Slashdot Mirror
Modding and the Law
S3D writes "An article at O'Reilly discusses modding as a cultural phenomenon and its relation to the law and authority. The conclusion is that social activists are modders too. They want to change the government into something that supports a productive society. They want institutions to stop hiding facts and to pay attention to science. They want to change corporations, change people's day-to-day behavior, and change our own social relationships."
Andy Oram offers interesting insights, and paradoxically offers as a solution, modding our government. Cool!
They want institutions to stop hiding facts and to pay attention to science.
If they're anything like Slashdot's mods, they'll also try, at times, to suppress facts that contradict their position.
What's so culturally phenomenal about modifying stuff? We've been doing it ever since we made flint knives. The only new aspect of "modding" is the restrictions unreasonably placed on it by corpolitics.
Argh.
Sometimes the right way to change things, isn't by going thru the system at all. For example, illegal copying. Inspite of all the brow beating and guilt trip morality, there is nothing wrong at all with sharing music with other people. They not only have a right to copy, but they also don't deserve punishment for it either, even if it's the law, and even if they know it. IMHO, the internet and rampant copying have done more good for society in the last 10 years than all the information in the last 100 years combined. Starving artists? Bull, most people have a far better chance making a name for themselves by sharing their creations freely.
I got excited for a second there...
modding has always been around. Only recently has it become any phenomenon through greed of the manufactorer. Could you imagine buying a car, and then being sued for replacing the factory deck with a new one? Looks like some corporations seek to stop selling any goods to anyone and instead just want to lease out the use of their property. If they do it should be clearly printed on the box. If not, when you purchase it, it's YOURS to do whatever you damn well please to do with it.
*DrugCheese rants*
You can call it "modding" but I think the we are supposed to try and fix social injustices.
> The conclusion is that social activists are modders too. They want to change the
> government into something that supports a productive society. They want institutions
> to stop hiding facts and to pay attention to science. They want to change corporations,
> change people's day-to-day behavior, and change our own social relationships.
Oh bullshit. YOU may THINK you are promoting that in YOUR activism. Other equally activist folk are promoting very different things. So stop projecting your own political notions on everyone else and pretending it is the only possible viewpoint.
Typical slashdot twaddle, what passes for politics and philosophy here isn't even cereal box pop philosophy. Bah!
Democrat delenda est
A fun game anyone can play.
This week; why social activist activity is like modding.
Next week, why modding and social activism are like biological viruses: 'both set out to commandeer the host and change its functions to their own end'.
The week after, why the IETF is like a shoemaker; both provide the tools that let people transfer information from place to place.
The difficulty with analogies is not creating them, but in creating ones that shed valuable light on either topic. This analogy doesn't help understaning of modding or social activism.
It is interesting to me that the main planks of the controlling interests were laid during the Clinton years:
The No Electronic Theft Act of 1997
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998
I guess we now know why Hollywood is so in bed with the Clintons. The established media companies, as usual, are fighting any trend that loosens their grip on us. Their latest ploy, the new TV program about a woman president, is just the latest transparent move (get us all used to the idea of Hillary in charge). Just think what onerous laws they will be able to pass once the Clintons get back into the White House!
I think modding and the related fanfiction (which can be considered as "add-ons" or even complete AUs to someone else's original creative work) derive from an even more basic impulse than to change the world. People like creating things, they like to tell stories, they like to make things. Most don't desire to be professional (at least initially) and maybe they don't have the talent. It is easier for you to tell stories/make new work based on what someone else has done as the universe/tools already exist. Also it helps you draw a larger audience as the audience is also familiar with the universe. I mean everyone when they were young after watching a particularly engrossing movie have made up stories in their heads how they were part of the Jedi or little plotlines about what happened after the end. Maybe you weren't entirely satisfied with some aspect of the movie/book/game and want to change it to suit yourself. All the internet does is allow something that previously would have been private gain an audience outside of your close friends and family. If you look at the rich cultural fabric of any society, you have stories that "grew" with each retelling as someone heard it in Village A, went back to Village B, embellish it a lot, and then someone in Village B went to Country C and changed it a bit to fit the local beliefs and maybe even mix it in with a preexisting story with a similar plotline. The idea of taking someone else's creative work or even a real story and using it for your own story that you tell someone else is one of the foundations of any country's creative fabric.
Also, when you think about it, isn't it healthier to have people, esp. young people sit around using their brains to create mods or write fanfiction (even if it turns out crap) than just sitting passively watching TV or playing games that someone else wrote? At least they are using their brains and doing something and trying to create something than just sitting there and passively taking what someone else is saying.
was an analogy stretched so far it just snapped like an overwound violin string. :-)
Those apes dancing around in the beginning of 2001 are the firt modders, with their l33t femur-bone mod.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Change *everything*?
... for what? One rhetorical
question: Does different = good?
The list you quoted does not include "everything". Jus three things, one a historically-new serious problem (corporations), and two on-going basic traits (but "broken" in the context of the current world) of our evolution as domesticated primates.
That's a good plan
And a not-so-rhetorical answer: Yes, when what you have now clearly has serious fundamental problems.
Corporations have a single motive (profit), the pursuit of which has the logical outcome of destroying the planet and enslaving the human race.
People's day-to-day behavior, while "mostly harmless" in isolation, adds up to nothing less than the evironmental nightmare we now face. That needs to change.
And our social relationships - As long as you can describe "haves" and "have-nots", yet we have the technological capacity for everyone to "have", we have a problem. As long as some people feel so trapped that they need to hurt others to cope, we have problems. As long as we have people so ignorant they need to blow up other people for their imaginary friends, we have a problem.
Now, random change won't help. But only a fool would avoid carefully thought-out change, even experimental, to address any of those issues.
Oh look, the next generation of culture, mind, society and consciousness altering activists has found a way to ignore the failures of all the previous culture, mind, society and consciousness altering activists.
Hippie, punk, hair metal, grunge, goth and now whoever these people are.
Modding is modding. It's doing what you want with what you've bought. It's not social commentary and it's not a blow against the man, "the media" or a challenge to the educational system.
What's already happened is that some companies have made their products mod-friendly as a marketing ploy. "Look! Our product is genuinely mod-friendly!" and if it is all the geeks trundle of and buy it.
OH NO! The movement's been co-opted by the system!
Counter-cultureal theories fall apart when you realize that there is no counter-culture, just the next big cultural thing. There is no selling out, just selling to a broad market rather than a nieche market.
To claim the goal of all social activism is "They want to change the government into something that supports a productive society. They want institutions to stop hiding facts and to pay attention to science." is a gross and naive oversimplification. Many social activists are actively ANTI-science (Fundamentalist Christians). Many social activists are actively ANTI-production (anti-globalization groups, ELF, etc).
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With my recent purchase of Battlefield 2 I recieved a full modding kit (which is also available online) including map editor and tutorials on how to use 3rd party programs. Thought to accomodate modding even goes into the development of the game: BF2 is scripted using Python, as many other games (the recent interview with the Civ4 dev team highlighted this: they used Python so the game could be extensively moddable.
Many games companies even put up with some blatant copyright infringment. I work on http://ta-mod.com/ which is a mod for the Battlefield Series of games, turning it into a Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun styled interface. Legally, EA could waltz in and shut us down for infringing their intellectual property on the C&C series, but they are fully aware of our activities and they seem to be quite enthusiastic about it.
The traditional industries can learn this lesson. If they bundled Rip/Mix/Burn programs with their music/movies just as PC Gamer developers do I would actually feel pushed to buy the content as the value added from something which you can add to infinitely over time is so much greater than a passive disk which you watch/listen to then put back. They would be adding value to their product, reaping a PR victory and not expending more than 20c per unit sold for a printed CD including the modding tools. If they don't include the tools, people will get them from somewhere else - it's a question of keeping their market.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
It's inherent in our nature to tinker with what is, which is how we got out of the caves. Whether it's modding governments through revolutions, putting a few more horsepower through that engine or moving our processors ahead a few MHz. Companies (or anyone) trying to stop it are fooling themselves as it is a true force of nature. Of course people are going to mod x-boxes, cell phones and things like people's habits through things like anti-smoking legislation. While making legal claims that say you are not allowed to mod may give a company a right to sue, there aren't enough lawyers in existence to make a small dent in what goes on. Even if there were enough lawyers, there aren't enough court rooms.
This is also a reason why attempts at computer security/anti-copy schemes are doomed to fail. They pay some poor schmoe to come up with these schemes and thousands out in the world treat it's arrival like the release of a new game. Who will win? As for telling people it's wrong, good luck. Most modders would rather ask forgiveness than permission and when they buy something take the attitude that you can't break into your own house. Make things onerous enough for them and they'll revolt. Technically, the American and French revolutions were illegal acts.
It's all very much like in Shogun when Toranaga tells Blackthorne that there is no mitigating circumstance when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord. Blackthorne replies, "unless you win". Which of course Toranaga realizes is the one mitigating circumstance.
Now get back there and unlock those cell phones and x-boxes. While your at it, mod those politicians to get them to tell these companies suck it up.
Start producing some independant canidates that hold those views, support them with your money and actually vote.
Just like being an armchair quarterback, being a armchair politician will accomplish nothing.
America is not just a two party system. We need to educate the voters that voting isn't a contest to try and pick who is going to win, It's about who you WANT to win.
We need a canidate that acknolwledges that our economic system can't be purely capitalist nor socialist. We need a moderate mix of the two with the decisions based on the needs of the majority.
We already have some socialist systems in place such as Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Public roads and parks. Lets not try and dismantle those at any given opportunity.
But for myself, what I see as the major problem in American Politics today is that the funding comes mostly from corporations and business people. Politicians don't represent the voters; they represent those who supply them with the money they needed to run for office and the promise of a cushy high paying corporate position when they are voted out.
This of course has led us to the corpratism situation we have today where the lobbyists are going as far as writting bills that they then hand to the politicans to submitt (the energy bill for example).
Our government has been bought from the people and is now solidly in the hands of corporations.
Look, the republicans have done a good job of hanging themselves and violating everything they stood for as a party. It's pretty apparent now that the next elections will see alot of them lose thier seats. But, what good does that do? Corporate money is hedged between the two major parties anyway!!
The whole concept of a government was to represent its citizens. Just like tribal hunting parties, if one hunter scores a kill the whole party had food. It existed for the benifit of the group. Leave it to human nature to subvert that concept and exploit it for the benifit of a few.
It remains to be seen if the unorganized masses can change the system run by organized corporate intrests. We only tend to THINK about it around election time, they WORK on it EVERY DAY!!
but I did not mod the deputy
Corporations exist to produce a useful good. Profits represent the difference in value between instant consumption and investment. However the system has been broken by policies that reinvent those relationships. Instead of the question being asked "is it the most efficient way producing a useful good", and coming to the conclusion that if it is not, the investment needs to be placed elsewhere. http://mises.org/quiz.asp 20. B
Insider trading is wrongly maligned because who is better to judge the worth of the stock than those responsible for generating results.
I'm bored, so I'm stopping now.
Modders want to change something that they own and paid for... and accept the responsibility if they fry their gadget or mess something up.
Activists want to change not only things that other people own, but also change people against their will, and don't want to accept responsibility if they screw up (i.e. when do activists for public housing take responsiblity for the disasterous urban housing projects debacles of the 1960s that led to the creation of new "Ghettos"??? When do anti-nuclear activists take responsibility for global warming because they have eliminated a potential form of non-greenhouse emitting energy?? When do anti-drug activists take responsibility for the half-million and rising Americans in prison, and the thousands killed in the drug war in Columbia??? When do human rights activists who want the U.S. to cut trade with "human rights abusing countries" take responsibility for pissing off half the world???)
Imagine if a "modder" decided to "improve" someone elses dialasis machine, and that someone else died in the process, and then the "modder" blamed the manufacterer of the dialasis machine... and that is a perfect example of an "activist".
The world could do with a few less activists, and a few more people minding their own damn buisness!
Would it be okay to someone live in your basement without paying rent as long as you didn't know he was there and he caused you no harm? No.
Not all philosophers[1] agree with this assertion.
It's just impractical to sell the computer to your neighbor in order to sell him exclusive access to a file (which is what you would be selling if it were a paperback).
Difference is that a paperback doesn't suddenly acquire more works bound into it, unlike an Apple ID which is bound to every work purchased with that ID.
If you don't like the license or the DRM [in products of MPAA members or Microsoft Corporation], don't agree to it or don't use it.
What viable alternative is there?
"I've seen several movies that I thought I could improve on. All of this is illegal, and that's dynamite." But it's not illegal.
Say what?
I'm surprised the author didn't raise fair use here.
Because in most cases of public non-commercial use, the expected gain of a fair use defense is less than the money that would be spent defending it in court of law.
The problem is that a license is superior, producers cannot help but adopt it.
The problem is that the people who buy popular software have no way of negotiating those license contracts. There both are and should be limits on what a party with vastly superior financial resources can demand in such a contract of adhesion.
[1] Philosophers deal in morals. Lawyers deal in law.
If you look at the structure of early corporations, such as the Dutch East India Company, it's pretty clear that the major hallmarks of modern corporations were in place - limited liability, functioning as an entity separate from its directors or owners, etc. What really happened in the latter half of the 19th century was a loosening of the procedures required to create a corporation - prior to that time, creating a corporation required a government charter which was generally only obtainable from the sovereign or the legislature directly. Typically, the only thing required now is filing the paperwork.
As for the legal fiction of corporate personhood, it's a mixed bag. Corporations do enjoy some of the rights of natural persons, including the right to own property and enter into contracts, and be held responsible for breach of same.
On the other hand, corporations are not pass-through tax entities the way sole proprietorships, meaning that profits are double-taxed - as a matter of fact, the state of New York still calls the corporate tax a "franchise tax", which is a throwback to the days when corporations were directly chartered by the state. The free speech rights of corporations, falling under the rubric of "commercial speech" as they do, are really quite limited compared to an individual's right to speak. The long and the short of it is that the rights of personhood that corporations enjoy tend to be directed at those necessary to conduct business - e.g., the owning of property and so forth.
Anyway, we may certainly quibble about the negative impact of corporate personhood, but in the end a corporation is merely a collection of individuals, working towards a common goal, with certain legal structures intended to facilitate those goals - the economic benefits of which are really quite undeniable. Virtually everything you own and enjoy was made possible by some corporate entity or another, from the computer you're typing on to the plates and flatware you ate dinner with. Your material wealth is very much facilitated by the free flow of investment capital made possible by corporate personhood, so perhaps we should examine the negatives of such structures in light of the tremendous benefits to society they provide. That may be unfashionable these days, to say that corporations really do quite a lot of good for society, but it's the truth - if anything, the material comfort that makes it possible for modern activists to decry corporations is itself facilitated by corporations. ;)
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.