Slashdot Mirror
Lessig's Challenge: Are You Up To It?
Eloquence writes "At the 2002 Open Source Conference, law professor and cyberactivist Larry Lessig, last prominently featured here because of the Eldred case, asked some poignant questions: 'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? How many people have given more money to [the] EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?' Luke Francl has interpreted these questions as a challenge, and decided to chronicle both his donations to good causes and his less voluntary payments to 'the media oligarchy' on this page: Lessig's Challenge. This is a good idea if others imitate it: If these pages become interlinked with each other, not only can they motivate us and let us track our progress, they may also help us to keep each other up to date about 'good causes' -- there's more than the EFF, after all. With Harry Potter in theatres and Lord of the Rings before us, should 'nerds' also be thinking about supporting those who fight for our rights to, say, play DVDs on an open-source OS?"
Uhm, this is sorta weird.
He bought a print of a small artist and counted that? He donated to a radio station and counted that? I buy lots of things from small companies. But small companies don't lobby. They don't actively undo the damage that giving to your local telecom does. That's why Lessig mentioned the EFF.
I mean, I'm a hypocrite by posting this I guess, since I have never given to the EFF, but if I just get to count purchasing things from small companies/artists, I'll clobber my telecom bill every month, guaranteed.
...is that while the EFF does good works, and I am a member in good standard having given nearly $500 in the past year, the problem is one of motivation.
While regular folks and even a lot of techies realize that not paying their DSL/cable modem/satellite Internet bills is going to get their service cut off, the same cannot be said for the EFF. Yes, I totally agree that there may very well come a day where we cannot do anything due to companies strong-arming governments to pass legislation to reduce what we can do with the Internet, but unless and until the majority of folks get this message and understand its severity and urgency, Lessig's challenge will be unsuccessful.
I would also like to point out that many people take issue at some of the causes that the EFF fights. Please don't let one or two court challenges that the EFF helps with deter you from becoming a member if you already haven't. The fact is that the majority of the EFF's aid is of critical importance to my and your free speech rights and they need every cent of help we can offer.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
OSS will lose its appeal the the mass if they end up having to pay for opensource software as well
There is the difference between having to pay and choosing to pay
Also of course if you are a programmer you could give something back to the community by helping develop OSS. If you're not you could help with ideas, bug reports, etc. And if you're a lazy unskilled idealist you could donate
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
The problem here is how to bring that message to folks. An uncontrolled medium such as the Internet is very easy to at least publish and, to a lesser extent, promote. The sad part is the very media that would reach the masses are controlled by the other side - namely, television and radio. It's the lowest common denominator, yet how do you penetrate it when it is on the opposite side of the fence?
This needs to start with us, every day. With our secretaries, our neighbors, our grandmothers, everyone in every way. Word of mouth is powerful. But it can't just stop there, and I fear that it won't be enough in the end. With digital tv and DVD Audio just around the corner, and more severe copyright controls, you can bet that this problem will be even worse, and this message will sadly be further quelled. Nevertheless, it all starts with us...
If you *really* believe that these companies are doing wrong you shouldn't be spending your money on them in the first place. Believe it or not, you'll be able to live without seeing hobbits on the big screen or having 1.5Mbps into your bedroom. Giving money to the opposition after the fact may make you feel better, but doesn't change the fact that you've already compromised your morals!
Lets be honest - just how much success have they had? They've managed to get the word out about open source, but they failed to stop the DMCA, and none of their legal fights against it have been particularly succesful.
And lets be honest - it was RedHat's lobbying that reduced the effect of UCITA. The only thing that stopped the CBDTPA and that P2P protection bill was the noise made by people on discussion forums writing in protest.
What's better--working for an hour to remove works from the tyranny of copyright, or working in a "regular job" for an hour and donating the proceeds to EFF?
ScienceSeeker.org
I'm not sure if I can totally approve of this type of activism, because it mirrors exactly what is wrong with the USA today. It shouldn't be just about "how much money". If you really care about something, get off your butt and do something about it. Get vocal - organise grassroots movements, write letters, explain the problems you see to your friends, family and community. But don't just expect to buy influence with money - that's what is currently ruining the democratic fabric of the USA.
if the EFF registered as a charity in the UK then the Government would topup any contributions I made.
Is the EFF a charity?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service?
Well I have Cable but besides that I get good service. So that'd be $0 to a shitty ISP and $0 to the EFF.
How many people have given more money to [the] EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?
Let's see, I haven't bought an MS product at retail value in a long time so again, $0 for MS and $0 for the EFF.
Do I win something now???
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I'd happily make donations to the EFF if I knew that they'd act for issues I'm faced with too (I live in England).
The last time I checked, I couldn't find any information about whether they would do this (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Of course, the rest of the world (Europe especially) do seem intent on matching American laws, so making American law sane would indirectly affect me, but that seems a very roundabout way to make my money effective.
How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service?
Well, what kind of high speed access is EFF going to provide for me?
As soon as the EFF has the monopoly on freedom, they can send me a bill in the same amount as my cable bill (with modem). Until then, it's small donations. Sorry guys, but I'm just not going to send a "Microsoft Tax" to someone else who is trying to guilt me into it.
I suspect you're trolling, but I'm going to bite anyway.
This has nothing to do with pricing, competition, or even the quality of your service. Donating money to the EFF isn't going to lead to the fall of capitalism and the beginnings of a socialist empire.
Rather, by not donating to the EFF and helping to fight some of their free-speech causes, you might find that all of your beloved competing Internet providers won't provide you with certain sites or materials that the government deems offensive that day. Imagine having six or seven Internet providers to choose from, their prices kept low by competition, only to not be able to surf a large majority of the Web that has been silenced by government regulators.
So I guess you'd be happy to choose Acme DSL and pay only $12/mo but only get to surf AOLTimeWarnerViacomCBSNYT's media sites and those sites that haven't been censored by the government. Worth it?
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
The DMCA will be implemented in different variants world-wide. This is a real issue: To play DVDs on Linux, you need to break the law, in America and soon elsewhere as well. That's why it's important to change the law instead of just passively ignoring what's going on and hoping that the problems will go away. If you do that, what's currently the case with DVDs will soon be the case with all commercial media, thereby defeating the whole point of open source.
Note that the copyright cartels have already successfully gone after people who distributed the DVD decryption software, and even those who linked to the tool that allows doing so. They love the additional control over content use that the DMCA gives them, and they'll fight to keep it and to extend it even further (which brings us to Microsoft's Palladium).
But, that's an interesting hair-trigger ya got there...
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
I tried to make a donation to a good cause. But I could not find out where to send the money. I couldn't track anyone down at all. So I guess SPEWS will have to do without my money and we'll all still have to deal with a growing spam problem.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, because this way of taking it into action is absurd. If your point is to fight against the monopolies, then the answer is to give zero $ to monopolies and a penny for EFF. If you understand it like this, then the Lessig challenge makes sense...
'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service?'
We shouldn't have to pay as much for a just legal environment as we pay for goods and services. If the current legal environment is pay-to-play instead of a representative democracy (I believe it is), then shouldn't your lobbying contributions be going towards campaign finance reform?
The proposal that we must give as much to the EFF as we pay for goods and services seems like suggesting that it would be good financial policy to max out your credit cards and then put all of your disposable income into savings bonds instead of paying down the debt.
If the only course of action is to continue to play the game of having to buy laws; if fixing the process that makes the laws is not feasible, then it seems to me that it's already too late. It's time to forget reform and switch to either revolution or abandonment.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I agree with you wholeheartedly. There are some organisations over here such as eurorights and there is someone claiming to be the eff-europe but there doesn't seem to be the same momentum as in the USA. Hopefully things will pick up here before the laws get passed, rather than after.
Stick Men
I believe you are confused.
Ducat n.
A piece of money.
vs.
Ducket n.
You can do what you please with your ducats, but please be careful with your duckets. Ducklings can break.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
And if you're a lazy unskilled idealist you could donate
If you're a "lazy unskilled idealist" you probably have no money.
1)Send Me a bill
2)Credit Card
3)EGold/EDinar
4)Network for Good
5)PayPal
6)Stock
6-12 Months of Anonymizer Private Surfing is included with a minimum of $25 donation. Your gift is 100% tax-deductable.
A visit to the Action Center at the EFF would be useful as well. Do your part or watch your rights slip away! Direct others to help you in the fight.
I suspect if you were to allow "real" charities that do such useless things as provide food, cloting, or shelter to those Less Fortunate, you'd find a LOT of people giving more to such Charities than we give to Micro$oft, Verizon, or AOHell.
Most folks, admitedly not all, would reduce their contribution to other charities were they to donate to EFF.
Potential Best of Both Worlds: donate time to a charity helping them set up and manage (yes, long term) an accounting system that does not require sending a lot of money to Bill Gates.
'Just a thought, a mere wrinkle.
Mark
It had never occured to me in the past that EFF might be on their big list but they are! So this year, my donation has gone to the EFF conveniently via payroll deduction and the CFC
For those of you wishing to do the same, the CFC code is 2229
Many people who read slashdot are very interested in "open" software and would like to see it prosper. While the EFF does not exist to promote open software, the issues it tackles almost always also benefit open software. How many of you would be insufferably proud if you could submit a tiny patch to the Linux kernel? Or a new feature to one of your favorite projects? (I'd be)
Many of us would be, but either we don't program, don't have the time, or don't have the legal ability. So, stop sitting on the fence and do something. It doesn't have to be a ton. $500 USD is a lot to most people. $15 isn't. If you can give 500, do it... If you can give 15, then do that, and I can assure you that you have done more for something you beleive in than 90% of the other geeks you know. And that's something to be proud of.
Writing a check is sometimes more valuable than writing code.
An email I just sent to Luke:
Hey Luke...I decided to take up Lessig's challenge as well. I am kicking it off by cancelling my AOL account, and I will donate the amount of money I would have spent on that account for one year to the EFF. That comes out to 19.95 x 12 = $293.40.
I'll give AOL a call, let them know why I'm cancelling the account and where the money will be going, and then post my notes on that call in my journal!
The web page for my slashdot journal is "A HREF="http://slashdot.org/~Locke!Erasmus/journal/" >here . Please do not list my email address, just the link to my slashdot journal.
Thanks!
I should have picked out the nickname Demosthenes!Tecumseh.
I disgaree.
"NASA" is an acronym. EFF is not.
Pronounced like this:
"NASA", not "the N.A.S.A"
"the EFF", not "Efffff"
-Dave
our rights to, say, play DVDs on an open-source OS?
This argument makes me ill. Arguably you have rights to play DVDs that you bought before the whole DVD brouhaha on an open-source OS. But now that it's clear what the license holders are demanding, I find it crazy to demand that you have a "right" to play, say, next-year's DVDs on a given OS.
To me, it's like smoking. ARGUABLY, tobacco companies should be liable for smoking-related deaths that happened due to smoking in an era when the health-risks of tobacco were not widely disseminated, and when people could plausibly have misinformed about them. But now that EVERYONE knows (and has known, for the last 2 decades or so) that cigarettes can cause a host of problems, I shed no tears for people who do fall ill due to their smoking now, and I don't think the tobacco companies should be liable for THESE deaths.
Similarly, I shed no tears for people who "demand" their "rights" to play the latest DVD on platform X. If you don't like the conditions that are being attached to a product - say the latest Star Wars DVD, or the latest Metallica CD - don't buy it, don't go to the theater, don't listen to their songs on the radio, and don't hype it on your website. That is the surest, best, and most honest way to get the MPAA, RIAA, etc. to listen to your demands.
Another anology: I might not like the terms of some GPL'ed product, thinking it "really" should be under a BSD license. Does that give me the RIGHT to use it under a BSD license ?
I made it a point to use DirecTV's DSL service ( it's still regular DSL ) instead of Bellsouth's DSL service so can in some way support the underdog.
The competitors to the telcos do lobby and the more customers they have the better. Please think about switching from the 'baby bells' to one of the upstarts eg. DirecTV or Speakeasy.
Some competitors offer great deals as well. For instance, bellsouth would charge me $120/month for a static IP, while a static IP is free with my DirecTV DSL service, and they don't mind me running any servers.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
> RMS wants no one to have any [money].
This is a lie.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I strongly believe that the battles that are coming will require that FSF (where I work) and EFF both be as strong as possible. I pay $107.40 annually for my home Internet service (a cheap 56K dialup). I am today renewing my annual donation to EFF, increasing my usual amount from $65 to $107.40. I just yesterday pledged $120 to FSF for 2003. (Eben Moglen, BTW, recently gave substantially more than that). I hope that you will choose to support both organizations at the same level as your ISP charges (or split the amount of your annual ISP charges equally between FSF and EFF).
Sincerely,
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
Hi, I'm the guy who made the Lessig's Challenge website. I'd like to address some of the concerns which have been raised with the idea.
To my doubters: This isn't about a fundraising drive for the EFF (though I think you should join. Did you know the EFF only has 7,000 members? You can make your voice heard in the way the EFF operates if you join). It isn't about me buying cool stuff and writing it off as hurting the MPAA.
It's about supporting a different way to do things than the MPAA and RIAA. They want to lock up content and charge you every time you view it. They want to prevent you from viewing DVDs on Linux. And we help them do it. Every time you buy a CD, every time you go to a movie, you help them take away your freedom.
It's time to fight back. We can fight back not only by giving money to the EFF and the ACLU and the Free Software Foundation and Digital Consumer -- orgainizations which will fight against the media oligarchy -- but also by helping those artists and programmers who are outside the system. If they can make a living without turning to the RIAA or MPAA, the media oligarchy will not survive for long.
I'm not asking you to boycott these orgainizations entirely because it's not really plausable. Everyone likes to go see a movie now and then, everyone likes to listen to the radio or buy a few CDs. What I'm challenging you to do is to keep track of how much you're giving to the oligarchy (to take away your freedom) and counter that with a donation to people who will fight against that.
Here are a few suggestions:
The list goes on and on.
I get my DSL not from a monopoly, nor a company that sells content, and certainly not one that tries to restrict what services I can run. Covad might be a couple more bucks a month, but if more people would sign up with such businesses, we'd have fewer worries about AOL/TimeWarner/BabyBells.
I used to give the EFF money, and now I don't, for precisely the reason you cite -- I disagree with them whole-heartedly on a couple issues they're totally, utterly wrong about (particularly, their constant, wrong-headed attacks on spam-lists as being anti-free-speech, as if my decision to use the SBL somehow gags an activist, or is not a personal decision like chosing which newspaper to buy).
I won't give money to support an organization that makes such awful decisions and is unwilling to listen to reasonable arguments.
If you're like me, pick your fights more specifically -- donate to individual legal funds, find smaller, more issue-oriented causes.
-- q
To play DVDs on Linux, you need to break the law, in America and soon elsewhere as well.
That's not true. To play DVDs on Linux FOR FREE, you need to break the law. There'd be nothing illegal against someone creating a closed-source DVD player that actually went through the trouble of licensing the DVD decoder, like every other software entity has to do.
If it was important enough to enough people who would drop $20 on it, you'd see a commercial Linux DVD player overnight.
Professor, I understand that you urge people to donate to the EFF an amount equal to what they spend on products from the MPAA, RIAA, and other cartels pushing for abusive laws and DRM schemes to further their Mafia-like control over information and culture. But the EFF has demonstrated that it will spend donations, not only for that purpose, but also on unconscionable lobbying against well-respected legislative and community tools to control spammers -- the hands-down worst abusers in the internet culture. I have read your book "The Future of Ideas" and was impressed by what you had to say. But I cannot for the life of me imagine how the ubiquitous spamming of unwilling net users could be regarded as a positive component of the "digital commons" you described.
So this is my challenge to you, Dr. Lessing:
Respond to this post with a persuasive defense of the EFF's pro-spam lobbying, which convinces me that my freedom as an internet user is enhanced by forcing me to continue being bombarded with emails for porn, fraud, and garbage products. If you persuade me, I will immediately donate $500 (the estimated amount I spent this year on cartel-controlled media) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
So as long as 1% of the money spent on a product goes to something you don't like, you shouldn't spend the other 99% on the product either, even though it goes to the things you *do* like and want to support? The frustration with using the free market power to vote with your wallet is that most purchase prices include a heck of a lot of "riders" you are also voting for, just like a bill before Congress. And, just like a congressman you are stuck where the only way to vote against those riders you don't like is to simultaneously vote against the rest of the bill that you would otherwise have supported. When you support the making of good high fantasy movies, like LOTR and want to see hollywood make more, the only way to "vote for" that is to also "vote for" the DMCA as a small rider tacked on to your ticket price.
Asking people to never support these riders EVER isn't a practical solution unless you plan to move up into the mountains and live as a hermit. The solution of making sure you give more money (votes) to the opposition than you do via incedental riders on your ticket prices, CD-R prices, and so on, is certainly sub-optimal. But it's the only practical way short of not being a participant in the modern marketplace at all.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
If you're a "lazy unskilled idealist" you probably have no money.
Unless Daddy left it to you. Where do you think most "foundation money" comes from? What got RMS so much attention? Foundation money.
And while I'm at it, why should I donate money to the EFF when I don't support every cause they believe in? What's their administrative overhead anyway?
If there were a defense fund for a particular case that I thought was important, and I had the money, I'd consider donating to that particular defense fund. I have no desire to join a broad "movement" that takes in far too many ideas with which I disagree.
In other words, Larry can take his challenge and stick it. What next? The Larry Lessig 700 Club?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I totally understand your point; it's just that you're saying two different things.
To say that it's illegal to play DVDs on Linux is untrue -- you just have to go through the same process every other company does and pay the DVD decoder license.
To your second point, yes, the product couldn't be freely distributed, but that a different issue! If it's important to you, why wouldn't you pay a company a couple bucks to develop it (and the DVD decoder license)? I don't see how it's that different from any of the good closed-source Linux packages that people see fit to pay for (admittedly there are few, but if this is something you really want, why not just pay for it?).
This is not a case of Linux being picked on; it's a case of Linux having to play by the rules of the rest of the world. If Linux users were willing to pay for it, they'd get it.