The Internet Backlash

An AC wrote to say that "telepolis has an article telling you why the DMCA and the companies who pushed it forward are doomed to fail. It's nothing new but a good summary of the neverending copyright discussion." The author's summary is good but I disagree with the conclusion -- there's no reason to believe that some deus ex machina is suddenly going to save net users from a police state.

Comments

Re:How's this work?

[ethereal]

If you are up to completely reverse-engineering authentication.riaa.com's protocols, then you're right, you won't have a problem. For the rest of us, who don't want to have to figure out DeCSS, SDMI, or whatever the control method of the year is on our own, that "little piece of paper" is what's preventing us from getting the appropriate access software from the people that have the brains to figure out how to write it. Not to mention the average user who just wants to read their ebook on another PC without having to wonder about finding the (possibly illegal) decryption software, installing it, etc.

Hypothetically, you're right, and there is no way to totally lock things down. In the real world of limited time, money, and encryption know-how, just a few bad laws are all it takes to separate most people from their fair use rights and even to deny them the knowledge that such rights exist.

Why the DMCA is Just The First Step

[cburley]

First, imagine there's a planet-full of people with little or no communication between smallish groups whose individuals, due primarily to being physically close to each other, interact in ways that might be called "primitive" by some future standard.

Second, imagine what happens when a new technology comes along that allows these groups to communicate with each other, not so much directly via voice, but communicate stuff like "I've got something I'm willing to part with, which someone else might want" and "I could sure use something I'm thinking about, does anyone know where I can find something like that".

Except, the big thing about this "new technology" is that this form of communication is primarily about abstracting these communications in a way that makes obstacles formerly difficult to surmount -- such as knowing lots of details about a local group before communicating with it -- nearly completely disappear.

And, this technology, while it supports "Peer-to-peer" communication, is most effective because it supports arbitrary many-to-many communications at this level.

That is, a person in group A doesn't have to know much of anything about a person in group B to communicate these kinds of statements, queries, requests, offers, etc., nor do those two people have to rendezvous to communicate, using this new technology, in a fashion that automatically excludes either of them from communicating with other people in other groups.

But, there's a problem. There are entities -- let's call them "interests" -- that depend, they believe anyway, on the difficulty of communication between groups in this manner. They believe they have to keep these groups effectively separate, so they can be the "intermediaries" through which these groups do most, ideally all, of their communication.

And these interests become very alarmed at the prospect of the groups of humans communicating so easily and openly, that they try to shut down the new technology.

But, guess what! The new technology almost automatically "routes around" any blatant roadblocks set up to restrict it, because if communication is shut down directly between group X and group Y, it'll naturally, with only a little extra effort, flow indirectly via other groups.

Even in cases where specific groups, or collections of groups, are "successfully" shut off from the outside world, this new technology allows people within the isolated groups to communicate effectively, even in "hiding" if necessary, enough so they yearn, more and more every day, for the opportunity to communicate freely with all those other groups out there, with whom they now communicate only sporadically and at great risk.

So, these "interests" inevitably try yet another tack.

For one thing, they try to convince enough people in each group that, somehow, people in their group who communicate the most, and gain the most from the communication, benefit unfairly from the new technology.

They also start setting up beauracracies to try to centralize, or channel, these communications, and encourage more and more people to consider any communications outside of these channels to be, somehow, immoral or unethical.

Oh, sure, at first these beauracracies are designed to "smooth the flow" of communications, to "enable" them for "newbies" who don't know the system all that well, so as to protect them from themselves, so to speak.

But, inevitably, these beauracracies do almost nothing but grow, and not by simply participating, like everyone else, as equals, in this communications system -- no, they have to use force to interfere with, and maybe "skim off of", communications that would ordinarily happen just fine without them. Only by reducing the natural flow of communications can they really grow the way their proponents dream they should.

And the irony is that they've convinced so many people of the necessity of this, that even people who haven't yet even begun to really use and understand this wonderful new technology are educated, or indoctrinated, to believe that it is, in fact, evil, or at least enables a great deal of evil, and that, in the long run, it should be shut down, by force if not voluntarily by its users, to return to a "simpler time", before the technology became available, or at least to a time when it wasn't so widely and effectively used by individual people as they saw fit.

After all, the beauracracy, by controlling communication, is able to emit a constant stream of "examples" of "horrible things" that happen when communication happens freely. They get better and better at focusing people's attention on those comparatively rare examples, successfully hiding the fact that the vast majority of uses of this new technology are benign, if not obviously beneficial to society as a whole, as well as the individuals engaging in them.

Yet, as anyone who pays attention knows, wherever the anti-technology interests succeed in "roping off" several groups for awhile, those "horrible things" happen so much more often. They don't publicize that, of course, and a whole cottage industry arises to defend, and mislead regarding, those roped-off areas, even after the ropes have been overrun by the people within them. These areas are, therefore, regarded by many as "safe" areas, potential utopias where the constant access to worldwide communication is reduced to a pleasant, nearly noiseless, trickle by the beneficent dictators who decide exactly who communicates with whom, when, and how.

Sure, these interests, in trying to achieve these results, occasionally overreach, provoking harsh reactions from a (usually small) segment of the overall population.

But, with rare exception, there are never enough people in any given group that truly see the threat these artificial impediments to this form of communication, imposed on behalf of the "interests", represents to the body of humanity as a whole.

The divide-and-conquer strategy thus appears to work, and work well. Over time, as more and more people begin to define their well-being based on how much they communicate with the beauracracy, rather than freely with other groups, people who might otherwise fight against the whole idea of such a beauracracy resort instead to fighting in favor of just this or that specific form of beauracratic interference with how this new technology would naturally work, so as to ensure that the beauracracy becomes more firmly entrenched between groups that would otherwise communicate freely, so people already depending (at least somewhat) on the beauracracy for their communications will have more to enjoy, safe in the knowledge that their friendly beauracracy provides them a "safe", "reliable" connection to the outside world.

For example, notions of "fairness" arise that, while simply and directly handled in an unfettered system, seem to require yet more beauracracy to balance things out. Instead of someone who spots such an unfairness simply offering their ability to communicate on behalf of the disadvantaged, they're encouraged to call on the beauracracy to explicitly disadvantage those who are seen as, comparatively, advantaged. The result is that the widespread urge to do good for one's neighbor in need is replaced by a widespread urge to call on the use of force to make someone else "do good" for that neighbor.

The only thing that could dismantle such a beauracracy is if a substantial number of citizens made it their goal to dispel not just with the beauracracy, but with the whole notion that it's ever necessary to intervene between two or more people communicating using this new technology.

But that's not likely to happen, because the "interests" ultimately end up controlling the media and educational establishments, making even openly discussing reducing the interference something that must be done in whispers.

Now, if you think I'm talking about the Internet/WWW as the "new technology", and the "interests" as corporate and governmental bodies using tactics like the DMCA, the CDA, and other things (like the French government banning certain materials on Yahoo), you're only partly right.

Because, in reality, I'm mostly describing a system of communication between humans that's nearly language-independent (it works well even between people who do not share the same spoken or written language), "agnostic" (it doesn't care about the race, religion, gender, or other attributes of the people involved in the communication), nearly instantaneous (information about each communication almost naturally communicates itself to everyone else using the same system, almost like being in a chat room), and, most interestingly of all, that's probably over 10,000 years old.

That system of communication?

It's called the "price system".

That's right, I'm talking about the free market, the "place" where two or more people can go, communicate effectively regarding their needs and wants to conduct a transaction, often without the need to know much of anything about each other, and communicate almost perfectly compressed information on the transaction to everyone else in the same market.

And who are the interests that oppose or seek to fetter this communication?

They're the people who brought you Collectivism, Communism, Socialism, Taxes, Levies, Fees, all the largely involuntary means by which communications via this system are either impinged upon or forced to occur.

And, just as decreasing the ability of people to freely exchange "data" on the Internet is easily seen by "geeks" as having an overall detrimental effect on the ability of society to function in an ideal way, these fetters on the free market have nearly the exact same effect on humanity, multiplied by several orders of magnitude or so.

For example, laws restricting naturally-free trade across international borders prevent important information from flowing between them -- information on inefficiencies on one side or the other -- just as laws restricting discussing security or performance flaws in software prevent information on those flaws from freely flowing.

In both cases, the Powers That Be, or that want to be anyway, claim there's insufficient need for such freely-flowing information, compared to the "damage" it'd do to one side or the other.

But, those of us who already understand the importance of a truly free market, and have confidence that it's the humanity of individual humans, not the individual wills of a comparatively small elite with a great deal of gunpower, that'll, in the long run, best guide humanity to the highest uses of these technologies, consider what's happening to the Internet today, including the DMCA, the encroachment of national borders on this supposedly "borderless" territory, as merely a modest replaying of the gradual neutering of a bit player (compared to the free market, anyway).

Sadly, even though the Internet is not necessary for the price system, or free market, to flourish, it is impossible for the Internet to truly flourish without the price system or free market. No government that infringes on the free market will ever permit a free Internet to flourish, because, in many important ways, they're the same thing, or just different manifestations of the same fundamental urge all humans have to communicate with each other in all sorts of ways regarding their needs, wants, hopes, desires, abilities, energy, and so on.

And, as long as our children are indoctrinated in the schools, via the media, and by our own laws to view the market as some sort of enemy to be constantly tamed by the use, or at least the threat, of force (aka government intervention), they'll inevitably, directly or indirectly, view the Internet in just the same way, especially once they "get over" the "newness" of it.

Those of us who've been "online" long enough already recognized the symptoms years ago, such as, people claiming the Internet isn't "fair" because not everyone has identical access, bandwidth, etc.

So, I don't see how DMCA can end up being anything but a short stop -- perhaps a temporarily-overreaching one -- on a long march towards the same degree of restrictions on free communication of "digital" data that we already have -- AND WITH A GREAT DEAL OF SUPPORT FROM THESE SUPPOSEDLY "BRILLIANT" INTERNET "GEEKS" -- imposed on the free market.

Oh, the new restrictions will have to be better-packaged than the DMCA and CDA, to be sure. And the Supreme Court and legislatures will have to be "taught", just as FDR taught them, to view the U.S. Constitution as requiring governmental intervention in Internet communication (a la the free market) instead of preventing it. (But this issue transcends the Constitution of one nation anyway, of course.)

So, you can complain about the DMCA all you want now, but just you wait.

In another 20-40 years, tax rates for most anybody working for a living in the "free market" will start at around 70%, the Internet as we know it will have been replaced by a network that allows "free" access for its citizens to communicate efficiently only with corporate and governmental sites (the former paying high taxes, perhaps in the form of bandwidth and content) and very limited, low-bandwidth access to truly free intercommunication between arbitrary people...

...and anytime you complain about the situation, you'll be told, in no uncertain terms, how "extreme" you are, how you want everything back the way it was in the "bad old days", back when only the super-rich had decent bandwidth, and how, without the new government programs doling out access, a vast sea of people (who you might find to be contributing little anyway) might actually be -- gasp! -- unconnected from the Social Network (or the People's Network or whatever it'll be called to make the bill sound unopposable in Congress, a la "Campaign Finance Reform").

In summary: if you want to fight infringements on your freedoms, it's about time you figured out that it's your freedom to communicate, including discussing and exchanging price information (of which an actual monetary exchange for goods and services is a crucial component), that's the basis for most practical aspects of all the other freedoms you do seem to care about right now.

But as long as you take up the banner against the free exchange of price information, as so many of you "geeks" do, your efforts to repeal things like the DMCA will be nothing more than temporary successes for the benefit of a limited audience that'll, sooner or later, look to even more governmental limitations on freedoms formerly enjoyed widely by users of the Internet.