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Saving the Net
An anonymous reader writes "Doc Searls, editor at Linux Journal, has a very insightful editorial that brings it all together - the FCC media consolidation ruling, SCO vs. Linux, why broadband is under attack by telcos and cable systems, why we lost Eldred vs. Ashcroft, what's really interesting about Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a very astute observation about the vast gulf between Liberals and Conservatives."
Most Democrats I know are more than happy to call themselves liberal. ..which has nothing to do with the word "liberalism" that the parent was talking about. I'm glad those on the left are abandoning the word "liberal" for the word "progressive." Hopefully popular usage of the word will revert back to its original meaning. I associate liberal with Isaiah Berlin, not Ralph Nader.
As another poster pointed out, it's plain and simple greed. The big media companies want perpetual copyright so they can continue to milk those works as long as possible. Copyright to a media company is the same as a manufacturing company's raw materials or even inventory. Manufacturing organizations are taxed on their inventory; if the big media companies want to own all that copyright, they should be taxed on it.
The real issue here is that the overwhelming majority of people at large are not aware of these issues. Anyone attempting to educate the masses on such things are immediately shut out as hippie radicals. The only people really working at these issues are the ones who stand to make a profit on them (i.e. the big media companies). Those same people working relentlessly for profit via copyright are the ones who are so quick to equate Linux, open source, anything public domain, etc to communism.
The cruel irony here is that the very people who label public domain as communism are the same people who are robbing our freedoms.
Sigh. Linux and the Internet were great while they lasted.
Watch the name calling. You're apparently not such a scholar yourself.
The poster said "democratizing..." was "part of what the internet was all about", not that it was created for that purpose. It is not revisionist to point out that in the nascent days of the Net, the cited motivation was a strong component of the network's culture. It is this network that Doc Searle's argues needs "saving" from becoming a crass and commercialized content vector for media giants.
OTOH, If you'd called him out for failing to capitalize Internet, I would have applauded you.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Perhaps you should check here or here and learn, once and for all, that Internet was not designed to withstand physical attacks. It just was a by-product.
Oh, lest I forget, ad hominem attacks take weight of your assertions (even more when they are not quite correct).
'til next post...
Marcos (any likeness to chance is pure reality)
This is simply not true. The Republican Party leans heavily on large donations from individuals. These individuals generally are in the financial "upper crust", and generally benefit financially from a Republican administration (massive tax cuts, etc.).
The Republican Party is geared towards saving people money. This is the key issue for Republican politics, regardless of all the morality bullshit they spew. If you're greedy, you vote Republican, whether it's for an end to the estate tax or a $300 tax refund loan.
When do they decide who gets the nomination? Is it at the national convention? Or is it similar to the electiorial college, you weigh each states votes?
The candidates win delegates in each state primary, and the results are tallied at the national convention. Delegates can vote contrary to how their state voted, but it's unusual.
It's not to hard to get 40,000 people who like you to give $20. Granted it's only $800,000 and not the 100+ mil or whatever obscene about the retard currently in office spent.
Try 60,000+ people giving an average of over $60... the Dean campaign collected something like 7 million in the last quarter. Bush, of course, has about 200 million... but once the Democratic lineup thins out, it'll be easier to raise funds.
It sounds like GNUnet might be something you would be interested of.
Nope, I would want a whole nother IP network to run whatever stuff I liked on. With its own DNS servers, etc. Just like the current IP network runs over a physical network, this IP network would run over the current IP network. Literally an Internet over the current Internet. Probably using IPSec to link the nodes of the new network up to each other.
Get your own free personal location tracker
http://ronja.twibright.com/
(Exactly what you were talking about!)
Tony.
from this site:
$220 million directly donated to presidential campaigns by individuals under the law (hard money, not soft money large donations from individuals)...
$157 million to Republican candidates......
$63 million to Democratic candidates......
conclusion: your source is faulty.
Why do I h8 apple?
This is not a new concept: whoever controls information outlets controls what the readers of that content see. Ever wonder why there is a King James Version of the Bible? or a New International version? They started from arguments between groups that eventually resulted in new bibles being printed. The same thing happens with movies and music. Anyone over 40 can give you the name of a song they like that got remade recently and an incident where some kid thought the remake was the original, giving credit to the new artist. Or old TV movies/series that get remade to the same effect.
Every time a new distribution media comes along it is usually controlled easily and readily because startup costs and production tended to be centralized. Publishing companies need printing presses, music and TV need studios, etc. People who want to control the distribution can easily do so by cutting it off or regulating it at the source. Distribution was also easily controlled since transportation cartels tended to be monopolies or oligopolies that would make deals with producers or get taken over by them. Localized distrubitors could be bullied with threats of price wars or bribed with treats of guarenteed monopolies in their area (much as states do with wine distribution contracts these days). Yet the internet is an entirely different entity, in that distributor and publisher have been combined into one and that no one corporation can hope to realistically control even the majority of computer-based infrastructure.
As with any new medium, test cases arise that will set precedent for how to approach this new medium. Companies with the money are bribing Congressional officials to guarentee their copyrights and change the nature of them from honorable, respectable, limited right to an exact piece material into exclusive right to repress any and every idea even remotely based on the original idea for 75-100 years. Innovation has slowed dramatically as a result, and this would decimate engineering and scientific progress if the same ideas ever became law in those fields. Yet now people can readily copy material and distribute (publish) it with the click of a mouse. There's no time to tax it, regulate it, put it through a middleman, or anything else. Copyright laws were changing even before the internet came about, and music oligopolies were exploiting the populace for decades, but now they can be circumvented with ease. This infuriates the companies since fair-market value for their material turns out to be so much lower than their formerly enforcable prices were. Thus, in a backlash, they now want to charge more to "make up for lost profit" and have Draconian copyrights and copyright enforcement laws to protect their material ad infinitum whether it is justifiable or not.
What really makes this tricky is that the infrastructure is diverse and the battlefield is international. Laws are limited only to the country they are made in. Ultimately it would take the UN to write legislation for anything realistic to apply to the entire planet, so the companies are going for the next-best thing: arresting or bankrupting anyone in the US involved in "copyright violation" and trying to force other countries to do the same. They do this by threatening trade sanctions by bemoaning their loss of revenues due to "pirates", legitimate or otherwise, and getting pity from some of the populace. It also helps that these same companies also tend to own TV and news stations as well as many congressmen who rely on those sources to get re-elected.
It will be difficult to fight this war from our end since we lack the resources and congresmen of these giant companies. How do we fight back legally? First, get some like-minded friends together and write your congressmen and see if they won their last election by a thin margin. If they are not solidly rooted in their district, they will very likely listen to what you and your voting friends have to say. Second, if you are not already, get regist
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.