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Lessig @ OSCON
passthecrackpipe writes "Leonard Lin has put up the presentation Lawrence Lessig gave at OSCON (mirror). It is great. It requires Flash." Nice Flash work, very impressive, and of course Lessig is a superior speaker. Worth your time and the 8Mb download.
If you stop it, it rewinds. Aargh!
http://lessig.org/freeculture/
:wq
does anyone else get horrible echoing in the flash?
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
What have you done?
.1% of the 1.x billion-person market) on the Slashdot masses, we should be able to buy us some politicians too!
I just sent EFF $100. If we invoke "Chinese arithmetic" (anyone who's looked at a business plan involving China knows what I'm talking about- "if we could just capture
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
It is great. It requires Flash.
Don't those two statements contradict eachother?
*ducks*
slashdot!=valid HTML
I'm getting 74kb/sec off it, seems to be handling the load just fine. I wouldn't want to be receiving their bandwidth bill, though ;)
Err, he's taking time off to prepare his arguments in the Eldred case (begins Oct. 9) before the Supreme Court... apparently stepping away from Greplaw as well.
Some links.
http://eldred.cc/legal/supremecourt.html#oppose
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/
When I grow up, I want to be a karma whore.
Oh the irony, the audio is available exclusivly in MP3, this is an open source confrence
What signature defines me as a person?
-- JC Watts
(that's a quote used in the presentation, and no, I don't use Linux. I don't support the "other side" either.)
Maybe someone should make a verbatim transcript of this, or is it already available somewhere? If yes, links please :)
If you donate $5 or more to the Eldred Legal Defense fund (at http://eldred.cc/howyoucanhelp/), you'll get a copy of a CD I created, with a copy of the website linked in the original post, as well as self-contained flash executables for windows and mac.
Geez... I guess I'm so used to my crappy DSL line. I don't even blink at an 8 MB download. I used to though, when I still was on single channel ISDN.
I'll take a look at that site of yours. I don't need the CD. :)
I really liked when he asked the audience.... (approximately): "who's donated to EFF?" "Ok, who has given as much money to EFF this year as they gave the cable monopolies for shitty bandwidth?"
I thought that was an awesome way to measure it. As far as I'm concerned, my bandwidth bill just doubled... any amount I spend on that, I'll match in donations to EFF.
Bandwidth means little without the freedom to use it.
Now I know what all those unemployed Flash designers are doing with their time.
Seriously, could this guy make it any more *difficult* for us to listen to his message.
Step 1: Free speech is in danger
Step 2: You can't do much alone
Step 3: Profit! (well, donations)
Ok, it's not a business plan, but only the EFF coordinated effort can aleviate the problem, so please donate if you can.
unfinished: (adj.)
Keep talking to your friends. Show them articles you come across about the evil effects of laws like the DMCA. Bring some copies of your coolest personal CDs to work to play, and mention that you won't be able to make those copies much longer. If your co-workers don't believe in the existence of Tux, give them a Knoppix CD-ROM to play with.
Sure, most people are asleep, I've found that too, but it's a funny thing; every one who gets interested in this stuff starts talking to other people about it too.
Oh, and let's not forget; give your support to the EFF and others, write to your elected representatives, or if they're utterly hopeless like my own Sen. Hollings write to their opponents; try to persuade them over to the Light Side, offer them your support (financial and otherwise) if they do support your issues.
Remember, if you can't support them financially, maybe they could use some volunteer Web support, or an envelope stuffer. Have you been to your local library lately? Librarians are usually a pretty strong free-speech demographic, and library patrons are the kind of people you're likely to reach best. Make up CD-Roms with fun free games, useful utilities and some interesting presentations on important issues; give them away to everyone you meet.
It's not going to be effortless, but you're not as helpless as you think. You undoubtedly have skills and resources you haven't even touched yet.
I think it's a great idea, which is why I'm bringing it up again. Lobbying congress and educating them on these matters just isn't going to work. Politicians aren't passing things like the DMCA because they're ignorant -- they are doing it because they are bad politicians. After failing to do the right thing over and over, we can't give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. We can't reform corporate shills, but maybe we can replace them.
Instead of pleading with them to do the right thing, we need to at least try to make them do the right thing. In a case when it's hard to identify the good politician -- especially the good and effective politician -- it's a lot easier to identify the bad guy. There's lots of politicians that aren't standing up for the public's rights. But there's only a few that are standing up to actively take those rights away. We should focus on them.
When we do, we can run online ads, radio ads, and grassroot ads, anything to try to defeat this person. It doesn't have to be that expensive. We play the negative game -- it doesn't matter who the opponent is, this is a question of symbolism, of asserting our power. Because if we can cost that one politician the election, that will really mean something. Sure, there'll be more to step up in his place, but maybe we can get them out too -- do it a couple times, and people will be afraid to be the corporate media lacky.
And yeah, that's not the nicest political game. It's classic "special interest" tactics. But shit... if politics was so nice, we wouldn't be having these problems. And we're not doing this to get ourselves subsidies or for other selfish reasons (mostly) -- we're doing it for the public. And there's nothing wrong with negative politics -- that's how this country has worked since the beginning.
Unlike all the other techniques -- that dream of the day when there's massive participation -- this doesn't seem that remote. I bet $50,000 and a lot of volunteer manpower could could counter $500,000 in campaign finances, if the target was right and the manpower clever.
On patents, I think the most sensible argument against them was presented in a letter to the US Patent Office by Donald Knuth, where he points out that software and the algorithms used therein are mathematics, and mathematics have previously been exempted from patents.
Regarding copyrights, while I would be quite happy with a short limitation on the life of a copyright (5 years would suit me just fine... 10-15 would be ok, anything longer is ludicrous in the technology field), I think his presentation is quite a bit more radical than most professional programmers might agree with after putting some thought into it.
Some of us don't particularly like working as employees of companies which we do not own, but without the protection that copyright provides it would be impossible to make a living by creating consumer software products. Yes, you could write custom software under contract to a corporation for money, or write software as an employee of a company, but to write a product for consumers? Who would pay for that? The average person who'd want to use a word processor certainly isn't going to cough up enough money to pay my rent for the amount of time I'd need to write one...
Without copyright, if I write a cool app and want to sell it, I'd only sell it once before anyone who wanted it could just get it for free... This is absolutely great for code I write in my spare time for fun, or tools and libraries I write to help me do my work where they might be useful to others, but *something* has to put food on the table.
However, I do think that once you buy something, at least the copy you own should be able to be used by you in whatever manner you wish. So his speech seems misguided... The real threat is that with recent legislation, that is less and less true.
I support the EFF and donate.... but the presentation is off target. I hope his arguments before the Supreme Court are less radical and stay based on the fact that 100 years is way too long for a copyright, rather than implying that copyright is bad.
Think he used a pirated copy of PowerPoint? ;)
I write code.
... by pausing and restarting. The echo then went away.
(It took a little while to realise it wasn't creative license on the part of the Flash author!)
Remember that negative publicity hurts. Exagerate, tell the public that big business wants to take away their video recorders. Tell them that the fast forward button is being banned. Yes, this is a little strong but isn't what the NRA do when they tell Americans about their rights. Tell them that some idiot has got protection on work they ripped off from someone else over 50 years ago. Ask them whether they believe it is right for them to be able to take apart anything that they own so that they can maintain it themselves...
Leave the techie stuff out. The public and politicians won't understand.
Name names.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
One of the pictures Lessig uses in the presentation (the Flash version) is this Venn diagram with a white background representing "unregulated use", a red circle representing "copyright", and a grey border around the red circle representing "fair use". He then points out that the red circle (copyright) has essentially expanded to completely cover the white background (unregulated use), leaving us to fight over the scraps of the grey border (fair use).
What Lessig doesn't point out is that technology has completely blurred the boundary that used to exist between the red circle and the white background. In the absence of DRM, there is no meaningful distinction between publishing an e-book (red circle) and making a purchased version available to a few of your 'friends' on a p2p network (white background). Or, if you prefer, there's no meaningful distinction between purchasing an e-book from a publisher, and downloading it from your p2p 'friend'.
In other words, the world is going to be all white or all red, not because Valenti, Rosen, and their ilk are trying to actively expand the red circle, but because technology has made the circle meaningless. The content distributors understand that they're fighting a 0-1 war, and know that their days are numbered unless they make the whole world 'red'.
I don't think I'm being unfair to Lessig by saying he misses this particular point. One of the examples he uses was that sales of CDs only went down 5% last year, so the content distributors are presumably over-reacting. But that's too myopic. Within a few years, with unregulated technology, John Q. Public will be able to fire up their p2p client, type in the name of the album they want, stick a CDR in their burner, then go away for 15 minutes while the software queries freedb, downloads the songs on the album at CD quality, burns them to the CD-R, downloads the cover art and lyrics and sends them to the color laser printer. It could possibly even schedule a micropayment to the artist's account and put a shortcut on John Q. Public's desktop in case he decides the album was worth it.
Who in their right mind would bother to buy a CD then?!
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
What can the average computer user do
Number one, Vote with your pocketbook!
Issues, DRM enabled devices...
I did not buy the new Magellan Meridian GPS because it used SD media.
I bought a CD burner
I bought a CD MP3 Player. It does not support WMA, Liquid Audio, etc. It only supports red book audio and MP3 audio.
The Archos Digital Jukebox/recorder is on my to get list. It viloates the SDMI standard by allowing a stereo analog high fidelity recording to be made. It allows the recording to be exported and copied in an unprotected format (MP3). I plan on transferring my pre-recorded tapes and vinyl to CD. The SDMI standard includes the requirement for voice grade mono analog recording and nothing better. A good stereo cassette deck will outperform a SDMI recorder everytime! Is a HI-FI VHS or 8mm VCR going to be my next audio recorder? I hope not! I will not support the SDMI audio recording standard. Voice grade mono recording does not meet my needs to back up my aging music collection. SDMI stuff is analog input bandwidth limited This input will be restricted to voice-grade mono and band-limited (-3dB at 100 hZ and -60 dB at 8 khZ) It is also to be imediately converted to SDMI protocol for local use. This translates to "it'll never be burnt to a CD or shared with your friends" This is useless to use to record the baby's first words to share with the grandparants. A tape deck is more capable in this regard. The SDMI compliant hardware is uncompetive in the marketplace due to the severe restrictions placed on it.
Read the SDMI spec here if you need to know the rest of the restrictions.
http://www.sdmi.org/
Most people have no idea this spec even exists.
Don't buy anything supporting these standards.
This includes portable media (memory cards).
Support companies that provide useful quality products and support open standards.
This is the biggest reason I use Compact Flash and CDr.
What I don't have...
A DVD player,
A DRM enabled book reader, audio player, TV/ computer monitor/ USB speakers, music in WMA or Liquid Audio format, portable devices supporting SD memory, etc..
I'm picky about my hardware and the content providers will have to cater to my needs or miss my purchases when they move into protected media.
I do not buy software that requires "activation" or a "dongle". The only exception is software that is part of an access to a service. An example is the firmware in my cell phone and pager.
The truth shall set you free!
I just sent the following email to some friends of mine who work at Disney.
Dear friend, I hate spam as much as the next guy, so you will understand that I wouldn't be sending this email if it wasn't important. The following is a link to the audio and slides from a speech given by Lawrence Lessig, a professor of Law at Stanford University, on an issue that is very important to me - namely our freedom to create. http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/lessig/ I would urge you to listen to it, it is about 30 minutes long, so put on your headphones and pretend you are listening to music ;-)
If, after listening to it, you agree with me that this is an important issue, then please do as I have done and encourage your friends to listen to it, and to pass it on to their friends.
All the best,
Ian.
I think this is the only thing that politicians will consider the prospect of losing an election. I think its good to fight the war on as many fronts as possible.
For people who think that linux will lose its coolness or its purity if it gets too popular. I want to tell them that they will lose linux if it doesn't get very popular, soon. Linux should get a market share of at least 20% before some form of DRM becomes mandatory by law, in US and Europe. DRM will kill Linux if it succeeds, and there is only one thing that can kill DRM and that is Linux.
The solution is that technical people should develop linux, and if they don't have anything really important then they should lobby to the government. And if the Elections are around the corner (like they are now) then get going against your local Senator if he/she was in favour of DRM/DMCA et.al. Local LUGs should be able to get this thing going collect as much information about the senator that you can and go after them. And if your senator is against this thing then also work in his/her favour.
Its important to delay DRM as long as possible, by any means possible.
-anandsr
I agree.
...Make sure you don't slander.
I'm also a canadian. I'm also already quite involved in more local politics.
Here's what you do:
register eliminatehollings.com or somesuch.
collect some basic information, put it on the site.
get slashdot to post a link for it. set up for paypal donations. Donations should pay for the site, (bandwidth and hosting, *nothing more*) and the rest should go to the EFF, or better yet, an opponent of Hollings that there is a general agreement is better than Hollings.
Set up credit card donations. All along the way, you should be asking people (credit card people, hosting companies, etc.) for a discount or free stuff, as you're running a non-profit site to promote traditionally guarded rights in the digital era. If nothing else, you'll get the message out in an interesting way.
Post anything you can find about the amount of money Hollings has received from Hollywood, and the bills he has introduced, sponsored, supported, etc. Post anything about his voting record you can find. Use lines like "Hollings has been convinced by Big Media that their profits are more important than any of your rights!"
If you want more elaboration, reach me at r a e w a s c h a t u w a t e r l o o d o t c a
But *you*, yes *you* need to run with this. You need to do it quickly, well, and you need to get it posted on slashdot. Then some other people will take over aspects. Once Hollings is gone, you pass the torch to someone else.
It will become your life's work (other than your job & family, hopefully!) for a year or two. If you do it right, you *can* succeed.
-Rob
-Rob Ewaschuk
You shouldn't have skimmed - he answers what you can do. To wit:
Don't email - write a letter and include a check made out to the representatives who support reigning in copyright law. There are so few right now that I can list them. They are:
Rick Boucher
Chris Cannon
That's it - all the U.S. Representatives who understand this issue. Support em cause they're all we've got right now. However, there is hope on the horizon....
Hank Perritt, the former dean of the Chicago School of Law, is running for congress. Help him win his seat and it'll help. If you live in Chicago, volunteer at Perritt's campaign headquarters. He needs all the free help he can get.
In your letter that includes a donation, make it clear why you support these particular men.
You can also send money to Eff.
You're not helpless, you can do something. The thing is to DO IT - not whing about it.
Do it now, not later.
Have no cash? Then at least get and display your free Free the Mouse bumper sticker.
Your post really made me think the proper question: what if no one takes the lead on this? Isn't it up to me? I can't, though, not if I'm going to meet the obligations I already have. I am genuinely doing what I can; if someone takes the point to create an organized effort, I can redirect some of my resources, but I cannot lead the charge.
We have brick-walled on what public interest political educational and advocacy groups can do. If we are to be able to make a living at high-tech, we can no longer afford to send delegations to DC to give dog and pony shows which will be greeted with polite applause and be followed up by backroom political deals involving money comming from Hollywood.
Here's the minimum specification for starting something effective... along the lines of the NRA/AARP style political advocacy group I've been calling for which is the only chance we've got of reversing this tide before it rolls over our jobs.
What would it take to form a REAL political activist group with a chance of winning?
All it would take to start an organization along the lines of what I'm calling for would be for ONE person (or a handful of people) to hire a political organizer with experience, either out of NRA/AARP/etc. or one who understands their methods, an experienced political lobbyist, set up a domain, a server, a contract with a political fax server outfit (to do the "fax your legislator" setup), and a PAC registration... and announce on slashdot and Politech that "we're open for business"... that person doesn't even NEED to put together an overview, I've posted one in several versions.
The startup budget might be as much as $200K. That just gets the office open, the Webserver up, and minimum support staff, to actually make donations to politicians means raising money... as in open your checkbooks, we as a group must at least match Hollywood's spending on politicians. The good news is that we as a group collectively have a hell of a lot more money than they do. All we need is a group to aggregate our donations and get them to our friends and our enemies' opponents.
Note that there are people who've been saying "if you think this needs doing, why don't you do this?"... that's the answer. This is not something any random geek can put together, there's a cost of entry here and most of it goes to buy expertise that isn't in the average geek's head.
Anybody who believes otherwise is wasting his time, and if you get sucked into his trip, yours as well. (Greetz, GeekPAC! - *snicker*) If you can't do this, don't start a group, wait until somebody else does that can. If nobody else appears, start making plans for America's non-tech future. Saying "We're gonna take back Congress" is a waste of time unless you have access to at least some budget and expertise.
If nobody in our community can do this... as in pay the cost of freedom... we don't deserve it and we won't have it. We CAN win... but somebody's going to have to get together the framework described here to do this.
Losing on this issue is going to cost anybody in a position to do anything serious about our situation a lot more than $150K.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Just look at a Disney DVD.
I'm really sick of the "That function is not permitted on this DVD" when I try to fast forward through the crap they put you through before the film.
And I'm not just talking about the FBI warning either.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I'm curious about your other obligations. I'm a student, I'm heavily involved in making student life better. I'm also canadian, which puts me out for this sort of thing, but I would turn it down as well, because of other obligations. Are yours family? work? Do they go beyond that? If you're already involved in some aspect of your world outside family and work, then you're doing your part...if everyone did that, we'd be doin' just fine.
I'm glad you thought about what I had to say. I think that the idea of singling out an elected official is an excellent one - one of the best (in terms of manageability, understandability, explainability, cost, time, and effect) that I've ever seen WRT to "your rights online." It brings things into the realm of what one voter, one citizen, one consumer, can understand, while having a broader "chilling" ("warming"?
Someone needs to run with this, for the sake of US online rights. In Canada, I am monitor the "battle," and will dig in and help out if the time is necessary. The politics of the game here are very, very different, though.
Cheers,
-Rob
PS. -- I'd prefer this be by email, if you're indifferent. my address is in my last post.
-Rob Ewaschuk
Yes, I know that $150K != $200K, I revised one number when I should have fixed both.
There are a lot of people who made have made their pile in high-tech, the latest ones being the ones who exited high-tech stock before the dot.bomb . If you are one of them, ask yourself "If Hollywood gets everything it wants unopposed, what are my chances of profitable high tech investment or starting a successful new technology with the Feds and Hollywood in control of what my company can and can't do? If you know one, show them this post and my other one on this thread.
Here's a fair usage quote from a recent slashdotted article by Cory Doctorow which might help you answer this:
"The tech companies at the BPDG had been there with the understanding that the BPDG's job was to establish a set of objective criteria for new technology. Those criteria might be restrictive, but at the very least, tech companies would know where they stood when they were planning new gizmos.
Hollywood suckered the tech companies in with this promise and then sprang the trap. No, you won't get a set of objective criteria out of us. From now on, every technology company with a new product will have to come to us on its knees and beg for our approval. We can't tell you what technology we're looking for, but we'll know it when we see it. That's the "standard" we're writing here: we'll know it when we see it."
Can you do business in this environment with CDTBPA thrown in and more legislation designed to lock down and lock out technology as Hollywood builds on its success? How much is it worth to you to have an America you can do business in?
I'm asking you to open your checkbook, your Roladex, and give some of your time.
The next person who asks you this in a few years may be asking for "your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor". It won't be me, I won't be in the USA at that point. I won't be able to make a living here.
Of course, you might be looking forward to retiring in a non-tech, sleepy, backwater America where bright, ambitious kids emigrate and high tech is something you buy or have smuggled in from Japan or Europe or Canada. If this is your wish, just do nothing, the Senator from Hollywood and his friends will bring this to your door.
If you who have benefited most from high-tech business are not ready to come forward and protect your own interests as well as those of the rest of us, fine. If your next vacation home or a high-end Lexus are more important to you, your money and your right to spend it as you please.
When you discover that your choices to do technology yourself are to beg the government and DMCA/RIAA for permission and wait or to emigrate, at least you'll know who to blame. Not Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen. The person you see whenever you look in the mirror. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" won't stop the content industry from turning the US high-tech community into roadkill.
I'm not nominating myself as the head of a geek-oriented version of the NRA/AARP.
I can say that I know how to find that person and the other resources needed to get started. But nothing can be done without the seed money. The people we need to get this running don't work for free and the services we need have price tags attached.
For the rest of you, if this happens, be ready to participate. No mass-action political organization works unless there are people who really will partipate, with your $5 and $10 and $100 and $1000 contributions, with the willingness to point-and-click a fax "message to Congress", talk to your non-tech friends, and to walk precincts for our friends if you're asked to do so.
If this doesn't happen and Declan is proved right, the best advice I can give you is to start preparing for a future when there is no longer a significant high-tech presence in America. Will you emigrate or figure out how to make a living in a depressed economy that isn't ever coming back?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Then post problems. Organize. Change their minds or work to vote them out.
Yes, I realize this is a pipe dream.
Seriously, could this guy make it any more *difficult* for us to listen to his message.
Obviously you didn't check the link. It is available as Flash, MP3, and a text transcript. Mirrors were also provided. This guy makes it easier than anybody else to listen to his message.