Posted by
chrisd
on from the taking-your-toys-apart-to-see-how-they-work dept.
shaikeiro writes "A fine
article in the Economist about Ed Felten and what he is up to now. Also a good summary of what "freedom to tinker" means. From the article: "Thus, the freedom to tinker ends up being about the freedom of culture."" Are you a member of the EFF yet?
Thought this seemed familiar, I read it nearly three months ago in the print edition.
Still, he makes some very good points. Have a look at the news story below to read about the 5-year jailterm Champion Of The People Fritz 'they named an evil chip after me' Hollings and others are trying to get you if you dare to tinker. How do people who work against the interests of the people who elected them so continue to get elected?
I think that the majority already agrees on the benefits on the "freedom to tinker". What companies currently cannot solve, is the free-riding problem. It does not matter how much you preach about tinkering, as long as it damages existing business, it is freedom stinker for many companies. Dr Felten is clearly a clever man, maybe he could put his energy in solving that instead.
If your business model revolves around restricting others' freedom, and it's easier to change laws than to actually provide the public with a product worth buying, isn't that a sign that something is seriously fucked up? Obviously not... let's just work on improving the bars and chains, then.
-- deus does not exist but if he does
Thoughts on the subject
by
Diabolical
·
· Score: 5, Informative
All of the arguments given in the article is well known by many of the audience targeted by this article. However, most of them allready discarded the idea. A company isn't interested in someone improving on their products. They want to be the only one owning all rights to that device or software because that's how they make their money. They aren't concerned with cultural or social implications. That's not their issue. They want to secure as much marketshare as possible before some new technology becomes available that could replace their product.
What would be an issue though is that increasingly, corporations seek out the help of their paid representatives to get their agenda legalised. And that's where law should stop. It should not be a responsibility of lawmakers to protect large corporations. They should invent or create other ways, within legal boundaries of course, to protect their income. Laws should be made to protect the individual as much as possible against not only other individuals as well as against organisations who are just planning to seperate ones money from ones wallet.
It is not just the US who has these issues at hand. The European Union as well, is facing these same problems. Lots of/. people who aren't US based believe these issues are only a problem in the US. Well.. it's not. The EU has shown time after time they are very capable of making the same mistakes as the US government does. Wether it is because they so fondly want to shape another worldpower or that they are too lazy to come up with decent laws and rules i'll leave in the eye of the beholder.
Fact is we must react quickly on these kind of issues before even that right has been removed from us. Not just in the US but in the entire world.
I was impressed with Felton's use of the word "tinker" when in the/. community, such activity would clearly be known as "hacking." It has the same meaning, but not the same negative connotation to the mainstream. This way he still manages to get the point across without distorting the original intent. If you go through the article and replace the word "tinker" with the word "hack," it doesn't alter the meaning of the article at all. And clearly The Economist is on the "tinkerers" side in going along with the change in terminology.
-- "No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
The free-riding problem *cannot be solved* with digital information.
Companies only have their distribution mechanisms for digital information to compete with. If a CD distributor doesn't perform as well in the bandwith*convenience/price arena as your local ISP/telco, then it's a matter of *tough luck*, at least in a free market.
Oh, you want to publish something to some but keep it secret to others who haven't paid? You want to tell someone a secret but you want to guarantee, beforehand, that he cannot possibly tell another? *Tough luck*, unless you tell the secret and then rip out the other person's tongue and chop off his hands prevent him from further communicating with anybody else. The only way to make that happen digitally is to make every PC a read-only device. Oh, that's what you want then? But we already have that, you dumbf'ck, it's called TV. We don't want TV. We're sick of TV, and we won't allow our computers to be replaced by TVs just because some industry paid f'ck said so. Get over it.
RIAA, MPAA: the game is *over*. Cope. Please take your whining elsewhere, and please stop abusing society by buying f'cking laws.
When no good music gets recorded, no good books get written, no good movies get produced and no good paintings are being made anymore because the artists are starving, I'm sure society can come up with a *better* solution than simply handcuffing all its inhabitants, don't you think?
I'd say if you want to publish something digitally, you'll just have to live with the initial payment. If that's not enough, convince more people to pay before publishing it. If not enough people want to do so, then *tough luck*. If they do, all the better. It's still a free market after all, only one where the public is a *single* customer. If that customer wants to buy something valuable, he may have to make some savings up front. The concept is not even new, it already works fine for public highways. Society wants them, because society as a whole benefits from them, so society decides to pay for them as a whole. What's so f'cking hard about that?
-- All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
publishing and secrets
by
solferino
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Oh, you want to publish something to some but keep it secret to others who haven't paid? You want to tell someone a secret but you want to guarantee, beforehand, that he cannot possibly tell another?
i like how you link publishing / not publishing to asking someone to keep a 'secret'.
in my personal life i have recently realised that it is wrong to tell someone something and ask them to keep it a secret, or to ask them to keep the information hidden from certain other ppl - it is entirely their perogative once they have received that information as to what to do with it. if you want to keep some information unknown then the only way to do that is to tell nobody - if you tell even one person then you should accept that potentially the whole world can know, and that there are no grounds for you to be upset if this happens as you are the person who originally released the information
this situation is exactly the same with publishing - once you release something to the world by publishing it, then potentially the whole world now has accesss to it and it is morally wrong for you to try to limit the access.
perhaps it is ok for you to request acknowledgement for the work, but it is not ok to try to create artificial barriers (society based laws) to force 'payment' for your work. ppl who license their software under the gpl accept this. i see no difference for 'creative' artists
the only right you have to control access to your 'creative' work is the right to not release or publish it in the first place - either everyone has access to it or no-one does. any concerns for 'payment' are entirely subservient to the moral right of free information transmission
Slashdot Mirror
Thought this seemed familiar, I read it nearly three months ago in the print edition.
t op
Still, he makes some very good points. Have a look at the news story below to read about the 5-year jailterm Champion Of The People Fritz 'they named an evil chip after me' Hollings and others are trying to get you if you dare to tinker. How do people who work against the interests of the people who elected them so continue to get elected?
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956811.html?tag=fd_
For those who don't know who this is:
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/
Posted anonymously so as to not karma whore...
at Freedom to Tinker. Lots of interesting stuff...
I think that the majority already agrees on the benefits on the "freedom to tinker". What companies currently cannot solve, is the free-riding problem. It does not matter how much you preach about tinkering, as long as it damages existing business, it is freedom stinker for many companies. Dr Felten is clearly a clever man, maybe he could put his energy in solving that instead.
If your business model revolves around restricting others' freedom, and it's easier to change laws than to actually provide the public with a product worth buying, isn't that a sign that something is seriously fucked up? Obviously not... let's just work on improving the bars and chains, then.
deus does not exist but if he does
All of the arguments given in the article is well known by many of the audience targeted by this article. However, most of them allready discarded the idea. A company isn't interested in someone improving on their products. They want to be the only one owning all rights to that device or software because that's how they make their money. They aren't concerned with cultural or social implications. That's not their issue. They want to secure as much marketshare as possible before some new technology becomes available that could replace their product.
/. people who aren't US based believe these issues are only a problem in the US. Well.. it's not. The EU has shown time after time they are very capable of making the same mistakes as the US government does. Wether it is because they so fondly want to shape another worldpower or that they are too lazy to come up with decent laws and rules i'll leave in the eye of the beholder.
What would be an issue though is that increasingly, corporations seek out the help of their paid representatives to get their agenda legalised. And that's where law should stop. It should not be a responsibility of lawmakers to protect large corporations. They should invent or create other ways, within legal boundaries of course, to protect their income. Laws should be made to protect the individual as much as possible against not only other individuals as well as against organisations who are just planning to seperate ones money from ones wallet.
It is not just the US who has these issues at hand. The European Union as well, is facing these same problems. Lots of
Fact is we must react quickly on these kind of issues before even that right has been removed from us. Not just in the US but in the entire world.
I was impressed with Felton's use of the word "tinker" when in the /. community, such activity would clearly be known as "hacking." It has the same meaning, but not the same negative connotation to the mainstream. This way he still manages to get the point across without distorting the original intent. If you go through the article and replace the word "tinker" with the word "hack," it doesn't alter the meaning of the article at all. And clearly The Economist is on the "tinkerers" side in going along with the change in terminology.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
The free-riding problem *cannot be solved* with digital information.
Companies only have their distribution mechanisms for digital information to compete with. If a CD distributor doesn't perform as well in the bandwith*convenience/price arena as your local ISP/telco, then it's a matter of *tough luck*, at least in a free market.
Oh, you want to publish something to some but keep it secret to others who haven't paid? You want to tell someone a secret but you want to guarantee, beforehand, that he cannot possibly tell another? *Tough luck*, unless you tell the secret and then rip out the other person's tongue and chop off his hands prevent him from further communicating with anybody else. The only way to make that happen digitally is to make every PC a read-only device. Oh, that's what you want then? But we already have that, you dumbf'ck, it's called TV. We don't want TV. We're sick of TV, and we won't allow our computers to be replaced by TVs just because some industry paid f'ck said so. Get over it.
RIAA, MPAA: the game is *over*. Cope. Please take your whining elsewhere, and please stop abusing society by buying f'cking laws.
When no good music gets recorded, no good books get written, no good movies get produced and no good paintings are being made anymore because the artists are starving, I'm sure society can come up with a *better* solution than simply handcuffing all its inhabitants, don't you think?
I'd say if you want to publish something digitally, you'll just have to live with the initial payment. If that's not enough, convince more people to pay before publishing it. If not enough people want to do so, then *tough luck*. If they do, all the better. It's still a free market after all, only one where the public is a *single* customer. If that customer wants to buy something valuable, he may have to make some savings up front. The concept is not even new, it already works fine for public highways. Society wants them, because society as a whole benefits from them, so society decides to pay for them as a whole. What's so f'cking hard about that?
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
i like how you link publishing / not publishing to asking someone to keep a 'secret'.
in my personal life i have recently realised that it is wrong to tell someone something and ask them to keep it a secret, or to ask them to keep the information hidden from certain other ppl - it is entirely their perogative once they have received that information as to what to do with it. if you want to keep some information unknown then the only way to do that is to tell nobody - if you tell even one person then you should accept that potentially the whole world can know, and that there are no grounds for you to be upset if this happens as you are the person who originally released the information
this situation is exactly the same with publishing - once you release something to the world by publishing it, then potentially the whole world now has accesss to it and it is morally wrong for you to try to limit the access.
perhaps it is ok for you to request acknowledgement for the work, but it is not ok to try to create artificial barriers (society based laws) to force 'payment' for your work. ppl who license their software under the gpl accept this. i see no difference for 'creative' artists
the only right you have to control access to your 'creative' work is the right to not release or publish it in the first place - either everyone has access to it or no-one does. any concerns for 'payment' are entirely subservient to the moral right of free information transmission