At The Crossroads

The Internet and its distinctive architecture have created a freer culture than we have ever had before -- or even imagined. The next few years will decide whether the Net will be made to conform to existing laws and values, or whether society will recognize it as a new kind of realm. The fighting has started. (Read More).

As any number of legal and constitutional scholars have written, the Internet has breached many of the walls built around information, ideas and intellectual property.

Perhaps the primary reason the Net has been so free is its architecture, no doubt the greatest protector of free speech online and the reason that issues relating to the distribution of software and hardware are taken so seriously. If politicians, lawyers, businesspeople and journalists have grown alarmed to the point of hysteria because of the Net's wall-busting capabilities, the digital infrastructure has been freedom's best pal and the reason we are all freer than our non-wired counterparts.

Some in the media, a number of affected artists and copyright holders, and many large corporations -- even some people involved in technological movements like open source -- have a tendency to oversimplify copyright issues. Piracy, they say, is wrong, and copyright isn't necessarily a bad thing.

This is, to say the least, stating the obvious. They're right. Piracy, like murder, arson and theft, is unequivocably a bad thing. Who, exactly, is for it? And ownership of ideas is an important tradition. Unfortunately, the issue isn't that copyright is a good or bad witch, but that like the one in Oz, a very big house has fallen on it.

This isn''t a Sunday School morality play, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. The reality is that the very definition of copyright has been shattered by the Net, along, perhaps with conventional wisdoms about piracy and theft. Finding a fair and workable response will be difficult.

The relative anonymity, the tools of encryption, decentralized distribution, multiple points of access, the irrelevance of traditional geographical boundaries, the challenges to conventional policing, the lack of systems to identify content -- those features designed by the far-sighted wizards who built the Net three decades ago have made it difficult, if not impossible, to control speech in cyberspace.

Not that people haven't tried. Congress passed not one but two Communications Decency Acts to curb speech online, and millions of dollars worth of blocking, filtering and censoring programs have been sold to schools, businesses and parents. Corporate lawyers are cranking out print and e-warning patent and copyright letters by the thousands, sometimes even the hundreds of thousands.

There is no special reason to believe that the current architecture will remain in place. The next generation of Net architects -- more and more likely to work for businesses, with radically different interests than the Net's original designers -- may well build in more controls over the movement of content and information.

Even the U.S. government is beginning to grasp the impact that corporatism is having on technology. In a California speech last week, Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers noted three features of the information revolution: its dependence on brainpower more than conventional economic resources; the globalization of information technology and markets; and its tendency to produce successive monopolies, with a single firm often dominating each generation of technology and products.

Monopolies, as economists know, are obsessive wall-builders. "We can already see the beginnings of this reconstruction," writes Harvard Constitutional expert Lawrence Lessig in his book "Code; and other laws of cyberspace." "Already the architecture is being remade to reregulate what real-space architecture before made regulable. Already the Net is changing from free to controlled."

True. We are clearly passing from one phase to another, though it's far from clear exactly how free the Net will or won't remain. Technology is inherently unpredictable. No one foresaw the Internet, no one can state with certainty how it will evolve. Everyone reading this is well aware of the growing number of lawsuits, patent and copyright issues cropping up online dealing with text, ideas, music, words, software. One primary instrument of legal architecture being deployed to control the Net is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), little mentioned until a few months ago, but by now familiar to almost everyone interested in speech, copyright or intellectual property matters.

It says a lot about the sad state of media and politics that few people in the country understand how much is at stake when it comes to Net architecture and other issues directly related to this uniquely free environment.

"The architecture of the Internet, as it is right now is perhaps the most important model of free speech since the founding [of the American Republic]," writes Lessig. "This model has implications far beyond e-mail and web pages. Two hundred years after the framers ratified the Constitution, the Net has taught us what the First Amendment means. If we take this meaning seriously, then the First Amendment will require a fairly radical restructuring of the architectures of speech off the Net as well."

This is a powerful idea, much closer to Thomas Jefferson's visions -- he didn't believe ideas could or should be owned -- than to those of contemporary political leaders. He also foresaw that the politics surrounding ideas could change.

But the kind of restructuring Lessig is talking about will take time, and involve complexities and controversies beyond the existing public debates over speech and copyright, i.e. you're-a-thief; no-I'm-not.

In a way, technology and copyright have always been at war. Before the printing press, the idea of copyright was almost incomprehensible: copying was so cumbersome and expensive that nature and time itself protected an author or creator.

Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned.

This has brought the Net to a distinct, profoundly significant fork in the road. There are really only two choices when it comes to defining and enforcing free speech and the ownership of ideas and intellectual property. As a society, we can try to make cyberspace conform to the rules of physical space. Or we can recognize the extraordinary potential of this new culture, and invest cyberspace with laws and values and properties that are fundamentally different.

Before the Internet, copyright law and the means to enforce it were relatively simple. Cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law and legislators to protect against illegal copying. In a sense, the Net is a giant Xerox machine, cranking out digital copies at almost no cost, in staggering quantities, to incalculable numbers of people -- all at unbelievable speed. Pity the cop whose job it is to enforce existing copyright -- tracing and punishing violators -- online. Talk about a crime wave.

This has enormous implications for free speech and intellectual property. Technologies that work have always gotten used, whether they should be or not. It's still true. People who can download text, columns, games, ideas, music and software will do so, if for no other reason than because they can. People who can use technology to comment freely, distribute code, challenge authority and criticize powerful corporate interests will do so, not only because they have the right but because they are able. This is the immutable reality of cyberspace, the new political consciousness emanating from the Internet.

All along the Internet Edge, legal and political conflicts are intensifying over the ownership of music, patents, programs, code, content and ideas.

This battle will sorely test a system that hasn't even begun to come to grips with the impact of the Internet on freedom, or on traditional models of commerce and information distribution. The libertarian ethic that has always defined much of the Internet associates government with threats to liberty. Traditionally, the libertarian is concerned about reducing the power of government. But threats to liberty change: in our time, they increasingly arise from corporate, not governmental power. And there is no mainstream political movement primarily concerned with that, in part because corporatism has acquired much of the press and now provides the primary funding for the political system.

To date, there's no consensus about which Internet choice should be made -- to make it conform to existing laws and values, or to recognize it as a new kind of space. Nor is there anything like broad agreement about what changes might be made, if there are to be any.

But the issue is becoming more distinct every day. Computer users, members of Web communities, software developers and Web site operators are increasingly confronted with lawyers, arguments and new kinds of questions about the movement of information and ideas. The Net is, as a result, in danger of losing at least some of the freedom that characterized its first decades.

The United States has always had a love-hate relationship both with freedom and government. America has been a country that self-righteously espouses the notion of individual liberty, even as many Americans and institutions from the Puritans to the sponsors of the DMCA -- have continuously tried to take it away. Since freedom involves not a single idea but a complex system of values, the struggle to define what it is is a never-ending intellectual, economic, personal and political --and increasingly, technological -- struggle, one which is now engulfing the Internet.

The Net gave America a freer culture than it had ever had, or even quite imagined. The next few years will decide if it stays that way. Were the founders alive -- people like Paine, Jefferson and Franklin -- they would find in the Internet many of their values and dreams for a free and democratic society. And they'd fight to keep it that way.

"New circumstances," wrote Jefferson in 1813, "...call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects."

Comments

Re:Coherent (moderation comment)

[Anonymous Coward]

A problem not dealt with well by the moderation system is that a comment can be both Interesting AND Flamebait simultaneously.

What Are You Doing About It?

[Indomitus]

Nobody ever said Jon Katz has all the plans. One of the main points of this whole Open Source thing is that the mass of people have more ideas and plans than one company or person and that's a good model to use. If you have a personal political itch, scratch it. Don't wait for somebody else to tell you what their itch is. If you see something that bothers you, rally your own troops, take care of it.

Re:New uses for copyright

[Eric E. Coe]

That reminds me of the classic comeback for the original quote:

Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

Not that it really has anything to do with this already off-topic thread...
--

Re:Unequivocably?

[Eric E. Coe]

Of course you never used a road, the aqueduc system or went to school.

I just couldn't let that one pass... People who try to justify big goverment by listing a few programs that (almost) everyone can agree are Good To Have should take a hard look at the basics of the budget (especially on the national level). Most of your money is going to other purposes, that are not nearly so justifiable.

Besides, why should I be forced (at gunpoint!) to go through such an inefficient and wasteful middleman to purchase the few services I really want?
--

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[cpt kangarooski]

I find it really hard to believe that you are against all government. Even the most libertarian of libertarians is unwilling to face up to the anarchy that would result in a world where there are no laws at all. (Who ultimately enforces contracts? Who ultimately defends property rights? Do you want to live in a society where you must personally defend everything you own yourself through force of arms?)

But you're not seeing that corporate interests wield great power over the government, and are quite dangerous. Perhaps they would be less dangerous if they were not already receiving the benefit from the government of being a corporation. (Personally I'm opposed to coprorations in most cases - individually owned businesses or partnerships are more my style)

Additionally, a capitalist system is not inherently the only way to do things. It is the economic system that most closely aligns itself to the 'shape' of natural human liberties.

But just as we have government and laws to preserve the lion's share of our natural liberty at as minimal an expense as possible (e.g. it's illegal for you to randomly kill people - this preserves freedom in general by permitting people to exercise their freedoms without being killed) so must economic systems be bent to fit PEOPLE. People must not serve the goals of capitalism, or socialism, or communism or anything else like that.

Antitrust regulations PRESERVE the integrity of the market by preventing it from lurching into a broken condition where monopolies squash competitors in a defiance of ideal capitalism.

Some zoning I can understand - it's irresponsible to put a toxic waste dump next to a school. Other zoning is stupid, I agree - completely segregating residential areas from commercial areas is dumb; cities thrive on having storefronts underneath apartments)

And workplace regulations, while sometimes going too far, are generally another example of requiring some infringement to be taken for an undeniably better good. Largely because again, capitalism isn't perfect. Why shouldn't consumers achieve their goals by voting with their votes as well as their wallets? Both are acceptable mechanisms for PEOPLE living in a better society, at the loss of as little freedom as possible.

There are abuses. Just as frequently at the hands of corporations as people. Perhaps that's what you ought to be complaining about.

Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[cpt kangarooski]

God only knows why, but the labels ended up backwards. Probably because the various camps kept their names but changed their attitudes. IIRC left-wing and right-wing are backwards in the US as well.

Liberalism (in general) is permissive. Conservatism (in general) is restrictive; typically trying to maintain the status quo.

Like I said, the labels have gotten reversed. And besides which, in the US we have a Conservative party that's liberal economically and conservative politically and morally, and a Liberal party that's conservative economically and politically (different goals, but they attempt to achieve these goals the same way) and liberal morally.

You'll notice how both have a liberal:conservative ratio of 1:2, which is why I (with a ratio of maybe 2.5:0.5) don't see a big difference.

(in case you're wondering I'm liberal morally, mostly liberal economically save those restrictions needed to preserve an economic system that works for non-jillionares/monopolies, and mostly liberal politically save for those restrictions needed to preserve as many freedoms as possible; anarchy sucks)

At any rate, I think you're being too black-and-white. People can be nice to kids and dogs, and still crush thousands of people to get to the top. I like to trust people to do what's right, but I don't think that it's responsible to not have SOME safety net in place if people grossly abuse this trust. Think of it as a failsafe mechanism, even though emphasis is placed on not needing to use it at all. (which prevents it from being more powerful than it needs to be)

Thus, I walk on the street feeling safe from being killed, but I also like to know that if I am killed the killer is likely to be caught and punished. Relying on my kinfolk to settle scores and maintain feuds has not worked out well, historically.

Re:Coherent.

[cpt kangarooski]

That's about right. The AARP is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Of course, a lot of this is stupid misdesign of the social programs they like to keep. If they were being responsible, they would lobby for changes that provide for a better system in the long run.

But I don't think that the AARP members are interested in anything in the long run ;)

Maybe immortality programs....

Idiotic Reactions Forthcoming?

[Loundry]

I've read most of Katz's postings when they're available. I thought his pieces were thought-provoking, sometimes insightful, and sometimes stupid. But what I am really disappointed with is the reactions that many people post whenever Katz's postings are mentioned here. "Katz sucks!" "Yet another one of Katz's iditotic diatribes." Iterate those as many times as you can adding some padding words, and you may possibly get 35% of the postings which will follow.

If you disagree with Katz then point out where his statements are invalid and back up your contentions with evidence. That will be much more effective than posting some variant of "Katz sucks!" and you won't come off souding like a petulant child to boot.

Re:Idiotic Reactions Forthcoming?

[spiralx]

Agreed. A lot of people seem to have a go at him for posting stuff "we already know". Well, duh, that's the point. I always thought that the idea was that Jon would take an idea, write a piece around it, so that it would provoke discussion of the topic. I don't think he was ever intended to be some kind of "visionary".

In a sane legal system...

[Julian Morrison]

...corporations that do such things would be sued and likely have their chief execs jailed for corporate manslaughter. The fact that the legal system lets them get away with it is a government-caused error.

Re:Threats to liberty

[davecb]

With respect, you're confusing the source of the problem with the tool used.

In the days of the great Trusts, the owners of the trusts bought congressmen and senators to get legal protection for their monopolies. Does this then mean that we should do without congressmen and senators? Should we have kings instead?

What brought down the monopolies was the actions of those self-same concressmen and senators, with the help of the courts and the then department of justice.

Government is a two edged-sword: it can cut the people, or it can cut of the heads of those who actually threaten our liberties. Do not try to eliminate it, lest you find yourself in a world where the corporations really do have their own armies, and the citizins have none.

--dave

Re:Jefferson

[davecb]

DonGenaro said "and also according to jefferson's vision people can be property".

Actually he said it was unfortunate that they should be property, and proposed the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia put together a fund to return the kidnapped slaves and their descendants to their homelands. [Source: The Atlantic, some time last year]

--dave

Re:we're not going to like the way this turns out

[davecb]

G27 Radio wrotethere just doesn't seem to be a way to protect .. IP on the Net without taking away our freedom to share... If there is another way, please say so.

There is, and it was discoverd partially by accident by Tim O'Reilly and friends.

I'm the financially sucessful second author of a book. It is downloadable for free, yet people insist on buying it and sending Tim money. Tim then sends me money.

Why? Because the printed book is independantly valuable: the on-line copy is better for quick reference to techniques, the paper one is better of understanding. It's more portable, can be dropped in the bath with only minor damage, and actually has a better index. The on-line copy is valuable because teh sections make useful tutorials on particular subjects, and one section has a clickable fault tree, which is cool.

That means, you see, that the products that will suffer from the net are the ones which are identical, whatever their media, the ones where there is no value added by adapting them to a different media.

Right now, this looks like folks who will suffer are the publishers of mass-market songs. Top 10 stuff, to be precise. Which isn't the whole of recorded music or the recording industry, much less the whole of music or the whole of literature.

--dave

Reasons for "Idiotic Reactions"

[Byteme]

Yes... but it often seems that his diatribe is full of steam, and he is getting paid by the word to reiterate the a priori. Some of us (I do not speak for all) do prefer the B.K. era of Slashdot (B.K. = Before Katz), when a post was [Summary + Link + Discussion]. Katz should save his skills for book or movie reviews. I do not think that Slashdot needs an editorialist. Wasn't Slashdot quoted as being 'the new journalism'... does this mean that fact-finding and insight comes from its posters? If Katz is staff, let him just post submissions and then contribute some book or movie reviews.

just my $0.02, but may be some of reason for Katz-bashing

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[smugfunt]

The claim that one cannot own an idea is nonsense in many cases.

It is nonsense to think one can own an idea, at least once you let it out of your brain and into someone else's. All this talk about Intellectual Property is NewSpeak; call it property and people can only think of it as property. Copyright and patents are not "natural" rights nor do they confer ownership in the material sense. They are privileges granted by the state to creators in order to foster creativity. Creators are allowed exclusive benefit for a time so that everyone will benefit in the long run.

This is good. Ideas are not property. Breach of copyright is not theft.

As Jefferson himself said: "Home taping is not killing music."

Re:New uses for copyright

[Polaris]

It always amuses me to see people earnestly analysing the English translations of the Tanach. How do you know the translation is accurate? Learn Hebrew, then you can do some analysis. Also, Tehillim (Psalms) are not "hymns"! No choirs standing around in white robes in the time of David the King!

The geek will inherit the earth..

[MikeFM]

Politicians and corporate moneybags no longer own the earth.. today everything is driven by technology. Everything you see or hear or touch or eat has probably came out of the hands of geeks. Without us those in power would find themselves holding an empty bag. Only the geek tendacy not to want money and power has kept us the underdog and now that our basis for existance is being challenged we will fight harder and harder until the day we win. To the geek what things are more important than knowledge and freedom? These very things are being taken away from us. They leave us no choice. We must hide our fair natures and become beasts. We have seen the future and they can not take it from us. They can not drive us out without destroying themselves and so we shall win if only we fight.

Re:the copying vs copyright clause

[Bricius]

Does Intellectual Property exists at all?

• This doesn't mean that the IP is worth less. And it doesn't mean the the owner of the IP should just give up protecting their property. And it doesn't mean that the whole system is flawed. It means that if you believe that your property is being taken away from you, you have to fight harder to protect it.
  ...
  If it's your property, and you feel strongly in that being your property, then you need to protect it.

... if it's your property ...but is it?
When you have an idea, being it a melody, a sonet, an algorithm, a novel or a simphony, till it stays inside your mind only, then it is certainly your. But is it your property? If someone else comes out with the same idea and publish it, then it is his idea, no more your, even if you know that you had that idea far before that other one was even born.
So now the idea have been published in some form by you or by someone else. I am now exposed to that idea, by reading, listening or watching it in its actual form. Now I understand that idea and I have it in my mind in the same way you had it before. Am I stoling it from you? No. Can someone force me to delete it from my mind? No. So how can the supposed owner of that idea claim to be deprived or enforce ownership on it?
Intellectual Property is a broken concept!
If you don't share it you don't own it. By sharing it you give it away.
You don't own it, you never owned it, and a law saying you own it is like a law affirming that the sun should turn around the hearth: yust a funny idiocy.

Back to the subject.
If you don't own the IP, what is the Copyright Law about?
The Copyright Law gives a temporary monopoly on the economic benefits that can (but may not) come by mean of copying, distributing or performing the actual form of the idea, to the person(s) publishing it, in exchange of their act of sharing it with all the other people, for the explicit purpose of creating an economic incentive to produce more sharing.

Now comes the last part:
It's the publishing act that generates the sharing, and therefore it's that one the actual moment when the "IP goes into Public Domain".

This is absurd and can bring to stolen property!
Let's check with a real example: a singer, well known with the name Cat Stevens, wrote and published a lot of songs and poetry. Later he converted itself to Islam religion and consequently disclosed authorship of those blasfemity he published earlier.
He tryed hard to have those ideas destroyed. Guess what? He lost. An author do not have the right to destroy his own published IP because he does not own it; its in the public domain, even if its economic benefits are still granted to him (until his copyright expires).

Re:Article Moderation: -1, Redundant

[finkployd]

No one made you read it. Certainly no one made you comment on it.

That is the great thing about this medium, you can just skip over stuff you are not interested in.

Finkployd

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[meme]

It amazes me as an atheist that those who claim all things come from a god are the first to protect someones copyright over god's gifts. You people are not only insane, your greedy and selfish too. Shame on you!

313173 d3(1@R@710N 0f 1nD3p3Nd3n[3

[Cool Hand Luke]

\/\/3 7h3 |-|@[K3r D00dz, 1n 0rD3r 2 f0rM @ M0r3 P3rF3[7 f0rVm f0r w@r3z, p0rN, Ho7 9r17z, 7r011z, F1@m3z, & N@71L13 P0Rn7m@n n33k1d, |-|01d 7h3z3 7ru7hz 2 b 313173, 7h@7 w3 r 313173 & U 5uX HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

Where was I... oh yes.

<flame>
I'm tempted to print out a copy of that "declaration" and piss on it, but that wouldn't count a legitimate use of office equipment, now would it? What a load of William Gibson-inspired hooey! "Our identities have no bodies"?!!!!! Comparing the Internet community to the Pre-Revolutionary Colonists? Why didn't Mr. Barlow just come out and express his 311373ness?
</flame>

*sigh* Pretension bull like that makes me question what the FSF is really all about.

George Lee

Re:Coherent.

[Bryan Andersen]

You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?

No, but I have seen them organize letter writing campaigns to congress.

Want something to change? Speak up. Write your congress man. If you remain silent, we can only infer you are happy as a clam.

Re:Thoughtful . . .

[Badgerman]

Actually, by not getting the net, I mean they misunderstand its development and major strengths. I think right now they know what they want it to be, but not what it is.

And regarding television, networks have been suffering declining viewership for some time last I heard - only Regis Philbin has helped save the day ;)

Thoughtful . . .

[Badgerman]

More thoughtful than I expected, actually.

The problem I see is not as simple as corpratism/freedom/etc. It's more a problem of people not grasping basic things about human culture and living systems.

Living systems get more and more complex over time, and humans, massively adaptable, can change and grow at a stunning pace. We have adapted with culture and technology to be able to live anywhere on (or above) the planet. In general, human society and creations get more and more complex over time.

The internet is this taken to an amazing extreme, a gigantic interconnecting network, tying people and their systems together. It's an engine of change, perhaps the biggest thing since Gutenberg (as stereotypical as that sounds). It's evolving itself as well, promoting information exchange.

Sadly, a lot of people don't get it - the netcops, some companies, etc. This massive, growing, accelerating "thing" exists because it is open, it is chaotic, it is interconnected. In their zeal for control (probably due to fear and ignorance as much as greed), the want to go against its very nature.

The bizarre copyright laws can (and probably will) come back to bite people. Corporate blandness will be rewarded with indifference and lack o finterest. Innovation requires freedom - as does good, effective, commerce. Policing the net would require massive bureaucratic and legal efforts that would be better used elsewhere and would likely be ineffective. Attempts at control by individuals, governments, and corporations may result in THEM being controlled and constrained tomorrow, bound by laws backfiring and applied differently than expected.

This won't stop people from trying to manipulate the net - because if they "got" the net, then they wouldn't try to control it. If anything, not only do we have to fight these manipulations, we have to educate.

Re:Thoughtful . . .

[igaborf]

Corporate blandness will be rewarded with indifference and lack of interest.

Clearly, you don't watch US television broadcasts. In this country, blandness is rewarded with wealth and fame. The Net will be no different in that respect.

This won't stop people from trying to manipulate the net - because if they "got" the net, then they wouldn't try to control it.

True if by "'got' the net" you mean they want to promote the kind of social interaction the Net is uniquely capable of providing. But large numbers of people would be quite willing to sacrifice the public good to their own benefit. This is inherent in the truism that people tend to "vote their pocketbook."

But the principal problem, in a nutshell, is that powerful people tend to become powerful because they are good at manipulating situations to their own advantage and are willing to do so. Many of those people would like nothing better than to change the Net so it benefits them, regardless of the effect on the Net as a social/cultural engine.

Re: The Bible is copyrighted, you idiot

[scruffy]

Any modern version of the Bible is copyrighted. Why do you think you can only (easily) find older version (e.g., King James) online?

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[Wah]

Furthermore, if you decide not to give a private company your business, you don't have to.

This becomes a problem with major media companies. Not only can they be incredibly difficult to avoid supporting, but they also control the flow of information about the world. And other businesses. So, many times, the information that would cause you to not give a private company your business is withheld because of a partnership with a major media company. Proving this is nearly impossible, yet simple reason says it happens, and even simpler reason says it happens much more often when the number of major players dwindles. Everyone is a friend or very powerful, and you don't get is pissing matches with friends and powerful people. It's not good for the bottom line. A homogenous(sp) media is not good for a free society. A homogenous media that lobbies laws to limit competition and rights of citizens doubly so.

Mmmm... take it and run with it you who claim to love the word freedom...

Run, run, just as fast as you can. Can't catch me...I'm on the other coast. ;)
--

Freedom

[Wah]

Thanks for the article Jon, this one actually looks like you almost want to stand up for what you believe. I guess as a journalist you need to walk a line. I just post, so I get to pick a side and defend it.

The Net gave America a freer culture than it had ever had, or even quite imagined. The next few years will decide if it stays that way. Were the founders alive -- people like Paine, Jefferson and Franklin -- they would find in the Internet many of their values and dreams for a free and democratic society. And they'd fight to keep it that way.

A Free Press. This was one of the most important issues to the founders of this country (US). A free media, the voice of the country. Many people have seen and commented on the current nature of that entity. We no longer have a "free" press in this country. We have one that is controlled by continually fewer people with increasingly more friends. You don't talk bad or even about your good friends without permission. These few powerful companies control not what we say, but often what we talk about. It's the same (roughly) as the /. universe, where Taco, Hemos, e-mit, and others pick the stories and we talk about them. It is the people at the top who pick the stories, or at least the ones we focus on. The Net has changed that, thank god. Now it is actually possible for me to avoid seeing Elian (a few weeks back) and still get some news of the world. But other forms of media (outside the news) are also under strict control. Some feel this is a good thing, I would argue differently.

I run a website out of my apartment, many other people do the same thing, or use a hosting company, or some other means of making their voice heard. It's quite easy, comparatively. Compared to say..running a TV station, or a radio station, or a newspaper. Quite easy. What the Internet has allowed is for ANYONE to offer the services of a billion dollar corporation. ESPECIALLY in the area of the press. This shift of power has increased competition ENOURMOUSLY for media companies. Instead of trying to compete in the marketplace, they are competing in the courtroom using rules that they are writing through Congress. That's not how I want my market to function.

"New circumstances," wrote Jefferson in 1813, "...call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects."

I definitely feel the Internet is a new circumstance. We need new words and new concepts to define the old objects. The biggest one we need to tackle right now is copyright. The current rules are being written and lobbied for by industry against politicians who don't know a client from a server. This is being done by companies that can make sure that the general public NEVER hears about such issues, at least without some serious spin. It is up to those concerned citizens to raise awareness for the issues that they feel are important. I think redefining copyright and IP for this new century is one of the biggest challenges facing THIS country. And I think they need to redefined with the Freedom of the Internet and the Freedom of the People top of mind. If you chain my voice, can my body be far behind?
--

Re:Freedom

[TheFuzzy]

Thank you for the thoughtful post on freedom. I have no nits to pick with you; in fact, I agree completely. Instead of an argument, I'd like to extend the point of view expressed by tackling current battles from a view of macro-economic development.

If you know your historical economic theory, you are familiar with the idea that human history, in abstract, has gone through phases of economic development. The simplest version is: Subsistence Tribal ==> Slave Society ==> Feudal Kingdom ==> Capitalist State. Each time a trasition has been thrust upon a region, country, or society, there has been considerable resistance from the old system. Witness, for example, the battles between traditional nobility (mostly Catholic) and industrialist nobility (mostly protestant) in the British Isles in the 18th century.

I assert that we are witnessing the beginning of another phase transition of socio-economic systems, from corporate-capitalism to something we can't yet define. As such, we can expect the machinery of corporate-capitalism to resist violently this transition, using legislation, copyright, lawsuits, and police. However, history cannot be frozen by legislation, no matter how much the King Canutes of AOL/TimeWarner/RIAA/NewsCorp would have it so.

A good example of this would be the battle of RIAA vs. Napster. Napster represents a newer, more anarchistic method of music distribution and reproduction. RIAA represents the old way. As such, they are using the old tools - intellectual property law and copyright - to smother the new technology. My prediction? Napster will be crushed legally. It will be replaced by something like FreeNet, which will be far harder to destroy in court because it has no legal entity.

Please don't think that I'm painting a rosy picture of the new revolution. Historically, transitions between socio-economic systems have been a very, very bad time for those caught up in them. We can expect, in the near future, laws making ownership of certain technologies (FreeNet, DeCSS) a felony; copyright violation witch-hunts; vilification of new technology mavericks; and violent retaliation by extremists of all kinds.

-Josh

Corporations ARE the danger

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Corporations have no intrinsic power to harm freedom;

This, in my amateur opinion, is a lie. Where do you think the government got the IDEA to impose these laws? Lobbyists, congressional aids, people whose sole concern is staying in Washington, and they all speak the language of money. The money is what drives the laws. You think government cares about Napster or newsgroups? They know less about the internet than my cat. But, they DO understand that the huge mongo-corporate-enslavers want it done, so they can sleep safely in their tax-paid bed and fly in the tax-paid private jets. If you want to know the source of the problem, look beyond the obvious. Goverment enforces these laws, but whose idea were the laws in the first place?

A democracy vs. a republic

[VT_hawkeye]

The question is, was "democracy" ever the real intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution?

Democracy is one of the most misused words around, as far as describing a government goes. A good case can be made that "democracy" should only be used to describe a system where citizens themselves have a personal say in each decision that is made (commonly known as "direct democracy").

What we tend to define as "democracy" in the U.S. is actually a republican (I'm not talking about the party here) system of government. The whole idea of electing representatives (little-r, includes Senators, House Reps, and whatever local governmental types you may have) was originally to remove the decision-making at least one layer from the common folk, on the theory that the hoi polloi didn't have the time, inclination or ability to properly educate themselves on all the issues that must be decided by a modern government.

The devolution of republican government into a true democracy (through such things as ballot initiatives etc.) is one of the biggest issues affecting our lives today. Whether that movement is a good or bad thing is really up to you, and often those lines don't coincide with party labels. What scares me, though, is how much this could change how our nation is governed, and yet most people don't even know the proper words to describe it.

Re:A democracy vs. a republic

[wobblie]

The question is, was "democracy" ever the real intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution?

Well, no. It wasn't - however - the constitutional amendments and the Bill of rights are extremely hostile to the state and give us quite a bit of legal recourse within the system: it is no wonder the US government has fought the constitution tooth and nail since its inception.

Democracy should rightly be considered a process. It doesn't neccesarily mean a "tyranny of the majority"; one man, one veto - this is also democratic. "Direct democracy" - what anarchists have been talking about for quite some time - is definitely a possibility, but it depends on how free people really want to be.

The problem with America (well one of the problems) is that its people are very strongly convinced that they live in a democratic society, when the truth is that only the thinnest veneer of democracy exists here. Look around you - your workplace, your schools, your communities: there are virtually no democratic institutions in the US at all; as a result it's populace is atomized, emasculated, and impotent beyond belief.

Americans are quite used to following orders and not participating. Once one gets a taste of it though, I believe there is no going back.

This is nothing new at all, these things have been batted around in america for ages; they are just not talked about. Since the brutal destruction of the labor movement, America has been basically a business run society without interruption. Read your labor history, especially of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

--

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[nit]

What if I want a new hand that feeds me? Like my own?

Re:Napster is NOT theft, and I can prove it.

[Fritti]

To which I can only add a heartfelt "amen, brother".

--Fritti

shameless plug

[bob dobalina]

The one thing about this essay that torqued me down was Katz's claim that "liberty is threatened now by big corporate interests". Forgive me for being a randroid, but there's a huge difference between a corporation desperately trying to get you to give them money and a government that puts a gun to your face and demands it. The notion that corporations infringe upon or threaten liberty is a shocking instance of newspeak that should be dissected and exposed for what it is: a sneaky attempt to switch one word for another (we randroids call this one "concept-stealing").

In any case, I submitted a proposal to H2k for a presentation addressing the very questions Katz raises in this article. If anyone's interested in my slightly unqualified opinion on this, and you'll be in the NYC area July 14-16, consider stopping by. And while you're at it, urge Emmanuel and everyone else to put me in the program.

Thank yew fer yur support.

B

Re:cutting the wheat from the chaff..

[bob dobalina]

Well, it seems to make sense. If government can influence business, isn't it only fair that business can influence government? I mean, government can inhibit, prohibit or outright destroy businesses. Shouldn't they at least be afforded the mechanism to defend themselves?

They don't even get a guarantee that their lobbying dollars will pay off. Their "in the pocket" senator could vote the other way on that crucial issue. Seems to me the only ones who make out good on the deals are the representatives.

B
Kanamori's definition of infinity: "you don't go there."

Once again, the point is

[WillAffleck]

that Jon doesn't get it that this opening up is something happening elsewhere. Here, in the US, where he is purported to live, we have more restrictive laws, and our personal freedoms are being chipped away at day by day.

Now, if one were to write an article about how the techno-samurai of the 21st Century will start shopping around for countries to live in, based upon how much personal freedom each one has, that might be an interesting story.

Remember - it's a two-way street - corporations can only control those who let themselves be controlled. People like myself, citizens of multiple countries, can go to France to get booze, winter in the French West Indies, drop by Amsterdam to get a good head of smoke, and go to other countries to live in.

But most technogeeks are not techno-samurai. They have one citizenship, not enough funds to move when they feel like it, not enough corporate holdings to hold the silly regulations at bay, and think they are powerless to change this. But they're not - it is not difficult to choose to game the system if you know what you want.

Please moderate the above up!

[Error 404]

I don't have any points at the moment.

I use an older version of the word "Conservative" (when I was a pup, Conservatives knew what was good for us, and anything else was a Commie plot) so I (on one level) disagree with FyreGryffon, but he makes some very interesting connections, and his article is making me think. Which causes a certain degree of pain, but I have ibuprophin in my desk drawer, and if that doesn't solve it, there is good Russian vodka in my freezer.

Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[CokeJunky]

Thank you for not flaming... As I said, devils advocate... Here is a wonderful point:
That would make more sense if laws existed in some sort of vacuum where there was just Right and Wrong
But ideally laws exist on the basis of right vs. wrong, using a set of guiding principles to weight when one possibility takes precendence over another.
Our society has "developed" to the point where we have set out some of those principals. Some places like Canada and the US have set out those principals in their constitutions.
This is a case where those guiding principles collide -- the right to free speech, vs the right to protect your work. Once upon a time we lived in a barter society -- musicians and artists had few direct means to care for themselves -- arts demand much time and only provide mental gain. Fortunetly, from the bards and buskers to the court patrons, others valued their work enough to provide them coin, food, lodging, etc.
The question I pose is thus: How much do we value the works of these people, and those in the other fields where IP rules the day...
Musicians in our current society are taking a bad rap, (pardon the pun) because of the music industry feeds them alot of money...
But what if writers, and novelists started having their books scanned in, converted to text and traded away on the internet, without them ever seeing a cent? They make much thinner wages for their work, and you might see a few going homeless just because someone decided that their work should be free.
Scary thought? It's really not that far off -- the only reason why it hasn't happened yet is because computer screens are not easy to read. Text storage, compression and charactor recognition are all available, and reasonably reliable.
I make an effort to buy the books of the authors I like, as a way of ensuring more will come out. Simmilarly, every single one of the few cd's I have bought this year were of artists I heard on mp3's.
Copying music isn't anything new. Trading tapes was very common. The difference is that with the internet, unlimited time browsing and high speed connections, it only takes seconds for one copy to diseminate... You don't have to buy a new hard drive every time, and you can easily delete unwanted songs... There is nothing to limit the rate at which it is done, and it is hurting the industry.
How much do you value the work of those artists? They enrich our society, and lives. I perform my own art (that of coding;) better while I listen to music, and the long commutes are made enjoyable by books.

Why wasn't it controlled before?

[CokeJunky]

Pardon me for playing the devil's advocate, but I would like to point out a little tiny detail:

The internet, and cyberspace escaped much notice for the first 20-30 years of it's life. A culture developed in a vacuum of regulation. In the early 90's it's popularity blossomed with the accessabilty increases, and many of the net's new denziens of the time (like my self, circa '92) quickly grasped the culture and joined it, taking it to heart as a new way of sharing and co-existing with people around the world.

But the fact of the matter is that laws are still laws. And many broke existing laws. We brought this upon ourselves. Instead of following the much looser laws of the time by intelligently applying them to the new medium, we, ALL OF US, chose instead to use the digital transfer of information as we pleased. So, goverments are now faced with corparations trying to get into this world and being faced with lawlessness against them in ways that they had never before dealt with.

Now undoubtadly some fLAMER will point out that they havn't done anything wrong, but the point is that they didn't stop it either....

Intellectual Property law isn't unjust, isn't wrong. Why shouldn't a musician be able to make money off of any copy of their work? They chose to take their musical talents and make a living of it. Why should every piece of software have open source? For the most part humans don't give up stuff for free. This is a many thousand year old tradition.

Rem: Devils advocate...

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[Harri]

Intellectual Property law isn't unjust, isn't wrong. Why shouldn't a musician be able to make money off of any copy of their work? They chose to take their musical talents and make a living of it. Why should every piece of software have open source? For the most part humans don't give up stuff for free. This is a many thousand year old tradition

That would make more sense if laws existed in some sort of vacuum where there was just Right and Wrong and that was it. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Two Right things can conflict. Sometimes Wrong things can't be legislated against (Speech inciting racial hatred?). Sometimes unjust laws have to be made to combat an even greater injustice. You may well argue that there is in fact no Right and no Wrong, only things that people currently like and things that they don't like.

There is no God-given right to make money from what we do. It is just the way society has grown up. You might argue that everyone has a right to enough food. However, your argument is absolutely useless to someone whose child just starved to death in Ethiopia. There is simply no way to get enough food in time to save all the people who will die. The concepts of rights are not always useful in the real world.

The issue here is not "But the artists have a right to money". It is "The artists need money, otherwise we won't have music. Can we provide them with it?". And the answer is, not through the traditional channels. Not any more. Not without providing extensively invasive legislation, or at least legislation to allow extensively invasive contracts. There is simply no way to make it work without causing more problems than it solves.

And just because something's a thousand year old tradition means nothing. There was a thousand year old tradition that you could make a living hoeing turnips for a farmer. So should we ban automatic turnip harversters so that lots of people can go and hoe turnips? Things change. It might not be nice for everybody when it does, but there isn't a lot you can do about it.

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[B'Trey]

I don't think the dilema is so much about right and wrong. I think it's more about possibilities and impossibilities.

We have a massive War on Drugs at which we throw billions of dollars, and you can buy crack on just about any street corner. Do we want to create a "War on Piracy" that endlessly gobbles money with little or no return? The result of the War on Drugs is generally that the poor and/or minorities end up in prison. A War on Piracy will punish a much "higher class" (in the sense of social standing, not social fitness) of people and will get much less public support.

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[B'Trey]

My sig says it all.

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[dev/eth0:]

You're forgetting something. When you said, "So, governments are now faced with corparations [sic] trying to get into this world and being faced with lawlessness ..." you forgot that, as Katz said, the Internet not only ignores, but points its tongue out and raspberries international boundaries. The net is (although not for long) and should remain a frontier, where free speech is ensured. I think crackers can play a positive role in this. I doubt corporations would be so eager to squish our rights if they faced repercussions such as, say, a testimonial to the moral injustices they've pressed upon the community replacing the front page of their domain. Posessing the right morals (or lack thereof?) and the skills, crackers could potentially be to the RIAA, MPAA, etc. etc. now what students and other protesters were to the government during Vietnam and during many other incidents and attempts to squelch human rights -- no, not targets, but counterweights. We need more than just words, I think. We need action. Maybe being l337 will account for something more than a mumbled "script kiddy .." in the new age, eh?

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[Mr. Slippery]

Why shouldn't a musician be able to make money off of any copy of their work?

Because a pay-per-copy scheme limits my freedom to share information. That freedom is more important than the government's power to create copyrights.

They chose to take their musical talents and make a living of it.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that a per-per-copy scheme is the just or practical way for that to happen.

Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?

[Alarmist]

We have a massive War on Drugs at which we throw billions of dollars, and you can buy crack on just about any street corner. Do we want to create a "War on Piracy" that endlessly gobbles money with little or no return?

Fact: the United States collects over one trillion dollars in revenue every year.

What could a trillion dollars do? Imagine what would happen if the billions devoted to the War on Drugs was suddenly freed up for other interests (Social Security, improving public education, a decent space program, a more intelligent defense program, social reforms, et cetera ad nauseam).

Yet this money is wasted in an ideological war that cannot be won.

The United States government is not full of stupid people. Most certainly, it is not run by stupid people. These people may act stupidly, they may come across as stupid, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are, for the most part, not stupid.

So why this flagrant misuse of resources? It serves three purposes, one of which you touch on below:

The result of the War on Drugs is generally that the poor and/or minorities end up in prison.

First, the War on Drugs creates a large oppressed underclass, fit only for minimum-wage jobs or those considered odious to the powers that be. This has the dual effect of providing a cheap workforce and having an element that can by its mere existence threaten other segments of society: "Be good, or you'll end up like the crack junkie over there!"

Second, the creation of this underclass gives the government free license (more or less) to pass legislation that strips all citizens of civil rights under the guise of persecuting the guilty. We have more police with broader, less well-defined powers because we have created an underclass of unruly citizens who have little incentive to obey the law.

Third, we have effectively wasted a lot of resources that could have been put to better use improving the lot of everyone in the United States and a fair number of people elsewhere around the globe. The powers that be are not interested in a good society. They are not interested in world peace. They are interested in the easiest path to power, which is to keep the public ignorant and powerless, unable to fight back or even to understand what is going on.

A War on Piracy will punish a much "higher class" (in the sense of social standing, not social fitness) of people and will get much less public support.

This would be true, but the events at Columbine have given them an effective tool to use against us: we're now "protecting the children." The freedom of access to information will be curtailed sharply, not because little Johnny wants to look at pictures of naked people, and not because little Johnny could find out information on illegal drugs or bombs. No, it will be regulated because little Johnny might find out that he's been lied to. Even worse, he might start telling people that they've been lied to as well.

These events bode ill not only for us, but for all of humanity.

Re:The future of the internet

[CountZer0]

I agree that software piracy and music/video piracy are looked at completely differently by society. In fact, software piracy is not only commonplace, it is accepted as THE way to do things by most people. I have YET to work at any company (or consult for any company) that doesn't pirate software. Granted, my consultation has been limited to Small Buisinesses for the most part, but even the local Chamber of Commerce pirates MS Office, and the US Navy had no problems pirating Windows... (On my ship at least) Still, to the public, computers are pretty much a miracle, a "magic box" as it where, and most of the population seems to think that the normal rules don't apply (nor does common sense... ask any tech support person, and they will tell you, people automatically forget common sense when they come near a computer)

Music and movies, on the other hand, are a part of the general population's daily lives. These issues are far older than computers. People have been conditioned by the industries to think that any copying is illegal. Most people are under the impression that creating cassette tape mixes from CD's is illegal... Some think copying VHS tapes is illegal. (I am talking about copying for personal use... which of course, it is NOT illegal... but most people THINK it is... due to massive ad campaigns and legal battles to try and stop things like VCR's and other recording devices.)

So, you take a public that is largely unaware of their legal rights, and you mention something about music and computers and copying, the thoughts are "Isn't it illegal to copy music?" and "Computers are scary, unknown magic boxes, they must be bad" (Fear of the unknown is a proven human trait) Is it any wonder then that the common person thinks that copying music with a computer is one of the 7 deadly sins?

Anyway... Not sure what my point is... I had one, and maybe it got expressed in there somewhere, and maybe not...

-CZ

Re:The future of the internet

[CountZer0]

Sorry to say it, but the things you envision as happening in the "future" are already old hat to those of us who have played in the alleyways of the net for years. I personally have many copies of "Multi-CD Software" and "hours of porn footage" Not to mention that most movies are available online either at the same time as the release, or even prior to release (Granted, the movies tend to be of the "I smuggled a camera into the theater" quality, but not always, and this has less to do with the technology/bandwidth involved, and more to do with the movie industry's tight controls on film distribution.)

Also, I take your "y2k" analogy with a ton of salt. To be honest, no one knows what might have happened had "y2k" not been hyped in the extreme. I know for a fact (as an ex-y2k consultant) that there where many businesses, large and small, who would have been required to do without computers had they not taken steps to fix bugs. Also, a good many other bugs (not y2k related) were uncovered by my y2k investigations, and this has lead (at least in the cases of MY customers) to companies who have better computer infrastructures then before.

My point?

Piracy is just as big a deal NOW as it was back in 1983 when I would get together with my buddies and copy 5 1/4" C=64 games. (Or I would download all 8 sides of "Pool of Radience" over a 300 baud link... that took me the better part of a WEEK, but I still did it rather than cough up $45) So, has anything really changed? No... Bandwidth grows (Now I can dl "Pool of Radience" for the C=64 in under a minute, yeah I really did this not long ago.. VICE is your friend) but so do programs... So now people spend a few days assembling the many pieces of "Baldur's Gate" (Took me about a week... go figure) Is piracy MORE rampant now ? no... Is it less? no... It's pretty much the same as it ever was... Same with music. I used to have hundreds of copied audio cassettes (copied from other cassettes) Sure, the quality pretty much sucked, but what did I care, CD's where unheard of, and the origional tapes didn't sound that much better than my copies, and my copies sounded a hell of a lot better than the radio... (not to mention I had shit you just don't get to hear on the radio...) Now I have many gigabytes of MP3's.. Sure the quality is a little bit worse than CD, but not much... And I still have shit you just don't get to hear on the radio.

So, piracy is and always has been a part of society. "What will they say?" Same shit they always have...

-CZ

Re:Coherent.

[Trailer Trash]

You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?

The AARP represents the wealthiest segment of the population, and generally the segment that has the best representation in government. That means that 1) they have the money to buy congressmen and 2) they have no qualms about screwing everybody else to get their way.

So the reason that you don't see the AARP marching around is that they prefer to send in their veritable army of lobbyists and go straight to the heart of the matter.

The interesting aspect of the AARP is that in their quest to get the best deals for the current crop of retired/elderly folks, they are screwing their future members. I'll never join unless they change drastically, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Of course, I can't join anytime soon :)

MC

Re:A simple thought

[ucblockhead]

That's already the case. If you want to buy the latest Stephen King book, xerox 5,000 copies of it and stack them in your closet, your are within your rights to do so. It only becomes a copyright issue if you give one of those copies to a friend.

That's why it is perfectly legal (despite what the RIAA says) to rip a CD. You can make all the copies of that copyrighted data you want as long as you don't give that data to anyone else.

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[ucblockhead]

You are making the mistake of assuming that it is a black and white world where there can be only one danger. Government is a danger. Corporations are a danger. The world is (unfortunately) full of danger.

Dangers to freedom lie wherever power is concentrated. Whether that is a government, corporation, military, rebel group, whatever. It doesn't really matter. It is any center of power that must be watched.

Anonymity/Privacy

[sconeu]

Here's one that it looks like Jon didn't really touch - looks like he stayed more on the copyright issue.

What about our long lost privacy on the net? It used to be the standard joke that "Online, nobody knows you're a dog". Now with all the DoubleClick style tracking and so forth, it seems to be that "Online, EVERYBODY knows you're a dog."

This frightens me almost as much as the implications of AOL/TW/DISNEY/SONY trying to control what I can see or say online.

Re:nothing to our names, eh?

[ktakki]

But what was the extrinsic value of your dissertation? Could it have been bound and sold in a Barnes & Noble bookstore? Made into a major motion picture? Are there legions of bootleggers waiting to pirate your dissertation and sell it on the street?

It would be more impressive if you took a work that you cared enough about to copyright and released that into the public domain.

k.

--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank

Freedom is slavery.

[ktakki]

This is a powerful idea, much closer to Thomas Jefferson's visions -- he didn't believe ideas could or should be owned -- than to those of contemporary political leaders.

Thomas Jefferson had no problem owning people, though. Right, Sally?

k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank

Tell that to residents around Love Canal...

[unquiet]

...and Bhopal India. Illness and death can "harm freedom" too.

Sure, government is inherently a much greater threat to freedom, and I agree with the gist of what you write, but to say that corporations are not a danger ignores too many harsh realities.

A third option

[drteknikal]

>There are really only two choices when it comes
>to defining and enforcing free speech and the
>ownership of ideas and intellectual property. As
>a society, we can try to make cyberspace conform
>to the rules of physical space. Or we can
>recognize the extraordinary potential of this
>new culture, and invest cyberspace with laws and
>values and properties that are fundamentally
>different.

Whenever I see a closed set, I not only consider the presented options, but whether they truly are the only ones available. In this case, I think there is a third option. Instead of making cyberspace conform to the rules of physical space, or setting different rules for cyberspace, a third option exists to set different rules across the board.

Although the "change everything" approach may not be politically actionable, it may in the long run be more expedient than setting different rules for cyberspace, which will only aggravate the existing dichotomy.

Re:Easy != allowed

[drteknikal]

Acceptability isn't the issue. If it's easy, people will do it. Period. You can discourage it, but you cannot prevent it. After all, it's easy.

Re:The question of control

[igaborf]

Oh, I agree. I'm a geek, not a lawyer, so you'll have to focus on the spirit of the idea, not the literal words. Somebody else will have to come up with the exact wording.

It's the spirit of the idea that's the problem. You want the government to tell private parties what they must carry. And before you demur: that's inherent in the idea. Unless you're willing to argue that the carrier must carry everything anyone wants them to carry (as in the Eisner example I gave) -- and I think you agree that's impractical -- you leave it up to the government (the courts, mostly) to decide what material rises to the level of "must carry." That's antithetical to the free flow of information that you are (rightly) trying to promote.

Re:The question of control

[igaborf]

Perhaps we need a new ammendment to the constitution that would read: No industry, whether public or private, shall make no restrictions to the flow of information except for information that they own directly.

• Hello, Time Warner? Mike Eisner here. You know those 8 channels of ours you've been carrying? We've decided to increase it to 80. What? You don't have the capacity for that? Tough. The law says you have to carry them. But hey, I'm reasonable. Give me 10 times the fee for each of the 8 you're carrying and I won't file a complaint on the basis of the "no restrictions" amendment.

Yeah, I think your proposed law does need a little work.

Re:Control of ISP's: also useless

[Baki]

Poor french. Even in Switzerland with its outrageously expensive Swisscom, you can call for the equiv of $0.05/minute to the US now. Of course by using an alternative carrier via a prefix.

Control of ISP's: also useless

[Baki]

They might try to control ISP's (as Germany has also done) and require them to block certain sites.

But that won't really help either, since international phonecalls have become so cheap (less than $0.05/minute) that those who really need to access some blocked materials can easily dial in into a US ISP.

Re:Boundaries

[Omicron]

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.

Re:Boundaries

[Omicron]

I agree with everything you said in your post, but I'm not sure about something with Yahoo so I figured I'd ask. I know with a site like AltaVista or Google, the sites are automatically added to the search database by a web spider or indexing agent. But doesn't Yahoo add and categorize their links on a much more manual basis? I knew they used to (and I don't mean in the days when they were two college guys with their list of links on the net). I just thought Yahoo exerted a lot more control over their links.

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[jheinen]

"Corporations have no intrinsic power to harm freedom..." Sure they do. Corporations are almost directly responsible for the freedom-inhibiting laws under question. So long as money drives the political process in this country, corporations will continue to be the most potent political force, since they have by far the most money. There are two very dangerous situations arising in this country: 1) corporate $$$ is the most influential lobby, and 2) large corporations are consolidating ownership of the media. If these trends ae not reversed I have a very real fear that we will eventually exist in a state where the governement is largely a puppet of corporate interests, and the citizenry is fed a steady diet of inane, mind-numbing entertainment. In short, we are on the road to an AOL Hell more stultifying and pernicious than anything previously imagined. And the sad part is, outside of a small minority, no one will really care.

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[webword]

He is giving us powerful words to use with the non-geek so that they might understand.

This is an odd comment. This is forum for geeks. We want more geek-speak, don't we?

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[webword]

His article is just a starting point for a conversation. It's the comments you read and write that will give you some insight if not an exact answer. More talk is still necessary.

Aren't we supposed to move at Net speed? Aren't we fast enough to play the game? The bottom line is that there is always all this talk. There are so many starting points that things are just too damn muddy. There are a thousand points to start from but no one is moving. (The only thing moving are lips -- chatter chatter chatter, talk talk talk.)

So I ask again, what is the beautiful vision? Give us the end state desired and perhaps some specifications. This is a sharp bunch of people but we need to know what is really needed. We'll built it and set it up. Without tangible goals, we cannot move forward. We're in a gutter without an end state but no one is willing to stand up and offer the beautiful vision. What is the geek battle plan?

Maybe this is all talk...maybe there is no beautiful vision. Maybe it is this simple -- There is no spoon.

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com

because it has not been possible to do so.

[spiny norman]

Laws are still laws - and unjust laws are still unjust laws. But the more pertinent point that Katz is making is that technical capabilities will be used, and popular demands and desires will be met. Trying to outlaw file sharing is like trying to repeal the law of gravity - it won't work.

And as for your statement that "...humans don't give up stuff for free. This is a many thousand year old tradition," there is a far older tradition of cultures based on gift exchange (aka potlatch on the northwest coast of N.Am.) This type of economy is appropriate to a society of abundance, which is the 'natural' state of a digital economy, and one toward which it inevitably must tend,

...rant to be contined...

Re: Threats to Liberty

[StrangeAttractor]

It is simply inevitable that corporations hold the government's leash. P.J. O'Rourke summed it up succinctly: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

I've given this a lot of thought since I became a libertarian. There's a lot of business-bashing, most of which I dismiss, but much of it is valid. There is certainly some ugly behavior from corporations that I can't reconcile with my basic presumption for freedom. If companies' rights derived entirely from those of the individuals involved, I'd say let everyone offer what they want, and the offerings people don't support will die off (i.e., let the market decide). But that's definitely not the case in our society. Corporations do NOT operate subject to this limitation.

The basic problem (IMHO) is with the idea of a corporation. It's not just an association of individuals who agree to pursue common goals (typically, getting filthy rich), and who would remain liable for the actions they take. Incorporation is a grant from the state (in the U.S., literally a state - Delaware gets a lot of the action because its incorporation laws are very favorable) that creates a fictitious person (the company) which is liable for the company's actions. That therefore shields the decision-makers of the company from liability for their decisions. Officers of the corporation thus have plenty of reason to ignore potential negative consequences of profitable (but shady) short-term actions. Hence, some executive decides on behalf of Union Carbide to skimp on maintenance costs, and winds up poisoning Bhopal. An Exxon boss chooses to ignore the habitual drinking of Capt. Hazelwood (Hazelton?) rather than risk the potential lawsuits for firing him - and the Valdez incident results. It is this dynamic that squeezes the human factor out of their decision-making (those bosses collected their bonuses and were applauded - but did they ever get punished for the harms their short-sightedness caused? have their names ever been publicized, exposing them to public disapproval?).

My first reaction is that corporations should be eliminated (in a perfect world, maybe). But corporations arose in English common law because of liability problems concerning the city of London (it became the first corporation - fictitious person authorized by law - because who is liable for its decisions? If a pedestrian falls through a rotting bridge plank, who gets sued? The mayor? The previous mayor? The city planner? A bridge engineer? The workman who followed the engineer's orders?).

I'm realistic - I know corporations won't be abolished tomorrow - but legal band-aids (such as limits on corporate contributions to political campaigns, or the travesty of eliminating private contributions and having government pay for political campaigns) will have tiny effects in the short term, and will be mooted in the long term (don't forget whose money calls the shots in implementing - or nullifying - the laws).

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[Seth Finkelstein]

Once again I have to ask the question: [1] What are people doing about corporations taking over the Net? [2] What is Katz doing? [3] Is he really raising awareness? [4] Did his article move you? [5] Are you going to act on his ideas and suggestions?

1. Me, not much these days, I'm burnt-out on net-activism, too much backstabbing and rip-offs.
2. Being a writer is OK
3. Yes, I think so. He may not be a genius, but he's decent, especially graded on a curve of typical blather of the Internet.
4. No, but I've been throught these arguments for many years. I could see it being part of a cumulative influence on someone, though.
5. See point 1.

Re:Tired of the World

[Deosyne]

Sorry, friend, don't know what to tell you. The temptation to stick the gun barrel into my ear and squeeze the trigger gets pretty pervasive at times. Everyday, I wish that I had been born different; I wish that I wasn't as smart as I am, I wish that I was better looking, I wish that I liked associating with people, I wish I disliked computers. You ever tried to write an honest resume, one that would net you a job that you really enjoy? I bet if you did, it would really open your eyes to how fscked the world is, despite the happy tidings that people love to spread. Could you imagine an HR rep getting something like, "Love to spend hours and hours on my computer but hate dealing with the general public" and dealing with it seriously? Of course not, because its "unhealthy" to be like that, because its "wrong" to be like that; if you don't believe me, ask my mother-in-law, she'll be more than happy to tell you. "Antisocial" had become an epithet that almost ranks right up there with "asshole."

You all want to know the secret to happiness? Listen to Kintanon; get the Brittany Spears CD, the baggy drawers and the MTV feed. Join the status quo and teach yourself to love it, because the world will then open its arms and accept you, because it sure as hell doesn't want you as you are. I fully support government mandated mind control programs, because I figure if society can't accept us for who we are, they may as well make us forget all about it, so we can spend our days smiling and offering fries with that. I, for one, am sick and fucking tired of playing the silly dog and pony show for the world at large just so I can move ahead. But hey, "that's just how things are" so I guess I should stop bitching now and be a good little drone...

Deosyne

"Were the founders alive . . ."

[Savage Henry Matisse]

Were the founders alive they'd be 180-some years old-- absolutely ancient-- bald, blind, in constant agony from the grinding progress of the failing organs (or would they have recieved bionic replacements by now, making them a trio of super-cyborg-presidents?), probably weeping constatnly, praying to finally die.

Well, that's my opinion at least.

"Hey, what would Marilyn Monroe be doing right now if she were alive?"
"I dunno, Tyler, what?"
"Clawing at the lid of her coffin."

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[spiralx]

Thanks, it's always nice to see that someone (well apart from those of us on the troll forum) appreaciates the time you spend on a good troll. It seems like most people lump trolls in with the spam, when in reality spam annoys trolls more because it makes it far harder for them to succeed :)

on copyright enforcement

[kuma]

Pity the cop whose job it is to enforce existing copyright -- tracing and punishing violators -- online.

doesn't it bother anybody that katz is confusing civil with criminal law enforcement?

this should be obvious--it is generally impossible for a "cop" to ascertain if a copyright has been violated... only the copyright holder knows if a party has been granted the right to copy (in a manner not allowed by fair use).

oh yeah, ianal, but copyright is a huge ethical issue with fans of mainstream/pop cultural works from other nations (copy and distribution of television programming, for instance)... civil law and copyright are *constant* topics in certain usenet newsgroups. how could katz get this wrong?

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[superkorn]

Thus far most discussion seems to assume that the only alternative to our present copyright system is total information anarchy. I just wanted to post a story I found a LONG time ago by a couple of cryptographers outlining a third intellectual property paradigm they call the street performer protocol:

The Street Performer Protocol

The basic idea is that creators hold their works for ransom. Once they get enough money, the work is released and instantly becomes public domain. Read it before you start flaming, it sounds pretty workable to me...

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[synnthetic]

Don't forget about schools.
The media put Columbine on the map, and now schools are becoming more strict, more prision-like procedures. Metal detectors for courtrooms, fine. Metal detectors before homeroom, uhm, I think we've got a problem.
Tobacco free schools? War on Drugs?
Seems more like a Parent Republic, and I don't want Uncle Sam anywhere near my family tree.
Free Speech just isn't enough, I would definately like to have most of my 4th ammendment rights, too.

to the DMCA supporters around here

[alizard]

I find it interesting that nobody around here who supports the DMCA status quo says anything about the :"fair use" concept of copyright law.

I do not support copyright infringement or other theft of intellectual property.

I have a patent pending right now, so I have a certain interest in protecting intellectual property in general.

However, copyright, like patent, was intended to provide a service to society as a whole, not just the intellectual property owners. Why should we as a society pay for the mechanisms of intellectual property protection? Why should we as taxpayers allow the use of the courts for enforcing patent and copyright law? Because intellectual property law is intended to benefit more than just the owners of intellectual property.

Things have gotten to the point where even quoting something in passing or even hyperlinking to a site that offends a corporate intellectual property interest can bring DMCA-equipped lawyers down on one's neck. Does society as a whole benefit from this? Is the public interest served by making it illegal to discuss Microsoft's attempt to bastardize open-source protocol in a technical context?

There are certainly imbeciles around here who support these insane notions.

Should it be illegal for a public library to lend out an e-book or music CD? Should it be legal for companies to publish e-books or music CDs which it is technically impossible for a public library to lend?

That sort of thing is what the concept of "fair use" is intended to cover.

The apparent intention of the DMCA is to allow corporate interests to redefine "fair use" of copyrighted material in any way that does not directly and immediately profit them out of existence. This happened because they bought enough legislators to get the DMCA passed.

An example of concrete action that might be helpful? I think it's time to start a campaign to get the DMCA repealed or drastically changed to make it impossible for corporations to use it to interfere with freedom of speech.

Re:Coherent.

[B'Trey]

Perhaps. Or perhaps a few of those wizards will come up with mechanisms that can be used by all and sundry. Is freenet fundamentally incompatible with IPv6?

Re:Threats to liberty

[B'Trey]

We can agree to disagree, of course, but I think the problem here is the tool, not the source. From the very fact that a centralized government with that much power exists, it follows that the power will be abused. If you find some way to control or elliminate corporate influence in the American political landscape, someone or something else will step in to fill the void. The government will not automagically begin serving the best interests of the people.

Flags of Convenience?

[Andy_R]

Very true, I've lost track of how many articles and comments on slashdot forget that the internet is not just located in the US.

I'm a firm believer that (bearing in mind that any website is effectively 'multinational' in location, if not content), any 'regluated 'portion of the net will virtually relocate to whatever system of regulation is the most relaxed anywhere in the world, just like the owners of ships do now.

The US seems to be keen on exporting the DCMA and so on, but it can't be long before some government or other gets annoyed at this (or better yet, spots the commerical advantages in saying no to it)

- Andy R.

Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[frost22]

Political liberalism (same disclaimer as above) can be reduced to the idea that people (defined as "everyone but *me*" by most liberals) are too ignorant, selfish, or cruel to Do The Right Thing on their own, so there must be a (theoretically) benevolent government there to make sure that everyone gets a fair share.

Where in all worlds did you get this ridicolous nonsense ? Liberal ideas are exactly the opposite. You did a fairly good job to decribe left wing socialist/social democrat approaches - but the basic idea of liberalism is that Freedom - that is the absence of control by a third party - is in any case the preferred solution. Now Liberals differ in emphasis where to apply this basic assumption - some find it more important in economical matters, while others think individual issues to be more iminent - but the guiding line is Freedom itself.

To the contrary I have never met a conservative who's not got a few areas where he thinks his own moral views should be forced upon others not sharing his views.

Ah, the wonders of American education...

f.

Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[frost22]

But your definition of liberalism does not apply to the quote-unquote "liberals" of our current government.

Thi is an entirely amercan phenomenon. In most parts of the world politics like that would be decribed socialist or social demoractic. In fact, British Labour premier Blair is quite successfully imitating Clintonesque politics and selling it as 'new labour' (while Germany's Social Democrat Chancellor Schroeder is not so successfull at imititating Blair's rhetoric and selling it as politic).

Liberalism is an old (perhaps one of the oldest) political streams of the modern time, and certainly is opposed to socialist Ideas in most places.

f.

The question of control

[Dark Paladin]

Over the past few months, I've observed an interesting new approach on control of information.

I guess I really first noticed it when AOL wouldn't let anybody else use thier Instant Messaging system. Microsoft and AOL got into a fight over that, and eventually, Microsoft lost because it wouldn't put "insecure" pieces into its messaging system. (Hey, MS! How 'bout doing that with Outlook or IIS4.0? Thanks!)

Then there was the infamous denial of service from Turner Communications, forgoing to show ABC on thier system, and even putting up the inflamitory message "Disney has taken ABC away from you!" After being reported to the FCC, Turner put the channel back on.

Now, we have a new problem brewing between Blockbuster Video and American Beauty. It seems that Blockbuster didn't get as much money out of the deal that they wanted. So rather than purchasing fewer videos and placing those on the shelves, they are simply holding them behind the counter so people have to ask for them directly. Their reasoning? Well, since they have that "it's in, or it's free" offer, they don't want to lose money from having so few copies in. Everybody knows that's not it. It's because they're pissed they didn't get their way, so they'll punish Dreamworks by making it more difficult to rent videos (seeing how much money the movie studios make from that rental income.)

So what does this have to do with anything? It's interesting that a country that holds that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But it makes no mention of private industry. Businesses can do the very things that government cannot, restrict speech. Perhaps we need a new ammendment to the constitution that would read:

No industry, whether public or private, shall make no restrictions to the flow of information except for information that they own directly.

This still allows money to be made from copyrights (if Dreamworks owns American Beauty, they can restrict what informatoin goes out), but Time Warner can't keep it off a cable channel if they don't like it. It probably needs a little work, and the Courts would have to help define it, but it seems like we need some Constitutional changes to protect freedoms from businesses.

John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
We don't just like games, we love them!

Re:The question of control

[Dark Paladin]

Yeah, I think your proposed law does need a little work.

Oh, I agree. I'm a geek, not a lawyer, so you'll have to focus on the spirit of the idea, not the literal words. Somebody else will have to come up with the exact wording.

John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
We don't just like games, we love them!

Re:Unequivocably?

[PedroReish]

>How many people here lose a third of their salary every year?

Of course you never used a road, the aqueduc system or went to school.

_

Re:Katz, get a life man

[Catbeller]

"I don't know about anyone else, but the media pisses me off. " By posting this, you are now part of the "Media". The overused, undefined, and lamentable used of the word "Media" is the scandal of this age. What the hell is the "Media"? Why is it the Enemy? If it's the Enemy, exactly why are you reading this? If you don't want to read news stories, and thus avoid the Evil Liberal Propaganda, what the hell are you going to get your news from?

Re:New uses for copyright

[Tarquin]

Learn Hebrew, then you can do some analysis.

Actually, wouldn't you have to a) find an original copy of the Biblical texts and b) learn Aramaic (sp?)?

Just my 2c...

--

Jefferson

[DonGenaro]

"This is a powerful idea, much closer to Thomas Jefferson's visions -- he didn't believe ideas could or should be owned -- than to those of contemporary political leaders. He also foresaw that the politics surrounding ideas could change. " and also according to jefferson's vision people can be property.

Where do we go from here?

[KiboMaster]

The first part of solving a problem is identifying what the problem is. Katz did a good job here identifying what the main problem on the net is. If we want to save the net (and free speech along with it) we need to get out there and educate people on why the net needs to be saved.

I've been on the net a good portion of my life (circa 1990) and in the begining I absolutely loved it. The free flowing of ideas and information was apealing to me. However, for the last few years I've watched the net become more and more like the real world. I really think it should be the other way around. If the government were to do the things corporations are doing on line in the real world people would take notice. There are these things called rights perhaps people have heard of them.

I'm sick and tierd of seeing my rights squashed because a few people of millions are illegally copying MP3's or DVD's. There are plenty of legitmant uses for MP3's. And I see no reason I can't play DVD's on my Linux box.

Where do we go from here? That is a tough question. We need to create new laws that protect the rights of everyone on the net. Don't let the government (and corporations) take away the Internet. Don't let them place political boundaries in cyberspace.

Libertarianism...

[xtremex]

I think freedom is best described by the Libertarian party: No law should be made that inhibits my rights directly.
A good example: The seatbelt law. I where my seatbelt, but if you feel like smashing your head against the window..be my guest. Clears out the gene pool. If you want to inject your veins with Heroin..more power to you. But if you come into my house to steal my TV to support your drug habit..that's a different story. I am the biggest defender of the anarchy of the internet. The last true bastion of free speech. But, then again,
do i have a right to use something that is not mine? That's for the internet community to decide. In a true anarchy, if i want your house..I just take it. That's if i can get past the owner with a shotgun. What ever happened to community law on the internet? I do what the hell I please, but if someone doesnt like what i'm doing, he can stop it.
I think it's referred to as tribal law.

Re:Libertarianism...

[FyreGryffon]

FWIW, the Libertarian party is the only political party in the US that's likely to stay far enough out of my knickers to keep me happy.

More to the point, the liberals are overly concerned with what I do with the money I keep in the pockets of those knickers, and the conservatives are far too worried about what I do, and with whom, when I'm wearing no knickers at all.

All I want is a little chunk of land, where if I can see someone from my house, I have the right to prosecute for trespassing.

And I have that.

Happy Gryffon, me.

US copyright is bad, European is more or less OK

[gaijin_]

It has been repeted again and again that copyright is a good thing, and that a writer or painer or any one else who make intellectual stuff has to have a right to make money form what they have made.

This may be true, but it doesn have much to do with copyright. Atleast the US variant of it. In Europe the creator is protected in the copyright laws. The Norwegian law is even called "Lov om opphavsrett" wich litterally mean "Law on origin rights". It is the originator of the work that is protected.

The US instead have a intelecual property law, that protects the owner and not the originator. Defending this law is defending the proffits of time warner, and not the fair income of poor writers.

IP-laws should be stopped from penetrating Europe, and removed from the US legal system. It is the originator, and not the owner that should be protected.

Library of Congress explains copyright for you

[ShakespeareProj]

Last week, I interviewed David Carson, a copyright attorney at the Library of Congress in D.C., for a story on this very issue. He (obviously) fully favors adapting existing laws to cover copyright issues on the Internet. Here is his argument. Copyright is just what it says. The author has the sole right to copy and distribute her work, whether it be text, code, music, choreography, etc. She can give it away, if she likes. She can sell it. But since she created it, she decides who copies it, and how it gets distributed. Copyright, he says, is necessary because it gives the author financial incentive to create. And if that incentive is taken away, who is going to be able to create? Rich people and only rich people. Middle- and low-income artists will be knocked out of the game because their creation will be worthless, literally. Kiss the next Beatles good-bye. Digitial technology and the Internet makes copyright problematic, as Katz points out, since copying is easy and perfect, and distributing is easy and cheap. Once a piece of digital information is created and given to ONLY ONE OTHER PERSON, there is no way for her to protect her copyright. And, according to him, copyright law is getting more and more cumbersome. A good law, as he points out, is clear and easy to understand. As technology advances, copyright law gets more confusing. That makes the whole copyright system shaky. It seems to me that copyright law is getting worse and worse. And it's nearly unenforceable on the Internet. And a toothless law is a worthless law. Pretty much, he said that the government is trying to enforce copyright law through guilt. All right, you naughty children, don't you see that it's not nice to copy someone's work without paying for it! You should be ashamed of yourselves! And that's lame. I would be interested in hearing alternative ways for artists, programmers, choreographers, designers to be protected and paid for their work. Because, frankly, the copyright laws don't work in cyberspace, and they never really worked in the real world either.

Re:A cowardly piece

[ulysses2000]

Having personally known quite a few professional musicians, while it is true that in general they truly enjoy creating and performing their art, it is not done out of any desire to contribute. It is what they love/ are best at/ are driven to do. The crux of the matter is that they need to eat the same as those of us who make money through more conventional means.

Re:Say what?

[darkwhite]

ALLRIGHT! Now I get marked down as a troll! How fitting. Of course the article doesn't make sense at all, so who cares.

Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio

A simple thought

[Khazwossname]

Perhaps copyrighting should have a simple boundary inserted in it - copying for private use is allowed, copying commercially without the author's permission is illegal?

Re:A simple thought

[Mr. Slippery]

Perhaps copyrighting should have a simple boundary inserted in it - copying for private use is allowed, copying commercially without the author's permission is illegal?

I would suggest that for-profit commercial copying not be illegal, but would require royalty payments to the author. This would work sort of like music performance royalties today - I can sing anything I want anywhere I want, but if I'm getting paid to do it the songwriter gets a cut (via BMI or ASCAP). The actual implemention of this gets weird sometimes, but I think the basic idea is sound, just, and practical.

Re:Boundaries

[Holyscapegoat]

A misguided government of a large and fairly rich country can do an incredible amount of damage during the time it takes it to realize that its goals are unachievable.

This is quite possibly the most profound statement I've ever found on /., and it applies to the US government. See the "War on Drugs", the DMCA, the Vietnam war... the list is endless.

Re:New uses for copyright

[Holyscapegoat]

Does anyone here have any suggestions?

I have a two-part suggestion, based on the following assumptions:

1)You a are very clever troll. In that case, I applaud a very well-conceived and entertaining post.

2)You actually believe that fundie bullshit. In this case, I have four words for you: You aren't God, asshole. YOU didn't write the Bible. In fact, the bible you read (I'm assuming KJV, all idiot fundies seem to read the edited version) bears little resemblance to what was actually written in Hebrew - the translation of the bible into Greek was atrocious. Your overwhelming holier-than-thou attitude is very typical of thumpers - judgemental, unforgiving fuckers such as yourself are the ones who will find themselves in Hell, if it indeed exists. You claim to be Christian, but don't have the slighest idea what true Christianity is. Let me leave you with a quote you probably conveniently forget as it does not match up with your rigid view: Luke 6:37 -

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.

Re:The future of the internet

[Holyscapegoat]

At the moment it seems that most advocates of internet privacy just want to stop people from downloading a couple of MP3s - what are they going to say when people are able to download entire discographys, or movies like Titanic?

In fact, this future has already arrived - have you checked IRC lately? Movies that haven't even been released yet, or just have been released to the theatres, are available for download. I have yet to think of a popular movie I couldn't find with a half hour of effort (not that I would DL them of course, this is merely research) Of course, the files are 100-500 megs depending on quality, so unless you've got a Cablem modem or equivalent, it takes a looooong time.

Of course, as bandwidth gets higher, the faster it gets... isn't technology grand?

Humdrum Conundrum

[ideadev]

I just cannot understand why anyone is shocked by this 'struggle'. As a representative democracy, the US is enternally in danger of 'losing it all' to one faction or another. Given, in our day, it's the money concentrated in corporations which buys legislation. Money was always supposed to buy legislation, it's a fact, but in the agrarian days, the concentration wasn't as serious and the representatives weren't professional. It's facile to shrink this down to government versus 'us,' censorship versus First Amendment. Moving around the Net, downloading news and p0rn, has little or nothing to do with the First Amendment. It's the liberty clauses in the 5th and others which we should be invoking. And then the conundrum... Right now, vast tracts of the Internet are OWNED by massive corporations, which do not have to legally bind to any clause of liberty or speech. Placing the international considerations aside, wouldn't it take a greater government involvement to 'liberate' these lines and subject them to Constitutional tests? In other words, a better question to ask is, where does Government belong on the Net?

Re:Threats to liberty

[lukel]

The primary threat to freedom is still governmental power.

The primary threat to freedom actually other people. In the case of democracy, those people are the majority of voters.

The problem is that governmental power is increasingly controlled and directed by corporate interests.

Namely, those people whose pension funds are invested in the stock market.

My point is that, for every freedom you have, there is another freedom someone lese doesn't have because of your having that freedom. Freedom, when it is not qualified by who has it, what they are free to do, and what they are free from, is meaningless.

cutting the wheat from the chaff..

[Sebastard]

"The libertarian ethic that has always defined much of the Internet associates government with threats to liberty. Traditionally, the libertarian is concerned about reducing the power of government. But threats to liberty change: in our time, they increasingly arise from corporate, not governmental power. And there is no mainstream political movement primarily concerned with that, in part because corporatism has acquired much of the press and now provides the primary funding for the political system."

This is probably the most important statement in that entire essay.. Government and political bribery is now legal in the U.S.. Why should a company worry about controlling it's interests, when it can just pay the government to do it for them..

Boundaries, new society and freedom

[sambamateur]

Someone said about french people against Yahoo France: "They dont seem to understand that things like that usually appear only if you look for them and that it is virtually impossible to stop."

French laws are made by french people for french people (and companies) only. The recent decision against Yahoo France simply reflects the desire of a majority of french people to restrict the development of racist ideologies in their country. This decision is not against the Internet, but against the services provided by Yahoo France to french people. As I said, restrict is the right word, and not stop. This is like speed limits: signs and police patrols can't prevent people to go faster than you want, but if you put enough of them, probably these people will think twice before they do so.

Boundaries... In the US, you have the right to buy a gun. In France, you can buy alcohol anywhere, anytime, at almost any age. In The Netherlands, you can legally buy marijuana under some conditions. These examples reflect the opinions of the people from three different countries. Although they are based on a largely common culture, none of these countries are willing to change their opinion on these examples. And since you can't be in the US, in France and in The Netherlands at the same time, this is usually not a problem.

New society... What J. Katz and others propose when they talk about a "new society" is usually a selection of what they like most from the different existing societies (e.g. both alcohol and marijuana freely available in addition to mp3 files, possibly without guns). There is nothing wrong with this, except that since the Internet is ubiquitous but immaterial, you can't avoid the existing societies (i.e. you're physically always somewhere, and the place matters). So you can't create a new society, but you need to change the existing ones. J. Katz fears that the Internet might be changed by the existing societies that want to impose their laws. He says "Were the founders alive (...), they would find in the Internet many of their values and dreams for a free and democratic society. And they'd fight to keep it that way." Does he mean that the existing societies are not already free and democratic? Although I agree with this for some countries, I don't think this is true for the countries that might "change the Internet" (e.g. US or EU).

Freedom... Laws have been invented so people can live together with a common code. In a democratic society, these laws are not imposed but freely chosen by the people and Justice ensures that they are respected so people can also trust them. Freedom is important, but total freedom (i.e. no law) leads to the law of the jungle where the strongest decides everything [1]. Where is the strength today? Money, media? Where will it be tomorrow? Sometimes I have the bad feeling that people asking for freedom today might just want to be the strongest tomorrow...

---
Sadly, things which are now happening in Freetown (Sierra Leone) are giving us a terrible and very ironic example of this.

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[nimmo]

People seem to misunderstand a few very basic and simple things when it comes to so-called copyright piracy.

Theft is a word that gets thrown around a lot. Copying is not theft - it's, well, copying. I would urge you to go get your dictionary and look up the word. In order for it to be theft, I would have to DEPRIVE you of something - take it away from you, deny you possession. Copying does not do this.

It may very well deprive an artist or a large corporation of income - but that is not the same as taking money out of your pocket. It is ASSUMED that an artist or large corporation would make money on the alleged stolen thing, but that is not a forgone conclusion (especially if I didn't buy the item).

Don't let people confuse the issue. It's more about control - who will get to read a book or listen to a CD, and for how much and how many times. This is exactly what e-publishers want to do - make you pay on a per read or listen basis - and lock up ideas in a vault, only to be released upon payment.

This will breed mass ignorance - the people who can afford to read will, those who can't afford it, won't. If these large corporations have their way, the idea of a lending library will go by the wayside.

We need to see these things for what they are and not get sidetracked - are we going to let stockholders, interested primarily in profit, dictate our cultural norms? In the last few decades we have allowed this to happen and look at the result - television is a commercial wasteland, vapid and spiritless, our popular literature revolves around sensationalism, violence, and mindless sex, our music is temporary pop nonsense (with large corporations acting as kiddie porn pimps - you ever check out a Britney Spears video?).

People have to take a stand on this stuff - and copyright is but the first battle in what will prove to be a long war to regain our culture, not let it be dictated to us by corporations that merge and acquire and reduce anything of substance to white bread.

Can anybody out there say "Rollerball"?

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[nimmo]

What if I invented a technology (improbable, but for the sake of argument) that was able to make copies of objects in the physical world? For instance, I use this technology to make a copy of your car. You still have your car, I have not taken it away from you. If I didn't tell you about the copy, you wouldn't know the difference.

Would we define this as theft?

Now, it may devalue your original car if the car was customized, if you wanted to sell it.

But it wouldn't be theft.

Same with MP3s. Actually, since MP3s are essentially nothing but random electrons outside of the computer or storage media, it can be argued that they don't even exist - not like a CD.

People would say it's still theft because, ultimately, I am denying an artist or big corporation the possiblity for income. This is a large assumption, of course, but one used every day to portray MP3 file-sharing as theft.

People copy stuff all the time and it is not considered theft - for example, copyrighted books at the library. Why isn't this considered piracy? Isn't it the same as copying an MP3 file? Yet almost everybody has done this at one time or another, probably even Hilary Rosen.

We should resist the characterization of copying as theft. We should call a spade a spade - MP3s are copies, not originals.

A cowardly piece

[Mog0th]

This column was an act of cowardice. Look through it- Katz starts by saying that piracy is wrong, but then goes on about freedom for several paragraphs, and then about the impossibility of protecting copyright laws. Finally, he moves into a mini-rant about how corporations are infringing on our freedom. What are we to draw out of this? What could we possibly conclude, except that it is acceptable to steal mp3's, source code, or whatever else, since this makes us more free, it can't be stopped regardless, and corporations are evil anyway? But of course, you're not advocating piracy, are you Katz. You said so at the very start. Remember the context, that this is the same columnist who several weeks ago condemned metallica for trying to protect their property. So basically, here is a pro-piracy piece that is masquerading, with the help of some irelevant material from Jefferson, as some sort of paeon to freedom. This is cowardly because he is advocating the actions of mp3 bootleggers, etc., without being prepared to admit to it. If the notion of copyright is truly dead and unenforceable, then we are in a lot of trouble.

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[Isao]

If someone were to take my book, cut off the binding, and duplicate it on a high speed duplicator (perhaps a Xerox brand duplicator) and resell, I would be irked. If this were common, I may not write another book.

More to the point, if this were common, I might not bother writing the book in the first place.

If someone else claims it as their own, I'd definitely not bother.

Easy != allowed

[SandsOfTime]

Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned.

People who can download text, columns, games, ideas, music and software will do so, if for no other reason than because they can.

How easy or difficult something is to do does not necessarily influence whether society will choose to allow it. After all, it is quite "easy" to throw rocks through store windows, have sex with underage girls, or grow marijuana. And with the availability of guns in America, it is easy to go out and shoot someone. That has not resulted in society shrugging and deciding to allow those things. It has also not resulted in everyone who can do those things rushing out to do them merely because they can. If the social environment presents a strong disapproval of copying copyrighted materials, and a real threat of getting caught and prosecuted, people will not be as willing to do it, no matter what the technological issues.

Re:Boundaries

[True ChAoS]

They do have a more manual approach but due to the sheer quantity of links they receive it is still very diffcul to check every single one received. The french government is particularly incensed about online stores being able to sell french citizens Nazi related products.

ChAoS

"Does Fuzzy logic tickle?"

Futility

[Xrkun]

It seems to me that our government (U.S.) is wasting valuable tax dollars trying to regulate an unregulatable entity. What I see is big businesses trying desperately to avoid change. Corporations don't want their existing money making industries to dry up. What they don't realize is that it is only a matter of time. Does the record industry really think they can stop people from downloading MP3s? Don't they realize that laws are only useful when followed? When the majority of people decide to break a law, that law becomes useless. Simply put, if copying material is illegal, then the people will copy illegally. It doesn't matter what laws are in place. If there is a desire, that desire will be fulfilled.

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[SlightlyMadman]

Please dont fall into the number 1 misconception concerning piracy. Yes, piracy is sort of like theft if I was going to buy something, but I decide to pirate it instead, but that's not the case in the majority of situations where piracy is committed. Most of the time, people who pirate things would not have purchased it if it wasnt available for free (cracked). When this happens, those who make money from the sales of these goods lose NOTHING. Think about it, how does me pirating a copy of Software X affect the company that produced it any worse than me not buying it at all?

Re:Quite coherent. Especially for John

[Nidhogg]

But net is not US and even more importantly US is not the net.

Exactly. This was my thought upon reading this. I live in the U.S. and not to sound unpatriotic but the blatant egotism of some of our citizens and elected officals to think that our Net 'laws' apply to the rest of the world drives me batfsck.

I for one don't see how Net regulation of any sort will work unless we have every national gov't agree with every other national gov't on the details. No matter how extensive that nation's Net presence is.

Let's read that again.

Every national gov't must agree with every other national gov't.

I think we're gonna be okay.

What the hell is this crap?

[MasteroftheVoxel]

The internet will change the world like no other network ever has before. As many very intelligent people have said in times long ago past, never before has such a giant change has come upon us in the this rapidly changing society which has been oppressed by the media for centuries before Thomas Jefferson had once said, "This is not Sunday School! This is normal school, and no praying is allowed!"

While stating the obvious, let me point out that Congress and large Corporations have been passing laws not only to curb our free speech but our dogs too. People have fought back. They thrown things. But only how has the government begun to grasp the reasoning which lies in between the law, namely the DMCA, that evil piece of legislation, that suppresses our rights, represses our sexuality, oppresses our right to free beer, and is totally against what Thomas Jefferson stands for. Vote TJ in 2000!

Let me reiterate myself redundantly, by pointing our some more obscure, nonsensical points that will be ambiguous to all but my girlfriend. Copyright doesn't exist any more, man! Its like, well, nonexistent, dude. Its floating up there. Ya can't see it, but its all around us. Whoa thats so deep. You are so cool. Gimme another hit. Its all in binary, dude. Think digitial.

Let me just say that this battle will not be over until the war is won...

Save me please!

Re:Katz, get a life man

[ComradePenguin]

the "media" is what I'm painting with.

Etot "sig" byit pisyat v Russki!
(35.0% Slashdot nezdorovi.)

Re:Coherent.

[SquadBoy]

Some decent points and I have to agree it is good to see something good from Katz. But I have to disagree on the copyright "infringement" point. Copyrights can not be enforced on the net it is impossible and will get more so. I have to disagree with Katz I think the net will become more secure. And freedom will increase as a result. This also threatens the government. I don't have my copy of "The Diamond Age" with me but once it becomes really secure no one can track down anyone else. So my take on this right now alot of crap is produced and shoved down our throats because those with the cash can do so. The power the net gives us is to preview for ourselves see what we like and what we don't and consume that which is *good*. And also the power to create for ourselves. What this means is you have to create good stuff that people will want to pay for since you can no longer force them to pay for crap. Think about it if your friend writes a piece of good code for you you are really likely to do something for him in return. When M$ pumps out some crap you are really likely to fire up the burner. So does the net destroy anything? no no it does not. Will it force people to get really creative and start to care again? Yes yes it will. In other words jump on the cluetrain and have fun.

Jon Katches my respect.

[AntiPasto]

In world where in classic anti-drug PSA style, where I can talk about piracy by saying "You Dad! I learned it by watching you!", Jon Katz has described the issues for an entire generation. When's Katz going to be on Dr. Katz?

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[cajun603]

the real problem ... is the fact that the laws themselves do not respect rights.

...

- Decency laws, euthanasia laws and forced self-safety laws ignore the right of self ownership.

- Zoning rules, antitrust, workplace regulations and most taxes or tariffs ignore the right of private property.

These two "rights" are mutually incompatible. "workplace regulations" for example actually help protect "the right of self ownership."

Most, if not all, laws were passed to protect private property from the disposessed. How was that private property gained in the first place? In the case of the US, it was taken from the Native Americans by first the colonists and then the US gov't. In the case of much of Britain the common areas were taken over by the rich and powerful, transforming the poor, free peasants who had the right to work land for their own gain into poor "free" peasants who were forced to work land for the gain of the landowners.

Not a popular view in the US, but worth reading about: http://www.infoshop.org/faq

Nelson was right

[crimsonandclover]

The net should have provided for charging small (or large) amounts for access to some content from the beginning.

The difference between 1000 and 10,000 accesses is that you can make the same profit with 10,000 accesses at 1/10 the price.

Here's the deal the Net has to make with publishers: you will no longer have the overhead of physical reproduction. In return, you will pass those savings along to those who use and those who support the Net.

In order to make that deal, the Emerging Global Netocracy needs leaders and negotiators. It already has the Power.

"Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't...

[LaNMaN2000]

The primary problem with Internet legislation that has been passed up to this point is that it is deeply rooted in the use of analogies made to existing case law. For example, proponents of Internet censorship argue that porn on the Internet should be regulated to the same degree that it is in a book store or newsstand. What they neglect to take into account is that you must actively "click-through" to a website while placing a porn magazine in public view would force even those who do not want to see it, to be confronted with it.

In the aforementioned example, the use of analogy makes the legislation more concrete, as it can "inherit" (sorry about the OOP "analogy" :-) the case law from prior litigation. However, it also places an undue burden on Internet pornographers who need to conform to laws that should not affect their medium.

The only alternative is to create a whole new bod of case-law as it pertains to the Internet. The problem with this approach is that more litigation would be neccessary to clearly define the legislation and its application. This would place an undue burden on small-business websites as they would be forced to hire a legal team in order to fend off lawsuits that could otherwise be avoided.

You're damned if you do abd damned if you don't establish a new class of legislation. What are we to do?

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

Curiously enough, I put up a piece about the House Small Business Committee meeting and how to do activism in regard to congress. Unfortunately the article was rejected.

It would help if /. could decide whether they want to post information helpful in the fight or not.

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[thesparkle]

Correct. Consider.

A private company needs my support through revenue. I have to purchase a product or service by entering into a contract (can be paper or can be as simple as handing money over in exchange for a can of Coke, for instance), in order for said company to raise revenue. If I do not like a product I have purchased, I have legal recourse. No private company is immune from the legal system, even if it is only Small Claims Court against Sears for delivering a broken lawn mower to my house.

The government collects revenue, mainly through taxation imposed upon corporations and individuals based upon their annual earnings. They take money and redistribute it to various other individuals and organizations. If you are not satisfied with the product (military, Congress, Social Security, ,etc) the government produces for you, with your money, you cannot get your money back nor can you take the government to court without their permission.

Furthermore, if you decide not to give a private company your business, you don't have to. If you decide not to pay your taxes, the IRS has the right to impound your wages and property without due process of law and force you to prove your case before returning said property, interest free by the way.

Mmmm... take it and run with it you who claim to love the word freedom...

I will pay the sum of 1 dollar..

[thesparkle]

.. if Jon Katz stops writing articles on /. and instead starts publishing recipes, instructional manuals, or street signs. Anything but his opinion; it is like reading online version of Newsweek or Time...

..and stops using the term "the 'Net". His Sandra Bullock fixation has grown weary. Maybe he can start using terms like "cyber" or interchange between "The Web" and "The Internet" when describing the Internet! After all, he probably thinks they are the same..

Blah.

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[kz45]

if its a society, then slashdot would be gone. Slashdot, although many of you would like to forget, is a corporation. They are in it for the money.(otherwise, they would have a non-profit organization). Before anyone talks about how bad corporations are, they should think about the fact that they are destroying the hand that feeds them.

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[Golias]

If only all the other trolls on /. were capable of your subtlety. You had me going right up until "...which have increased synergy across the web"

I especially liked the part when you called the old-school gurus of the Internet "Luddites", without even a hint of irony. That's not just trolling; it's poetry.

I actually enjoyed reading your post even more than the article. :)

Re:I'll take freedom or I'll take death.

[deProfundis]

Thank you for your comment. I'm sure that someone out there has drawn an insight out of your words. Please take the time to register with Slashdot, that way you wouldn't have to post as a coward.

I'll take freedom or I'll take death.

[deProfundis]

I like having my say. Even if you think I'm a slathering idiot I still get to contribute my little piece of the pie. That's a powerful thing - look at the process that Slashdot encourages, open discussion where the creme of ideas (hopefully ;) rise to the top. This must be so threatening to anyone bent on maintaining control. I think that for-the-moment the community Slashdot has attracted over the years could in itself be considered a weapon. After all, what is more dangerous to a special interest group - a couch potato or a group of people debating the rights and wrongs of an issue? As a community Slashdot is a political force. And unfortunately, from an old world point of view, the discussion is open, agenda's are hard to hide and kickbacks are impossible (heheh). You stand by what you say.
IMHO public Forums ala Slashdot are the future of politics. Who better to set policy than the individuals who are interested in them bouncing ideas off like-minded souls? If I was currently part of the "establishment" I would consider this idea a great threat to my future paycheck.
I believe in a future where the governing of a people is managed in a decentralized manner and ideas, not ego's, fight for dominance. But of course if a peaceful transition to such a society is blocked then I would feel justified in asking my fellow Slashdotters to throw their sabot's into the cogs - and if the decentralized decision agreed with me, it would be done.

Then reality sets in...

[chrome koran]

Legoboy started by mentioning how the most vocal supporters of copyright dissolution are the young at heart and he clearly has a point. Here's a funny thing I've noticed over all these years of mellowing and getting too tired to be an angry young man...

Our capitalist (free market, laissez-faire, insert your favorite term here) system actually does a pretty good job of deciding these issues. Forget about congressional legislation, DMCAs or whatever else...the almighty dollar continues to reign supreme, and while many of you might deride such a selfish system, experience shows that it actually works pretty well in most cases like this.

If music sharing continues to be incredibly popular, then someone will figure out how to make money from it, and that someone will eventually have competitors because nothing attracts investment money like more money. Then competitors will fight over special deals with special artists whether it be for online chat sessions, special secret encrypted stuff or whatever and eventually the money will begin to trickle down to the musicians themselves. Which is of course, a good thing.

Now many of you have argued that it is impossible to protect copyright online and you are correct...it is also impossible to protect copyright offline in the sense you mean. I can buy a pen and paper and write the whole thing down in the case of text or record you singing live at a club in the case of music. Yes, a technology-capable person can always break whatever copyright protection encryption because the decryption source code has to be somewhere.

However, that means the copyright is undefendable for about 0.1% of the population. So what? If 99.9% can't hack the protection then, in effect, it is perfectly protected. Now you (or any other of the 0.1%) can give your friends a copy and that's ok too. But, if you try to distribut it en masse, via a gnutella-like app, you will become a big enough revenue attack that someone will be knocking on your door and hauling you off to jail (concentration camp, whatever). Note that this is exactly what happened before mp3...you made copies of music for your friends and nobody cared. You made thousands of copies and set up a stand in Times Square to sell them, the police arrested you. Same thing with videos. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually they get you because money is involved.

And that's actually a pretty good solution...So don't be so angry...it'll probably work out quite well in the end. This is just the growing pains phase as Mr. Katz so eloquently pointed out.

Re:New uses for copyright

[nagora]

Ah, sarcasam. Well, to answer in kind: It's a good thing we have Christians in our midst to clear up the question of all these other religions that seem to have cropped up. Of course, they're all bunk!

But, lucky us, a bunch of Romans 2000 years ago got told the truth by someone who never met Jesus, and who disagreed on almost every point of theology that he taught and HIS OWN BROTHER continued to teach, saw the light and passed it down to us.

How those Moslems must kick themselves, The Zorastrians must feel foolish indeed, and let's not even mention the horrible mistake the Jews have been making all this time. If only they had read one of the versions of the Bible (pick one - any one!) they could all have been saved.

It's one thing to believe in Santa, the tooth fairy and the existance of one true god when you're a kid, its quite another once you're supposed to be an adult.

Special bonus: the non-sarcastic answer.

People who study theology (those who are religious, that is) get wrapped up in the internal logic of the thing and are cut-off from the reality which is that it's all made up. The classic example is the old argument about angels on the head of a pin: the whole subject can be (and has been) debated in great detail, but only if no one says "There aren't any angels, so it doesn't matter". Then the whole house of cards falls down and you're left with the realisation that theology is on the same plain as collecting Pokemon: great fun so long as you keep it self-contained and ignore the fact that it's totally meaningless outside it's own context.

Well off-topic now.

TWW

Re:New uses for copyright

[nagora]

Oh, that's brilliant! Which version of the collected Judeo-Christian fairy stories do you want to copyright? The original Hebrew/Greek, where Mary is not a virgin? Or the one that fits your cosey view of how everyone should get on?

What do you call 'misuse'? What on earth constitutes 'fair use' of a pile of badly-edited, badly-translated, irrelevent, superstitious sheep-herders' explanations of things they didn't understand 4000-2000 years ago (ie, just about everything).

Are you going to slap an injunction on the IRA next time they kill a protestant, or on the UVF when they kill a Catholic?

What practical use, in other words, would this be other than to let one group of cultist shit on other such cults.

What about Jesus, too? Can we copyright his image, even though every known portrait is based on the statue of Zeus which was one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world? Could Zeus sue if someone did?

Oh, and by the way, it's pretty clear in the Bible that Jehovah only allows the death penalty at his own express order, not mortals'. But people like you don't like that, so you choose to ignore it. But that's not misuse, is it?

Bloody Christians, bloody waste of bloody space the bloody lot of 'em.

Wise up.

TWW

Re:New uses for copyright

[nagora]

Comments like this only confirm my belief that Atheists are pinheads. After all..Atheism is the opium of the ASSES.

Ha ha. It must be nice to find something that confirms one of your beliefs, at least.

TWW

JonKatz...

[1337d00d]

Microsoft is going to be broken up. It's alright. Everything will be OK. Can you say that with me? Everything will be OK.

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[captainmikee]

Copyrights are fine if they are for a limited time and if they are not transferable by the author.

Perhaps we have the means to realize this now. With the ability to manage huge amounts of data, surely we can keep track of and reward the individual authors of works, instead of the publishers they deal with?

Under current US law, corporations have the same rights as individuals. Adbusters ran an article last year about this odd quirk of law. Unlike individuals, corporations can be immortal. Corporations are not motivated by the same things as people. That doesn't make them evil per se, but it does often make them natural enemies of most individuals. To give them the same rights (such as being able to own information) is a grave mistake.

Re:Coherent.

[Coz]

And sometimes it doesn't make a lick of sense but that's because they are reacting with their hearts, which is why protests with youth in them are usually motivated and fiery.

Not sure it's their hearts doing the motivating... I'd vote for a set of organs a couple of feet lower.... My Spousal Overunit, a former 9th grade teacher, says she'd've liked most of her former students if their hormones would've stopped hammering them back and forth long enough to have a coherent conversation.

You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?

You ever seen the Congress muck about with Social Security, Medicare, etc.? These folks don't HAVE to march in the streets - they have $$$, and write letters to their congresscritters and their newspapers, and write checks to opposing candidates. America (and Europe, and Japan) is an aging society - the kids may be the loud ones, but it's their grandparents who're accumulating the clout.

Re:New uses for copyright

[Coz]

Copyright the Bible.

Actually, individual translations are, indeed, copyrighted. Check inside the front cover of yours.

Granted, the original King James version is public domain now... but anyone who's walked through a religious bookstore will observe the proliferation of versions of the Bible, with annotations, study guides, etc.

Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable.

Actually, the much-quoted-in-this-forum doctrine of "fair use" allows for quotation of nice chunks of Biblical versage - and since it's usually preceeded by a blurb giving chapter and verse (e.g. "John 3:16"), attribution is taken care of, in most folks' eyes.

As for the "nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers" - which nation do you live in? Here in the US of A, we can't even get our various brands of Protestant Christianity to stop fighting amongst themselves on interpretations of this same book, and you want them to ally to fight copyright violations?

Knowledge is Power.

[Alarmist]

It's been said a thousand times if it's been said once, but it holds true: knowledge is power.

For the first time, many people are waking up to the access to information that is at their fingertips. Though little is available on the Internet that did not already exist in other forms, it is now easier to sift through that data noise and extract a few useful nuggets of information.

Naturally, the powers that be are concerned about this. An ill-informed, mentally-deficient populace is easier for a clever government to rule (all you need, really, is bread and circuses.) People who are incapable of critical reasoning are prone to impulse buys and less able to resist the siren song of marketing.

As a result of these forces colliding, we have on the one hand a rabble of loud-mouthed, self-concerned individuals who lash out against anyone who tramples on their perceived right to any information they please. On the other, we have large governments and corporations who know that the hoodwink they've kept over the eyes of the people for centuries is starting to slip. Naturally, there will be friction.

Surrounding the periphery of these contestants, we have those who are largely unconcerned by these events, and those who realize that neither the large organizations nor the rabble have their best interests at heart, and in this day and age, intelligent, like-minded people everywhere must stand together to defend the few rights they have left. It won't be an easy battle: there are many of them and few of us, but we do have advantages. A sighted dwarf can beat a blind giant.

One is almost tempted to wonder whether the current United States public education system is designed to produce unthinking, unquestioning mass consumers to be exploited at every turn by the powers that be. It certainly seems to be doing its job. What should we do about that?

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[weinerdog]

While it's true that copyright can and does create a financial incentive to both proactively and responsively create, that doesn't necessarily mean copyright is good. An analogy: smoking cigarettes can relieve stress, but does that mean that people should smoke at least a certain number of cigarettes? There are other, perhaps more effective, ways to relieve stress, many of which lack the harmful side effects that cigarette smoking has.

If it weren't for copyright, you may not be inclined to proactively write another book, meaning you might not be willing to write a book that nobody asked for and then trying to sell copies to people who would hopefully be interested. As long as people treat ideas as property: objects that can be traded, the lack of copyright may well prevent many people from writing. Many would continue to write for the personal satisfaction it gave them, but it is unlikely that very many would write full-time or invest money in a book that would not likely make a profit.

On the other hand, if you were to write a book for a paying audience (whether that be an individual or a collective), you'd be under contract and get paid for the service of using your creative talents to produce a work that people actually want, rather than creating a piece of ethereal "property" that nobody asked for, and then hoping that enough people want it that your "ownership" of the reproduction rights makes it worthwhile to have written.

That's a different model than people are used to, and a lot of people will say it's impractical or impossible. I find those arguments to be dismissive and defeatist; they ignore the incredible ingenuity that humans have used to solve much more difficult problems. The greatest barrier is the inertia in the current system. Those who have a vested interest in the current model will fight tooth and nail to keep it; even if, as I believe would be the case, a copyrightless society where creative people sold services rather than property, would be a richer and more productive one for nearly everyone. Since we have copyright, copyright owners have a vested interest in holding on to it and no interest in finding alternative solutions. If copyright were abolished, this situation would change very quickly, and the same energies that are now directed towards preserving and strengthening copyright protection would be turned towards finding an alternative model for creative people to earn a living.

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[Dan Jagnow]

I think there are two adaptations to the current copyright/patent system that would be helpful.

1. Come to international consensus on copyright and patent regulation and enforcement. Not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, but it needs to be attempted. The Internet makes conventional policing difficult at best.
2. Revise copyright and patent law to provide protections in proportion to the originality of the idea/work and the investment of resources required to come up with it. For instance, coming up with a new microchip fabrication technique deserves more protection than the "revolutionary" idea of one-click ordering.

Am I dreaming? Probably.

Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[FyreGryffon]

Actually, it's more often the sign of someone who is frustrated at frequently having his remarks misinterpreted at the most rudimentary of levels.

Remember, my comments are my own opinions. They are worth exactly what you *feel* they are worth.

Comments to the effect of "remarks like this are a sign of a weak argument" have been, in my experience, the refuge of someone who has little useful to add, but feels the need to speak anyway.

Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[FyreGryffon]

You didn't read the fine print, kiddo.

I was referring to actual political conservatism and liberalism, not the moral and social constructs built around them.

Political conservatism tends toward a smaller, less invasive government, until you allow the social and moral conservatism to creep in, in which case the government tries to control what people do based upon whether the government thinks its morally right or wrong. THat's why I disclaimed moral and social ethical stances from the argument.

A liberal government tends toward all manner of social programs "for the benefit of the people", which have to be paid for through exhorbitant taxes made all the more burdening by the expense of the immense bureaucratic juggernaut that's invariably put in place to manage the programs.

Do try and keep up with the rest of the class, next time.

Political thought and intellectual philosophy

[FyreGryffon]

The battle lines between political conservatives and liberals, and between Open Source and its opposite, the commerical software establishment, are drawn along intellectual and moral lines that are, for the most part, similar in nature.

The irony of the thing is, because people have a tendancy not to bother to look beyond what they want to see, few ever see the actual distinctions and where the lines are *actually* drawn.

Political conservatism (here I'm *not* talking about religious or moral conservatism, so Don't Go There) can be boiled down (roughly) to the idea that people can and should be trusted to act appropriately with what they have. They'll help those in need, they'll provide for their kids, they'll be kind to animals, and so forth. In short, they'll act decently.

Political liberalism (same disclaimer as above) can be reduced to the idea that people (defined as "everyone but *me*" by most liberals) are too ignorant, selfish, or cruel to Do The Right Thing on their own, so there must be a (theoretically) benevolent government there to make sure that everyone gets a fair share.

Essentially, those who have plenty, and who gained it legitimately, tend to be conservative, because they believe that they *earned* what they have, and therefore do not owe it to anyone. They will give it generously, when left to do so voluntarily, but will fight viciously when compelled. Those who have little tend to be liberal, because they see that everyone else has more, and they don't think that's "fair".

Similarly, Open- vs. Closed-source philosophies can be deconstructed.

The Open-source movement, for the most part, operates under the idea that individuals have the right to choose what they want to use, how they want to use it, and whether they wish to modify it to better fit their needs. It relies upon the contribution of its members; it could never work as it has if only one person was doing the development, and every one else was just taking.

The Closed-source establishment (commercial software in general) has taken the stance that individual people are not savvy enough to make their own choices about the software they use, and therefore some (theoretically) benevolent company must make the decisions as to what the public will use.

The sharpest minds of the open-source community give freely of their knowledge, yet they are willing to dig in and fight a trench-war over the intellectual theft of an idea that they gave out freely (as is evidenced in the community's uprising in objection to Microsoft's proprietary modifications to the open Kerberos standard).

Conversely, the corporate hacks who produce code for the closed-source establishment hide it furtively, lest some miscreant "steal" the code that they wrote, which code could generally be written by any twelve-year-old hacker who lives in a basement and has no idea what the sun looks like.

So. The lines are drawn thus: Political conservatism and Open Source philosophies rely on the idea that people should have the right to make their own choices, whereas political liberalism and the conventional commercial software establishment depend on the idea that people are dolts and need to be told what to do with their money and their computers. And, to an extent, their minds.

The irony, and the blurring of definitions in people's minds, comes from the fact that the Open source movement is relatively new, in an economic sense, and because many people are still not even fully aware of what the Information Age really means, they misinterpret it. It is seen as socialist, not the culmination of individual freedom. Socialism is, of cource, of a politically liberal nature. Open Source is seen as a haven of pirates, under the misconception that people who believe in giving their own software away for free must also believe it's right to steal the software that others have chosen *not* to give away. Linus Torvalds took a stand to the contrary in his comments regarding the Napster legal turmoil. He chooses to give his work away, but he does not legitimize the theft of that which others have *not* so generously given.

Piracy would be irrelevant in a purely open-source environment. Therefore piracy exists as a side-effect of the closed-source establishment. But because the old-school economists are incapable of drawing a distiction between freely giving what you have and forcibly taking what others have, they lump the 31337 W4r3z-d00dz in with the truly generous open-source contributors.

A pirate wants something for nothing. There are many people, of course, who take plenty from the open-source community and give nothing back. But that is a known and accepted thing. The strength of open source, and the corresponding weakness of the commerical software establishment, is this: If you tell everyone what you did and how, no one else has to waste the time figuring out how to do it, and can instead focus on something new. This is why open source has moved so quickly forward in recent years, and why commercial software companies move forward so slowly by comparison.

So it comes down to this: which do you believe? Are you smart enough to know what you want, or do you need a nursemaid to hold your trembling hand as you pretend to live your life?

Do you believe in personal choice, or on decision forced upon you from a faceless entity that has no idea who you are?

"Cannot" based laws NO LONGER Work!

[3seas]

Jeez, the problem is in the Damn rules CANNOT, YOU CANNOT THE YOU CANNOT THAT PAY ME AND MAYBE I LET YOU CAN.

What ever the hell happened to supporting and encouraging those who make advancements instead of playing a game about hpow much you can say CANNOT to YOU AND YOU AND YOU, BUT YOU OVER THERE BLA BLA BLA, anybody can ramble like kants, it's all cant's anyway.

BUT WHO REALLY CAN ANYMORE? Let's play this pathetic CANNOT game until nobody can do anything, CHECKMATE!

Lets' run it into the fucking ground, until somebody wakes the fuck up and realizes, PHYSICS AND NATURE DO NOT SAY CANNOT ANYWHERE NEAR AS MUSH AS MAN AND HIS GAME PLAYING (he who has the most IP Cannot wins)

Fucking pay those who produce good things, pay them to produce more and stop fucking playing the bully of the sand box brat.
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!

Re:The future of the internet

[Paul Townend]

Fair comment; I must admit, I'm not familiar with exactly what can and cannot be downloaded at the moment, although I read that there are places where you can download "The Phantom Menace" at pretty good quality. The point I was trying to make was that to the average person in the street, copying a load of C64 games isn't/wasn't regarded as a serious crime - if a crime at all. But when the average person hears that people are downloading movies and the like, then they can relate to this a lot more, and will likely be quite upset that people are watching for free what they are paying for.
The Y2K anology was the first thing that came into my head, and probably wasn't the best example I could have used. I agree that the problem would have been a lot worse without action, but when you see how little the impact was in countries such as Italy - who spent virtually nothing on fixing y2k issues - then maybe the y2k wasn't all that serious after all. This contradicts what your (admittedly informed) opinion on the problem was. Although I agree with you completely about it improving infrastructures, it shows that even after something happens, peoples interpretations about its seriousness tend to differ markedly.

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[Vygramul]

I view Jon Katz's articles as eloquent ways of phrasing our collective points of view that is readily understandable by the technology luddites that are now flooding the internet. He is giving us powerful words to use with the non-geek so that they might understand. That's what he is doing.

Golden Age

[Vygramul]

The problem is that the very accessibility of the 'net is working against it. To apply one of the concepts of the Matrix, people are so inured with the values and rules of realworld society that they are not prepared to plug-in, and some will never be able to accept the freedoms that we enjoy.

My greatest fear is that the Golden Age of the Internet has peaked and the decline started roughly with the Metallica/Napster fiasco and the various short-sited and ill-informed rulings making ISPs liable for content, undoubtedly knee-jerk reactions by judges who would be lucky to have a computer much less a net connection.

There will always be people of the bible-thumping variety who always seem to forget the more sublime messages therein who will be offended by the very concept of complete freedom. There will also be those who grow up learning a set of rules and have become so inflexible that the notion that something, "does not follow the rules," is enough to make their heads explode (society collects these people into neat groups and put into rooms with "human resources" signs on the doors.)

The question is how to either enlighten these people, or prevent them from damaging our freedoms.

Re:Golden Age

[Vygramul]

I think it's pretty close to universally accepted to geeks that making ISP's liable for content is a Bad Thing. While some cases are less clear than others (Napster is a less obvious dilineation than AOL:Germany being guilty of child porno because someone in alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.adults posted a pic of a nude kid), it is to the latter case I referred as a ruling being short-sighted.

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[Vygramul]

We do not live in Slashdot, much as that may be an attractive notion. For example, I emailed Katz's column to eight non-geek friends and family members.

Re:Quite coherent. Especially for John

[catkinson]

I thought it was a quite well written piece. I am interested in Jefferson's ideals that information should be made publicly available. Although I know little about Jefferson because I am a Canadian, it seems like he was a man ahead of his times. I foremost consider myself a citizen of the world; It pains my heart when I see divisions between people and borders and countries. The Internet is the first glimpse of what I hope to be a new future for the world. One without borders, wars and prejudice. I think that if you share the vision of one world, we need to stand up to Corporate Government (for we know who really runs the world now..) and fight for our lives back. Is there any reason that we really need so much legislation. We have a worldwide network that goes beyond current parameters. We need to define the new parameters and not let some stuffy, bribable, vote-hungry, Republican or Democrat politicians in the United States or any other country. We need some real leadership.

Re:Threats to liberty

[catkinson]

Do you really think that governments control their own ability to do what they want? You do know who runs the government. Do you really think it is the lowly peasants and their ability to vote? Big money talks and the lovely politicans, of the United States and any other country in the world who is so desperate to follow the US's lovely example of political and economical clout, leer after big business's dollars and job-security for their citizens, in order to make it look like they have had a sucessful reign in office, so they might be re-elected and complete the whole charade once again. Governmental power is absolutely controlled by and directed by corporate interests. They have nobody else who is willing to pay their way through office, re-election and life.

This is a serious problem for the advancment of the world, for although we have better and more technologically advanced devices with each slashdot-reload, it is all a big advertising campaign for your money. Everything and everybody is about more money and more things. Is this right?

Re:Coherent.

[spirality]

---anonymous coward said---
It's no coincidence that the vast majority of the rabid "open source or bust" crowd is no older than their early twenties.
----------------------------

I guess I fall into this category and I know why I support open source. I do it because I like to look at source code and change it if I want to. I hate broken software. That's the practical reason.

On a more abstract level I think open source is a break away from the status quo. We don't have to buy everything, we don't need to rely on big business. I have a DIY (do it yourself) attitude and open source complements that. I've grown up being told (by our media) that I should buy, buy, buy, and I'm sick of it. Worse yet I'm sick of the people who keep telling me to buy. I'm sick of them buying the government. I'm sick of them trying to rule my life. I'm sick of them ruling other people's lives. I'm sick of their images of beauty and fun. I don't need our coporate media and I do my best to live without their products. Open source (Free Software I should say, we get those terms mixed alot), is just one way of getting away from their posion.

Re:InCoherent.

[wobblie]

Of course, one could argue that this is the case for entirely different reasons, such as the fact that many have yet to mature and look at matters rationally. See: early army enlistment ages, college-aged protesters whose arguments just don't make sense.

There is an important difference between propaganda and indoctrination. Propaganda is actually a rather neutral word; it has bad connotations because the word was extensively used by Nazis. All it means is dissemination of your viewpoint. Indoctrination, on the other hand, means simply, the diminution of "allowed perspectives" within a social system. In this sense rebelliousness (a good impulse, always) are the opposite of those who are indoctrinated (e.g., those with patriotic aspirations). There is no commonality between the two in any sense.

As far as IMF protesters not making sense, well this is just hogwash; there is plenty of information available for you to see the defects in these institutions. If the World Bank/IMF's mission, as they say, was to eliminate poverty, then their record is unblemished with success.

--

New uses for copyright

[7days]

I find Katz' point of view here very interesting, and it started me thinking on some positive ways to use copyright law to offset its excesses. I am a Christian, and it very much upsets me to sometimes see Biblical quotes mangled and taken out of context to mean other than their intended meaning. For example:

John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."

It just makes me sick how many people believe that this means that belief in Jesus is the only requirement for salvation, and quote this as proof at every opportunity. The truth is that the "world" in this quote refers only to the elect, as shown in Psalms 67:2, "That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation AMONG all nations." Only select people AMONG the general population will be saved. Matthew 7:13 says, "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it." Very few people are among the saved.

Or Exodus 20:13, in which the famous Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," appears. Many people purposely twist the purpose of this quote to include governments. This is a lie and misleading people to Satan. At many points in the Bible, God MANDATES the death penalty as punishment for a crime. This makes it clear that this only applies to an individual killing another individual, and not the death penalty as punishment for a wrongful act.

So, what can one do to prevent this? This is simple. Are you ready?

Copyright the Bible.

That's all. Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable. Does anyone here have any suggestions?

Re:New uses for copyright

[remande]

And who would own that copyright? The Pope? A group of Rabbis in Jerusalem? Your church? My church? You? Imagine the harm if you gave the copyright to someone who thought he had the True Meaning, but actually didn't.

There are a lot of points that you can't get a group of ministers and preachers to agree with, doubly so if you include Catholics and/or Mormons (being Catholic myself, I am not flaming either). What percentage of Christian preachers and ministers believe in dinosaurs, for instance? How many believe that baptism is required for salvation? How many believe that one can fall after being saved? If you let a committee decide the true and proper use of the Bible, you would end up with some sort of watered-down Christianity where the real Truth would stand no chance.

Besides, which Bible are you copyrighting? King James, New International, The Book, another translation? Or are you copyrighting the originals, assuming that you can find the crypts they are stored in?

Copyrighting the Bible would just allow the copyright holder to bludgeon everyone, Christian and non, not aligned with that holder into legal submission. This might make some sense where there is general consensus as to who is right, but given such consensus, we wouldn't need this copyright. Even if, by chance, the Powers That Be hand the copyright over to exactly the right person or persons, you polarize Christianity into the we-have-the-copyright crowd and the we-don't crowd, and you create a new Schism where the we-don't crowd are at war with the we-have crowd in a way that they wouldn't otherwise.

As a Catholic, I belive that the Pope is the final arbitrer on this world. I still wouldn't hand him the copyright, because it would separate Catholics from other Christians even more so, without making Catholicism one whit more correct. And from my perspective, that's a best-case scenario. Handing the copyright over to someone not perfectly aligned with God (and who is?) would make it even worse.

I suppose you could hand the copyright over to God Himself (considering the books of the Prophets as "works made for hire"?). It wouldn't do much good without God coming down and defending it. As far as I can tell, God has had enough first-hand experience with courtroom drama for one eternity...

The potential for harm is enormous, and can be measured in megasouls. I think this is a Bad Idea.

Re:New uses for copyright

[radja]

so what you want is to restrict the interpretation of a work. That's getting dangerously close to thought-control. Also if you restrict interpretation of the bible, you will also have to restrict interpretation of other texts, religious or not. No more quoting anything. If that's what you want, go ahead. I wasn't planning on going state-side any time soon, and never if it gets through.

//rdj

Re:New uses for copyright

[radja]

>Psalms 67:2, "That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation AMONG all nations."
The word AMONG combined with the word ALL, means EVERYONE, all people.

This is quite dangerous to do with a translation. The original may state this clearer. The same problem exists with the non-destinction in english between "vrij" (free as in freedom) and "gratis" (free beer). That also reminds me: Any 'misuse' of a text would have to refer to the original text, not a translation.

//rdj

Re:New uses for copyright

[Kintanon]

That's all. Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable. Does anyone here have any suggestions?


Stop twisting the words of the bible for your own evil purposes.
Psalms 67:2, "That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation AMONG all nations."
The word AMONG combined with the word ALL, means EVERYONE, all people. Among all nations means that people in every nation will know salvation. This amount could be 1 person per nation, or every single person in every nation. The word Among does not automatically mean that not everyone will have salvation.
Also, how do you draw a connection between the book of John and the book of Psalms? The book of Psalms is a book of Hymns, it contains very little actual information. The book of John contains much of the direct words of Christ, the two books do not reference each other. I think you need to spend some more time reading the Bible and perhaps praying for guidance. You are hopelessly lost...

Kintanon

Re:New uses for copyright

[Kintanon]

I was simply pointing out that he is incorectly interpreting the meaning of the word in English.
So unless he's reading the original he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Kintanon

Re:New uses for copyright

[Kintanon]

It always amuses me to see people earnestly analysing the English translations of the Tanach. How do you know the translation is accurate? Learn Hebrew, then you can do some analysis. Also, Tehillim (Psalms) are not "hymns"! No choirs standing around in white robes in the time of David the King!


The Psalms were meant to be sung, they were being sung in the court of David. Do you even bother to read the book? If you know Hebrew you have the distinct advantage of being able to do so, so go read it. The Book of Psalms is a book of poetry, hymns, songs, whatever. Just because something is a Hymn doesn't mean it has to be sung by a choir.

Kintanon

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[bluesninja]

More regulation of the net is not the answer - anything which stifles the growth of potential markets is a bad thing and must be avoided at all costs.

This, I think, is exactly the problem that is leading to this crossroad. When the net was young, it was about the free exchange of (mostly scientific and CS-related) ideas and information. Thats not what it is anymore, as AC's post unwittingly points out: it's a marketplace full of tourists with no respect for the local customs. Not that everybody who signed up after 1994 is a tourist, but the mentality of those using the net is different now. People aren't using it for exchanging ideas; they're using it to be consumers, just like they are in real life. If the corporations maintain control of the net, this is exactly what we should expect: corporations like consumers. But it's death for a culture.

So, is the Internet a marketplace or a society? I think that is the real crossroads. If it's a marketplace, then copyright law should just extend straightforwardly from realworld marketplace law. If it's a society, then considerations of freedom and privacy should be paramount.

I for one would love to for the Internet to be a society. That necessarily means separating it from corporate interest. /bluesninja

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[deprof]

The value of copyright (conceptually) cannot be disputed. It is intended for protection of the "native author" (- Encyclopedia Britannica) and has nearly been agreed upon internationally.

The Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1710, was a milestone in the history of copyright law. It recognized that authors should be the primary beneficiaries of copyright law; it also established the idea that such laws should have only limited duration, after which works could pass into public domain. The designated period came to be set at 28 years. Similar laws were enacted in Denmark (1741), the United States (1790), and France (1793). Through the 19th century most civilized countries established laws that protected the work of native authors.

However, in practice today, copyrights are used more and more as a means to beat back the creativity and ability to acquire information of others. (Search back in Slashdot for the story about "For Dummies".)

Copyrights, protesters, and those in their 20s.

[Joe Malik]

First, like a lot of other people who have already posted, I personally feel that I have a bit at stake with copyrights. I am a writer, and at the moment a work of mine is finished, it is technically under US copyright. I've only registered for copyright once (which doesn't mean much, only that a copy is in the Library of Congress and you paid $20 to get it there), but everything else goes under "unregistered copyright." Now, I can understand why an *individual* deserves copyright. However, I fail to understand why, if I go to a publisher and want my book/poetry printed for the masses, the *publisher* gets copyright advantages. What ends up happening is that the publisher can give me, say, a 10% cut of what gets sold, even though I was the intellectual backing behind the whole thing and without me, there'd be no business for the publisher. (And yes, I do understand that much work goes into making the actual, physical books). Similar things happen in the recording industry, I would imagine.

In other words, I've got no problems with copyrights themselves. What I have a problem with is those copyrights going to someone other than the creator. (I also have a problem with patents going to people who "create" things that existed for millions of years, e.g. plants/natural pharmeceuticals). And quite simply, the advantage in the internet, and much of the new desktop publishing software available is that the creators become the distributors as well. We can skip the intermediary and keep our copyrights to ourselves. *Now* if someone wants to rip off a couple of copies of what I make, it's not such a big deal, because I'm getting 100% of what is sold instead of 10%. If I could live on 10% before, I can still make a living even if only 1/10 of the people buy what I wrote and then make copies for nine other friends.

Hmm. And I'm in my early twenties, too.

On that note, "college age protesters whose arguments don't make any sense" is rather harsh. A friend of mine was in D.C. in April and I have been impressed with how much she knows on the IMF, World Bank, etc. If you sit down and talk with some protesters, they actually make a great deal of sense, because many of them are spending their college careers studying the very things they are protesting. The problem is that many think they need to dumb down their message for the masses (which they don't), and then the DC police chief is able to dismiss these folks by calling them "kids with a cause." And as for not seeing AARP members at protests, may I remind you that Ralph Nader, the AFL-CIO, and the "Raging Grannies" were all at DC (Okay, they're not *all* retirement age). These people impress me the most, because they have the most to lose!

Re:Copyrights, protesters, and those in their 20s.

[legoboy]

In Vancouver, most drug dealers are non-white. This doesn't mean that most non-whites are drug dealers. Likewise with my remark about the folks in their early twenties.

When you go to a publisher, part of the contract you sign grants the copyright to the publisher. The fact that you agreed to this in the contract is why they get the rights. That it is difficult to publish something without signing such a thing is a differeny, somewhat troubling matter. Indeed, the internet is very helpful for direct distribution though it's a little more difficult to get any sort of compensation through it.

I didn't follow the news coverage of the protests in Washington because I expected something similar to Seattle. I was wrong and therefore don't know much about what went on there. I talked to a number of people who went to Seattle, though. Most of them were very uninformed, and were going simply to show off their "solidarity". What does the WTO do? Take jobs away from Americans. That was the full extent of the answers I got from a few of them. The viewpoint of the majority of these people was frighteningly isolationistic. While it is true that my disagreement with that viewpoint colours my opinion of the protesters, it was their refusal to even consider the other side that really turned me off.

However, I wasn't referring specifically to the WTO protesters. Many in the environmentalist movement are much worse. "You can't cut down these trees! They're... old! We'll lie down in front of your logging trucks to stop you." "This is the habitat of the endangered (cute, cuddly animal)!" And let us not forget the SUV-driving, jetski riding Greenpeace folks who were interfering with the Makah whale hunts.

The fringes take away from the arguments of the whole, thanks to our sensationalistic media in North America. That should really sadden us all. However, the fringes do occasionally cover for the fact that the arguments behind them aren't strong enough to stand on their merit. The WTO protesters had a point, and it was valid enough. However, the benefits of a global economy in which no country can wage war on another because they are too interdependent far outweighs the minor, temporary damage done to the economy of one's own home.

------

internet freedom

[avalonmick]

For freedom read American culture; for Government read American multinationals. This article with its selective quotes and examples amply proves the thesis that Americans do not know, understand, or care about anything outside their borders. They do not see the damage their culture does. The best effect that the freedom available now on the internet could have would be to undermine the arrogance inherent in the American culture.

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[nooekanami]

We copyright because we are greedy. As simple as that. Why isn't Socrates copyrighted anymore? How and why is the Bard "open source"? (you could make a movie called Romeo and Juliet based on the same story and no one would sue you for doing that). Simple. Cause its been so goddamm long, it doesn't matter anymore. But publishing houses still make money publishing his works, don't they? How much money did Shakespeare make from his writings? Looking back, does that make any difference at all? What is a sonnet worth? What is Enter Sandman worth? 50 years from now, would the Beatles' music be treated like Beethoven's and Bach's? Whether we agree with it or not, copyright of art is a meaningless, nauseating concept. Sooner or later, it will go.

Virtual isn't virtual

[Hrunting]

As a society, we can try to make cyberspace conform to the rules of physical space. Or we can recognize the extraordinary potential of this new culture, and invest cyberspace with laws and values and properties that are fundamentally different.

Or we can do something real. The Internet is not some separate world that exists freely of the 'real' world. Things that happen in cyberspace affect markets, fortunes, lives, and property. Do you think this isn't the case? Try asking the 14-year-old who was molested by a chat-room junkie. Try asking the businesses that lose money when DDOS attacks strike. Try asking artists (like Metallica) who find their songs posted to and critiqued on the Internet before they're even finished (yes folks, that's the event that prompted Metallica to take action). You can't just treat the Internet as a separate beast. You can't just say, "Well, the Internet's an entirely new beast, so we'll have to make rules for it that are about it." What are you going to do, get rid of copyright for the Internet and not the 'real' world? Are intellectual freedoms only for the Internet (or for the 'real' world, depending on how you view the whole IP issue)?

Maybe people should quit saying, "Oo, the Internet is special and different," and realize that it's an outgrowth of our current society and you can't just separate it. Should copyright law be erased? No. Ideas are free, but work is not, and things that are copyrighted are not ideas, they are the works generated from those ideas. The Internet will change society and society will change the Internet, but we can't choose one over the other. They're inextricably linked, and to say that we should create new laws for a new 'virtual' world shows a deep misunderstanding about how 'virtual' this new world really is.

Intellectual property

[Julian Morrison]

I've given this some thought, and come to the conclusion that "intellectual property" is incompatible with real property or self ownership. This is because it asserts ownership over patterns in things rather than the things themselves. As such it means that to the extent that you can arrange your own property into protected patterns, it stops being your property, and to the extent you arrange your thoughts in those patterns, you lose the right to speak them.

This despite the fact that you are not necessarily harming or cheating anyone - which is the only legitimate reason to restrict your freedom of action - by selling them a copy of this protected pattern.

Hence I conclude: intellectual property is not a right and contradicts a right - ie: it is a Bad Thing.

Workplace regulations

[Julian Morrison]

These two "rights" are mutually incompatible. "workplace regulations" for example actually help protect "the right of self ownership."

False. The right to self ownership includes the rihgt to self harm - including by contracting to work for an unsafe employer.

And yes, nearly all private property has changed hands countless times to and fro by theft and force over the years; "the war of all against all" is simply too complex a tangle to ever unwind. The only solution is to declare a truce and leave the property with those who now hold it. In a free system, competent people will rapidly make up the difference, while the incompetent rich will sink back to their own level.

Was copyright enforcement ever really simple?

[Wombat]

I'd just like to comment on a couple pieces of this article, specifically the lines that read, "Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned. ... Before the Internet, copyright law and the means to enforce it were relatively simple."
These statements about the increased difficulty of copyright enforcement are only true to a degree. If we look back at the history of copyrights, it's only been for a brief window in the twentieth century that they became their most enforceable. After all, first technology had to increase to a point where copyrights were more easily defendable, before it could progress to where we are now.
I'll use some theatrical performances as a couple of examples. In the 1700's the play "She Stoops to Conquer" premiered in New York a scant few months after int opened in London. How was this accomplished? The New York impresario had friends in London who went to the performance each night, and when they got home copied down the play from memory. They then sent the pages over to New York one act at a time. The resulting event was a great theatrical phenomenon but certainly a violation of copyright. At the time there was not much that could be done. It certainly wasn't using very advanced technology; just the regular ship from London to NY.
Now we move to more recent times, the late 19th century. Gilbert and Sullivan's "HMS Pinafore" was still running in London, while pirate productions cropped up all over the US with many of the original words and music, but in a bastardized form. G and S couldn't stop them, so they brought their own production to the US to show the public how the play was suppossed to be done.
Granted these are examples of a specific art form with its own peculiarities, but copyright of all kinds was hard to enforce before the twentieth century. Maybe the "earlier in the 20th C" is implicit in the phrase "before the internet," but I felt a need to qualify these statements in this article a little.

Wombat.
darn it. gotta get to class five minutes ago.

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[TeaJay]

Just a quick comment on copyright revocation after the French Revolution.

Any time a soceity is faced with the introduction of a new freedom (in this case the freeing of all information into the public domain), it takes, IMHO, at least a generation to deal with the impact. I've often thought that this is the result of the Illicit Thrill(tm) still attched in the subconscious of the generation which grew up indoctrinated into restraint. This seems to set people back into some teen-angst phase and they either mature in their behaviours or not. The second generation is then faced with some ugly spectres of the abuse of the new freedom and learns from the mistakes. It's almost another form of social Darwinism, those ill equipped to deal with the new freedom trash their nest and don't fare well.

my $0.02 of pop psychology - still cheaper than the real thing!

The only hope for the internet

[FreeUser]

...is FREENET.

We cannot and should not count on governments anywhere to respect, much less abide by, the notion that citizens should have the freedom to do whatever they want, even if it offends the very power and money besotted politicians whos yearning for dominion over our lives brought them to the positions they enjoy today.

Our sole hope lies in designing the infrastructure of the net itself to make legislative control of content a technical impossibility. FreeNet goes a long way toward doing this.

I would encourage anyone with an accessible IP address on the net to download the software and set up a FreeNet node. If you cannot do this (no permiment IP address, or other ISP restrictions), then please consider downloading the client software and familiarizing yourself with FreeNet and how it works.

Indeed, I do not think it is at all an exaggeration to say that we as free individuals have a civic and moral obligation to run FreeNet, and in so doing keep our freedom out of the hands of politicians and the undemocratic corporate institutions for which they work.

Broadband, Threat or Menace?

[Detritus]

I worry that the shift to broadband Internet access may result in major problems.

Despite repeated predictions of their imminent demise, there are still large numbers of dialup ISPs. If you don't like your current dialup ISP, or they don't like you, there are plenty of alternate ISPs.

Broadband internet access is much more centralized. If you are lucky, you have the choice between cable and DSL. Both controlled by large corporations who are, or would like to become, vertically integrated media conglomerates.

ISPs are not common carriers. They can refuse to provide service, or discontinue service, at their convenience. If they say no servers, no Napster, no VOIP, no streaming video, no "weird" operating systems or computers, you can accept it or go elsewhere. If you have controversial social or political views, they may cut you off your service.

With broadband, there might not be any alternate service provider available. You may have the choice between access on MediaConglomo's terms or no access at all. You are fair game for anything that "enhances shareholder value". You are a consumer unit with your finger on a "buy button". Your eyeballs have been sold to MediaConglomo's corporate partners.

Quite coherent. Especially for John

[arivanov]

As the subj says it is quite good. But I think that John overempahsizes the extent to which the net is america and america is the net. Yeah, I know US is not the only champion in stupid legislation. But net is not US and even more importantly US is not the net.

Quite a lot of the stuff happening is not the net but the society slashing back after having enough of reactionary gerontocracies like Iron Maggie, Andropov and Reagan. It is normal for people to become more sane and no longer bring american flags in cinemas and wave them when Rocky IV kicks the butt of a russian or vice versa (when the russian "hero" kicks the but of some american or when 007 kicks 'em all). The world has gone more complex and respectively the society has gone more relaxed as the old laws have trouble operating in the more complex world.

net is a part of it. But it is not just the net.

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[finkployd]

Perhaps the danger is not directly from companies, since the government's have the power.

and Power corrupts

Money buys corrupt power

Corporations have the money

So indirectly, yes corporation can (and do) directly manipulate government. Many a senator and congressman/woman have been bought by companies to do their bidding.

The laws that do not respect were pushed through on behalf of the corporations. Do you think the government came up with the idea of the DMCA all by themselves?

I agree that government is also to blame for eroding our rights, but companies are trying just as hard, and they can accompolish much working through the existing government to the same end.

Finkployd

Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace

[Greg W.]

I think it's mandatory to post the following. I haven't seen it in a quick overview of the comments, so it's either below my threshold or I'm the first to post it this time.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the
tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it
grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be
obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and
address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are
attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunica- tions Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams
must now be born anew in us.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial
product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves
immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996

John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[Greg W.]

The next time you want to 'justify' piracy...just think of someone coming into your home and taking your belongings....cause that, though not exactly, is what it is--theft.

Copyright infringement is not theft. These are two separate and very different crimes.

The laws that govern physical objects do not apply to information, and vice versa.

Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance

[Bryan Andersen]

Corporations aren't the ones inovating. Take the very concept of the news portal. It was started by a geek with an idea. The geek setup a web page that pointed to interesting news on other sites. Others like this geek's idea of what was interesting and important. More people came and saw.

"Fan" sites are another area that predated corporations. Now you corporate sponcered ones, but in the beginning it was some person who loved "x".

Most new technologies you see on the net were started by someone in their "garage". The good ones either turned into corporations themselves or were mimiced by corporations trying to get on the bandwagon. Remember even TCP/IP and HTML were ideas outside the corporate umbrella. Major companies like CISCO and SUN had their birth outside corporate control.

There is also another side to the corporate issue. There is more than one type of corporation out there. Some corporations are actively trying to control what the consumer sees. This is so they can better control the actions of the consumer. I'd say that this is they type of corporation that Kat's is talking about. It's also not just corporations that are doing this, it's governments, special interest groups, churches, etc. Groups that want to control what you hear, think and say.

Re:the copying vs copyright clause

[DGolden]

The problem is not just that with the current system - it's that corporations are pushing to change the status quo too - but in the other direction.

Already, American copyrights last a ridiculously long time - while everything else has been getting faster and faster ("internet time") copyright actually lasts longer than ever it did before - significantly longer than the average human lifespan, in fact - this is to little advantage for individual artists, since they are mortal, but definitely in favour of corporations, which can carry on indefinitely.

Also, in the current system, you have a right to "fair use" of copyrighted material - but the very, very nasty DMCA effectively eliminates that, while paying it lip service, by making it an offence to circumvent the protection on a copyrighted work, where protection is very, very weakly defined.

Thus, big business is pushing the copyright system in the other direction to 'net forces - IMHO, to the detriment of society in general. That is why people are fighting the _new_ copyright legislation. In my opinion, both copyrights and patents should be scaled to "internet time" - Say, 5-10 years for copyright, and 2-4 years for patents.

The War on Piracy

[paulio]

Btrey wrote: We have a massive War on Drugs at which we throw billions of dollars, and you can buy crack on just about any street corner. Do we want to create a "War on Piracy" that endlessly gobbles money with little or no return?

The war War on Piracy will be just as devastating as the War on Drugs and it will be fought for the same reason, not to stop drugs and not to stop piracy. There is only one reason for these wars:

Power

The US war on drugs makes the government more powerful because citizen's rights must be violated to "win" it. Just one result is "no knock" police raids on people's homes in the name of the war. Those too young to remember should know that in the US before the 1970s the police had to knock at your door and let you read the search warrant before they could enter your home. When I tell young people this, at first they think I'm lying. They can't imagine such constraints on the power of the police. This constraint went away when the Supreme Court ruled that no knock warrants were ok if the police thought that somebody might be flushing the drugs down the toilet as the police were standing at the door. Now no knock warrants are common even for instances where there are no drugs.

The War on Drugs makes the politicians more powerful because they write the laws. Enough said. The War on Drugs makes the mafia more powerful because they make huge amounts of money. To the mafia, this is the American Dream. Find a product that lots of people want. Sell it. Make tons of money. Build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door.

Now we've come to something new: The War on Piracy. The War on Piracy makes the corporations more powerful. It doesn't matter whether the war is winnable or not. The power is the important part.

Note also, that the War on Pornography (actually child pornography) also gives the government and the politicians huge amounts of new power. For those who don't remember, anon.penet.fi was a public anonymous remailer site in Finland. You could send and receive email without revealing your identity. The site was shut down when the US sent an Interpol search warrant to the Finnish government. What was it looking for? Child pornographers. Of course, they didn't find any pornographers. That wasn't the reason for the raid. The site shut down, just as the US government wanted it to. As I remember it, he guy who ran it wrote that it wasn't worth the trouble. And who can blame him.

The internet is the battleground where this conflict will take place and it will affect all of us.

Re:It's an economic thing; you wouldn't understand

[Russ Nelson]

K-Mart(tm) Clue: how do you enforce a ban on activity that you cannot detect?

You're talking about "should". I'm talking about "is".
-russ

Not possible *to* control

[Russ Nelson]

You miss the whole point. It's not that musicians *should* be able to make money off every copy. It's that musicians are no longer *able* to make money off every copy. There is no way to stop copying other than to shut down the net.

How do you adjust to this new reality? By denying it? Go ahead, try.
-russ

It's an economic thing; you wouldn't understand.

[Russ Nelson]

The ability to extract royalties depends on them being cheaper than copying. Copying is no longer uneconomic. What are you gonna do about it? Put your head in the sand? Copy"right" is now an economically useless thing to have.
-russ

Politicians have something to sell

[Russ Nelson]

Yup. Corporations fund the political system because politicians have something to sell. They only have it to sell because we allow them to sell it. We must oppose ALL government interference in the economy, because it will inevitably be taken over by those we intend to regulate.
-russ

Jesus stopped the stoning

[Russ Nelson]

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Sounds like a call for action against death penalties.

Oh, and which Bible do you intend to copyright? And what do you plan to do with the fair use clause? Just throw it out? There's a very good reason why religion and state are separated.
-russ

Coherent.

[legoboy]

See subject... And it's by Katz, too. Not bad.

Have you,the reader, ever noticed that the people who support copyright infringement the most strongly are nearly always those who have nothing to their name which they can lose via same? It's no coincidence that the vast majority of the rabid "open source or bust" crowd is no older than their early twenties. Of course, one could argue that this is the case for entirely different reasons, such as the fact that many have yet to mature and look at matters rationally. See: early army enlistment ages, college-aged protesters whose arguments just don't make sense.

Propaganda affects the young much more easily than those who are older. On a similar tangent, I've noticed that the Catholic Church now performs its confirmation ceremonies several years earlier. Presumably this is because me and a good many friends who were from Roman Catholic families opted out. Very unlikely that this was an isolated incident.

Personally, I'm all in favor of open source, though I disagree with one of the two major licenses. I just don't demand that everything I use be such. I know that it's just a vocal minority of the Linux and Slashdot communities that feel otherwise, but they certainly are vocal.

I had several paragraphs more but as they are local issues, they would be meaningless to nearly all of you. Insert some bitching here about a vocal minority of your choice.

For what it's worth, people inclined to mod me down should use overrated. I get a kick out of it. Especially when the moderator is just disagreeing with me.

------

Re:Coherent.

[legoboy]

No soy un combarde anonimo.

I don't know that I would consider you part of the group I was referring to. Everyone is fully entitled to make their own decisions. More power to you for boycotting non-free software. The people I'm talking about are those of the opinion that anyone who dares to pay money for some piece of software is a heretical fool. Don't even get them started about those who dare try to make money off of closed source software.

By virtue of the fact that you are not imposing your beliefs upon others, you are not a foaming at the mouth zealot.

(literal meaning, of course, people who don't like hearing the word zealot used on this site)

------

Re:Coherent.

[B. Samedi]

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brains.
- Winston Churchill

The young are always the most active in the search for truth and justice. It's the way we're wired. And sometimes it doesn't make a lick of sense but that's because they are reacting with their hearts, which is why protests with youth in them are usually motivated and fiery. You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?

Re:Coherent.

[StoryMan]

It's no coincidence that the vast majority of the rabid "open source or bust" crowd is no older than their early twenties.

It's interesting, too, how times have changed. Now, it seems that "youth" on the so-called front-lines are primarily concerned with information and the ramifications of how that information is disseminated. (And belive me, I don't denigrate this; I believe it's an important battle, and one that must be fought and decided.)
30 years ago, the front-line was Vietnam -- bombing Cambodia, nightly incursions into Laos, and the difficulties (and deceptions) of withdrawing troops from Southeast Asia.

It seems to me -- and I can't really problematize or more clearly elucidate this yet because I'm thinking as I'm typing -- but that there has been a large-scale social (and perhaps economic?) shift from the ideological and political dogma of the late 1960's to the information wars that we're witnessing now. To me, at least, this shift is *from* the usual layers of a stratified society -- the poor, the middle-class, the upper-class -- *toward* something entirely different -- something that (curiously) transcends politics and even the idea of democracy. I mean, it's true on the one hand that democracy encourages all voices to join the fray -- but if each voice is equal -- truly equal -- then how is it possible to maintain the levels of hierarchical order that democracy depends upon? The idea of majority/minority (it would seem to me) disappears when a democracy in its pure form exists. Who sets the rules? Who says the majority wins? Why not the minority? I mean, democracy presupposes the very hierarchies it attempts to subvert, right?

Information 30 years ago was controlled in a way that's simply not possible now, and as a result, the stratification (or "Democratization") of society was able to be manipulated by forces outside (and inside) the system -- the government and various social services, schools, churches, etc. Now these forces are struggling against the growing "blob" of information -- the more that 'information' (and I mean information in its pure form, encompassing everything from government documents to MP3 files to propaganda) becomes available, the more the hierarchies start to lose their persusasive force.

This is not to say we've been under the illusion of democracy for 200+ years, but it's more to wonder -- and it's early in the morning -- just where democracy starts and what -- specifically -- makes democracy possible.

The answer, I think, is information -- information is the key to maintaining order. And if the order is now somehow maintained -- via the courts, most likely -- then it's not that the democracy will cease to be, it'll just be rendered impotent.

Which is to say: I think I know how much of the so-called information war will be settled: it'll be settled so that the status quo will be maintained. It'll be settled (I would think) so that, like 30 years ago, it's possible to maintain the levels of hierarchical power which facilitate the "illusion" -- bad word, I know -- of democracy.

It's a scary thing when you try to think beyond 'democracy' as we know and attempt to posit the power relations that make it possible. Are those relations democratic? How do those relations achieve their power? I would argue that it's far from democratic. This doesn't necessarily make it right or wrong -- just that, ya know, there's more than meets the eye.

Katz, you care to comment on this?

Good point, Legoboy; Bad point, Jon Katz

[Sun Tzu]

I'm very aware of copyright and patent issues since I've written a bunch of software and designed a few algorithms. However, in spite of the fact that I would seem to be someone who IP laws would benefit, I think they have been stretched beyond the point of value even to me, especially with the recent trend toward obvious and trivial software patents.

Bad point, Jon.
Why lay such blame on 'corporatism'? If I ask the government to give me the deed to your house -- and they do it -- does that mean that there is a problem with people like me? Or, is the problem a bankrupt policy that can be so easily manipulated?

Of course people are greedy. That's hardly the core problem however. Their ability to use the mechanisms of the state for their own gain is the heart of the real issue.

Re:the copying vs copyright clause

[M-G]

When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week.

There is an interesting analogy to look at here. Once the printing press made Bibles widely available to the masses, it was the beginning of the end for the absolute power of the Catholic Church. The people could now read their own Bibles, and make their own interpretations, and tell the Church to piss off. Martin Luther wrote his theses, and the Protestant movement was born.

Today, a free net presents a threat to government abuses and the power wielded by the media and corporations. While these groups always continue to have uninformed consumers who continue to look to them for pre-digested 'content' (think AOL Time Warner and how many people use them as their ISP), they don't want anything to undermine their power. So their corporate lawyers will lash out at any perceived threat, using the fuzzy IP laws as their basis. Few are able to outspend the corporations in court, so the corporation ends up on top.

Bond is British not American

[Devil Ducky]

The world has gotten more complex and one of the major reasons for this complexity is the net. If a suitable way can be found for the net to peacefully exist in the rest of the world, then those same regulations (or lack of) can be applied to the rest of the world. If the 'net is left to govern itself and be world wide, then you are going to see nations fall (slowly) and everyone join a larger (world wide?) nation. This is of course not something most people in power want to see, and thus part of the reason they fight so hard. But change is not neccessarily bad, a world community will have pitfalls, but the ups may just be worth the effort.

Devil Ducky

Re:Boundaries

[Devil Ducky]

it's not sites that France is trying to block on Yahoo it's auctions

Devil Ducky

Tired of the World

[Kintanon]

Sometimes I look at the world, and I see what goes on, the lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, rampant stupidity, pervasive apathy, corruption, ignorance, bigotry, and I just think, "Why can't anyone else see how wrong this is? Why don't people just say what they mean, do what they say, and stop going out of their way to screw other people over?". The sort of situations I see makes me start to hope we do destroy ourselves and let the earth start over. Either that or I need to comb through the earths population and find the few hundred thousand decent people left out of 6 billion, and find some way to escape from this cess pit.

Does anyone else ever look around and just want to throw their arms up in despair, give in to the marketing, and go buy a Brittany Spears CD, some pants that are 4 sizes too big, and watch MTV all day long?

Kintanon

Re:Tired of the World

[Kintanon]

No. We're not all angst-ridden 16 year olds, most of us have more important things to worry about, like where the next meal comes from.



Oh please, if you've got the free time to post on slashdot you aren't exactly homeless and starving...
I'm 20, I have a mortgage, car payments, bills, etc... So what? That doesn't make the constant barrage of marketing any less crushing, it doesn't make the massive amounts of crap going on in the world any less depressing.
The attitude of 'I have more important things to worry about than whether or not the world is going to hell in a handbasket' is exactly why the world is going to hell. Wake up, do something nice for someone, try to make the world just that much more pleasant to live in.

Kintanon

Article Moderation: -1, Redundant

[zorgon]

Heard it all before, gang. Can we move on, now? Like, back to the whole news for nerds idea? This 'stuff' perhaps 'matters' too much for my taste. I'm burned out on all the blowharding about rights and the oh-so-important topic of the impact of the telegraph, umm I mean the railroad -- umm I mean the telephone, umm I mean television, umm I mean video games, umm I mean the Internet, on our society. Yawn. Stop pretending it's something new and exciting that will 'change the world.' McLuhan predicted the global village almost 40 years ago, and he's still wrong. Nothing I have seen in the last thirty-five years has changed my mind. There's a whole great big world out there that's not wired. Please, notice it every once in a while.

Geez..

[_marshall]

John,

Too much! You're really preaching to the choir on these "moral implications of the modern era" essays that you write. I whole heartedly agree with you on almost all of the subjects that you write about, but I must say that it just seems to me that you are trying to win over your "target crowd" by over analyzing certain topics.. (this one included)

Maybe this is just a pet peeve of my own, but I consider it bad(read:pathetic) journalism. Report the stories that matter, and when it calls for a lengthy essay discussing moral implications or privacy, write it then. As a general rule of thumb, most people don't like to hear the same thing repeated over and over...

Just my feelings, no harm meant.
~Marshall

--
Homer: "No beer, No TV make Homer something something";
Marge: "Go crazy?";
Homer: "Don't mind if I do!"

we're not going to like the way this turns out

[G27 Radio]

The thing that bothers me the most is that there just doesn't seem to be a way to effectively protect IP on the Net without taking away our freedom to share the IP that we create ourselves. Unless we find a way to monitor everyone's connections and make sure that what they are doing or saying isn't infringing on any traditional laws. If there is another way, please say so.

I do want to see IP protected to the extent that it fosters the creation of more science and art. The free exchange of thoughts and ideas seem more important to this end than guaranteeing profit.

I think the direction we are heading is a "royalty tax" on our network connections. The RIAA already receives money for blank audio media as it is. They get this money regardless of whether they produce anything or not. I think they'll be more than happy to have the same type of tax placed on our Net connections. I doubt the MPAA will be far behind in finding a way to do this as well. Is this what it's going to take for things to be "fair?" I think it will suck having a powerful recording industry that's state sponsored, but it's the only effective way I can see for them to stay in business. Not that I'd mind seeing the RIAA go out of business--there are plenty of non-RIAA bands and labels that would benefit if they did.

numb

Re:the copying vs copyright clause

[kootch]

it's at this point that you must put faith in the court system.

if you're able to explain why your patent is unique and is your intellectual property, there shouldn't be a problem.

as I've mentioned, how many of these bullshit patents, once challenged, have actually stood up in court or in practice?

Re:It's an economic thing; you wouldn't understand

[kootch]

This is the most flawed logic I have seen in ages.

Royalties are not based on the extraction $ vs. copying $. Royalties are so that a company can allow use of the technology that they spent time and money researching and developing or in the instance of music, time and money spent for a band to produce an album and put their intellectual property (the actual music) into a publishable format. The ability to extract royalties depends on the item being copied being cheaper to develop from scratch to mimick the original rather than it being cheaper to copy in the sense of copying files.

When you copy an mp3 and pass it around, you aren't recreating the music from scratch, you're duplicating the file.

Now go out to K-mart and try to buy yourself some real logic.

What's Katz Doing About It?

[webword]

Once again I have to ask the question: What are people doing about corporations taking over the Net? What is Katz doing? Is he really raising awareness? Did his article move you? Are you going to act on his ideas and suggestions?

The funny thing is that Katz is actually a good writer. Maybe not a good writer for geeks, but a good writer overall. But this article just doesn't cut it. It is talk-talk-talk. Give me a damn list of things I can do. Give us a list of things we can do. What action does he expect?

Give me buttons to push, applications to write, web sites to create, programs to code. Give me ideas about databases that would rock. Where are the checkboxes? We're geeks ... give us geek (brain) food. Feed us with algorithms and specifications, not fluttery ideas and ra-ra-ra, go team.

I'm going to yak if I hear too much more about the Evil Empire of Corporatism. What are the steps to improvement Katz? Where are the action items ? And what about those of us that work for an Evil Empire Company? We need $$$ and we have people to feed.

If you could have anything Katzmeister, what would it be? Give us the beautiful vision.

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.

Re:What's Katz Doing About It?

[G27 Radio]

The funny thing is that Katz is actually a good writer. Maybe not a good writer for geeks, but a good writer overall. But this article just doesn't cut it. It is talk-talk-talk. Give me a damn list of things I can do. Give us a list of things we can do. What action does he expect?

The thing about this article that I like is that Katz is not giving us a list of things to do. I think this was intended to be food for thought. I think the action he expects is for us to hash out some ideas in response to his article. His article is just a starting point for a conversation. It's the comments you read and write that will give you some insight if not an exact answer. More talk is still necessary.

numb

Lessig personal website, more stuff like above

[Seth Finkelstein]

See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessig.html

Lots and lots of papers in the same vein as the above article, but much more in-depth.

Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger

[Seth Finkelstein]

Stop bashing government powers, that's distractions from the real problems, which is the fact that we have now defined so much as private property.

The DMCA is about PROPERTY RIGHTS That's property rights in copyright. But it's still a propery rights law.

Note I am not saying anything so silly as there should be no private property or that there shold be no intellectual property. But the basic problem is, in fact, what is property in the net-age, and what is necessary to protect that property.

Lessig's website for CODE book

[Seth Finkelstein]

This doesn't seem to be in the article. Go check out

http://code-is-law.org.

That's the website for Lessig's book, CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace

It has excerpts

Possibly the best paragraph JK has written

[spiralx]

This has enormous implications for free speech and intellectual property. Technologies that work have always gotten used, whether they should be or not. It's still true. People who can download text, columns, games, ideas, music and software will do so, if for no other reason than because they can. People who can use technology to comment freely, distribute code, challenge authority and criticize powerful corporate interests will do so, not only because they have the right but because they are able. This is the immutable reality of cyberspace, the new political consciousness emanating from the Internet.

This is so true, but it is a fact that seems to have totally been missed by government legislators in their rush to compartmentalise and control the net. No matter what regulations they put against doing certain things, people will go and do them anyway because they can.

This means that strictures aimed at preventing certain people from doing something (e.g. pirating music through Napster) will do little to prevent those who want to do it, but instead will restrict and hamper those who have legal and valid reasons for doing the same.

Under a structure as open as the net there is never going to be a way to 100% police what everybody is doing, and the people that are going to get around such barriers are those who the barriers are there to stop. The only people regulation harms are those who are doing nothing wrong.

The net has changed the de facto rules...

[guran]

... of copyright infringement and other "information crimes"

They used to be: "It is illegal, but if you really want it, you can get it"
Now they read: "It is illegal, but if you feel like it, you can get it,... easily"

We are going to have bad laws

[wrenling]

...They are growing pains of our government, and hence, by extension, ourselves coming to terms with what we have wrought.

Once we accept that we are going to have bad laws, we can then take the next step: not only working with our congresspeople to see these laws repealed/amended but also to work towards creating sensible legislation that will protect the users, creators and infrastructure of the internet.

We cannot just sit here and make commentary after commentary - we have to make sure we are heard. Right now the major corporations and organizations (MS, RIAA, MPAA) have our leaderships ears. Hence, they are controlling what kind of legislation is being put out there. Send links to articles and threads to your congressman, to your senator, to your city mayor and your state governor, because laws and regulations are being considered on all levels.

Re:Threats to liberty

[jalefkowit]

We now have a nation by the corporations for the corporations, with no easy way to take it back.

If you want to give a slap in the face to the corporate interests behind George W. and the Gore-Bot 2000, you should call your local Green Party organizer right now and ask how you can get involved. Ralph Nader, the Green Presidential candidate, is committed to reducing the influence that corporations have over our public life. Consider the following items from the Concord Principles, the platform that Nader is running on:

• Second: The American people should have reasonable control over the public lands, public media airwaves, pension funds, and other societal assets which the public legally owns, rather than having these public assets controlled by a powerful few.
• Third: We need modern mechanisms so that civic power for self-government and self-reliance can correct the often converging power imbalance of Big Business and Big Government that weakens the rights of citizens.
• Seventh: Effective legal protections are needed for ethical whistleblowers who alert Americans to abuses or hazards to health and safety in the workplace, or contaminate the environment, or defraud citizens. Such conscientious workers need rights to ensure they will not be fired or demoted for speaking out within the corporations, the government, or in other bureaucracies.
• Ninth: Shareholders, who are the owners of companies, should not have their assets wasted or worker morale victimized by executives who give themselves huge salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden parachutes, self-perpetuating boards of directors, and a stifling of the proxy voting system to block shareholder voting reforms.

You may say that it's pointless for Nader to take on these issues, since he "can't win". Well, I would argue that someone with his name recognition and integrity can and will be a credible third party candidate; but even if Nader loses, if he pulls ten or fifteen percent of the vote, he will be heard. Remember how nobody cared about the budget deficit until Ross Perot made it his defining issue in 1992? Nader can do the same for the way corporations screw us over every day. Nader's fighting an uphill battle to get on the ballot in several important states, and you can help just by gathering a few signatures to get him there. Even if you're not the Green type, if you care at all about curbing corporate power in this country, you owe it to yourself to at least check out the man's Web site and hear what he has to say.

-- Jason A. Lefkowitz

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[|deity|]

Nice sentiment. In principal I can agree but like many a utopian ideal, it wouldn't float at all in reality. The problem is that if copyrights went to the writer/artist directly rather than to a corporation, snot-nosed teenagers and 20-somethings lacking moral centers and empathy for others would STILL rip off the copyright holder and then try and find some self-serving, selfish justification for their theft.

Sure some people might go ahead and steal your work but they might have less incentive to do so. Cheaper prices and all. Most snot-nosed teenagers and 20-somethings would not benifit from your type of work. Wouldn't it be nice if the artists instead of the corporations could make the profit and decide what to charge the public? The only difference between idealism and reality is implemetation.

The claim that one cannot own an idea is nonsense in many cases. If not for the person who wrote a given book or came up with a certain idea, then that book or idea would simply not ever have existed.

I never made that claim, although I do beleive it to be true. Your assertion that an idea or work of art would never have come about if not for a particular person is true in some cases but not in all. Many ideas, and discoveries have come from more then one source at the same time, although I will agree that art generally is a creative work of the artist and not something that more than one person would have come up with. I don't beleive that ideas can be owned. I do believe that the person that originates an idea that benifits society should for a limited time have rights to that idea. However the key here is limited time. Nothing should be kept from public domain for the lifetime of the artist plus 20 years.

Artists should be able to make a living off of their work. However any artist that is more interested in money then art is not an artist. Maybe a craftsman, for in my mind what seperates an artist from a craftsman is the objective of their work. An artist works for the sake of art a craftsman works for money. That does not mean that a craftsman has any less pride in the creation just that the goals are different.

Re:Threats to liberty

[|deity|]

I agree. Anytime you have politicians spending millions of dollars to get a job that pays a few hundred thousand dollars something is wrong. Money is what drives american politics and corporations supply that money. When a politician knows that with enough money he/she can get votes, why should that politician then feel a responciblity to the voters rather than the people who supplied the money.

We now have a nation by the corporations for the corporations, with no easy way to take it back. Before somebody comes up and says this is a democracy you can vote. I want to say sure I can vote but the choices of who I can vote for have already been decided. How many times in the last hundred years have write in canidates been elected for a major office?

changes past and coming?

[scott@b]

Several of the points raised could be expanded upon. Copyright did have little meaning until mechanical reproduction of text came about. Before then each book would often be unique, with its own errors and embellishments. And very expensive in terms of labour.

But there was a second stage to this. In the 1800s the printng press took another step forward, and books got cheaper to make once again. At this point knockoff copies of books became common; if you read biographies of popular 19th Century writers you'll find that many of them were constantly complaining about and taking on unauthorised printings of their works. And during this time it became much cheaper to reproduce artwork as well.

In the mid-1900s the photo-offset press addded on more step to this process. For not too much of an outlay anyone could be a print shop for short runs. While this didn't hurt bookpublishers much, I suspect that it did cause a decline in the sales of music scores and plays - fairly pricy items that small performing groups needed only a few copies of.

Electronic methods have made it even cheaper to copy, and removed most barriers to the distribution of the copies (actual the distribution is the copying process). So now the original publishers are being hurt, and fight back.

This may be signalling another major change in the publishing business. Perhaps the creators - author, producers, performers - will begin to bypass the publishers, go straight to electronic distribution, and take their chances on how many people use the product without payment vs. paying for it. I've heard that King did alright on his recent electronic release, earning more than he would have with a sale to a standard print outlet even with the amount of pirating that went on.

Cheap copies are a big part of historical changes in obscenity laws, too. The authorities were not very worried about porn so long as it remained limited in its distribution, the expense of making copies kept it in the hands of the wealthy. Cheap printing and cheap image reproduction allowed the masses access to these materials, and lead to a large increase in laws attempting to control it.

Porn also drove the cost reduction of many technologies. The printing press was quickly used to print such. The small businesses turning out naughty photos in the later 1800s help boost sales of photographic equipment and bring the prices down. As for VCRs, need we speak?

The same is holding true with the Net. So long as the dirty pictures were being passed about by some members of a small handfull of taxpayer subsidized egghead weirdoes then the government wasn't really worried. But let just anyone at it, and it's a hot issue.

Note that the cost of producing material things has come down over the same time period, jsut not so dramatically. Check how someone in the 13th and 16th centuries would think about buying a dozen drinking glasses/mugs, and then what it cost today. But manufacturing of material objects is still not as low cost as the copying of ideas, people will still pay for real matter implementations of someting.

These changes are much of what is driving the economy to the service side - currently there's no easy way to replace a person doing something for you. Good scifi robots could change part of that, but creative services would still be in demand. In the langer term these trends may lead to more creators looking at their work as the orginal creation of something, for which they receive compensation, and not the ownership of the creation itself.

Boundaries

[True ChAoS]

Its important that we set the boundaries (or lack of) now. In france, the government is trying to make Yahoo! France ban sites from appearing on the search lists if they contain rascist material. They dont seem to understand that things like that usually appear only if you look for them and that it is virtually impossible to stop. As far as the internet and breaching geographical boundaries go, the genie is out of the bottle, and I dont think france has the power on its own to put it back... ChAoS "A truth thats told with cruel intent beats any lie you might invent"

Re:Boundaries

[Kaa]

the genie is out of the bottle, and I dont think france has the power on its own to put it back...

Doesn't mean it's not going to try, though.

A misguided government of a large and fairly rich country can do an incredible amount of damage during the time it takes it to realize that its goals are unachievable.

Kaa

nothing to our names, eh?

[Alien Perspective]

When I finished my doctoral dissertation (some 13 years ago), one of the things you have to do as part of the "finishing up" paperwork is to fill out a form for University Microfilms...they're the service that archives dissertations in the US.

One of the checkboxes was:

• Do you want to copyright the dissertation?

I checked NO.

A couple of hundred pages, myriad graphs, eight years of intense work. (And no, it wasn't something wimpy like comp-sci).

So yes, some of us have put our (work, if not money) where our mouths are.

Have you open-sourced some code today?

Inverted

[Golias]

"The Internet and its distinctive architecture have created a freer culture than we have ever had before"

It seems to me that it would be much more accurate to say:

A freer culture than we ever had before has created the Internet and its distinctive architecture.

When the Internet was still the exclusive playground of universities and government, the "culture" you are talking about was dialing in to stand-alone private BBS systems.

If the Internet ever becomes less usefull to hackers and geeks, we will simply go elsewhere (along the lines of the "Walled City" in William Gibson's "Idoru"). Have no fear: If "the spine" was taken down tomorrow, and replaced with Al Gore's pirate-free, carefully monitored, kid-friendly, politically correct "information super highway" we would have our own replacement up and running within the year, paid for with our "day jobs" supporting the corporate net.

What it comes down to is that the Internet needs geeks to function, not the other way around.

The future of the internet

[Paul Townend]

No matter what anyone writes, no one really knows what the internet will be like in future; when I see postings like this, I always think back to the Year 2000 problem. There were warnings of disaster from respected software engineerings and analysts, and yet when rollover occured, very little happened - at least in life critical systems. It's certainly true that the internet is becoming increasingly policed; what's more interesting is what effect increasingly higher bandwidths will have on this. At the moment, piracy is limited to applications of maybe a few hundered megabytes, but what happens when we all have DSL or whatever? I can imagine being able to download the latest movies within days of their release, and in some cases maybe before they are released. Multi-CD software will be available to download, as will hours of porn footage. When the impact of this *really* hits the corporate and consumer consciousness then we're going to see a *lot* more regulation coming into play. At the moment it seems that most advocates of internet privacy just want to stop people from downloading a couple of MP3s - what are they going to say when people are able to download entire discographys, or movies like Titanic?
Well, just my $.02 worth.

exactly

[wobblie]

I'd only like to add that it does matter that the war on drugs is unwinnable; this makes it extremely convenient for those waging it - they can funnel as little or as much money into it as they like, because the result is always the same: failure. Which is better from the perspective of the State, the "War to end all wars" or an "endless war"?

--

New BIBLE patent applied for at USPTO!

[Nicolas MONNET]

• An apparatus for trolling by extracting randomly selected quotes from the bible. An apparatus comprising a computer system and a computer program determining a semi-random number.
• An apparatus for generating human sounding text. The device consist of a computer network of apparati comprising a keyboard linked to a Central Processing Unit and an Input Processor.
• The Input Processor comprises a mammal device referred to as Main Operating Network Knowledgeable Expert Yoddler (M.O.N.K.E.Y.) which automatically types semi-randomized character sequences, as described in US PATENT #69666.
• An apparatus for connecting to "community" bulletin board system ("The Website") through the means of the Inter-Net system.

Jon, corporations are not the danger

[Julian Morrison]

Corporations have no intrinsic power to harm freedom; the power the bad ones wield is government power directed and applied through the legal system.

Forget corporations, stop bashing them, they are a distraction from the real problem which is the fact that the laws themselves do not respect rights.

- Porn laws and piracy laws ignore the right to free speech and thought.

- Decency laws, euthanasia laws and forced self-safety laws ignore the right of self ownership.

- Zoning rules, antitrust, workplace regulations and most taxes or tariffs ignore the right of private property.

- And so on.

A Fundamental Flaw In This Story

[ZaMoose]

Katz seems to be under the impression that the 'net exists separately from the real world. The infrastructure that he expounds upon is very much "real world". Try as we might, we cannot simply turn all of the fiber, all of the routers, all of the servers, etc. into virtual objects. They still exist in physical space and so are still very much subject to physical actions.

We are not dealing with a closed system here, which Katz seems to assume. The 'net could (however unlikely) be ruled completetly illegal by, say, the US gov't and then what? The access we all hold so dear would vanish overnight. The backbone providers could be forced to shut down, thus killing the access for all. What good would "virtual" freedom do us if the police could simply bust down the door of any service provider and pull plugs from the wall?

I heartily agree that a new form of freedom is at work in the Internet. Right or wrong, millions of people have begun to take it for granted, this newfound freedom. We must always remember, however, that while we "exist" on line and have certain freedoms therein, there are still physical ties that can easily be cut by any government brazen enough.

-------------

Gutenberg's eternal struggle

[Remus Shepherd]

When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week.

No, you couldn't. Because the government wouldn't let you.

Soon after Gutenberg pressed the first book (it was the Bible), governments sought a firm control on the written word. Where a monarchy didn't exist to firmly control printing presses, guilds sprang up to limit the ability to publish to a chosen few. They knew how much power freedom of information had. In a few decades, protestants -- who now had bibles they could read -- rebelled against catholic power and new nations were created. All because the common man now had the ability to print books.

When the industrial revolution came around, steam and electrical power gave everybody the ability to run a printing press. Small publishers sprang up and started printing inexpensive books for the masses. But the big publishers, out of greed, lobbied the government to pass laws limiting reprints of anything but very old texts. Thus the copyright law we have today.

Now, with the internet, we're at a third plateau of publishing possibilities for the common man. And it's time we decided how much free speech we really want. If we really believe speech should be free, then copyright law has to be changed or erased, and a lot of big businesses are going down. The only other option is to accept less-than-free speech. Will the populace allow that? Time will tell.

But don't tell me that it is natural for information to be considered protected property, because it isn't. IP is an unnatural phenomenon that was created by business owners in the past few hundreds of years. It's a legal construct, and like all legal constructs it is subject to review and change. Hopefully we'll begin to look at what is best for humanity, and not what is best for any one person's pockets.

--

This post is a rehash of opinions from people better than I. Particularly one column at 2k journal.
And finally, an example of speech that is truly humanitarian and free: Project Gutenberg.

the copying vs copyright clause

[kootch]

"Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned. "

I think this is going just a bit too far. As the technology progresses, so does the ability to copy. When you had people carving books in stone, it took just as many hours to copy as it did to create the original... but then again, you could always have just done a rubbing to make a copy. When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week. The ability to copy has always been hand in hand with the ability to create. Now that it takes 30 seconds to print a cd, it takes just as long to make a copy of it.

This doesn't mean that the IP is worth less. And it doesn't mean the the owner of the IP should just give up protecting their property. And it doesn't mean that the whole system is flawed. It means that if you believe that your property is being taken away from you, you have to fight harder to protect it.

yes, there are bogus patents out there, and protective patents (patenting just to make sure somebody else doesn't and use it against you). But if you've noticed, the bogus patents aren't standing up in court due to the judge's becoming a bit more enlightened when it comes to technology. Thusly, in filing the patent, you need to be prepared to protect your property. If not, sell it to someone that is prepared to do this.

But nothing's really changed in this area, it's just gotten a bit more over-reactive, over-protective, and overly-hyped.

If it's your property, and you feel strongly in that being your property, then you need to protect it. There is nothing really wrong with the system, it has enough checks and balances built in that nobody really gets away with pulling a fast one. I could provide tons of examples of this if required. The system is intact, so stop hyping how bad it needs to be destroyed.

Re:Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[|deity|]

Here's the problem. Copyrights are fine if the artist is the one that benifits. When publishing companies rape the public and the artist by overcharging for a work and only allowing one form of distabution, that's when the balance changes. Do you feel that you should have the rights to that book for twenty years after your death? Copyrights are fine if they are for a limited time and if they are not transferable by the author. If the author of a book always owned the copyright then he could license the book to publishers for the best deal.

At the moment the publishers have all the power. They decide when a book will be published. What information will be published and what price they will charge the public.

Copyright is not a natural right while freespeech is we need to recognize that fact and move on.

Threats to liberty

[B'Trey]

Traditionally, the libertarian is concerned about reducing the power of government. But threats to liberty change: in our time, they increasingly arise from corporate, not governmental power. And there is no mainstream political movement primarily concerned with that, in part because corporatism has acquired much of the press and now provides the primary funding for the political system.

The primary threat to freedom is still governmental power. The problem is that governmental power is increasingly controlled and directed by corporate interests. The DMCA and its kin benefit and are driven by corporate interests, but they are still laws. They are backed by the threat of governmental force. Until such time as corporations begin fielding their own armies, government remains the primary threat.

Napster is NOT theft, and I can prove it.

[pestie]

Napster is not theft, and I can prove it.

Okay, maybe I can't exactly prove it, but I have can make a rational argument for it, and that's more than most people involved in this debate can seem to do.

Theft involves taking something that belongs to someone else. The common argument in the case of Napster is that Napster users are "stealing" from record companies and artists, and that the alleged theft takes place in the form of lost sales. The underlying assumption is that the Napster user would have purchased the music had they not been able to download it for free. In many cases this simply isn't true. Most people I know aren't willing to buy a CD for $12-$15 just because they hear a single song they like. If you, the Napster user, want to be 100% sure that you can never rightly be called a thief, make a solemn vow to yourself right now that you will never again buy a CD, and stick to it. There - your actions are no longer the source of any "lost sales." After all, you wouldn't have bought the CD's anyway.

What Napster users are doing is called "unauthorized use," not "theft" or "stealing." Some would argue that unauthorized use is just as wrong, but that's another argument for another time. In any case, I suspect most people would agree that unauthorized use in this context is a lesser offense than stealing.

Another popular (and wrong) argument is that Napster users drive up the prices of CD's, or at least keep them at their current, excessively-high levels. This also is crap. CD's aren't getting more expensive; they've hovered around their current price point for years. Let's suppose, however, that Napster really is costing the music industry huge amounts of money, and let's also assume that Napster disappears overnight and all those "lost sales" suddenly aren't there to drive up the price of CD's any more. Are CD's going to get cheaper? No way - no way in hell. The prices will never come down - the only difference will be that the record companies stocks all surge due to a sudden increase in profits. Rest assured, consumers will continue to pay the same high prices they always have.

Only one thing forces down prices - competition. There is no competition in the music industry. Sure, there are multiple record companies, but artists sign with one company only, which then has a monopoly on that artist. People don't buy CD's because they want to own shiny, round pieces of plastic; they buy them because they contain music by the artists they like. It's not like a drop in Metallica CD prices is going to force down the cost of Britney Spears CD's. For competition to exist, artists would have to be able to sign with multiple record companies and let those companies duke it out in the marketplace. There's almost no chance that'll ever happen - unless, of course, something comes along that fundamentally changes the nature of the music industry. I'm not saying that Napster is that "something," but it's obviously having some real impact on the music industry, and sooner or later either Napster or something like it is going to force some major changes in the way the music industry operates.

So, does this mean intellectual property has ceased to have value? Er... no - not even close. I don't know what the ultimate impact of Napster-like technologies will be or what will change in the music industry (or any other industry based primarily on intellectual property). All I know is this: the companies who acknowledge that this technology isn't going to go away and who change their business models to take advantage of it are going to be the ones that turn a profit. The sooner a business realizes this and takes action, the sooner they'll have that ever-so-elusive "edge" over their competitors.

Freedom is a Hot Topic

[cajun603]

Man this topic is a hot potato...

Some of y'all can rant about it being Katz just self-aggrandizing, but look at mainstream media. Why is any story POSTed? To be read! Ulterior motives vary, but I think mainly people write these stories because they feel the issue is important enough to publish their opinion on the subject, and they realize that while many will disagree, at least it should stimulate the public discussion that could lead to a good solution to any "problem" with the issue.

In the specific case of the "freedom" on the Internet, we are certainly facing a problem and many attacks from gov'ts and corp's who fear the implications of unrestricted information flow.

Existing "meatspace" laws only come up short because of the current difficulty inherent in enforcing them when the medium used to violate them is as distributed, twisted and mutable as the Internet's vast web of connections. The ultimate control point, of course, would be the major Telcos. They own the wires, fibers, etc, that the Internet's information exchanges travel on. Fortunately, the gov't hasn't decided to attack that point yet, probably because it would still be extraordinarily difficult to efficiently block and trace back "prohibited" packets, especially if they are encrypted.

We educated users of the Internet care about this because we use the 'net almost every day, and have come to rely upon it for much of our information gathering and sharing. It is also an important medium for disseminating ones opinions to a very large possible audience. As such, it is of course an important tool for Free Speech.

It comes back down to the existing laws and the country that spawned them, however. The Internet does have physical components, and the access points to it have physical locations, as do the users. Said physical locations are bound by the laws in that location. In countries where Speech is (mostly) Protected, like here in the US, we can expect that there will be little if any direct control over the "data conduits" and their connections to sites outside of the US. (I'm leaving IP law aside for the moment...) In countries where Speech does not have similar Protection, we can expect that there will at least be a vigorous attempt to control the "data conduits" in a similar fashion to other media. As another poster mentioned, a gov't can do considerable damage before it realises that it's goals are unattainable. However, they will not be resisted overmuch as long as the public that supported the creation of the laws still supports their enforcement. That this is difficult is not an issue to the majority, witness the current War On Drugs in the US...

Corporations are an "enemy" in this issue because they desire to protect their profits. That is their sole function, to create and protect their sources of profit. At least this is the case under current Capitolistic economic systems. If they see a threat to their profits, they will do everything in their power to neutralize that threat. This includes using their economic power to lobby for the passage and/or enforcement of laws against the rest of the public. Whether this is right or wrong is up to the individuals involved to decide, but until there is enough popular support for a change in the current model nothing significant will happen.

Perhaps the best way to ensure the continued expansion of communication and ease of information sharing would be to maximise the number of people who have access to the Internet. If everyone was on the Internet and came to value it as a vital tool for sharing information, opinions, etc. about all topics, including dissenting political ideas, revolutionary ideas, etc. then any attempt to shut off this medium would lead to a huge public outcry against such an attempt.

As it is, we do not have the support of the majority, because the majority do not have Internet access and therefore only have the information about it supplied by the predominant media forms of newspapers, radio, television and schools. And those of us who know realize that such sources are far from being unbiased, especially to those who have to work so hard to make ends meet they don't have time for anything more than the TV news soundbites they catch on the TV during meals and/or the radio soundbites they hear. Until we get the masses online, we will not have their support, and they will continue to base their opinions on the opinions of the popular media.

This is why it is so important to fight "filtering systems" in schools, libraries, and other public access locations, or at least to stimulate vigorous wide-scale public discussion about it, in order to get our point across that maximal access to information is VERY IMPORTANT to allow our children to develop into adults capable of dealing rationally with all sorts of information that they will be exposed to in their lives.

Perhaps an acceptable idea would be to get the schools to use Linux or Unix based operating systems and text-only browsers. Not only would they learn more about how the computers they use operate, but it should satisfy 95% of the parents who object to certain kinds of content on the Internet.

Of course, there are those who beleive that the role of parents and schools is to mold and socialize their kids to want to act the way we want them to, to want the same things we want, to value things the same way we do, etc. rather than teaching them how to decide such things for themselves...

If you want to preserve the access rights for "us techies", you needn't worry. It is relatively easy to get a "codeless technician class" Amateur Radio liscense, and for the motivated the higher class liscenses should be easy as well. Packet radio can and is done, and it is legal. Advances in error-detection and correction will need to be made because of the high amount of noise and the spurious contact quality from time to time. Simple encryption would defeat most attempts to "listen in". Basically a huge wireless LAN. One could also use various "line of sight" connection techniques, including lasers, microwaves, directional antennas, etc. For the truly paranoid, mobile "burst" transmitters. Transmission would be less instantaneous, but for mostly text-based information it could be very useful. Server in a van with a reciever and a transmitter. When the buffer is full, burst transmit. Coded-in callkeys to identify the intended reciever. All sorts of ideas, and all hard to track down. Especially the recievers.

You can be as free as you want to be, but TANSTAAFL...

Some copyright is good (heresy, heresy!)

[georgeha]

Some amount of copyright is good, it can give a financial incentive to creators.

In my case, I co-wrote a book last year. I spent a lot of time researching the subject, testing the subject and writing the book. I made a modest amount of money, enough to help pay for a downpayment on my house.

If someone were to take my book, cut off the binding, and duplicate it on a high speed duplicator (perhaps a Xerox brand duplicator) and resell, I would be irked. If this were common, I may not write another book.

If someone were to use my book as reference, along with the other books in the same field, and write a new book that improves on mine, I would flattered, they added some value.

Quick, someone dig up the link about what happened when copyright was removed after the French Revolution. IIRC, literature quickly devolved into pornography, there was no incentive to create lasting works.

In summation, copyright works with a creator's greed (and desire to provide for one's family), let's not be so quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

George

Re:Coherent....ramble..[ot] kinda

[Zebbers]

I agree totally...those who have little protect will not want or feel as strong a need to protect others...I think it's ridiculous how people try to justify piracy...get the fuck over it...I get 'pirated' mp3's and games and other software...I burn my friends copy of q3a...la-tee-da...*I* admit it's illegal and accept that fact...just like when I smoke marijuana...although I understand and actually support the reasons for antipiracy(though not the measures taken) and don't understand why I cant drink or eat or smoke or do whatever the hell I want to my own body. But thats another story...

Point is...although I, like others...use mp3s to find rare music or preview you it..do the same for games...or games Ill play once in a blue moon@lan parties and just want the cd to install it...and though I don't feel like a criminal..seeming how I do purchase games/cds/software etc,etc...from the very same people I "steal" from...I *ACCEPT* the fact I am commiting a crime. There is no justification. The next time you want to 'justify' piracy...just think of someone coming into your home and taking your belongings....cause that, though not exactly, is what it is--theft.

Yes, we need to protect copyright holders. No..we shouldn't give companies fucking 90 year copyrights...yes we should look out for artists, no we shouldnt go on witchhunts and hunt down the 'criminals' who d/l their mp3s...cause you know what, they are the same people who buy the album...

sorry bout that...Im just sick of all the justification