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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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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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+&x
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!
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.
So if a "vegetarian" were to enter a debate over whether or not to eat meat and praised people that had found a way to avoid eating meat as heroes, that would be ridiculous? You seem to misunderstand that the classification of anyone as a hero is a subjective thing and he is merely expressing the opinion that these are people that he admiresThey're not heroes, they're just in way over their heads after having done something before thinking of the consequences.
A little patronizing that. How do you know that they haven't made a principled and thoughtful decision to do this?
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.
That would seem to indicate a rational, thoughtful desire on his part not to become a martyr. He's already done a lot to admire, he's raised the issue, made it public and shown us the threat.
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.
Tell it to the people that founded this country on the basis of a tax-revolt, tell it to Gandhi, tell it to Martin Luther King, tell it to Nelson Mandela, tell it to the German underground resistance during WW2, tell it to anyone that's ever done anything to bring about change.
Your diatribe about Stallman descends into the merely personal. No one is really evaluating him as a hero or otherwise on the basis of his arrogance or the colour of his socks or anything other than the fact that he had a idea that involved change to the way things are and tried to implement it.
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.