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Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
netcetra writes "From a post by on CircleID by Phillip J. Windley: 'Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the Net at Linux Journal. ... if you take the time to read just one essay on the Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one.' Quote from Doc himself: 'This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.' Also see additional background on the piece on Doc Searls blog."
So if this is so important to read, why is it being posted so late at night in the region where this article should have the most impact.
I have to disagree. The problem here is not that the ability is going away, but that the freedom is going away. Those who take the freedom, those who excercise the ability in the face of legislation, are more and more often having to do it at risk to themselves or those around them.
How many companies can I badmouth before they shut me up by suing me?
How longer can I criticize the government before I get sent to Guantanamo?
Widespread lawbreaking indicates a problem with the laws, and not with the crime. This is why copyright law is so ineffective. It's also the reason that drug law doesn't really work.
In this case, however, more power is moving away from inviduals faster than it's coming to them. Of those who take that power back, by whatever means, more and more of them will be made to suffer.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
...still one of my favorite sins.
That and pride are the two things causing the current dark ages of the internet.
And make no mistake, we are in what future scholars will call the dark ages. We have this wonderful tool for communication which would enable vast networks of not just information, but concepts and ideas to be shared globally. And we are letting ( yes, letting ) big companies/governments take control and destroy this wonderful tool. All to satisfy some board of share holders, or some CEO's pride.
Whether they see us as the depth of the dark ages, or the beginning is the question I worry about.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"Widespread lawbreaking indicates a problem with the laws, and not with the crime."
Do you really think that argument holds water? Would you consider the 12,000 murders each year in the United States widespread? If that number isn't high enough, what about the 90,000 rapes? Still not high enough, what about 1.1 million car thefts? Suddenly the numbers are looking pretty widespread and yet I don't think anyone would argue there's a problem with laws against murder, rape or car theft. Want to get even higher? How about the 2.1 million burglaries and 2.2 million assaults?
At what point does a crime start becoming widespread? If murder were at the same rate as copyright infringement, would you argue that both were bad laws, neither were bad laws, or only one?
Oh, stats from here by the way.
--
RumorsDaily
What are you, an idiot?
First of all, it's impossible to force everyone to do anything. Second, it's impossible to massively delete every single site on the Internet. Third, even if you got every "web-host" to assist you, you still wouldn't get half the sites because they're hosted directly on the owner's machine. Fourth, web sites are not the Internet. There's IRC, Usenet, email, ftp, and about a million other protocols -- there's even still gopher!
Finally, and most importantly, your entire idea is wrong. It's exactly the opposite of what the Internet is supposed to be, which is unmonitored and Free.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
widespread.
2.2M represents less than 1% of the population, and the reality is it is a small percentage of repeat offenders.
You want widespread?
Copyright violation is being estimated by the media industries to be occuring on the rate of millions of offenses per day. Millions of users are logged onto P2P networks primarily for copyright infringement purposes (I said primarily, not exclusively).
Minor excess speeding tickets hit a large percentage of the population (upwards of 40% depending on jurisdiction and technologies being applied). That will definitely go up in the UK if/when they roll out those beautiful new speed cams.
Drug crimes hit a large percentage of the population. Sure, lots of people are in jail for violent crimes. But 1 person in 30 in the USA are in jail are because of drug crimes, the majority of those for simple possession. Estimates range, but the low estimates for teenage illicit drug use (one-time or more) is at around 25%.
Those are widespread numbers. Violent crimes (I'm sorry 12,000 murders is not a lot in a population of 280 million) are not. You just hear about the violence a lot whenever you listen to Fox News or whenever the police or government are trying to take your rights away. Even with the drug violence, long term violent crime rates continue to decline.
There's a book about this.
:) Go read it yourself.
It's called City Come a Walkin. It was published in 1980. William Gibson had some nice things to say about it.
The problem, in the book, is the problem we're seeing here. Some rich club mob wants to take over the Internet. They want to control the communications system, and they want to be the gatekeepers of what all will go over the wires. And they're using it to leech off of, and eventually control, society.
Cities have a way of becoming self-aware. In the book, we meet San Fransisco: City. And we meet Sacramento, briefly. (She looks like a prostitute, apparently.) Chicago's also got a soul- in a living man. New York. Phoenix. The major cities- They start to take on a life of their own.
And they fight as hard as they can against the network controllers. But... "When the city comes a walkin' we'll all be obsolete."
I don't want to spoil it.
Somehow, Searls extracted some hideous meaning from these comments. He wants to ask Whiteacre a bunch of deep questions about the Net and freedom. I don't think Whiteacre could answer any of them; nor should he.
The problem here is copyright, plain and simple. Instead of a direct market for intellectual labour, copyright gives us a pseudo-market for access to the products of that labour. Now all of a sudden the money's in restricting access to "content". That's right, the financial incentive is to STOP people making use of information. With that counter-productive basis, how is it any surprise that we end up with a market where the sellers have a vested interest in PREVENTING the buyers from getting what they want? This applies to both the publishing houses and the access providers.
When so many people break the law, maybe there is something wrong with the law. Maybe there is something wrong with how the problem of intellectual property rights is being approached.
I've seen NO creative thinking about IP rights. There's a lot of talk, but very little serious progress.
Maybe history is a guide. For example, did you notice how libraries made all publishers go bankrupt? Not.
Did you notice that television and video tape recorders utterly destroyed the movie industry? Not.
I don't download music. However, if I did, it is obvious to me that I would get interested and would buy more CDs.
I had several very bad experiences with the music industry and their marketing methods. The industry is extremely adversarial toward its artists and its customers. Over time, that caused me to listen to music less and less. What I'm seeing however, is that music industry leaders want to fix their problems without fixing the problems they create for me.
The world is dominated by people who believe that interacting with other people requires fighting. In fact, the only real solutions to social problems come from thinking.
well...when you consider that most victims of murder knew their killers, (%92 percent among women ) and once the victim has been murdered, they can't be murdered again, and no one wants to hang out/befriend a murder.... ...it seems to me that the supply of victims would diminish to a point that a particular killer would have no one left to kill,
Conversely, copyright infringement doesn't limit the supply. In fact the opposite is true, the more infringement the greater the supply. Sure i might not want to commit the same infringement twice, but others still can. Try that with murder. You can only pass the same bloody corpse around so much before it ceases to be interesting.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
Was slavery ethical? Was the holocaust ethical?
Only a minority of the slave keeping population seemed to object at the time. Ethics and morality change judging the past by todays standards it ludicrous. IMO, grandparent or whatever is spot on.
Maybe one day the pressures created by the ease of commiting piracy will lead to a more mature society with much more freely available enjoyment.
I think you are mixing your example a bit here ...
Is slavery ethical ... we currently don't think so. Was slavery deemed ethical back in the day, well I'm sad to say that I think it was! Gradually the idea of slavery became less and less acceptable until it was eventually outlawed, but it was obviously an accepted part of society for many years, not least in africa where the various tribes would take slaves from each other as a matter of course.
Now we get on to the holocaust. Obviously we can still look back and see this as a bad thing, but there the similarity ends, because the vast majority of opinion back then would also have been horrified by the concept. That a few people high up in the Nazi regime were able to fool and trick their population into helping perpetrate the attrocity is perhaps more interesting, but I'd say the majority of the population simply didn't know it was happening!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Yes, it's cheaper to publish information on the Net than in almost any other media, but it's also cheaper and easier to block said content on the Net than almost any other media.
Huh? Never has there been such a place with so little editorial responsibility. Unless you want to run around putting up posters, the simplest way to spread information that is too controversial, quaint or even illegal to end up at any publisher is to put it on a website, send it out by email, irc/dcc, post to newsgroups, whatever. Peer-to-peer is completely causing havoc on anyone trying to control information. For example, try finding the Scientologist documents they were sending takedown notices to ISPs and Google, among other places. You'll find that you can, and quite easily. You forget that we don't see people encrypt because we don't see ISPs censor. The first country to do will see a massive amout of SSL-proxy connections abroad.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Bravo to you for taking cultural relativism to its absurd extreme. The idea has moved from a challenge to be open minded, to the conclusion of all of philosophy. Gone are thousands of years of thought on what mankind could acheive, and we, in our profound wisdom, have replaced it with the "philosophy" that what is moral is what the majority of people say is moral.
Slavery isn't acceptable, no matter what time or what place. I don't care if 90% of people agree to it, those 90% are wrong. Whether you take a utilitarian, or absolutist, or just about any doctrine I can think of besides cultural relativism, it's wrong.
"News for nerds" -- aren't nerds supposed to be in favor of logic and reason? No sound logic or tenable reason can arrive at many of the junk ideas that float around here. You tell me how humanity is better by saying "what's moral is what we think is moral" -- give me some sort of reason based argument that isn't premised on "it makes us feel better."
It's this line of thinking that allows extremism, hatred, and tyranny. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and even those originating the ideas of relativism would accept that.
I know that this a long post, but everyone should read this essay.
ZNet Commentary
Not Everyone Felt That Way September 12, 2005
By Tim Wise
When I was a kid, I remember my maternal grandmother defending Richard Nixon for the crimes of Watergate, because, as she put it: "He didn't do anything any worse than what every other President did." Knowing, even at six, that this was hardly a morally compelling justification for one's actions, even if true, I recall how it infuriated me to hear it over and over again, whenever politics were discussed in my grandparent's home.
Little did I realize that such obfuscation was hardly unique to certain members of my family. Indeed, throughout the years, it seemed like whenever Watergate came up in conversation (as it would for a long time after 1974, and Iran/Contra after that), someone would pull out this same canard, repeating with the precision of an atomic clock, that "so-and-so didn't do anything that every other President/Senator/Congressman, or whatever, didn't also do." And invariably, those who would say these things were always staunch supporters of whatever asshole was being criticized: whether it was Nixon, Reagan, or Bill Clinton.
It's almost as if stupid arguments spread by osmosis, or some such thing. So we end up with people who have never met each other, nonetheless miraculously spewing the same apologetics, as if they had gotten some kind of memo instructing them on what to say whenever one of their personal heroes stepped in it.
So too, the oft-heard argument that one shouldn't be too harsh on this nation's founders, or other early USAmerican Presidents, when it comes to slaveholding, or involvement in Indian genocide, because, after all, they were "products of their time," and shouldn't be judged by the moral standards of the modern world.
I heard this one again recently, after an article of mine hit the Internet, in which I discussed, among other things, the depredations of Andrew Jackson: one of this nation's premier Indian killers.
The person who wrote to attack me as a "PC liberal" who "hates America," insisted that Jackson, and others like Thomas Jefferson shouldn't be evaluated on the basis of today's moral "underpinnings." And as with every other instance in which something like this has been said to me, in this case too, the comment was made absent any awareness on the part of its author, as to the position's utter absurdity.
The most infuriating thing about the "men of their times" defense, is that by insisting Jackson, Jefferson and the rest were in line with the standards accepted by all in their day, apologists ignore, in a blatantly racist fashion, that to the blacks being enslaved, or the Indians being killed, slavery and genocide were hardly acceptable.
In other words, the "everybody back then felt that way" argument assumes that the feelings of non-whites don't count. Some folks always knew mass murder and land theft were wrong: namely, the victims of either. That lots of white folks didn't, hardly acquits them in this instance. It's not as if the human brain was incapable of recognizing the illegitimacy of killing and enslavement.
Secondly, beliefs that killing and stealing are wrong hardly emerged in the 20th or 21st centuries. Indeed, the very people who suggest we should cut the founders slack because of the standards of their day, are overwhelmingly the kind of Bible-thumping conservatives who insist morality is timeless, and who clamor for the posting of the Ten Commandments in the public square for this very reason. Yet they appear to have forgotten that among those Commandments (which were not, after all, handed down to Billy Graham in the 1950s, but rather to someone else a wee bit earlier) are prohibitions against murder and theft.
In other words, the founders don't merely offend by today's moral standards; they offended by the moral standards set in place at least by the time of Moses.
But there's something else troubling about this kind of argument:
The Internet is wonderful and useful, because it is free. It's freedom is a fragile thing. Forces of ignorance and outright evil are attempting to gain control so they can profit, at public expense of course. If they succeed, freedom will be a collateral casualty. The war is fought at the most elementary level, human language. Those who convincingly define the issues can frame the debate in a manner that assures victory. The other side has won victories by defining the Internet experience in terms of content = property = scarce resource. We have content providers, content carriers, and consumers. And this is the wrong way to view the Internet. The Internet is a commons, where everyone can have their place and publish anything they want. We have to change the debate now! Stop letting these forces define the issues by getting there first and defining them the way WE want, or we'll lose the Internet! Write your congressperson! Join the EFF today!!!
That's how the article sounded to me. Very black and white. I think some of this is justified, but I object to several things here. First off, the tone of the thing: the article makes up a category with two pigoenholes, stuffs everyone into one or the other, declares one to be right and the other to be wrong, and exhorts the "right" side to go to war to defend us. It's as if the forces on the "wrong" side know very well they are in the wrong, but have made a conscious decision to be evil because evil is profitable. Except they don't know they're wrong, or evil. They are convinced they are right. The response is good intentions lead to hell, and they ought to know better, and therefore they are still evil. But we don't know all that. What seems dangerous to me is this "if you're not with the Internet, then you're against it" attitude that could push a lot of neutrals to the "wrong" side. Worse is singling out some and tarring them as evil-- could anger multifaceted entities with genuinely sympathetic views if this is done in error.
Second is the presumption that the freedoms and Internet are fragile. The implication is that it wouldn't be so fragile if we weren't so dumb, and I don't buy that. There are simply too many people with too much at stake to allow the Internet to fail, or to be given over to a narrow consortium of interests, or turned into a morass of censorship and patronizing guidance of consumers to products. Many people are too smart to be hoodwinked into going along with such dastardly schemes, and too smart to swallow those lines about it being "for own own good". This illustrates a basic problem with liberals and democrats. They evidently don't see that most people can see these dangers too, and go way out trying to "educate", not realizing that they are actually insulting our intelligence. Most everyone who has experienced DRM quickly perceives what a bad deal it is, and if they don't, need only hear what would be possible if not for DRM and what used to be possible to conclude on their own that they've been had. Ironic that well meant but snobby and elitist efforts to save us from being turned into cattle and suckers talks down to us as if we already are. And ironic that their efforts to strengthen the freedoms and Internet through "better" govt regulation may actually be the greatest danger facing the Internet.
So what should we be doing? Fighting evil, or educating, or inventing and debating? Or just relax because it'll all turn out all right in the end? Do no harm....
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
** my feelings gathered in the two years I was a paralegal in a DA's office, and in the nine/ten years my wife (who is a DA) spent in prosecuting cases ::
The great majority (90%+) of violence is assault.
The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate, press charges, or otherwise go away from their assailants.
Violence IS a repeat crime. Murder is when a violent person makes a mistake and goes overboard.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048