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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
** 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