Slashdot Mirror
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."
How about we all agree to disband and join bbs's ?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
From the article: But they avoid visiting a fact that should be deeply troubling to every candidate running (and then governing) for money rather than for voters: Dean's lead is owed to a huge number of small donations, not to a small number of large special interests. If he's being bought, it's by his voters. This is a New Thing. It's also been made possible by the Net.
This was part of what the internet was all about: democratizing the ability of an individual outside the established powers to enter into competition or publication or public recognition. Dean has been smart about this and so far, he certainly has my vote.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
When will Americans learn what "liberal" really means? Many Americans use it as if it is an insult, and they seem ignorant to the fact that the United States was founded on the basis of liberalism.
To paraphrase a common saying, do not attribute to consipracy that which can be adequately explained by greed.
There's little doubt that there's movements working against what much of the Linux communities believe in, but there's no Big Bad hidden agenda here -- just simple, petty and local greed.
Regards,
--
*Art
The only 'major' piece missing is a simple and cheap form of active aiming to keep the transmitter and receiver reliably pointing at each other. There's a project for someone.
Well, I'll just go build my own internet... with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the internet.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
But wait a minute - I thought that one of the requirements to be president is that the candidate must be an American-born citizen. Arnold, being Austrian-born and all, doesn't meet that requirement.
That article just seemed to be a collection of random quotes thrown together without one original thought from the author or even an underlying explanation of how they fit together.
A great example is the quote from the National Review. It is a great quote and specifically attacks the changes that have happened in copyright law. At the end of the quote the article "author" says "National Review is a conservative magazine. John Bloom is a conservative columnist. This is significant." But he doesn't go on to explain WHY this is significant. Is it because the author is surprised that a conservative can have an intelligent thought?
In other things he is just plain wrong. He states that "Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media)." Yet it is the democrats who are most in the pocket of big business. Here is a clue - Hollywood is 99.9% liberals. The other 0.1% is Drew Carey. Senator Hollings is a Democrat. DMCA was signed by a Democrat into law. Mary Bono may be a Republican but only in name.
If you think that the internet is failing than this article is a great sign it isn't. The fact that any unintelligent schlub could post an article like this and receive praise for it proves it.
The word consumer, as a whole, is also a source of aggravation. It implies a notion of being fed, of being given content that you don't necessarily desire. And this is precisely what this notion of "distributors of intellectual property" is demanding of you. Sit down in front of your computer/TV, pay an exorbitant fee, and watch the same old boring content and advertisement barrage over and over again. The great thing about the current computer is its ability to allow for the construction of content, not its ability to supply it. This is further amplified by the Internet, and the accompanying ease of distribution and immense audience. For instance, a musician could record a song onto his computer and sell it via the Internet, or a graphic artist could market his art. In the future, perhaps even an independent film company could market it's wares online. A future dictated by DRM and "property" restrictions allows only a few select companies to digitally "watermark" their media in a manner which the now-crippled computer can read. Does anyone honestly believe that these same companies that desire such immense control will relinquish it in the future to independents desiring to sell to the same market?
Suddenly a person is no longer an individual, but a forced consumer of multiple mega-corporations. The prospect is as disturbing as it is possible. The myth of "intellectual property" is curbing and inhibiting the free expression of ideas and content, precisely what copyright law was intended to promote.
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Howard Dean seems to be a very unusual candidate with regard to the use of technology and the tech crowd in general. How about we try to get an interview with him? We can ask him about DMCA, Patriot act and stuff like that. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who actually heard of Slashdot?:)
He appeared on Lessig's blog which has (I would guess) a lot fewer readers than Slashdot, so it seems likely he would agree, if we approached it right. Does anyone know his campaign people, so we can find out?
I am not sure why this was marked as offtopic. A little doomsday-ish maybe, but not offtopic. Face it, everyone is vying for control over the net. The Chinese government wants to control it, The U.S. Government wants to control it, the corporations want to control it.
They have concluded what Marshall McLuhan had years ago, that the medium is the message. The natrual extension of this is that whoever controls the medium, controls the message.
Without the anarchy which fostered the internet, we will end up with another passive form of entertainment that is inaccessable to the masses from a broadcast standpoint, television.
The internet is the voice of the people (scary,innit?). Sure some people speak louder than others, and some are leaders while others are followers. But everyone has a voice, and that is what is being taken away from us, slowly at first, and then with great vigor as we become more complacent.
I have a website, and nobody in their right mind would give me a television show. I don't know if that's considered progress, but I like where this whole internet thing could go, if only we're allowed to take it there ourselves.
Very smart.
The author does an excellent job of synthesizing a number of disparate, troubling issues going on in our society at the moment into a very coherent whole.
If you can understand that democracies are only as good as their voters' information systems, or that markets are only as healthy as the exchange of goods, services, and ideas in them is free, then you should be able to appreciate where the author is going.
The reason esoteric issues like telecom and media regulation, and intellectual "property" law end up commanding such a large amount of attention in the community is because both of these, people are realizing, are not just important, but absolutely essential, to maintaining those very important American principles.
A cheap, ubiquitous communications medium. The free flow of information which respects, but it is not outrageously hobbled by, the rights of authors... It's only our economy, and our democracy, at stake.
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I once told a friend, "There is far more Stupidity than Evil in the world."
I have since unfortunately found the corollary, "Sufficient Stupidity combined with enough Power is effectively indistinguishable from Evil."
Something like that applies here, "Sufficient Greed combined with enough Power/Wealth can effect the appearance of a Conspiracy."
Think "Greedy Lemmings," and it can look like a Conspiracy.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The other [factor] is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises. Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments. That's what's happened with broadcasting and telecom.
Lest we forget, it is actually the Democratic Party that is more in the pocket of Hollywood and the media companies, while the Republican Party tends to favor "big business" in general. Both parties have their share of guilt in all this mess. The DMCA was passed with bipartisan (i.e. substantial Democratic) support and was signed into law by a Democrat (Clinton). Trial and IP lawyers also tend to support the Democrats (cf. John Edwards). (Over-)deregulation of the media and telecoms industries took place largely during the Clinton Administration (though it started in the first Bush Administration).
I seriously doubt that Howard Dean is any angel on this, either. He's just as much a politician as any other. His rhetoric about being from the "Democractic wing of the Democratic Party" is a little ironic, given that he's against gun control, is hardly a pacifist (he supported Gulf War I and interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo), etc. etc. etc. I don't see him as being a liberal at all (neither in the modern "leftist" sense nor in the older Jeffersonian sense), but an opportunist like any other.
FWIW given my own political positions I'll probably be voting for "anything but Dubya", but I dislike the idolizing that Dean has been benefitting from of late. And I also dislike disingenuous attacks on one party or the other...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
I'm a hardcore conservative, and I'm not sure how much I agree with this definition. To my way of thinking, it's not a matter of "rewarding the strong". It's a matter of incentive --- if people are going to be taken care of no matter whether or not they do any useful work, they simply aren't likely to do any useful work. It's more a matter of rewarding effort than of rewarding strength. Granted, there are some serious problems with the way capitalism works too, and it does often turn out that the "stronger" ones do better. But I think that's the nature of freedom. You can't truly have freedom without the possibility of great success or great failure.
On a side note, as a conservative, I'm very strongly against the modern notion of "intellectual property". I'm all for property rights, capitalism, and the free market. But as the article mentions, copyright isn't a property right and shouldn't be treated as one. I believe in the Constitution above everything else, as far as politics go. And in the thinking of the founders, copyright cannot be a property right. Property is a right that the founders envisionsed as being inherent to mankind --- right up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rights like that cannot be infringed by the state. They are not granted by the state. They are inherent to the people. But, the Constitution allows Congress to GRANT and LIMIT copyright. If copyright were an inherent right, they would have protected it as such --- they certainly wouldn't have given Congress the authority to "grant" it. Therefore I must conclude that the notion of "intellectual property" is thoroughly unconstitutional, and thus I cannot support it.
I think the situation is even worse than the author describes. The media companies are turning copyright into a property right, which is bad enough, but they are also ensuring that they don't actually transfer any property rights when you buy from them.
They are setting up a sort of feudal system, where they own all the property, and we are merely serfs who get to pay rent to access the property.
It is important to restore some balance in the copyright law between the public and the media companies; but I think it is equally important to define what property rights (i.e. fair use rights) consumers have when they buy a CD or a DVD.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
Rebirth must come via legislation. Any attempts at a rebirth via technology will end up the same way.
We can run an internet underground, connecting sites via wireless gear, and that would be legislated, not to mention that it does not scale well. We can purchase expensive gear, but we cannot connect it via private lines. We cannot lay fiber or copper. We could buy fibre and copper, but we don't have enough money.
If I understand what you're talking about, QC runs over the existing infrastructure, and therefore can be regulated. Run wirelessly, all communications are self-regulating. Without substantial infrastructure, planning and money, it will never be more than a pet project.
It's very frustrating for me, and hard for me to understand. To me, the best way to live is to learn as much as you can, and try to find the best choices for yourself by gathering as much information as is possible (or feasible; you don't want to spend 2 hours researching where you will eat lunch today). Art and creation are, I believe, some of the most fun you can have without being naked (not that that's excluded...)
But a lot of people seem really, truly content with being told what to eat, wear, listen to, drive, vote for, support, etc. There are people who always vote Democrat/Republican without any consideration for the actual candidate. There are people that prefer McDonald's to real food. Most people just do what their friends do, and how did their friends start doing it? What's the source? I guess there's no way to be sure, but I'm betting it was an advertisement.
Maybe it's because it makes life easy. You listen to music to relax, and thinking about it is too hard. It's easier to watch TV than to read a book. It's easy to enjoy fast food, because it's a collection of chemicals designed to be pleasing to the largest number of people. No dangerous sharp edges for you to beware.
Similarly, most people don't want to create. Artistic effort is difficult, requiring many hours to produce something. TV can be enjoyed now. Learning how to really cook would be hard, and my family needs dinner today. Hamburger Helper is good enough. It was a hard day at work and I have a lot on my mind. I don't have time to be creative.
Now, there's great joy to be had in take-out pizza, beer, and Brotherhood of the Wolf. Some days, it's nice to let someone else take the helm. But Einstein understood that we have to keep our brains moving in new directions in order to keep them alive (he played the violin). If all you do is work and consume, you are a unit. I couldn't stand it.
(Some people take great joy in their work, which is wonderful, and ideal even. But being one-dimensional is still bad. You'll get further if you stretch your mind in new directions as often as possible; you may be surprised at how related two seemingly dissimilar things really are.)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
This is the key point from the article, the heart of what's wrong with the anti-IP movement and the Slashdot crowd:
On such a simple scale, it was clear how the majority of the Court would vote. Not because they are conservative, but because they are Americans. We have a (generally sensible) pro-property bias in this culture that makes it extremely hard for people to think critically about the most complicated form of property out there--what most call "intellectual property." To question property of any form makes you a communist. Yet this is precisely our problem: To make it clear that we are pro-copyright without being extremists either way.
So deep is this confusion that even a smart, and traditionally leftist, social commentator like Edward Rothstein makes the same fundamental mistake in a piece published Saturday. He describes the movement, of which I am part, as "countercultural," "radical," and anti-corporate. Now no doubt there are some for whom those terms are true descriptors. But I for one would be ecstatic if we could just have the same copyright law that existed under Richard Nixon..."
Through history the "there should be no such thing as private property!" movement has been driven by those who simply don't have much private property of their own and thus would like some of yours. This is the perception most of the mainstream has of the "it's our right to download movies and software!" crowd; that they simply want something for free because they lack the resources to pay.
You ask why we middle-Americans side with the big-media companies, but the answer is we don't. We side with the very basic American idea of you not being able to move into my houses with twenty of your hippy friends in the name of "property belongs to everybody!!! Who cares that we didn't build or maintain or earn or buy it!!!"
Someone will shout back that this isn't the argument of the anti-IP side, and I understand; but that's how it sounds to us. You didn't write or film or fund the movie. So why do you claim a "right" to see it free?
The author of the article is absolutely right; if you want to win the debate you must make it more about reforming copyright laws to make them more reasonable (the mainstream can get down with that), and less about "YOU EVIL CAPITALISTS DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP ANYTHING TO YOURSELVES WITHOUT SHARING WITH US!!!" The average American will NEVER come over to that side.
The ability to own property is as fundamental a freedom to this country as free speech or the right to privacy. If you want to change the minds of the masses (and you must if you want the politicians and CEO's to change theirs; bribes or no bribes they will go with the flow of public opinion in order to stay in office) you must re-frame the argument in that way... or watch your movement slowly die as the open-trading technology window closes. And it WILL close.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
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.
I don't know where you've been, but we currently have a $450bn projected deficit for the year 2003, and that number may grow to $500bn by the end of the year. This number, along with the trillions of debt that Reagan and Bush created, are essentially a loan taken out in your name, and in the name of every taxpayer in the USA.
After the Bush tax cut, the rich still pay a much higher percentage and actual amount than the non-rich.
Ah yes. Because you're one of the millions of people who don't actually look at your paycheck before you cash it. Maybe I can help you, by pointing out the 7.5% Social Security tax that the government withdraws from your check, along with the additional 7.5% that the government demands from your employer (money that you could be getting paid, otherwise.) And even though this isn't "income tax", it's being used to fund the war in Iraq, Congressional Pork, and who knows what else. If it looks like a tax, smells like a tax... Then it's a tax.
But the great thing about Social Security tax is that you only pay that 15% on the first $88,000 of your income. So under Bush's new tax cuts someone who declares $70,000 of income pays 35.03% of their income to the Federal Government, while someone who makes $1,000,000 pays only 33.81%. So much for fair.
And that's without any fancy deductions, which the wealthier earner will almost certainly be better able to take advantage of. Ask George Bush, who only paid 29% in 1999, on $900,000 worth of income. It's without counting the dividend and capital gains tax cuts which are likely to disproportionately benefit the wealthier person (I don't ever make more than a few hundred per year in dividends.)
Basically, anyone who believes this shit is pulling out their wallet and handing it over to someone who makes more than 10 times what they do. They're doing this, while our budget bleeds, because they think it's "fair"-- though they obviously haven't done the math. They're doing this because they feel that making the wealthy wealthier will somehow help our economy, when the problem currently on the demand side, eg it's people like the middle class and working class that we need to have extra cash to burn.
And somehow, the Republican Party is able to raise ever larger amounts of money. Hmm. I wonder where it's coming from. Basically, if you believe any of this is right, just or fair, then you're a sucker.