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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.
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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.
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.