving the artist a limited-time monopoly, not for the benefit of the artist, but for the benefit of the culture at large. (Really, it's in the Constitution.)

In fact, it's much like patents, which don't last nearly as long as copyrights. In exchange for publicizing the details of your invention, you get a short-term, government-sponsored monopoly on it. Are you saying that the light bulb, the bra, the syringe, the hammer, the bikini, the internal combustion engine, long underwear and a method of making potash would not be part of common cultural knowledge, and we should have to pay the descendants of the inventors who would have every right to not let us manufacture light bulbs, bras, etc.? What, exactly, is the benefit of having our culture's know-how locked up and controlled in that manner?

Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level.

I think you have confused stand-by mode of TVs with incadescent light bulbs. If you have a source for your factoid, please post it.

Here is a a source for the factoid about incadescent light bulbs.

A CFL in every Home = 1 Nuclear Power Plant

I spent a lot of my weekend doing research on energy, power generation, etc. (See my MyWeb links) I decided to run some rough numbers, and have come to the conclusion that the best use of government funds is to probably have a CFL handout/trade-in program.

There are an estimated 110M households in the US, so if you replaced one 60W incandescent with a similarly lumen-rated 13W CFL (I'd estimate a distribution cost of $100M-200M), you'd save just over $4.1B in electrical bills over the lifetime of the bulbs ($0.10/kWh over 8000 hours). At 5 hours/evening of usage (~4.4yr), we're looking at almost a billion bucks a year. That's not a bad ROI.

Another interesting figure that comes out of that is that we're talking about a significantly large amount of power saved. Over the bulb lifetime, the number comes out to over 41M MWh, or based on the 4.4y estimated lifetime, about 9.4M MWh/yr. That's more than your average 1000MW nuclear power plant will be able to generate (about 7.8M MWh at 90% efficiency), and a significantly lower cost ($2-4/MWh for handing out light bulbs versus $50-80/MWh).

So, replacing 1 incadescent light-bulb in each of the 110M households in the country would save the equivalent of one nuclear power plant (or better yet, a bunch of fossil fuel ones, which function at a much lower efficiency (around 60%) and are usually lower capacity).

It's probably fair to say that up to 4 bulbs per house could be replaced before the law of diminishing returns kicks in. So we could save the equivalent of 4 nuclear power plants or 8-10 "dirty" power plants at 1/10th the cost of operating them, plus saving all the externalities like reduced pollution too.

Lawrence Lessig is awesome. If you don't know anything about him (or even if you do), I highly recommend watching his last talk given in 2002. You can hear him and see his slides here. Even if you're not into legal things like copyright (like me) his speech is fascinating and compelling.

One of the benefits of having a fully open API: FlickrUploadr written in PyGtk by Michele Campeotto.

Personally, I've gone the cmdline route. Here's a perl-script I use that I run in my cron to automatically u/l what's in a dropbox folder: flickrer

Be sure to check out the Flickr API group. There's also a mailing list

Here's the Address scraper I wrote in Perl last year when I switched to a Treo 600: http://randomfoo.net/code/Sidekick/hiptop.pl

It's ugly and I'm not really supporting it (only needed it once, right?), but it works so I've GPL'd it and thrown it out there.

I have read Free Culture, I downloaded it for free, printed it at work, popped it into a three-ring binder and read it inside a week. This is the first book I have read of his, but I have listened to a speech of his from the 2002 O.Reilly Open Source Conference and seen him in television interviews from time to time. Lessig makes clear, convincing points - he has the gift of making complex issues understandable. He is respected and likeable, and will be a strong asset to FSF in the trials to come.

Not only is the 7.6% number a shame, it's nearly insignificant to what the RIAA is claiming is happening to the CD market. If you haven't already seen it, watch Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" lecture from the 2002 OSCON, it's friggen brilliant. (heads up - it's an 8mb flash presentation, but is well worth it.)

This also brings up an interesting point- it's always easier to start with doing this stuff to scumbags first- once it becomes common practice, then you can start doing it to other people.

You mean like this?

• MP3 and OGG Audio Files of 2002 OSDN/Usenix Kernel Summit
  
• Identity, DRM and Bad Ass MP3's for link for Digital Identity World's 2002 Archive
  
• Lawrence Lessig, at the 2002 O.Reilly Open Source Conference This presentation on was very widely linked when it was released.
  
• Deploying Network Quality of Service Features presentation which I found useful from the invaluable TechNetCast archives.

As long as the current copy protection mechanisms (of which Lawrence Lessig talks about in his excellent free_culture are in place, ebooks will not become common. Or I should say I hope people can see how useless they are and opt to not use them.

When you think of what the technology could do... You could have access to the digital version of any book, there would never be problems with acquiring a copy of a book. You could always get the book you wanted instantly from your local library, even through the net. Right now, the only thing they have is "gee-it's-new-technology"-effect, and they're really just severely restricted versions of real books.

But it's all inevitable. Even if every library in the world will decide to buy these pathetic excuses of a book, the unrestricted versions will come. They just won't be in the library. They'll be in p2p. Because we all know the ebook protection is fundamentally flawed.

I just pre-ordered my NEX ia a few days ago (it doesn't ship for a few more days; $130 + s/h for a NEX ia + 128MB CF) - my NEX II served me well for two years and just recently died. One neat feature is that it does do 64kbps MP3 recording w/ an internal mic. I was originally looking for a decent MP3 recorder, but unfortunately, one doesn't exist (the only ones that have level meters for example are $1000+ bulky pro units).

Anyway, I posted some research on my blog which might be of interest:

My old NEX II MP3 player just recently died on me. I started taking it apart, and it looks like I might be able to do some soldering to possibly get it working, but chances are slim (approximately corresponding to my soldering skills). It looks like the new NEX ia is coming out though, with voice/FM recording, better firmware, and possible Ogg Vorbis support, among other things. I sent an email to see what the recording quality is (hopefully with line-in capabilities), and to see if some slightly annoying NEX II bugs have been fixed.

From correspondence w/ Frontier Labs:

• improvements: multiple folder support, alphabetical song listing, more buffering, improved shuffle (but no m3u support, so you'll want to keep your CopyNex handy - see also: FATSort, PlaylistExpander)
• Ogg Vorbis is actually being worked on, for the NEX II's as well as the NEX ia and will be released as a firmware upgrade
• 64Kbps recording (can record at higher bitrates, but no selection mechanism in the firmware right now)
• No (recording) level-meter
• No line-in, the only external input is the built-in voice recording microphone
• Can play back MP3 files at the same time as recording

Perception Digital has a PD-095-01 Portable MP3 player which has a can record from an internal mic, FM, or a line-in at 13Kbps voice or 48-320kbps MP3 (!). That's pretty frickin' awesome. It's a little bit on the chunkier side, and only accepts SmartMedia, no Compact Flash though. Still, tempting, if I could find some user reviews...

The e.Digital Odyssey 300 (SmartMedia) looks interesting, although it also looks like it's no longer available. [the Mpio DMB+ looks like the same thing]

Also, PoGo! Products has their RipFlash line of Recordable Digital Audio Players (the TRIO is one w/ mic and line in, but is not memory expandable). Uses SD/MMC... (CNet RipFlash DX review)

See Also: minidisc.org's Portable Recorders with Uploading Facilities list.

Places to buy: e.Digital Odyseey 300, PoGo! RipFlash Trio, Perception Digital Hercules (PD-095-01),

It could also be used in many positive and creative ways (an exercise left for the reader).

But it is not an access control technology (DRM) in of itself.

There is another XML based rights expression language being pushed by DRM vendor ContentGuard called XrML - which they own but 'freely' licence.

The real question is: Can a rights expression language express unregulated uses?
What should the defacto position on which an instance of expressed rights (in ORML or XrML) be?
Can a rights expression language express that the content is no longer covered by copyright in the EU?

Larry Lessig's Free Culture discusses the unregulated side of this issue.

Exactly right. In fact the article quote Gates saying that if this type of patent were possible in the past, the industry would be at a standstill, but he doesn't continue this quote as Lessig does in this presentation where he (Gates) indicates his plan to do exactly that with our future. If you don't think he plans to use this to attempt to destroy Linux at some point, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Try listening to Lawrence Lessig's talk titled free_culture and it may suddenly not seem all that far-fetched.

All you people going on and on about how Stallman is an unrealistic madman should read Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallmans Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams which happens to be available under the GNU FDL and you might understand him a little bit better. The book was initially supposed to be an ebook with all the regular protections in place (as described by Lessig's presentation). I found the epilogue particularly touching.

I can't honestly see any advantage in ebooks for libraries in their crippled form. Well, maybe storage space but that is about it. You get more restrictions on your access to the information, less durable way to store it and somewhat clumsy readers but no advantages over traditional books. You could offer so much more with this without DRM.

Fair use is soemthing else. The DMCA enshrines digital media that abolishes all unregulated use. The MPAA/RIAA want to do this because the technology allows it. What they want to do is impossible to do with traditional media.

The entire picture is distorted by the prevalence of this "us vs them" battle. These laws dictate proper use of any creative work. The DMCA itself dictates the proper use of any digital distribution, creative or not. The RIAA/MPAA make up a very, very, small portion of the subject being regulated.

Lessig's presentation. (mirror)

On the "Us Vs Them" front, the RIAA/MPAA want to monopolize the American source of Culture. This is a very lucrative proposition. The RIAA/MPAA demonstrate a flagrant irresponsibility as steward of the culture they currently control, and they want to own more. They do this by bleeding off the Unregulated areas of Copyright. The goal is to abolish The Commons, so that you must buy your heritage from Universal Music Group, et al.

Eldred v. Ashcroft
... 10 had a favourable piece on Lessig and the lawsuit. ... October 13, 2002 - Amy
Harmon of New York Times: uphill battle over copyright. more news ...
eldred.cc/ - 7k - Cached -

The Limits of Copyright
... it an offense to write code to interfere with this use-controlling code, regardless
of whether the use would be considered fair under the copyright law. ...
www.thestandard.com/article/display/ 0,1151,16071,00.html - 34k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

Copyright law and roasted pig.
Communications Copyright law and roasted pig Lawrence Lessig on Eldred v. Ascroft
By Lawrence Lessig October 22, 2002. In 1930, 10,027 books were published. ...
www.redherring.com/insider/2002/10/ roast-pig-copyright-102202.html - 29k - Cached -

O'Reilly Network: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from ...
... A flash version of Lessig's presentation, including audio and other source files. ... their
works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law. ...
www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessi g.html - 27k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

High court weighs copyright law - Tech News - CNET.com
... Lessig and his allies are hoping not merely to overturn this law, however, but
to build momentum for an all-out legal assault on many recent copyright ...
news.com.com/2100-1023-961467.html - 28k - Cached -

Lawrence Lessig
... Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com mentions Professor Lessig in Left gets nod from
right on copyright law, on a speech given by Appeals Court Judge Richard ...
cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/ - 23k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -

Home--Berkman Center for Internet and Society
... Also see: Digitial Copyright Law on Trial [CNet]; Google Excluding Controversial
Sites [CNet]; ... the Hard Questions: On October 9 Lawrence Lessig appeared before ...
Description: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is a research program founded...
Category: Computers>Internet>Policy
cyber.law.harvard.edu/ - 13k - Cached -

Techdirt:Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His ...
Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His Campaign Forward.
Ramblings Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2002 ...
www.techdirt.com/articles/20021022/1311202.shtml - 5k - Cached -

that Lessig movie everybody is always playing, which is far more easy to digest. It's in Flash so it works great in Windows. Lessig is the same author as the article by the way.

Seriously. Look at every time the copyright term has been extended, and look at which vital piece of Disney's 'intellectual property' was about to enter the public domain. It's rather sad. You can learn more about this depressing trend in our shockingly greedy erahere.

Over the past three years, Lessig has given more than 100 talks like the one captured here:randomfoo

Yet another thing to add to my list of "and people wounder why linux is not being readily accepted by everyone" items. I mean, come on, the guy just wanted to help make things better! Getting booed off the stage hurts!

First, GNU/Linux will never be accepted "by everyone." Nor will FreeBSD, nor will BeOS, nor will Apple's OS X.

Nor will Microsoft Windows, unless Palladium and DRM is legislated into law by the likes of "Disney" Hollings, and even then Apple is likely to be kept around as a token "competitor," paying hefty patent fees to Microsoft for the privelege of being allowed to manufacture "legal" hardware in the US. Unless, of course, you get off your butt and do something about it, but I digress.

The problem is a simple and obvious one, and the solution as elusive today as it was the first time humans came to live together (and likely predates our ability to speak): Politics is ugly and banal, and people are fallible. This includes the Linux kernel developers and Linus Torvalds himself.

Example: The ggi project wanted to provide a kernel abstraction layer for video hardware in the same manner such abstractions are presented for everything else, from your ethernet adapter to your system's RAM and hard drive. Linus thought the idea sucked, then ended up doing a "poor man's" version of frame buffer support instead. How much better things would have been if the original vision of the GGI folks had been realized and supported we'll never know.

Example: PCMCIA. It is still a mess. The more capable userspace version got sidelined in favor of a broken and less capable rewrite ... I can only ascribe that to politics and personal pull, which every group, no matter how altruistic and well meaning, falls prey to now and then.

There are other examples, and perhaps Eric S. Raymond's effort is one (though I hesitate to make that assumption), but the purpose of this post is not to catalogue the mistakes Linus and others have made, or to air my own disagreements with them (but what the hell: when will we get XFS into the main kernel tree damn it! :-)), but rather to point out their humanity and fallability, a trait they share with everyone reading this comment, the guy posting it, and probably with every sapient being, everywhere.

Mistakes happen, everywhere, by everyone. The measure of a group or project's success isn't their perfection (as is so often implied in political discussions), it is by how much their mistaken decisions are outweighed by their correct decisions.

And using that metric, the Kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, have done very well indeed.

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
   
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
   
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.
   
4. Ours is less and less a free society.
   

When I checked his web page, it *only* had the Flash 8.4 MB swf file, the 7.2 MB MP3 file, the original Flash 18.7 MB source code, the icon file, and the font file. I'm pretty sure the powerpoint presentation and the transcript were added after I made my original comment. His timestamp at the bottom of his page, "Last updated: 08/17/2002 02:04:19", should at least confirm that the page was modified since then.

In any case, I'll retract my statement about the Flash designer bit. I doubt a real Flash designer would be as responsive as this guy has been; and I am glad that he has responded in this way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I will finally get to find out what this guy is all about.

- Stephan

Why do they make it so tricky to download shockwave and realaudio stuff?
I made a link you can right click and save cause I was too lazy to write a hack page.
http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free_cultur e.swf

Doc made a front row MD recording. I'll be putting it up eventually along w/ the rest my OSCON recordings. It will probably come across better than the transcript.

I can't belive how many people have my "Subtle mind control? why do all the HTML buttons say 'submit'" quote on their sites.

Have you seen this? Submit

Overture's only purpose to me so far has been to search for various things and be entertained at how much money people are blowing on getting hits.

What are the best/highest ones you've found? I played this game with Leonard Lin and he beat me with "Poker" and the misspelling "Casion".