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Ian Clarke and Freenet in the Crosshairs
EMIce writes "John Markoff of the New York Times writes of Ian, "Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared. ... Now, however, Mr. Clarke is taking a fresh approach, stating that his goal is to protect political opponents of repressive regimes." Wasn't freenet originally about dissent? Mr. Markoff appears to be re-writing a history that he probably only knows through a handful of lexis-nexis searches." Update: 08/01 18:32 GMT by T : Ian Clarke wrote to point out his comment posted to the story which lays out the actual subject of his Defcon talk.
...piracy is bad. Middle men (RIAA/MPAA) are good. If you believe in file sharing then you are completely opposed to copyright and probably a communist. It's all crap if you ask me.
The way I see it, (and the people who originally drew up the concept of copyright), a copyright should protect the rights of the person who CREATED the work. Not the assumed rights of the distributors. Not the guy making millions while doing nothing. If it's a song, then the people involved in the actual act of composing, performing, producing and recording the piece should be covered by copyright. Not the corporation.
(Note: the following statements do not apply 100% across the board, but they do apply in the majority of cases) The problem with our society is that we have a surplus population of useless morons who have no ability to actually do anything productive. They are the "middle men". All they do is insert themselves into the middle of a transaction and do everything they can to make it seem like they have value. But they don't. For example, take the long distance business. We used to have a system that "just worked". It was called the Bell Telephone Company. Yes, it was a monopoly. But, the level of service provided was world class. Then the great American terrorist Ronald Reagan, broke up the monopoly and created the hellball we have today. All in the name of "competition". So what do we wind up with twenty some years later? We have a handful of really big, greedy corporations who provide shitty service.
Where's the competition? Oh yeah... that's right. I almost forgot about all the "mom-n-pop" long distance RESELLING outifts. They offer you long distance at various rates differing by only a few cents here or there. And they provide even shittier service because a lot of times their tehnical people are complete bumpkin morons. (Where I work, we have a nickname for AllTel in Southern-Ohio: Fred's Phone and Feed Service [in case you can't tell, I hate country folk]) We actually had one of their "technicians" attempt to test a T1 line with a butt set. So all of these small long distance services RESELLING you long distance that they bought in bulk from the big greedy corporations offer what exactly? Their long distance service sucks. Their technical expertise sucks. And for the quality of service, their prices suck. The situation is even worse with cell phones. Just think about how many shitty places there are to buy your cell phone service from with how many millions of plans. That's NOT helpful.
So... back to the whole file sharing concept and copyright. The RIAA and the MPAA are the useless middlemen in this whole fiasco. They have realized just how irrelevant they could become if the artists took the power of distribution into their own hands. The only way to preserve their stranglehold on the business it to outlaw the technology that could get the artists wider exposure without help from the RIAA or MPAA. So they focus on the piracy instead of working to make a system that actually works for them and accepting that they may have a smaller role in the future. They want it all. But in all of this, copyright has been twisted in order to protect the "rights" of a corporation. The artists get shit upon. In most cases musicians don't get to keep a lot of the money they make because they wind up paying it back into their record label for supporting them. It's an ugly and scammy system that's basically run by thugs. They are corporate rats that are pretty much a mafia that needs to be rubbed out. All this bullshit about P2P folks not believeing in copyright is total smoke and mirrors. Copyright in it's original form was fine. As it stands right now, it's terribly broken since it protects the people who need the least protection and ensures that the original artists don't get much unless they tow the party line. It's fucked.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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>Your post is very dismissive, on the basis that free speech is decently protected in the US. But I think one goal of Freenet is to protect the anonymity and privacy of information providers that use it. Free speech by itself does not do that.
Given what passes for free speech from non-Chinese users of Freenet, I think it's pretty safe to say that while China may have crossed the line, the US hasn't.
That's the polite way of saying it. I live in the States. I have free speech. I don't need to be polite. So I'll say it impolitely:
The impolite way of saying it is this: In China, Freenet is a tool for political dissidents to embed their signal in the stream of noise of child pornography. In the United States, Freenet is a tool for a bunch of sick fucks to embed their signal in the stream of noise generated by Chinese political dissidents.
Sorry, Chinese dissidents -- I won't run a Freenet node. You're on your own because too many of my countrymen appear to be incapable of understanding that their right to "speak" freely brings with it a responsibility not to harm others - nor to be accessories after the fact of such harm - with their "speech". When you win your freedom, I hope you do a better job with it than we in the West did.
Thats nice and all, but do you always refer to yourself in the 3rd person?
The more you know, the less you understand.