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Public Interest Groups Face Uphill Battle at WIPO Meeting
Patrick Norager writes "As WIPO creates new rights for broadcasters, documents critical of these rights created by EFF and IP Justice were stolen and recovered in a bathroom trashcan." EFF has a general statement on the meeting with links for more information.
One group fighting music IP is called the downhill battle. All this pessimism can really get to you until you realize that these laws will ultimately fail. It's like trying to stop a waterfall. Check out infoanarchy.org for a view on how things will really turn out.
And cynics are, as a group, highly redundant and unoriginal.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
The guard at the table, protecting the documents to be heard at WIPO, seems to be a good image, but also a telling image. How long will it be before we can no longer place a guard at the table? How long before justice itself is patented by some company?Guard the table oh great EFF! I will continue to write, program and design anything I want to, IP bullshit be damned!!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Well according to Howard last night on Lettermen. Sat. Radio is the next big thing and he is going there to create is own rights. More power too him. I will pick on up just hear his first show which he said will be "One for the books".
Click HERE
This just goes to show how far these corporations and individuals are willing to go to maintain their monopolistic control of what they have. It is worse than the railroads of the 1800's and the Standard Oils of the 1900's...I do not in the least doubt they will do anything, including murder, to maintain their way of life.
It's really rather sad when somebody (we all know who they're working for, but don't let this be tried in the court of public opinion; get evidence first) takes papers that go after the industry and attempt to hide them.
But for the love of Jack Valenti, do it right - burn them or shred them, don't dump them behind a trash can!
Is it possible that that person wanted the documents found at the last minute to draw up controversy over this?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Is it possible that that person wanted the documents found at the last minute to draw up controversy over this?
What if they did? Seriously. It's not like the EFF has the advantage. They don't have the budget their opposition has to the tune of billions of dollars. You can buy a judge for a few million or less, and it has happened before. Even if they did put the dox behind the trash themselves, they are fighting the good fight.
But I seriously doubt they would try and harm their own case just to get some notice. The EFF is not like Greenpeace or PETA. The EFF is a sensible bunch of people.
I'm not sure I'd call it an uphill battle if the best plan their opponents can think up is to use the bathroom trash can to dispose of the documents.
While I never like to see sleezy behaviour, I've always thought it was a good sign when your adversary starts acting out of desperation. It means:
-you are a real threat
-their normal measures have not beaten you
-they are likely to make mistakes due to their "emotional" state
It is terrible that someone stole material and threw it away. And it is terrible that people's hard work has been set back. BUT, whoever did this is backed into a corner and feeling very threatened.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
As WIPO creates new rights for broadcasters, documents critical of these rights created by EFF and IP Justice were stolen and recovered in a bathroom trashcan.
Damn, I never thought they'd check the men's bathroom trashcans. Maybe I should try the women's bathroom trashcans next time.
Yep, definitely infringing on my patent.
I once stole a stack of soon-to-be-assigned reading packets off a teacher's desk when he stepped out for coffee. Of course, I was in the eighth grade. Grow up already! Take it like a man!
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Just doing a "Delete" puts it in the recycle bin. Duh.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
How many Bavarian Illuminati does it take to change a light bulb?
Three. One to screw it in, and one to confuse the issue.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Italy announced today that they would not sign the treaty. Quoth their Prime Minister, "I uh WIPO my assuh on your treaty-uh." /ducks
Unknown host pong.
Perhaps I am missing a key point (such as the paper was notorized), but no one had a digital copy to print?
Behold our modern IP warlords, staking out their territory, taxing us peasants for living on it and dictating how and when we can use it, hiring warriors to defend it against others, and all the while declaring that their property is sacred and their authority comes from God.
Massive complete ignorance of current copyright laws and any future laws will gear the marketplace away from strict standards no matter what the law says. The law once said 'separate but equal' and the marketplace said fuck that.
Well, Internet users are saying fuck that to media corporations. TV-viewers with VCRs and Tivos (and MythTV, you arrogant linux jerks) are saying fuck that to the stupid-loud-ads-in-your face-business-model.
The more the DMCA is being used in its limitless obscurity, the more it is being struck the fuck down. The more software patents become reality, the more prior art can be claimed in open source.
The marketplace controls demand and demand always controls supply. Big bad Joe wouldn't be selling pot to 16yo kids if 16yo kids weren't buyin'.
So, basically, I'm saying to hell with these corporations trying to tell me what to do with something after I already bought it. If I wanna cut a tennis ball in half and use it as a neato door stop, fuck Wilson if they tell me that's unauthorized use. They can fuck off because I paid for the balls... actually, because I have the balls. I already have the mp3s of the songs I want (don't need any new crappy music in my collection) and they weren't available for purchase when I wanted them, and CDs don't always play right and get scratched easily, so why should I go buy the cds of said music now? Make new shit for me to buy... that is worth buying.
There's safety in numbers - especially in a Democracy that gets to vote for who's in power. Crappy laws can be removed. And guess what, media companies?! -- the majority, consequently your own customers, is already against you! So fuck off and go produce something that I will buy instead of treating me like I'm not buying enough.
If it were easier to buy a high-quality mp3 for a buck that came with a keychain or some neato bullshit like that, I wouldn't have pirated them.
So, media companies, here's how to un-piss us off:
- apologize for calling your customers criminals
- make access to media easier rather than harder
- go with the fucking marketplace flow like a good megaconglomerate
- do some market research that doesn't involve what you think you're owed
- act like the consumer has a say in what he or she buys
- quit treating idiots in masses (ie. consumers) as idiots.. we tend to get smart in numbers
- make better shit
And finally, all of you pirates that are too lazy to click twice at the EFF website, donate, or fire off a flaming letter filled with poo at your nearest corrupt government fuck, you're still doing your patriotic duty by pirating. I want to liken you to MLK's stand of civil disobedience - but that would be unfair since you're just downloading Britney Spears while the black dudes got their poor asses beat. So instead, I will just say hurrah for teen angst and continue your P2P deviations.. because you are saying a lot, no matter how ignorant the media companies want to be.
Sorry I said fuck a lot.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
"As WIPO creates new rights for broadcasters, documents critical of these rights created by EFF and IP Justice were stolen and recovered in a bathroom trashcan."
and there were clean?
i have found, you can find,happiness in slavery!
That's just proof that someone read them.
What else can use a stack of papers for in the bathro-- oh my god dear no! someone think of the childern.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
*points at co-workers, family and friends* I TOLD YOU THEY WERE EVIL! EEEEEVIIIIILLLLL! Who's a paranoid wacko now? oh yeah I guess there's that other stuff too, but not this!
It might be possible to get the perpetrator's fingerprints off of the papers (if the Good Guys(tm) were careful in how they handled the papers once they found them in the trash).
I think the better question in all the face of that rage is: where were you when all this was in the planning stages? Why is all your "civil (a misnomer) disobediance" after the fact? I've yet to hear a single "I'm in it for the disobediance" person say "I tried to keep the Sonny Bono Act from passing, but I failed." or "I saw the DMCA coming from a mile away and was in the halls of congress protesting"
There's not even a "Hey Tivo! I see what you're thinking. Don't do it man!". The letters of protest? Someone check the mens bathroom. Maybe they were stolen too?
...would be an organization known as Transparency International http://www.transparency.org/; another would be Junior Chamber International http://www.jci.cc/ (for the 18-40 crowd). The two organizations recently signed an agreement to collaborate their efforts.
Otherwise, doesn't this phrase mean that the theft itself, as well as the recovery, took place within a trashcan? (which would imply an awfully small thief, not to mention a rather unusual place to have such important documents in the first place).
[Moderation -1, Grammar Nazi]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Peace man, how can they steal if everything is in the public domain. Maybe they just 'took you up in the offer'.
I'm upset that they didn't put them in the recycle bin or pass them on though.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Actually, it will be 'The EFF get FFEd-up', as in putting the big EFF backwards.
I will show your companies as much respect as you show us.
In short, I have zero respect.
FUCKHEADS.
Strange, I thought that would be 'The EFF get VWW-ed'.
Nope! They used a different method and I hear they patented it first. "Method for compressing and storing important documents in the trash". That is, they crumpled up the papers first.
Gosh, maybe they should take a lesson from the 1950's American Foreign Policies of trying to manipulate other peoples
Maybe it's time to go back to boycotts
A particularly nice movie: The Corporation. Nothing groundbreaking, but that was not the point. The point was to tell the story of how corporations came to being and why they are so fucking heartless. It includes interviews with people both inside and outside the corporate world. If you never thought about why the corporations occupy the place in your world that they now do, this films could be an eye-opener. Below are the eDonkey links for the film (3 episodes, different encodings), but other networks may have them as well.
4 52 |61E26051E883C07D83646F94EA51DD27|/
3 46 |A0779FC2FCB779170A0D731080FE05A0|/
4 24 |512F7E9F820E44F3DE13FF9D1470D9D9|/
6 03 |B3AEB0657C12ADF02F65A4BBDB490A21|/
4 74 |87C48DC6F846ACDDFFF3A1C634A67555|/
1 98 |4DD8040BC28C0E6AAFC8C9556240E4E5|/
3 90 |BEB7F1F625126E8BCB53A6FC0621BB12|/
6 22 |8C19BFCC0FC0871EB087B908AE19D818|/
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20Cd1.mpg|614170
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20Cd2.avi|516856
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e1.1.mp4|97272
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e1.2.mp4|56726
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e2.1.mp4|97412
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e2.2.mp4|56447
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e3.1.mp4|97394
ed2k://|file|The%20Corporation%20e3.2.mp4|60489
Personally with every new day I realise how the history comes back 100 years ago in some respects... The struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist opressors did not end, despite what you may have been told. It is inevitable, let's just hope we all do better this time.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
There are HUGE power grabs occurring which will transform the US and its citizens' ability to own their own information which are getting very little media notice. Check out the Federal Register's November 15th Request for Information on how best to remove traditional medical record conidentiality and instead make all of your medical information "interoperable" and accessible by the government and others for data mining.
1 800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2004/04-25382.htm
See: http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/06jun2004
A-F*CKING-MEN
char * X; ... ...
char * Y;
if (X != Y) {
}
The above if statement contains "A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to the same location in memory." (The quote is the entire abstract of the patent application.)
I'm sorry, but God needs to destroy the USPTO from space at this point.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Hey! To the moderator who moderated me troll. Thank you. Every time someone says this I'll point out the fine job of moderation you did.
It's not like it's my reputation you're hurting.
I'd be satisfied with most people if they'd just stop producing methane.
One of the more repugnant aspects of laws that allow the kinds of abuse we've seen is that if they are allowed to continue for any length of time, correcting it is next to impossible, since it will entail fighting the massive numbers of entrenched interests that have been allowed to accumulate. A trained monkey can create horrible, even destructive legal policy. Cleaning up the mess...well, that will require more than we can probably get from many of our current legislators.
Let's not forget that WE, as consumers, as humans capable of exercising various degress of discipline, hold the key as to whether or not ANY of these policies and/or practices will survive. Hint: a company can't survive long without revenue, no matter how many laws are in place to "protect" it. This will always be the ace up our sleeve- we just need to be prepared to play our hand.
Sometimes I think these moderator people are insane.
While the patent itself is for BASIC, the claims and abstract are quite elementary. I even *quoted* the abstract in its entirity. And doing a not-equal operation on a pair of pointers is all about finding out whether two vairables "point to the same location in memory".
In the old PC environment, with the non-flat memory model the pointers would need to be normalized (a-la the HUGE memory model), but that's about it.
So this is very much on-topic.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Dear Anne Campbell,
0 02130
I'm writing to you on intellectual property, but this time not
specifically in Europe, but rather in the World Intellectual Property
Organization. It appears that the body is not neutrally seeking
informed democratic policy-making, but rather simply attempting to
coerce its members into accepting strong IPR. I do not believe that
this should be the way in which an international body should work,
and I would hope that our government agrees.
Below, I have extracted relevant sections from the linked webpages.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002130.php#
WIPO: Day 3
November 19, 2004
Today at WIPO saw a flat-out disgraceful cooking of the deliberative
process. The administrators of the meeting -- the chair and secretariat
-- are pushing hard to make this treaty pass, even if no one wants it
to. The solution to the deadlock is "regional meetings" in which
countries that oppose the treaty can be isolated and arm-twisted into
coming into line, and where few or no public-interest NGOs will be
present. Some of the most populous countries in the world -- India and
Brazil -- along with many others called for a better approach: any
region that wants a meeting can have one, but the real action would be
at an "inter-sessional meeting" held in Geneva, with all countries
represented. Even though these countries presented a solution that would
have given regional meetings to those who wanted them, the chair
steadfastly refused to hear from them -- eventually, he used a straw
poll to discard their proposal altogether, and then called it
"democracy."
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002117.php
Both yesterday and again today, written statements provided by IP
Justice and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which were placed on the
table designated for floor papers, were stolen within minutes of being
deposited on the table. Additionally yesterday documents provided by the
Union for the Public Domain were also missing shortly after being placed
on the table.
This morning, many of these documents were recovered from the trash can
in the first floor men's restroom. Another set of IP Justice statements
as well as copies of the alternative NGO Proposal for a Broadcasting
Treaty were recovered from behind a desk on the ground floor. These
documents provided by IP Justice, EFF, and the Union for the Public
Domain were critical of the Broadcasting Treaty. The papers drafted by
the broadcasting industry, urging the treaty's adoption, however, remain
undisturbed on the table for floor papers.
Yours sincerely,
Wikileaks, no DNS
fuckin Affleck
What we need to do is use P2P and other systems to publicize independant music. It ought to be possible to create some semi-distributed music recommendation system, preferably combined with free distribution of samples. If anyone would like to work with me on this, e-mail me.
As an ad-hoc beginning, I'm currently listening to The Horse-Tamer's Daughter by Julia Ecklar who I highly recommend.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
The myth that there aren't commercials on Sirius is just that: a myth.
On the talk and news stations, there are commercials. Of course, this is because they're rebroadcasting regular tv news, etc, so the ads are in there too. Still, they're commercials.
Now, the music? No, there aren't commercials in it exactly - well, yes there are. It seems like every couple of songs there's a "Sirius" commercial on, reminding you that you're listening to Sirius radio, or piping in stuff like "Don't forget to check out channel 146!"
No - Sirius already has commercials whether they choose to call them that or not.
Let's not forget that WE, as consumers, as humans capable of exercising various degress of discipline, hold the key as to whether or not ANY of these policies and/or practices will survive.
No no no! Watch the South Park about Wallmart for a good humorous discussion of that topic. When people shop they act in their best interest, as they should. Trying to do inject some sort of ethics at the cash register is WAY too late and rarely effective.
The real power to fix these issues lies in our ability to vote. Let me be clear on this though: This power does not lie in your ability to elect someone who will do what you want and then walking away. Most people falsely believe that's what voting is all about. It's not! The power of the vote is the ability to organize, to band together, build consensus and convince whoever is in office *now* that you will vote them out of office if they don't do what you want. That's where the real power of the vote lies. Corporations know this. They wield that power to amazing effect. Do you?
If you are dissatisfied with the way things are going, never vote for the incumbent no matter how bad the challenger is. At the very least, it will make your next vote seem more important to the incumbent and make them pay more attention to your issues.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Webjay is a great help. Its express purpose is to help share great music you found put out by people who are distributing their works on the Internet.
I bought some albums by Brad Yoder -- he's a folk-ish kind of singer so I feel guilty about liking his songs. Check out wwjd -- it's hidden in a bad place on his site but it's a great song. Brad: "I love to play this song because it makes people at both extremes upset."
Ethan
Also, I forgot to mention, but two of the late Warren Zevon records -- The Wind and Life'll Kill Ya, are put out by Artemis Records, which is an independent label according to RIAA Radar (and the Artemis Records site itself, and I think Wikipedia too). I love Warren Zevon and most of his music is RIAA-owned, so it was really nice to find that someone so mainstream could be at least a little free.
Ethan
Enron?
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Capitalism relies on private ownership and predominantly on market forces. Corporatism, which is a new name for Mussolini's Fascism (he said it was misnamed himself), is built on close Government cooperation and intervention to build up corporations and the economy. It was praised around the world in the 1930's - Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all! After WW2 the term fascism became unpopular, but the economic model kept on rolling.
There're quite a few sites about corporatism, including this one which has links to other sites and articles.
That's where the real power of the vote lies. Corporations know this. They wield that power to amazing effect.
How is that, exactly? I could be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that corporations don't vote.
Corporations do vote - every time someone writes a fat check in the form of a bri^H^H^H campaign contribution. The number of and size of these contributions determine how much media penetration a candidate can expect, and this, I'd argue, has at least some impact on the way people cast their votes. All this corporate money is exactly the reason that the campaign finance reform is so vitally necessary. When you think of a candidate spending more than a hundred million dollars to get re-elected, something is very wrong.
When people shop they act in their best interest, as they should.
When people shop, they act in their best short term interest. America has become all about short-term interest. "I want it NOW, and I want as much as I can get." The massive amounts of debt incurred by the average American is an indication as to how pervasive this mentality is, and sadly, it is only one of several. The next time you walk through a mall, a park, or other location frequented by large numbers of people take note of how many of them are overweight. Same problem, different symptom.
Trying to do inject some sort of ethics at the cash register is WAY too late and rarely effective.
It's way too late and rarely effective because few people have the will or the discipline to actually do it. Like better eating habits, it entails a lifestyle change- doing things differently, and doing that consistently.
The massive amounts of debt incurred by the average American is an indication as to how pervasive this mentality is
:)
:)
Like it or not, debt is very important to the health of the economy. It's where money comes from and it is what motivates us to work. "If I don't work, I'll lose my house" is a wildly powerful economic force. It seems counter-intuitive that debt is good but look at the lifestyles of wealthy people. Now imagine a world where everyone behaved like that. We'd get no real work done. We'd all sit around enjoying our wealth. Now, don't get me wrong, I want to be one of those wealthy people, and getting rid of MY debt is good for ME but when the guy next to me has lots of debt, that's great because then I can get him to work to earn my money to keep from losing his house.
It's way too late and rarely effective because few people have the will or the discipline to actually do it.
Let me guess: You do have the will, which, in one small way, makes you a better person than most other people. It's just like better eating habits. Skinny people love to blame fat people's obvious mental inferiority (the lack of willpower or determination or whatever) for their obesity. It's the grown up's form of teasing others to make themselves feel better. Everyone does it. It's a big part of the secret to perpetual happiness: A constantly inflated sense of self worth.
Before you prop yourself up on a pedestal to separate yourself from the bourgeois masses who lack self control, try to reign in your arrogant contempt for others, unless, of course, you lack the self control to do so.
Asking people to make financial choices that are bad for their financial well being is as dumb as expecting CEO's to make business decisions that are bad for their companies. It's their job to make the decisions they make, you bet they are going to do it. Every financial decision we make has repercussions. While we can know something about some of them, (oh no, those Nike's are made by children in sweat shops) you can't know everything about all of them (uh, we aren't using the sweat shop children to make shoes anymore, now they are starving). Economies are complicated things. In the US, we happen to live in an economy where the structure of our ecnonomy enclosed companies in a great set of rules that basically made it so they could do what they do best, struggle for wealth and power, and it would benefit the general public. The problem is that, over time, they have found holes in the rules and they are now well documented and regularly exploited. Companies are now racing to move out of the crucible of competition into the lazy backwater's of monopoly, customer lock-in, exploitation and corruption. We need to plug the holes to get our companies back into honest competition for our business. Anything short of that is a weak band-aid of a temporary solution and is a distraction from the real work that needs to be done. Before you go off half cocked trying to convince people to alter their shopping habits, remember who *really* benefits from us chasing our tails in trying to solve this problem.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Ad hominem attacks will not transcend reality.
There are some very unfortunate trends in this culture, and no amount of rationalization will make the costs they incur disappear. You can't have it all. That's part of the human condition. People are good at deluding themselves, but only until they're forced to deal with the consequences. By then, however, the damage is done- it's matter of salvaging what's left.