Metallica: there's no surer sign that they've sold out. But you know, there are a lot of good bands for free on MP3.com who are happy to have you listen to their music. And they'll sell you a CD for $6.99. And a lot of the music there is damned good. These guys are just afraid people will find out that they don't have to pay $16.99 for a CD or $80 for a concert ticket to hear good music. Much less what Metallica has been pushing lately.
It seems pretty clear that censorship has done much more harm over the hears than porn. Killing censorship at the cost of enabling porn -- which never goes away anyhow -- is a good tradeoff. As for Metallica: ha! Who are they kidding? This will alienate whatever fan base they have left. Prediction: they'll be off the map within 6 months.
Actually, IAAL. Code is speech, and speech is protected by the first amendment. Action, for the most part, isn't. So you can write viruses all you want. When you distribute them to destroy systems, that's action and they can send you to jail. Seems reasonable.
Interestingly, the Brits did the same thing with movable type. Printing was seen as a threat to the regime and printers were strictly licensed; enforcing these rules was a major function of the infamous Court of the Star Chamber. The result was that many British printers, and even more British printing business, moved to the Netherlands, whose large publishing concerns (Elsevier, etc.) still give British publishers fits.
All correct. Also, there is no salvage law in space. There should be, but there isn't -- in fact, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes it almost impossible. For more see Glenn Reynolds & Robert Merges, "Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy" (Westview, 1998). As far as I know, it's not on the web but there are some good space law resources at
http://www.permanent.com/archimedes for those who are interested.
Re:DeCSS & CPHack aren't illegal until October!
on
'Battling Censorware'
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· Score: 1
Lessig's analysis is interesting, but he misses an important point: the First Amendment isn't the only constitutional issue here. Congress lacks constitutional power to pass copyright and patent laws that do not meet the constitutional test of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. It also lacks the power to protect intellectual property under the commerce clause if doing so would violate this provision. This argument is spelled out in an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation's Winter 2000 issue entitled "The Proper Scope of the Copyright and Patent Power," by Robert Merges & Glenn Reynolds. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available on the web.
Some people think it's *good* for robots to take over the planet. Click on the URL above and listen to "Embrace the Machine" to hear one take on this. More likely, if machines become "spiritual," why would they bother anyone in a bunker? Human affairs would appear to move at a literally glacial pace to them.
Click on the URL above and listen to the song "Embrace the Machine" for a discussion of this topic. More seriously, though, all the so-called philosophers who address this don't seem to have developed much of a moral framework for deciding whether intelligent machines are a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing. Mostly it just seems to be "eww, icky" or something along those lines: aesthetics masquerading as morality. What about the argument that we have a moral *duty* to bring about a higher consciousness?
"The tighter you squeeze, Lord Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." All this police-state stuff just makes kids more alienated and afraid to talk, which in turn makes them more dangerous. Of course, if you could trust school administrators not to be vicious idiots, a program like this might make sense. But in an age of expulsion for gun-shaped charms on charm bracelets, that sort of trust is hard to come by.
I'm trying a shareware model now for music. I have a small independent record company; we basically break even on what we do. We've been making music available on the Web for a while, but we're now just beginning to do it explicitly on a shareware basis, asking people who like our stuff to mail us money. I don't know if it will work, but there's no real downside to trying that I can see. (Click on the link above to see an example for the band "Mobius Dick"). Another thought: in my day job I'm a law professor. The RIAA shouldn't be on such a high horse. Their contracts are all written primarily to ensure that artists get as little money as possible (read Donald Passman's excellent book "All You Need to Know About the Music Business" to see how). They also talk about "theft." But theft of tangible property was always considered malum in se -- evil in itself, and wrong under both natural law and the common law. Theft of ideas is malum prohibitum -- evil only because it is prohibited -- and was *not* considered illegal in the absence of statute. This doesn't make copying illegally suddenly legal, but understanding this drains the issue of any significant moral high-horsery.
I think it's funny that so many religious leaders trumpet the need for humanity to achieve some sort of transcendence, then seem shocked and horrified when anyone suggests that it might actually *happen* sometime soon.
If Mattel is blocking people b/c of, say, nudity/sex or racism when they in fact aren't doing those things, there's a respectable claim of libel against Mattel. Somebody should sue them.
This is absolutely true. I own a small record company that distributes music via the web and Napster (click on the URL above to see an example of our blanket permission for copying, downloading, etc.). It's worked very well for us because it bypasses the majors' stranglehold on distribution and promotion. That's what they're really afraid of.
I own a small record label. We encourage people to download our music, and to make it available on Napster, etc. (Click the URL above to see our permission grant). The big labels hate this more than they hate people "pirating" Mariah Carey. It bypasses their traditional control over distribution, publicity, and marketing by eliminating all those bottlenecks. No need to fight Sony for shelf space when you can sell over the web; no need to battle payola-fed radio stations for airplay when people can hear your stuff over the web. Since the record industry no longer provides any value-added (Spotting talent? Right. Tell it to the Backstreet Boys), their only real edge is their control over these bottlenecks. Independent artists are already making more money with their own labels. The wide variety of music on the Web for free is an even bigger danger to them. Watch and you'll see that their efforts are aimed mostly at shutting down people like me.
Actually, it works great with one side effect: messages can travel only forward or backward in time, in quantized units determined by the distance in space of the two senders. That is why I am able to post on Slashdot. I am writing this from a habitat inside the asteroid currently known as Ceres, and it is the year 2271 A.D. (After Drexler). Carrying on conversations with people in the past is fun; the folks I can talk to in the future are too evolved to have anything interesting to say to me. BTW, it's probably a good time to get out of stocks....
Actually, I am a space lawyer....
on
R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 1
There is no salvage for space objects. Ultimately, the launching state is liable (this is complex for Iridium since I believe that some were launched from the US, some from Russia/Kazakhstan). But some batch of taxpayers will foot the bill for any damage done. There has been a push for space salvage law in order to deal with problems like this; perhaps this affair will give it some additional momentum. You can read more about it in my book "Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy" (HarperCollins Westview, 1997)(be sure you get the paperback, as the hardcover is an outrageous $68). There's also a good website on space law issues at
http://www.permanent.com/archimedes with HTML versions of many articles.
Living on a planet is so unsanitary -- all those people breathing the same air, drinking the same water, releasing dangerous nanodevices into a shared environment. Yuk.
"If those Indies, or Americas, or whatever are full of gold it still won't be worth it to bring it back. And they're full of dangerous savages. Why spend all this money when it's so much easier and cheaper to invade Poland?" Anonymous European, 1493
This calls for a campaign to corrupt the databases by entering spurious data. If enough people do this (and it won't take a significant percentage) the whole enterprise is doomed.
That was the problem. Before the mission was launched, someone forgot to install Service Pack 3, which patched a rogue-computer-turning-on-humans bug that had been in the earlier version of HAL. There's a rumor he was really running HAL '98, not HAL 5000.
Perhaps the most likely early application would be for advanced synthesis of pharmaceuticals and drugs. You can mechanically make the desired molecules by plugging precursor atoms together. You can do that in a controlled environment (rather than the messy human body) and simply harvest the results. This sort of chemical mechanosynthesis is likely to make production of many substances that are currently difficult or impossible to synthesize possible. Also, in reverse, you could disassemble complex and poorly understood molecules, thus learning their structure and composition more precisely than is possible with scanning tunneling microscopes, atomic force microscopes, or crystallography. The impact of this technology would be immense itself, and would probably attract sufficient investment capital to achieve the advances necessary for those ubiquitous artery-scraping, marbled-beef-consumption-enabling medical nanorobots.
As a law professor, I'm not terribly surprised by this one. Here are the problems: (1) Federal law is only supposed to apply in limited areas, but courts have -- until very recently -- given up even the pretense of enforcing those limits; (2) law enforcement officials have virtually unlimited discretion as to who they can prosecute and for what; (3) the doctrine of sovereign immunity makes them and their agencies very difficult to sue when that discretion is abused. So we get vague statutes, unbridled discretion, and limited consequences for the abuse of that discretion. Not surprisingly, the result is often bad. Read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" -- especially his account of how Steve Jackson Games was similarly raided because some agent didn't know the difference between computer games and reality -- for an account of this happening ten years ago. The remedy: lots of political pressure on the prosecutors (they do respond) and demands for legislation to make such incidents less likely. This is happening with civil forfeiture (discussed in this thread) right now, where legislation to limit it has passed the House and is before the Senate.
Ignaz Semmelweiss, physician who discovered that washing one's hand before delivering a baby could cut maternal deaths by over 90%. For this, he was ostracized by his peers, who didn't want to believe they'd been killing their patients, and wound up in an insane asylum. A true geek, he stuck to his principle to the end, and ultimately prevailed. And, as a true ubergeek, had the unforeseen consequence of his new technology creating a population explosion....
I know this is mostly in response to another comment -- but my original post was largely tongue-in-cheek. Though considering personal data copyrighted in the person whom they concern is a less creative application of copyright law than we've seen from certain companies lately....
Slashdot Mirror
Metallica: there's no surer sign that they've sold out. But you know, there are a lot of good bands for free on MP3.com who are happy to have you listen to their music. And they'll sell you a CD for $6.99. And a lot of the music there is damned good. These guys are just afraid people will find out that they don't have to pay $16.99 for a CD or $80 for a concert ticket to hear good music. Much less what Metallica has been pushing lately.
It seems pretty clear that censorship has done much more harm over the hears than porn. Killing censorship at the cost of enabling porn -- which never goes away anyhow -- is a good tradeoff. As for Metallica: ha! Who are they kidding? This will alienate whatever fan base they have left. Prediction: they'll be off the map within 6 months.
Actually, IAAL. Code is speech, and speech is protected by the first amendment. Action, for the most part, isn't. So you can write viruses all you want. When you distribute them to destroy systems, that's action and they can send you to jail. Seems reasonable.
Interestingly, the Brits did the same thing with movable type. Printing was seen as a threat to the regime and printers were strictly licensed; enforcing these rules was a major function of the infamous Court of the Star Chamber. The result was that many British printers, and even more British printing business, moved to the Netherlands, whose large publishing concerns (Elsevier, etc.) still give British publishers fits.
http://www.permanent.com/archimedes for those who are interested.
Lessig's analysis is interesting, but he misses an important point: the First Amendment isn't the only constitutional issue here. Congress lacks constitutional power to pass copyright and patent laws that do not meet the constitutional test of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. It also lacks the power to protect intellectual property under the commerce clause if doing so would violate this provision. This argument is spelled out in an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation's Winter 2000 issue entitled "The Proper Scope of the Copyright and Patent Power," by Robert Merges & Glenn Reynolds. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available on the web.
Perhaps the machine was not stolen. Perhaps it escaped.
Some people think it's *good* for robots to take over the planet. Click on the URL above and listen to "Embrace the Machine" to hear one take on this. More likely, if machines become "spiritual," why would they bother anyone in a bunker? Human affairs would appear to move at a literally glacial pace to them.
Click on the URL above and listen to the song "Embrace the Machine" for a discussion of this topic. More seriously, though, all the so-called philosophers who address this don't seem to have developed much of a moral framework for deciding whether intelligent machines are a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing. Mostly it just seems to be "eww, icky" or something along those lines: aesthetics masquerading as morality. What about the argument that we have a moral *duty* to bring about a higher consciousness?
"The tighter you squeeze, Lord Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." All this police-state stuff just makes kids more alienated and afraid to talk, which in turn makes them more dangerous. Of course, if you could trust school administrators not to be vicious idiots, a program like this might make sense. But in an age of expulsion for gun-shaped charms on charm bracelets, that sort of trust is hard to come by.
I'm trying a shareware model now for music. I have a small independent record company; we basically break even on what we do. We've been making music available on the Web for a while, but we're now just beginning to do it explicitly on a shareware basis, asking people who like our stuff to mail us money. I don't know if it will work, but there's no real downside to trying that I can see. (Click on the link above to see an example for the band "Mobius Dick"). Another thought: in my day job I'm a law professor. The RIAA shouldn't be on such a high horse. Their contracts are all written primarily to ensure that artists get as little money as possible (read Donald Passman's excellent book "All You Need to Know About the Music Business" to see how). They also talk about "theft." But theft of tangible property was always considered malum in se -- evil in itself, and wrong under both natural law and the common law. Theft of ideas is malum prohibitum -- evil only because it is prohibited -- and was *not* considered illegal in the absence of statute. This doesn't make copying illegally suddenly legal, but understanding this drains the issue of any significant moral high-horsery.
I think it's funny that so many religious leaders trumpet the need for humanity to achieve some sort of transcendence, then seem shocked and horrified when anyone suggests that it might actually *happen* sometime soon.
If Mattel is blocking people b/c of, say, nudity/sex or racism when they in fact aren't doing those things, there's a respectable claim of libel against Mattel. Somebody should sue them.
This is absolutely true. I own a small record company that distributes music via the web and Napster (click on the URL above to see an example of our blanket permission for copying, downloading, etc.). It's worked very well for us because it bypasses the majors' stranglehold on distribution and promotion. That's what they're really afraid of.
I own a small record label. We encourage people to download our music, and to make it available on Napster, etc. (Click the URL above to see our permission grant). The big labels hate this more than they hate people "pirating" Mariah Carey. It bypasses their traditional control over distribution, publicity, and marketing by eliminating all those bottlenecks. No need to fight Sony for shelf space when you can sell over the web; no need to battle payola-fed radio stations for airplay when people can hear your stuff over the web. Since the record industry no longer provides any value-added (Spotting talent? Right. Tell it to the Backstreet Boys), their only real edge is their control over these bottlenecks. Independent artists are already making more money with their own labels. The wide variety of music on the Web for free is an even bigger danger to them. Watch and you'll see that their efforts are aimed mostly at shutting down people like me.
Actually, it works great with one side effect: messages can travel only forward or backward in time, in quantized units determined by the distance in space of the two senders. That is why I am able to post on Slashdot. I am writing this from a habitat inside the asteroid currently known as Ceres, and it is the year 2271 A.D. (After Drexler). Carrying on conversations with people in the past is fun; the folks I can talk to in the future are too evolved to have anything interesting to say to me. BTW, it's probably a good time to get out of stocks....
http://www.permanent.com/archimedes with HTML versions of many articles.
Living on a planet is so unsanitary -- all those people breathing the same air, drinking the same water, releasing dangerous nanodevices into a shared environment. Yuk.
"If those Indies, or Americas, or whatever are full of gold it still won't be worth it to bring it back. And they're full of dangerous savages. Why spend all this money when it's so much easier and cheaper to invade Poland?" Anonymous European, 1493
This calls for a campaign to corrupt the databases by entering spurious data. If enough people do this (and it won't take a significant percentage) the whole enterprise is doomed.
That was the problem. Before the mission was launched, someone forgot to install Service Pack 3, which patched a rogue-computer-turning-on-humans bug that had been in the earlier version of HAL. There's a rumor he was really running HAL '98, not HAL 5000.
Perhaps the most likely early application would be for advanced synthesis of pharmaceuticals and drugs. You can mechanically make the desired molecules by plugging precursor atoms together. You can do that in a controlled environment (rather than the messy human body) and simply harvest the results. This sort of chemical mechanosynthesis is likely to make production of many substances that are currently difficult or impossible to synthesize possible. Also, in reverse, you could disassemble complex and poorly understood molecules, thus learning their structure and composition more precisely than is possible with scanning tunneling microscopes, atomic force microscopes, or crystallography. The impact of this technology would be immense itself, and would probably attract sufficient investment capital to achieve the advances necessary for those ubiquitous artery-scraping, marbled-beef-consumption-enabling medical nanorobots.
As a law professor, I'm not terribly surprised by this one. Here are the problems: (1) Federal law is only supposed to apply in limited areas, but courts have -- until very recently -- given up even the pretense of enforcing those limits; (2) law enforcement officials have virtually unlimited discretion as to who they can prosecute and for what; (3) the doctrine of sovereign immunity makes them and their agencies very difficult to sue when that discretion is abused. So we get vague statutes, unbridled discretion, and limited consequences for the abuse of that discretion. Not surprisingly, the result is often bad. Read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" -- especially his account of how Steve Jackson Games was similarly raided because some agent didn't know the difference between computer games and reality -- for an account of this happening ten years ago. The remedy: lots of political pressure on the prosecutors (they do respond) and demands for legislation to make such incidents less likely. This is happening with civil forfeiture (discussed in this thread) right now, where legislation to limit it has passed the House and is before the Senate.
Ignaz Semmelweiss, physician who discovered that washing one's hand before delivering a baby could cut maternal deaths by over 90%. For this, he was ostracized by his peers, who didn't want to believe they'd been killing their patients, and wound up in an insane asylum. A true geek, he stuck to his principle to the end, and ultimately prevailed. And, as a true ubergeek, had the unforeseen consequence of his new technology creating a population explosion....
I know this is mostly in response to another comment -- but my original post was largely tongue-in-cheek. Though considering personal data copyrighted in the person whom they concern is a less creative application of copyright law than we've seen from certain companies lately....