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Lessig on the World Social Forum
Raindance writes "Lawrence Lessig has a great article up on Technology Review about the World Social Forum held this past January in Brazil. In addition to telling an engaging story, it covers topics ranging from GNU and DRM to Brazil's interesting stance on the rights of foreign copyright holders, and is a good introduction to the permission culture/remix culture debate. It also makes me want to live in Brazil."
A few weeks ago Larry Lessig gave a great talk along with Jeff Tweedy at the New York Public Library. In it Lessig talks a lot about Brazil and how they are totally nuts about open source, and how it isn't only overweight nerds with ponytails who are into it (his words, not mine). Definitely worth watching, there is some great new material that wasn't in his book Free Culture or anywhere else that I know of.
Don't put advice in your sig.
You should do some research on the situation in Venezuela before accusing someone of being an enemy of freedom. Let's just remeber the fact that Mr. Chavez got back from a "coup d'etat" because of the peoples support. Besides, the ones accusing him of authoritarism (not that I think he's perfect, in fact I also think he should handle the situation in a different manner) are the ones that held the power before him. Best regards to everyone.
It might be more accurate to liken it to the DIVX rental system (not the coincidentally named unrelated codec).
In the original DIVX system, you would buy DIVX-DVDs for, say $5. This would give you one 48-hour window to watch the movie, at some point in the future (of your choosing). Then, if you wished to watch it again, you purchase another window.
After several (seven, IIRC) uses, the movie became permanently free, and you could unlock it whenever you wanted to watch it.
Theoretically, it was akin to renting-to-buy the movie. You could pick it up for $5 and watch it once (a bit more than renting, but no late fees). If you wanted to 'rent' it again later, well, you already had the disc, you just needed to unlock it again. Again, similar to renting, except you do it from home, immediately. Eventually it's permanently unlocked, and if you liked it enough to unlock it so many times, you've purchased it.
Perfectly logical idea.
The best part of the analogy, though, is how DIVX ended.
There was so little popular support for the idea (because people couldn't get over the idea of purchasing a physical disc without the right to watch it whenever they wanted), that the company eventually went bankrupt, and all the people that actually HAD purchased DIVX discs then had no way to unlock them. And of course the same sort of thing has happened to people with large iTunes collections that have had a hardware failure. Their legitimate purchase suddenly has no value.
This is the real fear of Digital Restrictions Management. Despite assurances, if permission is required to use the product, it is by it's very nature, unreliable.
Would you buy a car if you had to get permission each time you wanted to drive it? Maybe (if the car was cheap), but the first time you needed to be somewhere, and the guy who holds the keys for you cannot be found, you'll start looking for a new permission-free car.
Don't put advice in your sig.
The woman like Americans because Brazilian men are notoriously unfaithful, cruel and not around much. One town I was in the ratio of women to men was 8:1!
You've got to be shitting me. THIS is modded insightful?!
I'm Argentinian - that's right, we're Brazils' next door neighbours. Been there myself a lot of times. How the fuck can you tell that Brazilians are "cruel and unfaitfhul" to their women? How many couples have you met? Because i've meet a lot, and they were quite happy. Where were you visiting anyway? If anything, they're mostly great people, which is more than i can say of other countries i've visited. And yes, Brazilian women are usually fun and sexy. Not bimbos.
These bullshit generalizations drive me mad. So, all Americans treat their women like shit, dress like fucking idiots and shoot each other? Because they surely seem to do in those nifty rap videos!
And yes, electronics are expensive (not insanely expensive though), mainly because of the dollar-real ratio and import taxes. Deal with it. And you can have a decent salary as well - just stop thinking in dollars for two seconds.
That's exactly my idea of why current copyright laws in the USA are unconstitutional. The US Constitution describes exactly why the concept of "intellectual" property is needed: to create an incentive for publishing. If you have DRM, the idea itself is not published, it's protected by a trade secret. The same is true for software that's sold in executable form only. Copyright should apply to the source code alone, not to the executable binary file.
After the copyright expires, what does the public have? If it is a binary file, then no ideas enter the public domain, even after the ridiculously long copyright terms we have today. The same is true for an encoded DVD or anything with DRM in it.
So let's keep each set of rules separate. Patents and copyrights are intended for ideas that will enter public domain after a certain time. Trade secrets are with you forever, until someone rediscovers that secret. If you want to keep your ideas secret, it's your right. But you shouldn't benefit from laws intended to assure that new ideas will enter the public domain if you do everything in your power to keep those ideas forever secret.
Legislation such as the DMCA goes totally against the spirit embodied in the COnstitution.