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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.
http://lessig.org/freeculture/
:wq
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
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.
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.
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!
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