Slashdot Mirror
Lessig's "Creative Commons" @ The FAA
tramm writes "The
FAA, working with the
EAA have put together
a proposal to release old type certificates and blueprints once the copyright holders no longer exist. Sort of like
Abandonware
for
airplanes.
This very closely resembles
Lawrence Lessig's idea of a
creative commons, into which source code would be escrowed. Once the copyright expired or became abandonded, the sources would be released.
"This set of legal guidelines will help the FAA develop a set of
procedures to legally release what had previously been unnecessarily
protected as proprietary data.".
Hopefully the Copyright office will take note of the success here, as well as the Supreme Court's hearing of
Eldred v Reno."
Instead of killing $lashdot, I killed all the other trolls.
Therefore the library is going OFFLINE indefinately.
Now get back to doing you JOB, trolling, you lazy bastards.
Troll 139 of 140 from the annals of the Troll Library .
SLASHWIFE
News for negroes. Stuff for darkies.
WATERMELON UNDER THE GPL
POPEYES SELLING CUSTOMER DATA
BREW YOUR OWN 40s OR STEAL THEM
PORCH SITTING PIONEER DEAD AT 54
BOOK REVIEW: READ? FUCK DAT!
ASK SLASHWIFE: GOOD CRACK FOR CHEAP?
YOUR RIGHTS ON WELFARE: BUYING SMOKES WITH FOODSTAMPS
DNA TESTING NARROWS THE FATHER DOWN TO 1 IN 150
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
Feline Poop!
Allahu akhbar! September 11 was just the beginning.
I have a small penis.
the answer lies in goat
in my ass
So... does this mean that Windows source code will be available to the general public by, say, January 2542?
Doesn't the Bono act make this a moot point? Exactly when are these copyrights ever going to expire?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Sounds like a good idea to me, sorta like software companies that put their source code into escrow so that if they go under, their customers can legally obtain it.
Too bad there's not already a way to show that intellectual property has been abandoned. This would be a great method to be able to re-publish old books, movies, and Atari 2600 games.
I'd love to see acutual engineering documents and code for stuff like the Saturn V, the lunar module and the ground control computers
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
The GPL is based on Copyleft, which is just an construct on top of copyright law. When the copyright on GPL'd software expires, does the software fall into the public domain?
If copyrights are to be shortened to, say, 7 years, does GPL'd code then become public domain after those seven years?
It's a point worth pondering.
if something like this has any benefit for the tech sector. Or does tech move so fast that by the time the stuff is in Public Domain ... it is so obsolete?
I've always wanted to know how to build my own
P-47! Woo-hoo! Now all I need is a couple hundred thousand dollars. Hmmm...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
What a totally gay last name. Is he a lesbian? Or a fag?
Just so people don't get confused about what this will achieve: It will only help vintage aircraft oweners. Most of the old vintage aircraft have no manuals (IPCs etc); and the repairs would generally be applied through FAA approved engineers. Most, if not all newer aircraft will not be affected by this. I do not think that the FAA will let any one build an aircraft using these blueprints because the certification nw is totally different than earlier last century. They may however be built as experimental aircraft. That is where I think te EAA comes in.
While it may be perfectly sensible in this case (hey, aircraft and software are very different), I think a LOT of people would be nervous if their source code was automatically made available once their 'copyright' was over, this is a MUCH more serious step than just loosing your copyright.
if you loose a copyright, people can copy the program, but still need to reverse-engineer the source if they want to know your implementation.
of course, I'm totally supportive of fully open source, but we should remember that copyright is peoples right if they decide to go that way, and we should not assume that when this lapses we have the right to ALL of their work, they just loose that particular bit of protection.
there is a world of difference between copyright on a particular implementation, and the massivly 'general' patents currently being handed out in the US over quite obvious software techniques, the second are much more... stuipd, dangerous, ridiculous, etc, etc.... however copright is a MUCH simpler concent, so long as it's length is kept reasonable, and it's extent is limited.
of course, in the case of the copyright holder 'ceasing to exist' the case becomes much more hazy.. since ther is noone to defent the copyright, I guess all bets are off, but should their 'source code' (or exact plans/designs) be automatically made public? and who do we trust to hold these? hmmm... I personally think that would be excessive.
This is a great idea, but what about security? This information could easily be used by a terrorist in a hijacking or something similar to what happened on September 11th. Can we afford to allow this info into the public domain?
Perhaps this issue has already been dealt with, but I hope they are considering it, or there may be another September 11th as a result.
Current "serious" (i.e., whore) posts: 10
Current trolls: 14
Go speed racer, go!
Ayn Rand and the perversion of libertarianism
The political controversy of the late 19th century was: whether
socialists (all those who believed in the individual's right to
possess what he or she produced) should engage in the political
process, seize control of the state, and use the state apparatus
to achieve liberation; or, whether a worker's state was inher-
ently contradictory, counter revolutionary, and would only lead
to the creation of a new ruling class whose interests would still
clash with those of the ruled that the state should be abolished
allowing for no transitional stage of any kind during which power
may have the chance to reconsolidate itself.
The situation has recreated itself with amazing similarity
almost exactly a century later.
Non-libertarian parties the world over (those who see authori-
tarian centralization the bulwark of civilization) are bankrupt,
economically and intellectually. The only viable intellectual
current today falls under that ambiguous term~ `libertarian'.
Today there exist beneath this umbrella as many splinter groups
as there were a hundred years ago under the umbrella of social-
ism. Two distinct trends, a right and a left if you will, are
clearly discernible.
One group, clearly the largest with a hierarchical organization
modeled on the other political parties, believes, like most
Marxists, in constitutional parliamentary republican democracy.
They believe that the state is a necessary guarantor of indi-
vidual safety and the product of the individual's labor, and in
gradual progress toward a free society through participation in
the political process.
The other group, much smaller and far more splintered, reject
the state as necessarily a tool of class domination and exploita-
tion.
This group believes that what Bakunin said a hundred years ago
is as true today, ``If you took the most ardent revolutionary,
vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse
than the Czar himself.''
The first group is in all fairness a direct inheritor of the
ideals of the American Revolution. In modern times, however, it
has only two roots: (1) the Austrian school of economics repre-
sented by Ludwig Von Mises; (2) the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Von Mises never considered the libertarians. He answered the
Marxists and the Keynesians and defended laissez-faire capitalism
at a time when no one else would. His justification for capital-
ism was empirical~the greatest good for the greatest number.
Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of
capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism' for the liber-
tarian meaning of the word `socialism'. She then attributed all
of the ills of capitalism to government interference with the
market and all of the world's wealth to the minds of the men whom
the world considered the robber barons.
The contrast between Ayn Rand's `Objectivism' and libertarian-
ism is deeper than mere substitution of terminology, however.
Several of her propositions or axioms place her clearly outside
of the libertarian tradition.
Her justification of the state is derived from a Hobbesian
state of nature theory:
``...a society without an organized government would be at the
mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipi-
tate it into chaos and gang warfare....'' [The Virtue of Selfish-
ness, 152; pb 112]
``If a society provided no organized protection against force,
it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home
into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door~or
to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other
gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the
degeneration of society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule
by brute force, into perpetual warfare of prehistoric savages.''
[Ibid., 146; pb 108]
Ayn Rand's belief in the inherent depravity of human nature
which renders us forever incapable of living without rulers and
not descending to the level of `savages', clearly places her out-
side of the libertarian tradition which views human nature as es-
sentially good, capable of indefinite improvement through the
experience of freedom and the exercise of reason.
Her knowledge of anthropology is as embarrassing as her under-
standing of history. For example, in regards to her conception of
who are the savages, she describes America as, ``...a superlative
material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness,
against the resistance of savage tribes.'' [For The New Intellec-
tual, 58; pb 50]
To Rand, the essential characteristic of the state is that it
possesses a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. How does
she justify this monopoly or national sovereignty? She accepts it
as a given, something not requiring a justification, and demands
that an-archy, the negation of the proposition, justify itself.
Her concept of national sovereignty is then something tran-
scendental, existing separate and apart from individuals. and
beyond the right of the individual to accept or reject according
to his or her own reason.
These propositions clearly place Ayn Rand's philosophy closer
to Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx, than to libertarianism.
The state, according to Miss Rand, must hold a monopoly on the
enforcement of contracts and the settling of disputes between
individuals, at least whenever this arbitration is not accepted
by both sides voluntarily. She fails to consider that the en-
forcement of contracts by the state fundamentally alters the
nature of free agreements. Agreements are made on terms which
otherwise might not be, because they are justiciable.
The terms of ``free agreements'' under law are titled in favor
of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over
employees, in a way which would not exist in a ``free market.''
This leveraging of power is not `objective' at all. Depending
purely on legal convention, creditors may have debtors impris-
oned, tenants may be evicted without notice and their effects
confiscated, one human being may own another or the land on which
another lives and works, all to varying degrees.
To understand Ayn Rand's psychology it is helpful to know her
background. She was born to a wealthy St. Petersburg family in
1905. The position of her family in Czarist society must have
been considerable. At a time when the lives of most Russians had
changed little since feudalism, her family was wealthy enough to
afford a French Governess and take regular vacations to the Cri-
mea.
It should be noted that wealth in Czarist society was almost
wholly a measure of one's favor with the government. There were
few if any Horatio Alger stories about individuals who lifted
themselves out of serfdom without the patronage of the Czar.
At the age of twelve, she must have been very upset when those
nasty workers took over her father's business. Her family fled
St. Petersburg for the Crimea and the protection of the White
Army.
This experience rendered her forever incapable of seeing land
reform or any struggle of oppressed and exploited people as
anything more than hatred for the good and lust for the unearned.
She shared with Marx the bourgeois ideology that only a few
people were capable of running things. The masses ought to be
happy to have a job working for bosses. Any suggestion that an
enterprise could be run by the employees without having someone
in charge was to her absurd.
She shared with Godwin and Kropotkin the belief that the indi-
vidual is born tabula rasa~a blank slate, and all human knowledge
is derived from sense experience. She then proceeded, however, to
completely dismiss environment and socialization as the determin-
ing factor in the development of character.
People were to her good or evil, brilliant or indolent, depend-
ing solely on their volition. People should be judged by their
actions with equal severity regardless of their condition. Though
she insisted that the United States was not and never had been a
completely free country, she granted no such thing as extenuating
circumstances when judging an individual and had no qualms up-
holding the power of the state to inflict capital punishment.
A far more sinister legacy of Ayn Rand to libertarianism is
that of a moralizing autocrat who gathered about her an inner
circle which she ironically called, ``The collective.''
Outwardly, this collective professed egoism and individuality.
They were to be the vanguard of an intellectual renaissance. The
price of admission to this group, however, was slavish conformity
of one's life and professed philosophy to Ayn Rand's whims and
eccentricities. For example, she did not like men who wore facial
hair or listened to Mozart, and if you didn't give them up you
were unfit for Rand's inner circle.
This is particularly sinister if one considers that Karl Marx,
believed by millions to be the very symbol of liberation, was
also an autocrat who, though professed to be the ultimate champi-
on of democracy, resorted to extraordinary means to maintain
control of the International Workingmen's Association. He even
moved its headquarters to New York to exclude the libertarian
influence.
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is
the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization
existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members
must sign is taken directly from her admonition, ``I hereby
certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of
force as a means of achieving political or social goals.''
In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are
frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument
which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they
were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommo-
date them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Ayn Rand's writings are not entirely consistent on the point of
non-violence either. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark resorts to
the use of dynamite. In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold
engages in piracy on the high seas and even shells a factory
which has been nationalized. In a clandestine rescue mission,
Dagny Taggart shoots a guard who stood in the way of her desired
end.
In the event of economic upheaval, ruined by unemployment and
inflation, tenants and home owners may refuse to make rent and
mortgage payments. The unemployed may seize vacant land and begin
to farm, and factory workers may realize they can run things
without stock holders.
It would not be at all surprising if there were to emerge
within the libertarian right, groups committed to direct action
and counter revolutionary violence, even a coup d'etat.
Imagine a charismatic and autocratic personality at the center
of such a group and you have the Objectivist Lenin.
Like the Marxists and right libertarians, Lenin and the Objec-
tivists are professed republican democrats. Lenin and the Bolshe-
viks promised that if given power, they would immediately convoke
a constituent assembly. When they realized, however, they would
not hold a majority in such an assembly they turned against the
idea of such an assembly.
Can anyone doubt that the cultist mentality which characterizes
most of Miss Rand's followers could lead to the creation of a
group of self appointed avengers of the capitalist class? That
they would suppress strikes, demonstrations, and factory take
overs? That they would not execute people for crimes against the
libertarian state?
Ayn Rand believed in a republican form of government with a
cleverly constructed constitution which would deny the majority
of the power to infringe on the rights of a minority as she
conceived them. If the majority supported a general strike
against rents and mortgages and supported the factory takeovers,
would not the clandestinely organized Objectivist libertarian
party be tempted to dispense with democracy in order to enforce
what they conceived of as the rights of the dispossessed bour-
geoisie?
In all fairness it must be admitted that Ayn Rand herself would
never sanction such actions, but the same argument is made
everyday by western Marxists that Marx would probably not have
sanctioned many of Lenin's actions and would certainly not take
credit for the Soviet Union.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks won power by promising, ``Land to the
peasants!'' ``Factories to the workers!'' When they took power,
however, they immediately set about liquidating the factory com-
mittees and nationalizing the land. They crushed work place
democracy by installing armed guards in the factories, and even
returned former owners to their positions as employees of the
worker's state.
Leon Trotsky stopped the practice of soldiers electing their
officers from their ranks and even restored former Czarist
officers to their ranks in the Red Army.
When the Russian Revolution began few people clearly understood
the gulf which separated the state socialists from the libertari-
ans. Many dedicated libertarians like Alexander Berkman, rallied
to the Bolshevik cause, willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt in hopes that seizing state power would only be a transi-
tional stage toward the development of the stateless/classless
society.
Many sincere lovers of liberty now flock to the standard of the
Libertarian Party, as they did the Bolsheviks, completely igno-
rant of the history of the last century. As Santayanna said:
``Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat
them.''
What should be done? It should be obvious that government
enforcement of private contracts is not libertarian any more than
is taking state power to set people free. Libertarianism is and
always will mean socialism~the self emancipation of working
people.
Libertarians must stop courting the Republican right and return
to their intellectual roots. By standing outside of the political
process we deny the state legitimacy, and like the state tortur-
ers in Atlas Shrugged, they will come and beg for libertarians to
take over.
Remembering the experience of the Spanish libertarians, and
heeding the advice of John Galt, libertarians must refuse state
power even when begged. The state can never be a tool of libera-
tion. Only its complete and utter collapse will allow for the
emergence of non-statist institutions, libertarian coops, com-
munes, and free markets, to flourish and displace the political
state once and for all.
I am into the copy and paste.
it's not quite engineering blueprints, but Nasa's Mission Reports are pretty close for a single book. Detailed overview of the operation of the vehicles with lots of nice drawings detailing the nuts and bolts. So if you're curious about turbopumps or how you ignite a Saturn V rocket engine you'll like these books. They also generally include the crew debriefing where they talk about most of the interesting glitches in the mission...
And this is related to the tech sector how? I can optimize my server cluster by using plans for a Grumman fighter? There is plenty of real news out there form the tech sector, how about some of that for a change?
check out http://www.openchannelsoftware.com/ /. some time ago). As far as I remember, it started when NASA decided to give some of its code to Open Source community.
:)
(it was mentioned on
Stuff like "An Advanced Engineering Model for the Prediction of Airframe Integrated Scramjet Cycle Performance". It's a pity I do not have too much time anymore to study all the programs available there...
And, of course, we all know that Beowulf started in NASA/JPL when Don worked there...
Paul B.
He should have said 'you are' when addresssing the keeper of the Troll Library, the honorable RoboTroll. 'You're' is informal and not appropriate for a coward to address others with. That disrespectful asshole!
I am into the copy and paste.
... will one of the moderators PLEASE look into the story queue and make a decision on the Lessig feature I submitted on 2002-01-08 15:54:26?
I'm sure this will get an off-topic but its driving me crazy whenever I log in to see that
'pending (1)' still there.
I'm afraid it'll be hopelessly illegal unless they amend the copyright law.
This is a damn good idea. Lots of planes are flying long after their original designer and manufacturer are defunct, and anything that helps that is a good thing. People may even take this occasion to bring well loved classic aircraft back into production.
However, I would like to take this occasion to point out one very worthwhile extension of copyright. J.M.Barrie, creator of "Peter Pan" bequeathed his royalties to the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. When the copyright was due to expire in 1989, a special case was made in UK courts that the copyright be held in perpetuity by the hospital.
Now that's a good copyright extension. It helps people.
"Information wants to be paid"
HOW TO POOP AT WORK
We've all been there but don't like to admit it. We've all kicked back in our cubicles and suddenly felt something brew down below. As much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the WORK POOP is inevitable. For those who hate pooping at work, following is the 2001 Survival Guide for taking a dump at work. Memorize these definitions and pooping at work will become a pure pleasure.
ESCAPEE.
Definition: a fart that slips out while taking a leak at the urinal or forcing a poop in a stall. This is usually accompanied by a sudden wave of panic embarrassment. This is similar to the hot flash you receive when passing an unseen police car and speeding. If you release an escapee, do not acknowledge it. Pretend it did not happen. If you are standing next to the farter in the urinal, pretend you did not hear it. No one likes an escapee, it is uncomfortable for all involved. Making a joke or laughing makes both parties feel uneasy.
JAILBREAK (Used in conjunction with ESCAPEE).
Definition: When forcing poop, several farts slip out at a machine gun pace. This is usually a side effect of diarrhea or a hangover. If this should happen, do not panic. Remain in the stall until everyone has left the bathroom so to spare everyone the awkwardness of what just occurred.
COURTESY FLUSH.
Definition: The act of flushing the toilet the instant the nose cone of the poop log hits the water and the poop is whisked away to an undisclosed location. This reduces the amount of air time the poop has to stink up the bathroom. This can help you avoid being caught doing the WALK OF SHAME.
WALK OF SHAME.
Definition: Walking from the stall, to the sink, to the door after you have just stunk up the bathroom. This can be a very uncomfortable moment if someone walks in and busts you. As with all farts, it is best to pretend that the smell does not exist. Can be avoided with the use of the COURTESY FLUSH.
OUT OF THE CLOSET POOPER.
Definition: A colleague who poops at work and damn proud of it. You will often see an Out Of The Closet Pooper enter the bathroom with a newspaper or magazine under their arm. Always look around the office for the Out Of The Closet Pooper before entering the bathroom.
THE POOPING FRIENDS NETWORK (PFN).
Definition: A group of coworkers who band together to ensure emergency pooping goes off without incident. This group can help you to monitor the whereabouts of Out Of The Closet Poopers, and identify SAFE HAVENS.
SAFE HAVENS.
Definition: A seldom used bathroom somewhere in the building where you can least expect visitors. Try floors that are predominantly of the opposite sex. This will reduce the odds of a pooper of your sex entering the bathroom.
TURD BURGLAR:
Definition: A pooper who does not realize that you are in the stall and tries to force the door open. This is one of the most shocking and vulnerable moments that can occur when taking a dump at work. If this occurs, remain in the stall until the Turd Burglar leaves. This way you will avoid all uncomfortable eye contact.
CAMO-COUGH.
Definition: A phony cough that alerts all new entrants into the bathroom that you are in a stall. This can be used to cover-up a WATERMELON, or to alert potential Turd Burglars. Very effective when used in conjunction with an ASTAIRE.
ASTAIRE.
Definition: A subtle toe-tap that is used to alert potential Turd Burglars that you are occupying a stall. This will remove all doubt that the stall is occupied. If you hear an Astaire, leave the bathroom immediately so the pooper can poop in peace.
WATERMELON.
Definition: A turd that creates a loud splash when hitting the toilet water. This is also an embarrassing incident. If you feel a Watermelon coming on, create a diversion. See CAMO-COUGH.
HAVANA OMELET.
Definition: A load of diarrhea that creates a series of loud splashes in the toilet water. Often accompanied by an Escapee. Try using a Camo-Cough with an Astaire.
UNCLE TED.
Definition: A bathroom user who seems to linger around forever. Could spend extended lengths of time in front of the mirror or sitting on the pot. An Uncle Ted makes it difficult to relax while on the crapper, as you should always wait to drop your load when the bathroom is empty. This benefits you as well as the other bathroom attendees.
FLY BY.
Definition: The act of scouting out a bathroom before pooping. Walk in and check for other poopers. If there are others in the bathroom, leave and come back again. Be careful not to become a FREQUENT FLYER. People may become suspicious if they catch you constantly going into the bathroom.
I am into the copy and paste.
This information (the plane plans) is apparently considered under copyright as unpublished material.
But copyright was intended, I assert, to allow limited protection for material to be published and thus accessible to all readers who wish to buy the work.
Since these plans serve as a sort of public law document (they must be recorded with the FAA by the plane manufacturer and need to be accessible to them in order to check plane maintenance) then the question arises: Why copyright the plans in the first place? What public interest is being served by locking them up?
Yes, recent U.S. law allows airplane plans just as boat hulls to be protected as "intellectual property." But at least they could be published and thus available for a fee, instead of being locked up as trade secrets. Citizens ought to have a right to know (which is why the involvement of the Freedom of Information Office is interesting here).
Ayn Rand and the perversion of libertarianism
The political controversy of the late 19th century was:
whether socialists (all those who believed in the individual's right to possess what he or she produced) should engage in the political process, seize control of the state, and use the state apparatus to achieve liberation;
or, whether a worker's state was inherently contradictory, counter revolutionary, and would only lead to the creation of a new ruling class whose interests would still clash with those of the ruled - that the state should be abolished allowing for no transitional stage of any kind during which power may have the chance to reconsolidate itself.
The situation has recreated itself with amazing similarity almost exactly a century later. Non-libertarian parties the world over (those who see authoritarian centralization as the bulwark of civilization) are bankrupt, economically and intellectually. The only viable intellectual current today falls under that ambiguous term - "libertarian."
Today there exist beneath this umbrella as many splinter groups as there were a hundred years ago under the umbrella of socialism. Two distinct trends, a right and a left if you will, are clearly discernible. One group, clearly the largest with a hierarchical organization modeled on the other political parties, believes, like most Marxists, in constitutional parliamentary republican democracy. They believe that the state is a necessary guarantor of individual safety and the product of the individual's labor, and in gradual progress toward a free society through participation in the political process. The other group, much smaller and far more splintered, rejects the state as necessarily a tool of class domination and exploitation. This group believes that what Bakunin said a hundred years ago is as true today, "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself."
The first group is in all fairness a direct inheritor of the ideals of the American Revolution. In modern times, however, it has only two roots: (1) the Austrian school of economics represented by Ludwig Von Mises; (2) the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Von Mises never considered the libertarians. He answered the Marxists and the Keynesians and defended laissez-faire capitalism at a time when no one else would. His justification for capitalism was empirical - the greatest good for the greatest number. Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism' for the libertarian meaning of the word "socialism." She then attributed all of the ills of capitalism to government interference with the market and all of the world's wealth to the minds of the men whom the world considered the robber barons.
The contrast between Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" and libertarianism is deeper than mere substitution of terminology, however. Several of her propositions or axioms place her clearly outside of the libertarian tradition. Her justification of the state is derived from a Hobbesian state of nature theory:
... a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into chaos and gang warfare.... [The Virtue of Selfishness, 152; pb 112]
If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door - or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual warfare of prehistoric savages. [Ibid., 146; pb 108]
Ayn Rand's belief in the inherent depravity of human nature which renders us forever incapable of living without rulers and not descending to the level of `savages', clearly places her outside of the libertarian tradition which views human nature as essentially good, capable of indefinite improvement through the experience of freedom and the exercise of reason. Her knowledge of anthropology is as embarrassing as her understanding of history. For example, in regards to her conception of who are the savages, she describes America as, "...a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes." [For The New Intellectual, 58; pb 50]
To Rand, the essential characteristic of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. How does she justify this monopoly or national sovereignty? She accepts it as a given, something not requiring a justification, and demands that an-archy, the negation of the proposition, justify itself. Her concept of national sovereignty is then something transcendental, existing separate and apart from individuals, and beyond the right of the individual to accept or reject according to his or her own reason. These propositions clearly place Ayn Rand's philosophy closer to Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx, than to libertarianism.
The state, according to Miss Rand, must hold a monopoly on the enforcement of contracts and the settling of disputes between individuals, at least whenever this arbitration is not accepted by both sides voluntarily. She fails to consider that the enforcement of contracts by the state fundamentally alters the nature of free agreements. Agreements are made on terms which otherwise might not be, because they are justiciable.
The terms of "free agreements" under law are titled in favor of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over employees, in a way which would not exist in a "free market." This leveraging of power is not `objective' at all. Depending purely on legal convention, creditors may have debtors imprisoned, tenants may be evicted without notice and their effects confiscated, one human being may own another or the land on which another lives and works, all to varying degrees.
To understand Ayn Rand's psychology it is helpful to know her background. She was born to a wealthy St. Petersburg family in 1905. The position of her family in Czarist society must have been considerable. At a time when the lives of most Russians had changed little since feudalism, her family was wealthy enough to afford a French Governess and take regular vacations to the Crimea.
It should be noted that wealth in Czarist society was almost wholly a measure of one's favor with the government. There were few if any Horatio Alger stories about individuals who lifted themselves out of serfdom without the patronage of the Czar.
At the age of twelve, she must have been very upset when those nasty workers took over her father's business. Her family fled St. Petersburg for the Crimea and the protection of the White Army. This experience rendered her forever incapable of seeing land reform or any struggle of oppressed and exploited people as anything more than hatred for the good and lust for the unearned.
She shared with Marx the bourgeois ideology that only a few people were capable of running things. The masses ought to be happy to have a job working for bosses. Any suggestion that an enterprise could be run by the employees without having someone in charge was to her absurd.
She shared with Godwin and Kropotkin the belief that the individual is born tabula rasa - a blank slate, and all human knowledge is derived from sense experience. She then proceeded, however, to completely dismiss environment and socialization as the determining factor in the development of character.
People were to her good or evil, brilliant or indolent, depending solely on their volition. People should be judged by their actions with equal severity regardless of their condition. Though she insisted that the United States was not and never had been a completely free country, she granted no such thing as extenuating circumstances when judging an individual and had no qualms upholding the power of the state to inflict capital punishment.
A far more sinister legacy of Ayn Rand to libertarianism is that of a moralizing autocrat who gathered about her an inner circle which she ironically called, "The collective." Outwardly, this collective professed egoism and individuality. They were to be the vanguard of an intellectual renaissance. The price of admission to this group, however, was slavish conformity of one's life and professed philosophy to Ayn Rand's whims and eccentricities. For example, she did not like men who wore facial hair or listened to Mozart, and if you didn't give them up you were unfit for Rand's inner circle. This is particularly sinister if one considers that Karl Marx, believed by millions to be the very symbol of liberation, was also an autocrat who, though professed to be the ultimate champion of democracy, resorted to extraordinary means to maintain control of the International Workingmen's Association. He even moved its headquarters to New York to exclude the libertarian influence.
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members must sign is taken directly from her admonition, "I hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals." In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommodate them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Ayn Rand's writings are not entirely consistent on the point of non-violence either. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark resorts to the use of dynamite. In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold engages in piracy on the high seas and even shells a factory which has been nationalized. In a clandestine rescue mission, Dagny Taggart shoots a guard who stood in the way of her desired end.
In the event of economic upheaval, ruined by unemployment and inflation, tenants and home owners may refuse to make rent and mortgage payments. The unemployed may seize vacant land and begin to farm, and factory workers may realize they can run things without stock holders. It would not be at all surprising if there were to emerge within the libertarian right, groups committed to direct action and counter revolutionary violence, even a coup d'etat.
Imagine a charismatic and autocratic personality at the center of such a group and you have the Objectivist Lenin. Like the Marxists and right libertarians, Lenin and the Objectivists are professed republican democrats. Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised that if given power, they would immediately convoke a constituent assembly. When they realized, however, they would not hold a majority in such an assembly they turned against the idea of such an assembly.
Can anyone doubt that the cultist mentality which characterizes most of Miss Rand's followers could lead to the creation of a group of self-appointed avengers of the capitalist class? That they would suppress strikes, demonstrations, and factory take overs? That they would not execute people for crimes against the libertarian state?
Ayn Rand believed in a republican form of government with a cleverly constructed constitution which would deny the majority of the power to infringe on the rights of a minority as she conceived them. If the majority supported a general strike against rents and mortgages and supported the factory takeovers, would not the clandestinely organized Objectivist libertarian party be tempted to dispense with democracy in order to enforce what they conceived of as the rights of the dispossessed bourgeoisie?
In all fairness it must be admitted that Ayn Rand herself would never sanction such actions, but the same argument is made everyday by western Marxists that Marx would probably not have sanctioned many of Lenin's actions and would certainly not take credit for the Soviet Union.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks won power by promising, "Land to the peasants!" "Factories to the workers!" When they took power, however, they immediately set about liquidating the factory committees and nationalizing the land. They crushed work place democracy by installing armed guards in the factories, and even returned former owners to their positions as employees of the worker's state. Leon Trotsky stopped the practice of soldiers electing their officers from their ranks and even restored former Czarist officers to their ranks in the Red Army.
When the Russian Revolution began few people clearly understood the gulf which separated the state socialists from the libertarians. Many dedicated libertarians like Alexander Berkman, rallied to the Bolshevik cause, willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in hopes that seizing state power would only be a transitional stage toward the development of the stateless/classless society.
Many sincere lovers of liberty now flock to the standard of the Libertarian Party, as they did the Bolsheviks, completely ignorant of the history of the last century. As Santayana said: "Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them."
What should be done? It should be obvious that government enforcement of private contracts is not libertarian any more than is taking state power to set people free. Libertarianism is and always will mean socialism - the self-emancipation of working people.
Libertarians must stop courting the Republican right and return to their intellectual roots. By standing outside of the political process we deny the state legitimacy, and like the state torturers in Atlas Shrugged, they will come and beg for libertarians to take over.
Remembering the experience of the Spanish libertarians, and heeding the advice of John Galt, libertarians must refuse state power even when begged. The state can never be a tool of liberation. Only its complete and utter collapse will allow for the emergence of non-statist institutions, libertarian co-ops, communes, and free markets, to flourish and displace the political state once and for all.
I am into the copy and paste.
tramm is right in proposing that this abandonware project is similar to what has been discussed about the Creative Commons. But as one of the directors of the Commons, may I suggest we hold off much public discussion until the Commons is ready--maybe within a few weeks...
With the blueprints to software, you just run them through a compiler and a few minutes later, presto, you have the completed program. Want to manufacture another identical program? A few clicks, a few keypresses, and it's done. Not only that, but no bureaucrat is going to look over your shoulder or ask you to justify yourself as to why your assembled it that way instead of this way. Generally no one is going to tell you what you can or can't do with your precious program. No licenses, no training. Almost complete and total freedom.
Now let's move from the make-believe world of software and Slashdot to the real world of airplane building. You have the blueprints? Great. How about the BOM? You do know what a BOM is, don't you? Go make a BOM, once you've figured it out. Go assemble everything together by yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. Keep in mind that it will require ~1000+ hours for assembly. Keep in mind that a 40hr workweek is about 2000hrs a year. Some assembly operations may require special jigs, or tools. Go buy or build those.
Now you have a plane. Guess what? You can't do squat with it, until some bureaucrats say you can. They're not too evil, but they will require you prove the plane is safe, and they will restrict what you can do with it and where you can go.
It's not the same. Slashdot, stick to the kiddie stuff and leave the real world to the big boys.
http://www.spectator.org/AmericanSpectatorArticles /Lessig/Control.htm
[pp. 6-8] There are no societies without religion, even, or especially, those which believe themselves to be entirely secular. In our century, in our society, the concept of development has acquired religious and doctrinal status. The [World] Bank is commonly accepted as the Vatican, the Mecca or the Kremlin of this twentieth- century religion. A doctrine need not be true to move mountains or to provoke manifold material and human disasters. Religious doctrines (in which we would include secular ones like Leninism) have, through the ages, done and continue to do precisely that, whereas, logically speaking, not all of them can be true insofar as they all define Truth as singular and uniquely their own.
Religion cannot, by definition, be validated or invalidated, declared true or false - only believed or rejected. Facts are irrelevant to belief: they belong to another sphere of reality. True believers, the genuinely pure of heart, exist in every faith, but the majority generally just goes along lukewarmly out of cultural habit or material advantage. When, however, the faith achieves political hegemony as well, like the medieval Church (or the Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollahs), it is in a position to make people offers they can't refuse, or to make their lives extremely uncomfortable if they do.
The religion of development cannot be validated or invalidated either. It doesn't matter whether it works or not, nor how many ordinary people's lives are damaged or destroyed, nor how much nature may be abused because of it.
Development theory and practice cannot be validated because they are not scientific. They have not established reliable and recognized criteria for determining whether development has in fact occurred, except for internal economic indicators like the rate of return of an individual project or the growth of Gross National Product - themselves artificial constructions and articles of faith. This being so, there is no established way to identify, correct or avoid error either. When Susan George wrote the Afterword to A Fate Worse than Debt, she put it this way:
"Scientists are trained to avoid error by testing their hypotheses systematically. Normally, development theorists and practitioners should also be trained to test their hypotheses by observing what they do to people, since human welfare is presumably the goal of development. 'People' here does not mean well-off, well-fed elites but poor and hungry majorities whose fundamental needs are presently not being met. If decades of application of the reigning development paradigm have failed to alleviate their suffering and oppression or, worse still, have intensified them.., the paradigm ought to be ripe for revolution."
She then asked, naively, "In short, how many people have to die before the ruling paradigm is beaten back and we are rid of it once and for all?" thereby largely missing the point. The point is that priesthoods are not elected and they need not answer to the faithful; they are specially invested with the truth and with sacramental functions from which, by definition, the common herd is excluded. The faith they serve is itself a greater good in whose name present suffering is mysteriously transformed into future salvation. Or to borrow an old favourite from secular religion, eggs must and will be broken. One's children, or theirs, or theirs, will eventually sit down to enjoy the omelette.
This, for us, is the final and most compelling reason not to concentrate on pointing out yet again how multifarious are the World Bank's ill-conceived projects, how unresponsive its leaders, how impervious to criticism its doctrine. Such things may be entirely or partially true, but are at bottom expressions of a world-view. It is the foundations of that world-view we shall try to dig for.
The Bank resembles the Church and this will be a guiding analogy in these pages. Both believe themselves invested with a mission, both (the Church historically, the Bank at present) have set themselves against the state. Both celebrate the poor rhetorically while refraining from actually improving their capacity to change their earthly lot.
The Church, more than the Bank, is like God himself "a mighty fortress, a bulwark never failing" in the words of the splendid hymn. The Bank has lost many of its fortress aspects - particularly compared to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - and is more open to exchanges with outsiders. The overall vision that guides its practice cannot, however, seem to transcend the narrowest of economic orthodoxies serving a smaller and smaller fraction of transnational elite interests worldwide. The Bank's declared new, or at least renewed, "poverty focus" shows that it is groping for a mission but in practice it has no grand design beyond the casting of all economies in the neo-classical mould and the refashioning of all men and women as Homo economicus.
[pp. 245-251] "The Thing"
In the late 1980s the Italian Communist Party was undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. Italian Communists had no idea what to call whatever future Party might emerge from the ruins of the post-Gorbachev world. In all the documents, in all the discussions of the time, this as-yet undefined Party was referred to as la Cosa -- the Thing -- an institution in search of a new personality. Since The Godfather, Cosa Nostra -- Our Thing -- has entered all our vocabularies, whatever our language. Calling the Mafia Cosa Nostra is one way of not having to say what it really is.
At Bretton Woods, the founding fathers didn't know what to call the Bank either -- it got its name more or less by default and "Bank" it has remained. Throughout these pages we have tried to determine what the Bank is and at the end of the enterprise we, too, are tempted to call it the Thing because, although we think we have made progress, to some degree it remains fascinating and mysterious. One of the chief attributes of power is not having to say what it is, not having to reveal its true identity, not having to give up its secrets to even the most diligent search.
Thus the question "Why is the Thing so powerful?" is crucial. One thing about the Thing is certain: it is not powerful because it is a bank; that is, in ordinary language, a purely economic entity. Nor is it powerful because it has some of the characteristics one would expect of an international public service organization. It is a political and cultural enterprise, even a modern version of what the pioneer sociologist Marcel Mauss called the "total social phenomenon" (le fait social total). The obvious, financial and economic side of the Bank is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The multiple roles it plays and the many functions of power it assumes, like the difficulty of defining it, make the Bank a total social phenomenon, a Thing. This is why throughout the book we have spoken of beliefs, faith, doctrine, prophecy, and fundamentalism; of ancestors, initiation, esprit de corps, intellectual leadership and rule. This is also why, in addition to the facts and the documentary evidence, to the economic and political analysis we have tried to provide, we have made a few unorthodox sorties we called "Interludes" into the world of the imagination. If the Bank were just a bank we would have had no reason to call on fiction. We hope the reader will have found in each chapter and interlude partial answers to the question "Why is the Thing so powerful?" This is the thread we have tried to follow, the one that should bind the book together.
Borrowing from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we can say that the Bank is powerful because of its capacity constantly to exchange economic capital for symbolic capital and vice versa. Its economic activities generate money -- well over a billion dollars a year in profits -- but also immense prestige. Its prestige in turn generates more financial and economic power. The Bank has dug passageways and built bridges that allow it continually to shuttle between material and non-material wealth, to transform one kind of capital investment into another and to reap all the rewards of both.
The Bank is thus in a position to assume functions which are at once economic and symbolic: integration, guidance and, most important, maintenance of a programme of truth. The Bank is the visible hand of the programme of unrestrained, free market capitalism. The Bank's first function is to be an instrument of integration through the market. This market is (or should be) co-extensive with the world; like that of the Church, its vocation is universal. All nations and all people must become ever more tightly bound to it. In this setting, the doctrine of export-orientation finds its natural home. All countries must trade as much as they can and rely for their subsistence first on the world market, last on their own resources.
Until quite recently, even in wealthy countries, communities provided for most of their wants from their domestic, local economies. What they could not find close at hand, they sought at the regional or national level. Only rarely, usually for luxury items, would they have recourse to the world market. This historical pattern has been turned on its head: we are now exhorted to satisfy our needs first from the international, global market, then the national or regional one and so on, down the ladder to the domestic economy, lowliest of all. The Bank's second function is to act as a guide. Those who believe that its own doctrine is that of laisser-faire are mistaken. The Bank is, in fact, far more interventionist than the interventionist governments whose policies it seeks to transform. If the Bank were to leave people and societies alone, anything could happen -- they might operate not on the basis of the marketplace but on principles of reciprocity, redistribution or solidarity. In modern societies, the state has attempted, with greater or lesser success, to organize redistribution and solidarity. Thus the state, like the traditional society based on reciprocity, is under threat from the Bank.
Here we face a contradiction. The marketplace cannot be the natural habitat of humankind. If it were, the Bank's interventions would be unnecessary. Everywhere the market would already be the sole guiding principle of society and, if it were, in the Bank's own view, there would be no underdevelopment, no South, no need for modernization or for structural adjustment -- and no need for the Bank.
Why do we think we need the Bank? For the same reasons we think we need the Church. Frail, imperfect humanity needs constraints, guardrails, continual instruction in, and interpretation of, the doctrine. Those who have not yet reached the full expression of market capitalism and consequent development, those who fall by the wayside, must be goaded along the path to salvation.
To change society one must also change individual men and women. Man must be ontologically reconstructed and redeemed as homo economicus. What is redemption if not the passage from one state to another, from darkness to light? The virtues of the New Economic Man, whose dwelling place is the market, are the will and the capacity to accumulate, to follow self-interest and to maximize profit in all things. His wants are unlimited; to satisfy them, he must learn to struggle against his fellows. Scarcity is a fact of life. There is not enough to satisfy the unlimited desires of all nor to provide a place in the sun for everyone. If unemployment in their country is twenty per cent or more, the New Men and Women will pit themselves against each other to find work at any price, at all costs.
The Bank's third function is to be the standard-bearer of a programme of truth. If the world market is the Bank's fundamental organizing principle, price is its instrument. One of the Bank's major articles of faith is "getting the prices right", which it translates in French as la verite des prix, the truth of prices. A price has a metaphysical quality because it is supposed to be the invisible point at the intersection between hundreds, thousands, millions of individual transactions. Price, if governments do not meddle by providing subsidies and otherwise distort the natural balance of things, will regulate human activity and necessarily bring order out of apparent chaos.
Those who deny a programme of truth defy the law, in the case of the Bank the laws of economics, structural adjustment and the market. With the International Monetary Fund, the Bank is the keeper of laws which, like the Ten Commandments, are immutable. Once revealed, they must be followed.
Defiant countries that refuse them outright are blacklisted, literally excommunicated from the international community. Governments which receive the law halfheartedly must be exhorted to better performance. The Bank will reward or punish them by the granting or withholding of loans and credits. Thus it helps return them to the straight and narrow path or, in its own words, puts them back on-track.
If the New Man finds his life in the market, what of his death? All great truths must in one way or another speak of last things; the Bank's is no exception. The Bank's nominal mission is to promote development. Development in its biological sense means an organism's attainment of its inherent potential, inexorably followed by decay and death. In the Bank's vocabulary, however, this biological meaning is replaced by a concept of never-ending growth. The Bank's priesthood specifically denies limits to growth and promises an ersatz eternity in the here-and-now. If such endless growth is supposed to lead to an American or European middle-class standard of living for over five billion people today and who knows how many tomorrow, we already know this to be an ecological and biospheric impossibility, even assuming tremendous and rapid changes in technology. The Bank refuses to confront this last of all last things -- not merely individual or societal death but the possibility of species extinction, including that of the human species. Incantations like "sustainable development" stave off the moment when the finite must at last be faced.
The Church's traditional imagery of heaven and of hell is graphic and explicit. Although it cannot prove that anyone has ever gone there, it still issues the visas to the promised land. The Bank paints no pictures with saints, angels and demons but it does put up signposts pointing towards paradise, exhorting the faithful to imitate the blessed -- the now-developed rich market-economy countries or at least those who are well on their way, like the Asian tigers.
The very vagueness of the concept of development and the great number of candidates who hope to attain it legitimize the Bank's functions, justify its existence and explain its power. As long as the fragile planet's heavenward journey lasts, as long as the poor are with us, as long as salvation is sought where it cannot be found, the World Bank will find for itself a role and a mission.
I am into the copy and paste.
Lately, there have been a lot of relatively unopposed claims that liberalism has failed.
We seem to universally accept that the only valid economic system is free market capitalism, and we also have an extreme faith in the doctrines of this system: competition is always good and niche marketers are somehow inferior.
Some people even blame the recent crisis in Russia on its failure to accept free market capitalism quickly enough. However, as many probably realize but are afraid to admit, the emperor of the unfettered market has no clothes. As the estimable Robert Sheer pointed out in his Sept 1, 1998 column in the Los Angeles Times, we insist the "Russians pay homage to a free market theology that we don't practice in our country."
When one compares Russia and Sweden (a nation which is more akin to Russia than one might think), one immediately notes that "socialistic" Sweden has a far superior standard of living - superior in many ways to our own. Yet, while the liberal programs of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society brought unprecedented prosperity to a wide variety of people in this nation, until the recent stock market crash, left of center politics were considered hopelessly passé.
The irony is that the ascendant "conservative" economic theories are actually the theories from which the original "liberalism" was composed.
A true conservative would not take the view that "growth," change or even competition are always good things, yet the economic conservatism of modern times is based on a philosophy in which mutation is most central and competition is celebrated.
Since the days of Huxley and Spencer, capitalists have tried to make the religion of the free market sound like science by using analogies with evolution.
However, as a biological sciences major, I am not fooled. In the real world, most species will establish niches, territorial systems or collusive relations to minimize the amount of direct competition that is occurring. Species generally cannot coexist in direct competition.
Continuing the analogy, economy does mirror ecology. Every market is divided by corporations into niches or territories where there is a risk of direct competition. Yet, explicit niche marketing is not generally accepted.
For example, Apple Computer is always under pressure to gain market share beyond its niche of academic and artistic users but has actually suffered greatly from its attempts to expand beyond its core consumer base.
Moreover, while corporations always seem to form natural monopolies, we are consistently trying to break up such monopolies, both abroad and at home, in the name of increased competition.
I am aware of the dangers of monopolies; however, I realize that sometimes monopolies provide the most efficient means of delivering goods and services.
Take utilities, for instance. Even if we are saving money from the demonopolizing and deregulation of the phone industry, what is the cost in sheer annoyance from this free market harassing us during our family mealtimes? And this harassment is abetted by the Republicans who claim to support family values!
More seriously, phone deregulation has opened up the flood gates for fraud, and I expect further deregulation in other utility sectors to do the same.
I am not arguing in favor of Communism and against all competition. Considering that people do not behave so rationally as economists would like, the free market functions awfully well.
Moreover, I have seen what collective ownership (or at least collective maintenance) can do to a place - have you ever seen a clean kitchen in Arroyo Vista? Even though the custodial staff cleans the kitchens every weekday, a kitchen must be cleaned more often than once a day to be properly maintained. However, since no one person "owns" the kitchens in Arroyo Vista, nobody takes the responsibility to make sure the kitchen is kept clean.
Ownership is no guarantee of stewardship either. In this age of increasingly large corporations with cubical imprisoned employees, how much individual ownership exists to motivate our economy anyway?
I am only arguing that, in light of all the evidence of shortcomings in the so- called conservative economic philosophy that currently enjoys almost universal acceptance, we should not write off liberalism as irrelevant or dead.
I am into the copy and paste.
I was in the music biz earlier in my life and a copyright lasted for 25 years. Then could be renewed for another 25 years. After that it became pubic domain. Now the 25 years twice IMO is a little long and 25 years total makes more sense, but I believe is fair. I think patients should work the same way 25 years and then public. That gives the indivisual or company who invested time and money creating the idea time to reap the rewards of there investment, then the public gets it to use freely.
10 If something breaks, then 20
20 Print "We're fucked"
Also, one link in the article led to this much-more-detailed Apollo Guidance Computer page: http://66.137.204.220/plethorama/apollogc.htm
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Anyone else feel as if Slashdot is a little too oriented towards lawyers now? Whenever I visit /. the majority of the "news" is about copyright, trademark, or various other legal issues. I read this article and am scratching my head trying to find the cool or nerd aspect of it.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
what does the Federal Aviation Administration have to do with copyrights?
Many of you have this all wrong.
This only really applies to homebuilders. The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) is out there to promote building of homebuilt aircraft. They want these documents out there in the open to promote homebuilding, not lets build such and such WWII aircraft and know how to build this jet.
Most of these aircraft, most likely are little single-engined aircraft that most people dont understand one from another. This is really only applicable to you if you want to BUILD it and you want the plans or want to do some sort of coversion and you need the FAA approved STC.
These plans and STCs are very expensive to get so people like to hold on to them and charge for their usage. SO when you cant find the person anymore, you're SOL.
Dr Disney I suppose :-)
Infuriate left and right
Then there are STCs - Supplemental Type Certificates. These are authorized post-production modifications. Getting an STC accepted by the FAA is expensive. For example, an STC might allow you to run an OX-5 in a JN-4 Jenny on "blue" 100LL fuel instead of "green" 135 (hypothetical example, I have no idea what an OX-5 likes to drink). If it's not a popular STC, it's possible that the company went defunct and no one bought the STC. If you now want to use blue gas in your Jenny, you can't use the data that's already been given to the FAA proving that it's safe (that was the basis the original STC was issued on) -- you have to start from scratch.
The important things about this: i) no owner can be found (and it provides for a 60 day search period) and ii) the data will be released under FOIA.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
"I heard" that bin Laden was surprised at the total collapse of the towers.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
... who doesn't know what EAA stands for? It's not mentioned anywhere on their website what their acronym means. The closest I could find by searching http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym is "Experimental Aircraft Association". Is that right?
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Doesn't anyone actually read the article? There was nothing at all mentioned about copyrights, and I don't think they are involved. This is proprietary information which, if the owner were still around would not be released. But if they can't find the current owner, then release is possible.
I'm not sure I understand you. The whole point of having a copyright period is that it ends at some point and then whatever was copyrighted goes into the public domain. The public domain belongs to the public (duh) so therefore I have full rights to anything that has an elapsed copyright. That's the way it works.
Of course, if someone 'ceases to exist' before their copyright is up, why shouldn't the same thing happen? We're not depriving the copyright holder of their rights because they don't exist anymore. If there was a sale or transfer of intellectual property then the copyright went to whoever the new owner is and this scenario doesn't apply. All this FAA/EAA move does is ensure that things pass into the public domain as they should.
What, exactly, are you proposing? Keeping things in the public domain a secret? Banning all copying of information? Leaving orphaned information out there to die? I'm not sure what you're arguing for.
This
But also the EAA has a large membership percentage that are very talented aerospace professionals by day, who are also aerospace fanatics for fun by night.
There are also a small number of planes that probably would attract a large enough following that stand a chance at being kitted if the blueprints suddenly came available... a couple of legendary WWII warbirds immediately pop into my mind: F-4U Corsair, P-38 Lightning and the P-51 Mustang.
I have no idea about the legal status of the current owners of the F-4U or P-38. Sadly I don't think the P-51 will be among those up for release since as of the late-80s Piper owned the assets of the former North American Aviation and had been revamping the P-51 design as a South American counter-insurgency ground attack plane.
And based upon the flyers I know, I can tell you that the coolness factor of flying into Oshkosh in a shiny new P-38 would attract a lot of manpower.
--Rob
Former UK Prime Minister prior to Mrs. Thatcher. He pushed this one through as a special Bill in the House of Lords. Questionable precedent for a very good cause.
They are a fine organization that helps homebuilders of various unusual aircraft.
Ya see, if you want to get a new aircraft FAA approved, it costs millions of dollars and a couple of years of expensive testing. Until Cirrus Aviation got the SR200 certified in 2000, no one had got a new light General Aviation aircraft certified in years, everyone was just building them off the old type certificates.
But, if you build it yourself. (More than 50% of the effort) you can fly any weird-assed kind of airplane, with a very minimal level of certification.
Most homebuilders use kits, though theres still a lot of work to do to complete the aircraft, and qualify under the 50% rule.
The EAA exists to help these people.
Case in point: That stupid moron kid who stole the Cessna 172 and crashed it into a bank in Florida. All he accomplished was broke out a few windows, destroyed a beautiful little airplane, caused a media circus.... and raised the overall IQ of the human race slightly when he removed himself from the gene pool.
:-(
Small airplanes pose less risk to the public than cars and motorcycles do. They can't carry much more weight that the pilot and passenegers or can do much damage to anything.. a car can inflict much greater collision damage due to its weight, and Timothy McVeigh proved to the world that a rental truck can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. A small airplane (an aluminum one anyway) is basically made of thick "Reynolds Wrap" aluminum foil. It crumples to bits when it hits anything. Large airliners are a genuine risk because of their massive weight and the enormous amount of fuel they carry. We all know about that now
Lessig's figures for who long copyrights last is based on current law, after the changes that Disney pushed for in the late 90's.
For those who aren't into antique aircraft, think of the construction of the Kites your flew as a kid.
Many of these old aircraft are made of 1/4 to 1/2 inch wood sticks creating a framework for a fabric covering, which is sewn on and shrunk in place to make it tight and stiff. Add a motorcycle sized engine and you have the right idea.
In fact, many recent small aircraft designs are little more. Substitute small steel rods in the fusilage -- wood is still used in the wings -- and better engines. Another common modern construction tecnique involves fiberglass over foam. But of course this is much too recent to be affected by this article's subject rulings.
The point is that driving a car into whatever you wanted to destroy would probably be more effective.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
This is not about copyright and freedom of information. This is about the ability to create a part that can be legally used on a certified airplane. The FAA requires that airplane parts be documented, and that they be built according to approved plans. For Experimental planes, the person building the plane is the person approved to build the parts. You become certified to fix anything on that one plane, since you built it. But you can't build a part for an identical kit that your friend built in the next hangar.
For regular planes, certified as a manufactured aircraft, the manufacturer is the only one allowed to build replacement parts. They have the Type Certificate allowing this. Someone else wanting to build replacement parts can, but only after going through a lot of money and time to prove that their part is identical to the manufactured part. This gets you a Supplemental Type Certificate. The key is that if you have the paper saying you can build the plane (or part), then you don't have to go through all that hassle. You just build the part according to the specs. The FAA does spot checks on your quality control, and all is well.
In short, even though Boeing knows how to build modern jets, they can't build parts for McDonnell Douglas planes without buying the Type Certificate for those planes, or spending a bunch to prove to the FAA that their part is just as safe, and performs the same, with 200 paying customer lives on the line.
The trouble is that for some small planes, the original company went bankrupt and the file cabinet with the type certificates got thrown out in 1947. So if the FAA will allow, say, Cessna to ask about building hinges for that old Meyers biplane, then this rule would allow them to get a copy of the type certificate. Then Cessna can afford to bother building them.
The FAA agrees to keep the plans submtted as a trade secret, so that Lockheed won't have to worry about Boeing creating SR-71's. They are actually doing the right thing by guarding those secrets, but it is nice to see that they might create a method to open up old lost plans and certificates to let collectors have planes that can still be fully used.
C'mon now, this is Slashdot. We know that things don't work right the first time. We always have to refine our procedures. /Gimp "documentation" on their website to prove it. Shortly thereafter they will have pictures of Natalie Portman sunbathing on olympus Mons as additional proof.
Of course, if we are talking about hardware that costs more than a Cue-Cat then an elite hacker will make it work right the first time - and post Photoshop
There are a few things I'd like to point out. I hold this particular subject near and dear, as both an aviation enthusiast (for example, http://xb70.interceptor.com/), a computer geek, and a commercially rated pilot who has owned several aircraft.
IANAL, but:
1) it concerns me that all the EAA article mentions is the availablilty of the documents. There's no protection should a copyright holder appear post-fact to sue you for building his STC'd widget without license.
2) A difference between most abandonware and this is that certainly the intent here is to only deal with entities that no longer exist. That's entirely different from entities that don't care. most "abandonware" it seems, is indeed owned by someone and is copyrighted; it's just that they don't care to support, sell, or do anything but sit on it. This example won't change that a bit.
3) The reason that type certificates (TC) and Supplemental Type Certificates (STC) are zealously protected is because a lot of expense goes into them. Due to the nature of aircraft, even fairly small changes (such as replacing an engine with an almost identical model that 'bolts in' without physical changes) have to be documented and tested extensively. The only way for people to recoup those costs is to charge users of the STC a fee for a 'license.'
4) as others have pointed out, virtually everything the EAA is talking about is very old and has been abandoned for decades.
Steve