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FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen Talks On Upside
ContinuousPark writes, "From an Upside article based on conversations with Eben Moglen, FSF general counsel and author of Anarchism Triumphant: 'In such a context, Moglen says, distribution of a software tool that lets European movie watchers watch American films on DVD before they hit the local theaters or lets Web surfers break through their employer's site censorship policies are about as politically expressive as dumping a boatload of tea into Boston Harbor. Granted, it may not be legal under the current framework. But legal frameworks change. How long before today's encryption crackers become the next generation's heroes? In the face of such potential changes, Moglen says the only mistake for an attorney in his position is standing idly by while new history is in the making.'
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What happens with "anarchy" is not that the laws really disappear, but that they become arbitrary, the playthings of the powerful, totally beyond the reach of majorities to consent to, modify or rescind. Civil disobedience and anarchism should always be distinguished.
Anarchism is the end-state of that other adolescent mental malady, Libertarianism--although neither political camp will admit and owns up to the family relationship.
Thus I hope the Anarchism referred to as triumphant are the arbitrary and unjust laws that Moglen opposes and wants to see rescinded, such the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Okay, he might have a point but I think his position is biased to the point of no return. I mean, sure, some of the people that today we see vilified will become the "heroes" of tomorrow, but that's only to be expected - people who get caught up in changes through no real action or intent of their own often seem like "heroes" to those looking back at the situation.
But he has an opinion on the matter that makes what he says immediately suspect. As an "anarchist", he is obviously going to be anti-regulations, and so his stance that today's DeCSS authors are tomorrow's heroes is little short of ridiculous. They're not heroes, they're just in way over their heads after having done something before thinking of the consequences. And look at Matthew Skala. Yeah sure he broke Cyberpatrol's encrypted site list, but he's certainly no "hero" - he caved in as soon as Mattel threatened him with a lawsuit.
And the point is that even if these people were to become tomorrow's heroes, at the moment they are still breaking the law, and as such should expect to face the consequences. Sure the law isn't perfect, but breaking it to point this out is just childish and immature. Change in the law itself needs to be enacted within the law, otherwise it is little more than throwing tantrums, something which /.ers seem to be quite good at recently.
Anyway, I think that the whole premise is flawed - I don't think anyone would see these people as "heroes" in retrospect. Look at RMS as a prime example of a so-called "hero" - while /.ers seem to worship him they seem to have a miraculous ability to ignore any flaws in what he says and his arrogrant, elitist attitude. This is the man who throws a tantrum over the name Linux, insisting it be called "GNU/Linux" or, even worse, "Lignux". In ten years he won't be considered a "hero", just another piece of a larger whole.
Reading the Constitution, it seems pretty vague about copyright length. It simply gives Congress the power to grant copyright for a limited amount of time, but it doesn't define "limited." That seems to be the problem. The corps have pushed their agenda and Congress caved in, screwing the rest of us.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
We're having this discussion because the industry THINKS they are threatened. I've seen no evidence that leads me to believe there is actually a real risk right now. But, it will probably depend on how they behave and on the outcome of some court cases. Either way, there is no immediate threat that I know of.
As sorehands said, they thought for sure that their industry was doomed when VCRs were ruled legal and people were allowed to tape things off the tv and had the ability to make copies of videos. Instead, they ended up making even more money than before. Now they are claiming that the sky is falling again.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
A society without educated citizens is a society that is manipulable by those that run the media.
This is somewhat OT, but I was just talking about this with someone the other day. I was wondering why the government doesn't do a lot more to improve public education in this country. Instead they leave it up to those who can afford the best schools and those few who make it on their own to lead the country. The rest of the people remain inadequately educated, many severely so. As long as education remains at its current shockingly poor level, the country will be full of people who lack the critical thinking skills and background knowledge to effectively evaluate the issues we're faced with every day. Instead, they will rely on the media to tell them what to think about things. This does not bode well for our future as a country.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It's at least 5 years late. 5 years ago, Linux was already at version 1.0. Oh and since I'm nice, I won't even mention the Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate -- poor Andrew, having this shoved in his face all the time must hurt in the end ..
If you'd actually bothered to read the article whose title dealt with anarchy, you'd see that it never claimed he was an anarchist. What he says is that the current situation is an anarchy- because the old rules are being applied to a new situation for which they weren't intended, they are being applied poorly, or not at all. In that sense, the current situation is an anarchy. He doesn't propose that we get rid of laws, but rather that we scrap the ones we have in order to write new ones that make better sense.
Anyway, go read it... it's a fascinating look into legal history and how in the past this type of "anarchy" has led to huge changes in our legal system. He feels that this will occur again, and has some pretty convinving arguments as to why.
Remember- someone is going to be in charge- no one is claiming that no one should be. The only question is who, and that is a stunningly important question in a way that it hasn't been in many, many years.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Hey Sgt! I can easily see some of those huge companies making some troublemakers "disappear".
;) ;) )
*L* Do you even remember me? Back in the good ol days of TPD and my very own SPLHC BBS? *LOL*
As far as porting wakeup to win32.. why? Win95/98 have Task Scheduler, just make sure that mp3's are associated to a player, set task scheduler to run an mp3 file in the morning, and it should all go. That's what i did in windows, works fine.
A couple of very simple reasons actually:
1) I can
2) I too am learning perl, as the only thing i have available to me at work is Win32 I'm learning perl there ( no, telneting into my home PC is not an option until i get my DSL line
The only problems are...while wakeup HIDES at/cron it still uses them....I suppose I could have wake up call the task scheduler, but that would defeat the purpose *L* I have some ideas but *shrugs*
Back to the subject... in the wake of civil disobedience, many power mongers cannot control themselves and resort to irrational measures. It happened after the Boston Tea Party. It can happen anywhere. Irrationality is everywhere.
This is true, but I hope we would be able to stop it before it got THAT far...
Shit..there goes our Karma...off topic posts and all....
Sgt Pepper
*LMFAO* Roberto, my friend, don't you think that's just a little tad bit overractionary? No one is talking violence here. Now, when they start implementing the death penelty for Reverse Engineering then we can talk about Revolution in the old school sense of the word. The good consuel was simply pointing out the SYMBOLIC similarities between the too. Now there might be some SYMBOLIC deaths....the death of Free Software or the death of the "profittering gluttons" we have yet to see. Make no mistake though, it is a fight. :)
PS: I'm working on porting Wakeup to Win32, if I actually get it done want me to send ya the code?
(hey it gives me something to do at work! *L*)
Sgt Pepper
Another Cleveland Linux Geek
Thank god for CygWin I have bash and everything *LOL* Hmmm...i'll see what i can do about the snooze....
I personally believe people are inherently good, and if you make it easy enough for them to do the right thing (pay rather than steal), they will do it.
/do/ think it's intresting and deserves disscusion and thought.
Oh how we wish that was so. But the sad, sad fact is that stealing is almost always easier, and certianly cheaper, then buying. Therefore there will always be people trying to get something for nothing. I see a shift in the business world though, a shift from product based selling to service based. See, how much easier would it be ( and profitiable? ) for Time Warner, et al., to set up..oh..i don't know...a $15 a month service in which you get to download unlimted ( or a set amount of Megs/bytes/minutes ) music/movies/etc.? This, I believe is the wave of the future. Some places might even do it for free, supported by advertising ( kinda like commercial radio stations ). Is this a bad thing? I'm not sure yet, we'll have to see how it plays out, but I
When the British imposed the Tea Tax, every man and woman could feel the pressure immediately.
Actually, the net price of tea fell when the East India Company was given the monopoly and the tax was added -- there was no immediately felt pressure.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Ireland - 25 years of 'struggle' no change, everybody (including bomb-dodging Londoners) miserable. 1 ceasefire and things start happening yet people seem to forget that and talk about resuming violence, in this case it really _didn't_ do anything.. and as I said it did nothing for a quarter century
Let's not forget Ireland, 1916. Several hundred years of "liberals" bemoaning the "Irish problem" and working within the law - among them the Home Rule League, Daniel "The Liberator" O'Connell, the Land League, all the Irish Whig MP's in the British Parliament. A lot of trying to convince vested interests to change by the rules, a lot of failure. Then the Phoenix Club, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Citizen's Army and revolution, several years of guerrilla action initiated by several hundred law-breakers - the result? Freedom from the imperialist yoke. The reason that the North is still a problem is that the sectarian, nationalist elements of the IRA gained the upper hand over the socialists. There was then no chance for forging an alliance with the equally oppressed Protestant working class. In fact during the strikes in the shipyards in the 20's there were alliances between workers from both backgrounds which were quickly suppressed by the Unionist bosses using religion to drive a wedge.
Poll tax - ignored by many people, eventually got dumped as it was impossible to enforce and looked like an election loser (however many people just didn't pay anything and simply saw it as an excuse to avoid paying taxes, my folks paid the previous tax rate + inflation and got ignored because they'd paid _something_)
So here people broke the law by not paying the tax, organized their neighbourhoods so that bailiffs were physically repulsed when they appeared, co-ordinated with each other in mass non-payment to swamp the courts. These things are all civil disobedience, _breaking_the_law_. People didn't ignore it as an excuse not to pay taxes, they point of not paying it was not paying it!
I think that both of your examples are strong evidence against what you argue for!
Excellent point. Revolutions usually seem to be initiated by a few people. It's as though others don't believe that change is possible until they see something concrete.
I'm interested in the Franklin day planners. What the hell were those?
B.t.w. as far as being a social miscreant goes Thomas Paine is right up there, a persona non grata in Britain _and_ revolutionary France
Well, revolutions need a critical mass to proceed. It doesn't require a majority, like you said.
BTW, corporation haven't taken over our government (I'm assuming you are talking about the US). That's just paranioa.
But notice that many of the people who were for the American Revolution had the most to loose. That is, they were land owners and the wealthy.
Newspaper lockboxes are often cited as an example of the "people are basically honest" dictum with respect to IP. The common street box in the US for buying newspapers lets you take an arbitrary number for your quarter, with a vanishingly small chance of being apprehended. Yet, losses from people taking extra papers are so low, that there is no economic incentive to replace the boxes with smarter technology. In a dishonest society, the first guy each morning would take all the papers and hand them out for free at work.
Working together, I think that paying to buy movies online (maybe even before they're out in theatres) or buy songs will be the first step in preserving this threatened industry.
Who wants to preserve this threatened industry? I thought we had a free market, you don't set up industrial preserves in a free market. Serious question here, and I'd like to see reasons.
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So.. shall we find a bunch of social outcasts again and start a revolution? That seems to be how these things work...
/.?
Yea, you ever hear of this site called
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So by breaking a so-called "unjust" law you are just assuming that your opinion is better than the people which Americans elect to make these laws, which I would call arrogance of the worst kind. Your opinion is no more valid than any others,
When I talked to my Congressman the other day, he didn't know what the DMCA was. He barely understood the term reverse-engineer. He didn't know you could patent sotware, or why that might *possible* cause a problem. He does have a killer website though. My point, although our leaders are trying to do their jobs the best they can (...) often there is just too much to keep track of. The Internet brings this to light even quicker because of it's incredibly liquid and fast changing nature. It has becoming obvious, IMHO, that many of our IP laws were built for a differnt time. With a different set of rules. It's as if the laws of physics for media have been changed, now the laws of the the land need to adapt. They have become so stale and brittle from years of selfish interfence, that the most logical way to change them, is to break them. Repeatedly and casually.
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I'm a moral relativist of a sort, but this is relativism of the stupidest sort. Imagine this conversation was being conducted in a repressive state like Indonesia. Would you still say criticising the rulers was arrogant? And identify the rulers views with people's views? Give me a break. You have got to be trolling.
And some opinions are more valid than others!! Scientifically-ground ones for one thing.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Breaking a law you disagree with is attractive, hell sometimes it even works, but on the whole it's always useful to _try_ to change the law through the mechanisms that have been set up to allow that - it might not work but you are at least trying.
Some examples (UK bias):
Poll tax - ignored by many people, eventually got dumped as it was impossible to enforce and looked like an election loser (however many people just didn't pay anything and simply saw it as an excuse to avoid paying taxes, my folks paid the previous tax rate + inflation and got ignored because they'd paid _something_)
Ireland - 25 years of 'struggle' no change, everybody (including bomb-dodging Londoners) miserable. 1 ceasefire and things start happening yet people seem to forget that and talk about resuming violence, in this case it really _didn't_ do anything.. and as I said it did nothing for a quarter century
One way that I see it is that they can't win. You can't stop the free exchange of information in this day and age. It can't happen. No matter how deep you go, there is an underground channel that goes even deeper. We will get what we want. I hope it doesn't have to happen, but personally, I'm not worried either way. We're in control. We can watch their movies anywhere we want.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
The general public is not yet well aware of the direction in which forces like DMCA, UCITA, et. al. are going. When the British imposed the Tea Tax, every man and woman could feel the pressure immediately. Americans have a high tolerance for civil disobedience and mischief-makers if it appears they are working for some general good. Right now, however, the press looks at the DeCSS folks and their ilk as crackers out to do harm. While breaking bad software is fun and makes a momentary point, it is more important that we get the word out to the common man. Without him, we lose the fight. -cwk.
With the studios fighting the new internet community, the natural reaction is to fight back--which is clearly demonstrated with the rise of Napster, Gnutella, and even DeCSS. Working together, I think that paying to buy movies online (maybe even before they're out in theatres) or buy songs will be the first step in preserving this threatened industry.
If VCRs were not outlawed and blank tapes were not taxes, then they would go out of existence.
Fight Spammers!
It was a bunch of social miscreants that started the revolution.. a bunch of outcasts. Jefferson was a communist, Benjamin got hit by lightning and then tried to create a method of organizing his thoughts (see also: franklin series "day planners")... and George Washington was doing the same thing Clinton was this past year.
Nonetheless, we benefited from their work.. for a few years anyway. Then the corporations took over large sections of our government, subverted the law, and generally raised hell. And before anyone knew it.. ah, well.. they're too rich to stop now!
So.. shall we find a bunch of social outcasts again and start a revolution? That seems to be how these things work...
A Canadian law firm has a couple of good articles up on licensing, copyight, etc.
legal documents
I found these quite useful.
to carry things to their logical conclusion. :-)
:) My friend's band, with their permission.
;).
I was hoping to create something I like to think of as the GNU Media License. The basic idea is to both protect the right of the original creator to profit from their work, and to encourage free and widespread distrubution of creative works.
This is what I've got so far translated from a scribbled barroom napkin.
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Protecting the right to profit. This is accomplished by explicitly prohibiting anyone from selling the artifact. Also, it must be set-up (somewhat like an EULA) that by using the artifact you are agreeing to the agreement under which it is released.
There must also be some provision to both enforce the spirit of the agreement (widespread free (beer/gratis) distrubuition) and lessen the value of the artifact in absolute (supply/demand) terms. This is accomplished by requiring each "mirror" of the artifact to include a link to another "working mirror" (mirror defined as another Internet address where the file can be downloaded with less than 2 "clicks" (or redirects) working mirror is any Internet address with 90%(?) uptime, aggregated per week(?)) Including a working mirror helps to increase total distrubution as well as creating an open environment for exchange. This also makes it much more difficult to illegally control access to artifacts released under this license, as well as helping to ferret out abuses.
Also, each mirror would also be required to produce "source" upon any request within 48 hours of receipt of request. This "source" is of course the original source (i.e. Internet address, most likely a URL) of the artifact. A bit of a problem here, as abuses could develop as someone uses this license to benefit from the distrubution and later remove the source. Perhaps some legalese is needed here, any lawmakers in the audience today?
I just put this together last night, but there will most likely be few tracks released under it tommorrow (got a mini-disc and a mic today
I don't have much cash for lawyers, and I will be submitting for some help from the FSF, but I figured I'd post it for the phreaks here first, and I know they're pretty busy right now
Oh, and the original creator is allowed to profit by releasing the artifact under a different license (i.e. regular copyright) as the original author of the work, CDs, DVDS, Mini-Discs, Memory Sticks, whatever. Not to mention any other way they can from free global distrubution of their artifacts.
Comments, flames, suggestions? (oh, and this is the "dealing with it" part..)
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To carry the theme a bit more...
The basis for all "economic" laws is the prospect of the items that the laws proctect as being scarce. With the advent (or possibly the evolution depending on where one stands) of goods into a digital form, scarcity of those good disapear because of the inherent properties of the digital world. That is, the ability to create enough perfect copies of the good to actaully sate all possible desire for the good. What effect this had upon a market is simple: The market begins to devalue that good, in terms of market value, not personal or emotional value (see all of the toys and other collectables...there are literally millions of Star Wars action figures out there, but I can go to my local gaming store and find that any give one is well above original market value) and eventually expects it to be there as a part of the larger overall market for free or next to free (see paper, pencils, ink pens, etc). Those people, therefore, who are fighting the incomming digital world are fighting to keep thier goods scarce and by that, their ability to demand a certain price for their goods.
However it becomes easy to predict that this is a loosing battle. History shows us a previous example for such use: Look only at what happened to the value of home-made or cottage goods when mass industrial manufacturing became a dominate method of creation of goods. While it may have taken close to a century for the home clothing industry to disapear, it was a very hard faught battle, with both sides waging campagins of what we now call FUD. One side would claim that their goods were superior, the other would shout that your could rely upon theirs much more. There was no right or wrong about it, theirs' was simply a time of change. And both worlds survived. People still make their on clothes, taylors and seamstristes are still employed, and while it may have fallen by the marketable good wayside, such goods are still valued by the people who own them.
We are truly at a cross roads here, one that will define how the world will treat goods and the people that produce the goods of a digital market. With the ability to create as many goods as it will take to sate desire, we can for the first time in human history elmiate a form of want. Let us not waste it flippantly by claiming to be better than those who fight the future. In the end, both sides are needed for the future to occur.
Initially, I also considered Slashdot's moderation system to be censorship, but I don't any more. There is a clear rule that no post is ever deleted, so all information is available to everyone. Censorship by definition involves removal, so the term does not apply here. The cases in the article do involve removal, and that is why people are fighting back. If someone put "Score: -1 Immoral" above a link to cphack or DeCSS, I don't think anyone would care.
The Slashdot moderation system is a rating system, governed by your fellow readers. What this produces is a rating which reflects the opinion of a (presumably) representative majority of the reader base. This can be useful for extracting related information from the responses (such as related links), but is generally not useful for opinion-related discussions, as it tends to filter out uncomfortable criticism.
While a rating system can be useful, I don't think thresholds are. I always keep my threshold at -1, and even though most -1 posts are just noise, some are very intelligent and funny. The Slashdot trolls are like South Park in a way, and just like South Park plays an important role in criticizing our culture (mostly American though), so do the trolls for this subculture.
After all, in the 1850's they said that slavery was a property right, but it wasn't - it was simply a controll on human behavior as is intellectual property today. They said that we have no incentive to grow this great cotton crop without slavery as they say there is no incentive to innovate without intellectual property today. They said that we put effort into importing and training slaves, so therefore we deserve to own them and today they say that we put effort into these informational works so therefore we are entitled to controll how you use them. They even claimed that slavery was the reason for Americas great economic success as they claim that intellectual property is today. Of course slavery had to be right, because so many noble, intelligent, and prestigious men did busisness in it. ....
Yes it is amazing how history repeats itself, but it gets better
After all to them, the industrial revolution was not about industry but about the cotton gin and using it to leverage, grow, and extend their slave plantations as never seen before. One would think that the cotton gin would have been used to minimize slavery, but beeing so greedy it wasn't. Today they think that the internet is about extending these massive intellectual property mega-corporations like time-warner to leverage it's control in every home. Of course one would think that the internet would encourage them to share information more freely, but them being greedy it doesn't.
AND OH GOD HOW there were always those fools who thought that the slave states could peacifully get along with the free states, and that those today who think that the GPL can peacefully exist in a world with intellectual property. They are wrong and will pay as dearly.
Well, back then, it was only a matter of time before things hit the fan and war broke out. But BEWARE - the US civil war was one of the bloodiest in the history of the world and lost more lives for America than both WW1 and WW2 combined. This was directly because the industrial revolution was just bringing about new technologies like the machine gun and gas weapons, but society had not developed defenses for them yet. Yes for those of you who uphold in intellectual property, history has taught us that we should not try to compromize and hold no bars back in terms of simply "putting you out of busisness". Today we can know on faith that history, technology, and ethics are on our side. I just pray that you'll get it, before you get it, but if history is any indication you won't change until it's too late.
David
dmchr@netcom.com
It is true that CPHack may allow a person to shut CyberPatrol on a system (if they go through enough hoops).
What Moglen fails to note is that most companies use The Border Manager and Proxy versions. Since this is on a server, nothing anyone can do with CPHack on their machine won't matter.
Moglen also forgets that ways to bypass CPHack have been around for quite a while.
Fight Spammers!
The ability to rapidly and cheaply copy, transmit and store information brought on by the Internet and computers has put alot of pressure Intellectual property laws.
Originally, Intellectual property law was modelled after the highly successful and largely settled physical property laws. But from the outset, it was recognized that intellectual property was differenent. That's why copyrights and patents are of limited duration.
The holders of IP, some of whom are large, powerful corporations naturally want to protect and enhance their existing assets. This is to the detrement of the citizenry, because no new creation can retroactively occur. At the very least, new IP protections should apply _only_ to new works.
We need people like Eben who know the law to help ensure the IP corps don't run roughshod over the rights of the people.