Slashdot Mirror
File Sharing — Harmful to Children and a Threat to National Security
jkrobin writes to mention that a recent report from the US Patent office calls peer-to-peer file sharing harmful to children and a threat to national security. "Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file actions, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge."
They say that file sharing is a "threat to our children", but did you read WHY?
So... it's file sharing's fault that the RIAA looks like profiteering litigious bastards for suing a dozen teenage kids. Somehow, file sharing made them do it
I can't believe I just read that.
gah.
I'm moving to the Czech Republic or something.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
So the "harmful to children" line is completely bogus. LOTS of stuff is harmful to children. That is why parents have to take some responsibility to protect their kids. ... Oh, think of the children. Yes, think just how terrible it will be to grow up under information tyranny.
The second line is much most interesting. p2p really IS a threat to the nation state system. More generally, free information exchange will erode the power of the state significantly. Lots of people all freely sharing information will mean the whole concept of countries starts to break down. If everyone can get all the information they need from anywhere across the globe and across borders, why do we need those borders still? To protect the physical resources? Hardly. Information is the last (latest) great resource humanity has stumbled upon and now people are making Googles of money doling it out, just like the oil barons, and other folks who have controlled major resources in the past.
The really cool thing about information is that you don't loose it when you copy it, so there CAN NEVER be scarcity of information (at least long term) UNLESS the laws and the state artificially support systems to create information scarcity. WHY WOULD HUMANS CHOOSE THAT? Quite simply, they won't, when they fully understand the choice. p2p works directly against the idea that information should be artificially maintained as a scarce resource by laws, and hence, it gives the 'ole thhhhbbbtbtbtbt to the nation state and the lynch pins of it's power and ability to control the people.
Life is a such beautiful thing. It unfolds exactly as it should. This is good.
Software patents in and of themselves are not harmful, it is US Patent Office that is. Software merely takes a generalized machine and turns it into a specialized machine. Clearly a unique specialized machine should be patentable.
That said, the Patent Office doesn't have a clue about how to evaluate software patents. The number of obvious (vs non-obvious) inventions that make it through is just incompetence. The fact that things that have existed in the open for decades can be patented as unique wouldn't fly when it comes to mechanical patents and it shouldn't with software patents either.
The fact is, most government officials were adults and very busy before personal computers were common. Since they have been so busy with their careers they have had little time to educate themselves about technology. It isn't exactly correct to call them ignorant, because that's too respectful. More precisely, they are iggerunt.
Remember, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, called the Time-Warner merger with AOL, "better than sex". Immediately after, the combined company lost 88 billion dollars because of the deal. Quote from the linked article: "AOL reported a loss of nearly $100bn for 2002, after a loss of $44.9bn for the final three months of the year."
Ted Turner is a smart guy, but he was iggerunt about technology.
The proper response to "Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO" Jon W. Dudas is, "Dude, you're fired."
The trivial solution is simply to have anyone caught doing this crap publicly executed, preferably by wild horses or flaying alive or some such. These people are stupid enough to think it's a good idea to install Kazaa on their work computer. For the good of the human race, we cannot risk letting them breed.
What the propagandists are trying not to say is simply this:
"The US economy was once based on manufacturing. Our cars and buildings and aeroplanes and weapons were the best you could buy, and people bought them and America prospered. Lately people have stopped buying all those things, and we no longer manufacture anything for export but movies, music, and software.
Our economy has gone from world-leading to "service-based" in just a few decades, and our only hope of exporting something that people might want to buy is in movies, music and software. Unfortunately, all those things are now digital, and easily copied millions of times for free. Even more unfortunately, the more we try to protect our eroding export figures with DRM and IP enforcement, the more we realize that other countries don't have to play by the rules we make up. And it's those other countries that count most.
So it's time for education. Or perhaps Re-education. Time to teach everyone that, despite our own flagrant disregard for the Berne conventions and international IP rights from 1886 up until 1989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention), it's vital that the world now all fall into the US party line on IP enforcement and DRM. And if we can't do it with WTO, IMF, WIPO, and Most Favored Nation status, we'll do it with propaganda.
File sharing kills babies! File sharing promotes pedophilia! File sharing is communist and fascist and Saddam-loving! File sharing destroys family values and promotes the gay agenda!
I've wanted to say this for a long time.
Does it bother anyone that the lead author of this report is Thomas D. Sydnor II? Before joining the USPTO, he was an attorney at Arnold & Porter, the RIAA's main outside law firm. While at Arnold & Porter, he litigated patent and copyright cases. I have no clue whether he actually did work for the RIAA, but the contacts are interesting.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Indeed, where I used to work (Pentagon), an Air Force officer used a floppy to transfer an unclassified Word Document from the isolated classified network to the open unclassified network. The Word document had scooped up random classified data from the hard drive in its buffers.
When DISA was done, they had scrubbed half a dozen "contaminated" systems, carted the guy off to Leavenworth, and left a mark on the section's record (too many of those and its *very* bad for everyone working in the section).
In these cases, I do not know why:
Requirements when we set up an off-site Secret test facility were no less strict and a single violation would have cost the right to operate it. I really have to wonder how lax things have gotten. It also makes me very nervous about the government's insistence of late on creating large integrated databases. Even if I trusted them to use the data ethically (I don't) I do not have confidence that they could secure it adequately.
Your children really will grow up in the same world you did, populated with the same idiots. So will your grandkids.
The Singularity can't come soon enough.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
"they obviously don't have the same moral...standards that I do ... and they seem determined to turn me into a criminal for some reason."
Welcome to the state.
This is the nature of the state: "You do everything we tell you and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders. And if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
This is how it's done.
Not enough "drug dealers" in prison - so start making everybody who owns a gun, smokes, reads the Koran, or downloads music to be a criminal.
Anything will do - it doesn't matter. Just rev up some "moral outrage" or whatever and start labeling some group of people as "criminals", "degenerates", "threats" and "terrorists". Every primate will buy into it, because every primate wants to be on the side of the hierarchical authority. It's hardwired into your primate brain.
Eventually EVERYBODY is labelled to some degree - and you control it all. And everybody lets you - except for the REAL malcontents like me.
Go watch "V for Vendetta" again - especially the scene where Sutler is screaming, "I want EVERYBODY to remember WHY THEY NEED US!"
That movie is the most important movie ever made (that I can remember anyway.) It lays the process and nature of the state out completely in scenes anybody can understand.
Especially watch the scene where Evey loses her fear - THAT is the most important scene ever filmed.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic"
More to the point why is the Patent and Trademark Office making a fuss about this? Or can we expect the Copyright Office to produce reports vaguely related to Patents and Trademarks...
"file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job"
It seems to me that it's not file-sharing software to blame, but the shitty sys/net admins that the government employs to "secure" the computers that contain this sensitive data.
Indeed the real problem here is systems which allow end users to install any software.
Call me crazy, but I'd think that with the use of Active Directory, even a dimwitted NT admin could setup a computer that wouldn't allow people to install software like this in the first place.
Maybe securing Windows isn't that easy... Maybe it's a poor OS choice for this kind of situation.
People smoking pot don't have to motivation to kill anybody. Or believe somebody's religion, or believe what a TV ad tells them or, really, much of anything else anybody in power has to say. That's probably what scares those people the most.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.