First off intellectual property has no "rich history". It pratically has no history past a few hundred years, and the original copyrights were granted by kings to publishers in return for not badmouthing the monarchy - hardly a lofty foundation. Infact, note that copyrights came after periods like the renissance rahter than before.
You're partly right, partly wrong. As the Britannica article on copyright law points out, copyright did develop the way you said, and only became "modern" in 1710. It is striking, of course, that the spread of a specific technology (the printing press) and its eventual ubiquity was what drove copyright law to develop as it did - just as new technologies are forcing us to evaluate it anew.
But you're incorrect if you believe that the only intellectual property law is copyright. In fact, the Amazon dispute is about patents, not copyright. And patent laws go back at least to 1421 (again, read the appropriate Britannica article for yourself). I think a tradition at least 5.8 centuries old deserves some respect, but that may be just a personal blemish on my part.
It's sorta like arguing that slavery was a great thing because of all the wealthy plantations it created, but it was other forces driving America into the future.
I usually hate it when people use slavery as a metaphor, but you make an interesting argument. I see what your saying; my argument is a little circular. (So, too, is part of Katz's argument, where he says that "Corporations... exclude... 'non-commercial' voices." Well, of course, because once they bring on a new "voice" it becomes, by definition, commercial.)
I suppose in some sense my argument about the rich history of invention and creation we have had under intellectual property protections is unknowable (at best) or circular (at worst). Yet I think I'll stick with it, having had firsthand experience with a publishing firm that worried every day about the integrity of the databases it published. If those databases were pirated (as they have been, on occasion), without strong copyright protection, the company lost money. If it happens again, the company will probably stop making the databases - and everyone, including the pirate, loses out in the end.
Also, copying is not theft - it might be illegal, but it is just not theft in the true sense of the word. The people who created are not deprived of their original work in any way. They may be deprived of a monopoly over other prople's purchasing habits...
That's pretty much the point Katz was trying to get across in that passage where he quoted Lessig ("If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it"). But, unfortunately, it is incomplete. When you illegally copy a copyrighted work, you have deprived someone of something other than a mere monopoly. (In fact, it is the technology, not the "pirate" or "thief," which is responsible for revoking the monopoly.) The thing you have deprived the creator of is the potential to earn profit. We have to balance creators' needs against consumers', and Katz (and you) seem to tip the scale unfairly toward consumers.
For them copying may be good as it "gets the word out" and provides free advertizing.
There is certainly some truth in that. However, it is too narrow. Musicians are not the only people protected by intellectual property laws. If Stephen King's new book, which is to be published at midnight tonight over the Internet, is pirated and passed around freely by e-mail and mirrored on dozens of web sites, the copying will certainly be free "advertising" for King, but he will lose money. Maybe he would stop publishing online. If that happened, everyone would lose out in the end, including the people who got to read it for free.
I do agree with you that "theft" is too strong a word; as someone may or may not have hundreds of illicit MP3s stored on his computer (shhhh! the RIAA might be listening!) I certainly don't like considering myself a thief or pirate. (Actually, I kind of would like to be a pirate, although without the trite patch or the fruity parrot.) But we are living in an age when the pace of technological change makes us all accept a degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and fuzziness of terminology. So I don't mind all that much.
Jeffersonian pedigree ought not cause us to eschew careful analysis of what's being said. (Nor should it encourage blind adherence, thankfully, else we might have revolutions every two decades, as Jefferson advised elsewhere.)
Katz, you only reproduced part of Jefferson's quote. In the sentences preceding your excerpt, he makes it far more clear that he is speaking of abstract ideas. In fact, here's a larger version of the quote from an essay by John Perry Barlow. (I presume you've read this piece, which I just spent a very profitable few minutes doing.)
Certainly intellectual property needs to be reconceived so it reflects the ease with which "copying" (against which "copyright" protects) may be executed in our digital age. But people who create new information (artistic, for instance) or who add some value to information (perhaps by compiling or reorganizing it) must be paid for their efforts lest they lose incentive. This is not an abstract point. Consider the Feist Supreme Court case wherein a company's database was stolen in its entirety, and the Court ruled that, since facts cannot be copyrighted, the stolen database is not protected by copyright - despite the thousands of hours of work that went into its compilation. Since then, database makers have waged war in Washington, hoping to get from Congress the profit-producing protection that the Court stripped away.
Lessig notwithstanding, corporations will find technological ways to preserve (or create artificial) scarcity of information, since scarcity is what gives something its value. Information and ideas no more long to be free than a pizza longs to be eaten. Certain benevolent and generous creators, like Ben Franklin with his eponymous stove, will decide not to pursue legal protection for new ideas, so they might be freely available to all. Why should others, like musicians whose originality is critically acclaimed, be forced to freely give out the fruits of their labor? I find that absurd, not the scenario you consider absurd.
(And you cannot validly argue that the $15 billion the music industry made last year is evidence that digital music transfers are not harming the music industry; perhaps they would have made $16 billion were it not for the transfers of MP3s that Jack Valenti goofily calls "pilfering.")
If you say ideas cannot be owned, then go a step further: Why can land be owned? Why can pencils be owned? There are people who would argue that neither can be. Some would argue that the only thing that can be owned is your own body (which brings to mind the passages where Hegel, that hideous fraud of a philosopher, talked about owning food only once you have eaten it). And some would go even further, saying that you cannot even own your body - but that it belongs to God or the state or some greater human good.
Clearly we need to carefully reconsider intellectual property in light of technological changes. And we must vigorously work to educate our government about the changes. But that's no reason to discard the system altogether, or to pretend that technology has discarded it for us.
Perhaps the second part of your post will consider these matters.
You're quite right, that if this information was indeed disseminated to private businesses, citizens should be vocally complaining. However, economic intelligence is inextricably linked to national security interests. If there are indeed cases of industrial intelligence (or "market intelligence," as you call it), they should be prosecuted. But (as I've written elsewhere in this thread, here and here) I suspect the claim is fallacious.
Meanwhile, on a far more important note, I spent several minutes trying to figure out your Latin.sig line. Google brought me to the Aeneid in Latin (no translation), but - get this - it also brought me to several Slashdot articles you've written. (Same with Yahoo and Find.com.) In the end, the best I could come up with was from the Perseus Project, a line about how Dido never dreamed that love like that she shared with Aeneas could ever die. Is that about right?
Katz is right to point out that the very notion of intellectual property is under siege. I suspect he underestimates its resilience, however.
By quoting one Congressional aide (from among thousands and thousands), Katz supposedly gives us the point of view of the Old Guard. Concerned with things like theft and stealing and morality, such people seem not to understand (as Katz and many/.ers have argued) that the social shift going on here is vast, and that the technology itself is a driving force - not merely a "culture of thievery."
But that is not a fair representation of the Old Guard view. During my time in Washington, I've witnessed firsthand the plans and desires of trade groups and corporations concerned with the protection of intellectual property. Their paramount objective is not to quash the Internet and destroy the free flow of information - in fact, they see in information's freedom a tremendous opportunity for profit.
But information cannot be totally free, they argue. There must be some obstacle to reaching information (whether you mean literature or movies or economic data when you say the word "information"). That obstacle is the one where money is made.
Artists who cannot make money (and thereby feed themselves) will cease to be artists. Companies that collect economic data and publish it will no longer have an incentive to continue working. If information was totally free and Lexis-Nexis freely available to everyone, then the company that runs Lexis-Nexis (Reed-Elsevier) would no longer have a reason to run it. And not every business model can operate like Britannica's; it is not always possible to offer all your content and information online by slathering advertisements upon it. (And we should be glad of that.)
Theft is certainly a big fear, but the corporate and creative interests I've encountered here in Washington, D.C. are well aware that there may soon be technological solutions to technological problems. Lessig's book has been frequently misinterpreted (and perhaps here so by Katz) as arguing that nothing can be done counter to the code that defines cyberspace. But of course that code can be changed and built upon, and new methods of protecting intellectual property will be developed.
The traditional systems of protecting intellectual property have bequeathed upon us a rich history of invention and a marvelous universe of creativity which we must not squander by assuming that "anything goes." We must not arrogantly believe that recent technological changes completely undermine the value of safeguarding intellectual property. Certainly, the old system is under threat - the DMCA/DVD/DeCSS madness, the Amazon patent tribulations, even the debate over genome patents, all these prove that we must reconsider how we think about intellectual property.
But we needn't scrap our old notions entirely, in a rush to judgment we might regret later.
You're exactly right - it is wrong, and that is why there are laws which prohibit the U.S. intelligence community from doing it. If those laws are being broken, then the people or agencies passing secrets on to businesses should be punished.
And you're quite right about multinational corporations' impressive power, and their extranational interests. In fact, that's why many of them employ spies of their own - to get a scoop on their competitors.
If 5% of my belongings were stolen, I wouldn't feel very good about myself.
And you should be commended for that - it shows that you have moral standards above those of the occasional thief.
But we're not talking about belongings kept in an apartment or house, of course. We're talking about secrets which affect the lives of millions of Americans and billions of others around the globe. Some of the information the U.S. intelligence community gathers secretly includes:
The location and number of Chinese nuclear missiles, more than a dozen of which could already hit U.S. targets.
The status of the nuclear weapons programs in Iraq.
The health of North Korea's economy, which is an important indicator of that country's stability - and therefore, of the entire region's safety.
The software piracy market in Hong Kong.
The relationship between Moscow corporate heads and the Kremlin leadership.
These are just a few examples of important intelligence collected secretly (or "stolen," as you say). I'm glad there are people finding these things out.
This is actually a very interesting point, because it brings up a third type of intelligence (which, as we shall see, isn't really intelligence at all).
First, there's economic intelligence. The U.S. intelligence community is permitted to collect economic intelligence, which includes broad economic data (labor productivit, interest rates, national debt, economic growth, trade imbalance, etc.) some of which is considered secret. This can help the U.S. prepare for economic troubles on the horizon, like a meltdown of the peso or the Asian currency crash. The U.S. government can try to avert the crisis, or use our intelligence to at least minimize the damage. Also, economic data is important in understanding other countries' political status; knowing about North Korea requires knowing that country's financial straits. Or knowing about a country's history of bribery.
Then there is industrial intelligence. This is illegal - meaning, U.S. intelligence agencies are not allowed to perform this activity. If they do, they should be prosecuted. Industrial intelligence involves finding out secrets about companies and trade negotiations and passing those secrets on to U.S. companies. This (for reasons I've addressed above) does not happen - or at least there has been no concrete evidence that it happens, and that is a reasonable standard of doubt.
The third kind, though, is the idea you raise here. Business intelligence, is information collected by spies hired by private companies. This happens lots of times - businesses hire people to go undercover and work for a competitor and report back. Supposedly, this costs companies billions of dollars each year. (But, presumably, it therefore makes billions of dollars each year for other companies.)
Since a key part of the definition of intelligence (used by the intelligence community in the U.S.) is that is must be collected and given to policymakers, neither industrial or business intelligence technically counts as "intelligence." And the CIA does neither. I'll begin to suspect them when I hear credible evidence from a company that believes its secrets have been stolen by a U.S. spy and given to a U.S. company. But we must not base our suspicions on the tenuous threads we have seen so far.
The X-Files are over, so I can get back to Slashdot. Ah, how I love Sundays.
First of all, others here on/. have been saying (as you and I both did) that many countries are involved in industrial espionage. This is true, and here's a 1998 report from the National Counterintelligence Center that lists some of the countries that perform industrial or economic espionage here in the U.S.
Second, under U.S. law, no member of the U.S. intelligence community is permitted to pass secrets on to private businesses. That is not allowed. If it is happening, it must (by law) be stopped, and the people doing it must (by law) be punished.
Now, let's take a moment to consider the sources. First, the person quoted in the article is former DCI James Woolsey. He left the CIA after two years on the job (1993-95), which were remarkable because they demonstrated huge clashes with Congress - and the worst spy scandal in recent history, the Aldrich Ames case, which he completely mishandled. I think it would not be too difficult to say he's not the best source for revelations. His time away from the job have probably led him to be imprecise with words, and he likely said things he didn't quite mean.
Second, who is the other source? The author of the article is Duncan Campbell, the man responsible - almost singlehandedly - for creating the furore over Echelon. He authored a few of the reports about Echelon, and seems to have something against the practice of collecting intelligence. He seems to enjoy fanning the flames of paranoia of the intelligence community, and sowing the seeds of discord between the U.S. and Europe. That is why, when you read the article we're discussing, he conflates and confuses economic and industrial espionage, two things which should be kept separate, and stresses Woolsey's remarks about Europe.
In fact, the only line in the entire article where Woolsey says anything controversial - that the U.S. commits industrial espionage - is brief and offhand, and it sounds more like a confused ramble than a straightforward, direct admission: "Would [...] somebody do a technological analysis of something from a friendly country, which had no importance, other than a commercial use, and then let it sit on the shelf because it couldn't be given to the American company? I think that would be a misuse of the [intelligence] community's resources. I don't think it would be done."
Finally, how is the intelligence community supposed to defend itself? They say they don't commit industrial espionage, but their critics will not accept that, nor any other level of assurance.
This is being blown all out of proportion! I can't stand all the irrational spy-bashing that's been going on lately. Intelligence collection is not evil, but America's anti-secret, anti-disagreement attitude (combined with, of course, the real history of abuses by the intelligence community) has made us all lose sight of the incredible importance of intelligence collection.
Collecting economic intelligence is completely understandable - after all, economic crises are an incredible threat to the U.S. Collecting economic intelligence makes perfect sense; it can help us prepare for and manage economic catastrophe long before it happens.
Keep in mind that most of the information is OSINT (open source intelligence), and not intelligence obtained by spying. To quote the article: "Whether economic or military, most US intelligence data came from open sources, [Woolsey] said. But 'five percent is essentially secrets that we steal. We steal secrets with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites.'
The five percent he's talking about is the five percent of intelligence collected overall.
Let's get this straight: industrial espionage is illegal, and it does not happen. A huge part of the reason it is forbidden is that since business is international now, half the time you think you're helping an "American" business, you're actually helping a business abroad.
Illegal industrial espionage is produced for private businesses, but legal economic espionage is for policymakers. There are reasons of practice and politics and law and ethics that prohibit the U.S. from committing industrial espionge.
Meanwhile industrial espionage is committed by other countries - including Russia, China, France and Japan.
And, in case you're wondering, the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 makes industrial espionage against U.S. companies illegal. It used to be illegal in some states, but now the theft of trade secrets is illegal throughout the U.S.
Probably the main reason the New York Times is considered iffy is the unrelenting criticism of China's human rights record by William Safire, who recently said China's leaders were double-crossers and certain political trends are "leading [China] toward a political earthquake".
Two points of preface. First, as others have said, congratulations to the/.ers who leapt at the chance to comment to the Copyright Office on this matter. Second, you can be assured that the Copyright Office is going to seriously consider the comments, which were largely very well thought out.
I'd like to point out some brief excerpts from three of the comments. Others have rightly complimented the EFF comments - which we can probably assume will be a good indication of at least part of the approach EFF's team will use in the courtroom.
The heart of the EFF comment is this:
Hence, any "unauthorized descrambling" or viewing of DVDs constitutes a violation under the DMCA. Bypassing the wisdom of copyright law's First Sale Rule which terminates the author's right to control what happens to a particular work after its first sale, systems such as CSS effectively assert control over a DVD forever... [T]he Librarian should consider whether or not the technological protection measure actually protects a right afforded by a copyright holder, (such as copying, distribution, adaptation, public display/performance), or whether the system is designed to limit a consumer's legitimate use of media (such as viewing).... [T]he DVD format should be exempted as a class of works under the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions.
Second, the MPAA comments are extremely revealing - and will probably be important in the courtroom, too. In essence, they argue that CSS gives them important protection against more than just piracy:
Access control technologies are used, for example, to permit access to a work for a limited period (such as a free demonstration or "test drive" period, or the duration of a license agreement) while closing it thereafter. These techniques are also employed to allow access to part of a work while denying it to another part; to enable access by a specified category of users but not by another category; or to enable access by a specified number of simultaneous users but no more.
And, the third (and final) excerpt I want to quote is this, from the Computer and Communications Industry Association. They point out an absurd conclusion that the law might lead to if there is is not a broad protection for interoperability.
[A]t some point in the near future computer programs will be distributed on DVDs. Would reverse engineering CSS to permit these programs to run on Linux be permitted under the DMCA as enacted, or would the exception not apply because the decryption software would also allow the running of movies? To eliminate the possibility of this absurd result, reverse engineering for the purpose of permitting all forms interoperability -- and not just between computer software -- should be permitted.
Now, here's what happens next. The court cases are going to proceed - which I think is plainly thuggish behavior on the part of the MPAA and the Copy Control Authority. Court procedures are slow, but so is the regulatory process. It is conceivable that some of the court cases will be in the appeal stage before the Copyright Office makes any final decision.
Slashdot users can do two things:
1. Send reply comments to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office gives until March 20 to reply to those comments. I know that isn't a lot of time, but if you have some spare hours this weekend, you might want to jot something down. Some of your comments in this discussion could almost directly go to the Copyright Office - like
The rules for sending reply comments appear here. If anyone is unclear about how to send these reply comments, or wants to send their comments in PDF format (which is not necessary), I would be willing to help clean them up or convert them to PDF and send them on to the Copyright Office as a service to the/. community. I have set up a special Hotmail address (copyright_reply@hotmail.com to serve as a dropbox, and I'll contact anyone who seriously wants help.
2. Keep fighting the battle of public opinion. Most people don't know anything about this issue, and those who have heard of it largely don't grasp its importance. Tell your friends and family - and, if you can, write letters to your local newspaper. Anything you can do to move the battle from the online world to meatspace will help.
Check out the C|Net version of the story or the Wired version and you'll see that the goverment is still at least considering new rules and regulations - including some that would severely threaten the online anonymity we all take for granted.
You can read the DOJ report for yourself here. CNN is somewhat correct - it does say that "existing substantive federal laws appear to be generally adequate." However, it emphasizes the dangers to security posed by anonymity, and it does not shut the door on new laws.
Right now, it's really hard to predict what the effects of Net access around the world will be. There are ISPs popping up all over, but their services are incredibly expensive - understandably, since the necessary infrastructure for reliable service is not yet in place.
Just look at the Net access numbers. Less than 0.7 percent of the Arab world is online. South Africa and the Seychelles are the only parts of Africa with more than one percent penetration. The numbers aren't all that much better for South America, and, significantly, the world's most populous countries, China and India, lag behind the rest of Asia.
These percentages are not all that revealing, though. The important thing is the percentage of new Net users is climbing. In all those areas, the number of people with Net access is small, but the rate of increase is impressive.
Because of the infrastructure problems, only those who can afford Net access in each country spend money getting online. That means that only the very wealthy can reap the benefits of interconnectedness in those places - so, to answer your question, one of the early effects of Net access in many of these countries has been (and will continue be) the exacerbation of class disparities. We can only hope that will change, as Net access gets cheaper - but it will be terribly cruel for years as the impoverished around the globe see the fruits of the Net dangling in front of them, just beyond grasp.
There are other interesting implications, like the effects on cultural understanding. James Burke commented in an interview some years ago that he hoped the Internet would have the effect of forcing Americans to see how different the rest of the world is. I haven't noticed the kind of cultural broadening he imagined, but it may be forced upon other nations. So much of the Internet is in English, and so many important services and products originate in the English-speaking world, that late-comers to the Net may find their cultural identity under attack. One hopes that cultural-specific Net services will arise to meet their needs.
And, finally, there is little evidence as yet of the Net's liberalizing political influence. In fact, we are still in the awful early stage, where countries like China are placing stringent restrictions on Net access and are deciding which Web sites are acceptable for their population. Hopefully, this will diminish with time, but it is possible that these regimes may just grow more desperate as their control of information wanes - and desperation can lead to dangerous unpredictability.
We've got some more articles posted on our Equity page.
You know what - you're quite right. "Mainstream media" (assuming Katz and you mean newspapers and television) have done a terrible job of covering the DMCA issue, and this DeCSS affair. I suspect, though, that it is largely because they see it as an online-only issue that has not yet become important for the general public. (They are incorrect in believing that - I certainly think this is a matter of great urgency, and that intellectual property is in a volatile, near-crisis state right now, as demonstrated by the dumb DeCSS lawsuits and the fight over patenting parts of the genome.)
I spent a few minutes looking for articles on the websites of newspapers, magazines and TV networks to disprove you, but I was hard pressed to find anything. I came across a few, like this at USA Today and another at CNN, but most of their coverage was articles culled from ZDNet, C|Net and IDG. I certainly hope their coverage improves, and I expect it will. Newspapers and TV networks sometimes do a superb job of reporting on controversies in their industry, and I hope that continues. I think my real point - that news groups owned by corporations often report against the alleged "corporate agenda" - is still valid.
I also agree with you that "Enforced copyrights and freedom cannot coexist in cyberspace." But it would have been just as true if you inserted "meatspace" instead. Copyright enforcement, like all intellectual property - or any law enforcement, for that matter - inherently involves limits on freedom. As precious as our current freedom in cyberspace is, it is going to be curtailed again and again in the coming years. We must accept that, and realize that it is incumbent upon us to make sure we influence the direction of those limitations, so as to minimize their authoritarian effect.
I also agree with what you said about me being a windbag; it's inherited.
You're exactly right - corporations can be bad guys. In a sense, that's where the idea of the "corporation" came from. People form corporations so they will not be held responsible themselves when they screw up; they create a fictional person (corpus=body) who must take all the heat. So when a guy runs a painting business, he incorporates it so that when he screws up and spills paint on his customers' cars (as happened in my hometown recently), he personally cannot be sued, but the corporation can be.
You're quite right, I didn't mean to give the impression that corporations are somehow infallible. They screw up, and often. And I think they're seriously wrong on a lot of these intellectual property issues. But I'm just fed up with all the irrational, blind corporation bashing, and by Katz's penchant for describing those with whom he disagrees as mortal threats.
I'm afraid you somewhat misunderstand me. (Or perhaps I you.) My central thesis is that the situation is not simple, so I'm unclear on how I can be oversimplifying. Corporations (I argued) are not necessarily evil, and corporatism (I argued) is not necessarily an evil force. Politicians (I argued) are not simply bought and sold like chattel. Consumers (I argued) are not simply passive, timid victims. Geeks (I argued) are not simply libertarian individualists. All are swept in the dizzying revolution, and all are complicit in the events propelling it, and in the insights and mistakes that let us leap and lurch along. I'm saying that things are not simple - and assuming that the worst possible scenario will develop from this nascent situation is inappropriate.
You've made some really good points, Tony, and I'd like to respond to a few of them.
You are quite right to point out that corporations donate lots of money to nonprofit organizations, and find lots of other ways to have a voice, since our political process creates unnatural and ineffectual barriers to money in the political process. Do what you might, but money will find a way to get into politics - and the more arcane the "campaign finance reform" becomes, the more contortions corporations will perform. This is not "circumventing rules and regulations," but rather being whipped into laughable secrecy by campaign finance laws that create the silly fiction of a money-free political system.
It would be far better, in my opinion, to raise (or eliminate) all the restrictions on political moneygiving, so corporations and old rich people could all be less surreptitious about trying to achieve particular political ends.
But I strongly disagree with your claim that lobbyists can "buy" politicians, or that corporations can overwhelm the political process. That's wonderful jingoism, but empirically false. Even though it has spent millions of dollars on influencing the political process, Microsoft is still being bruised by the Justice Department. Lockheed and Boeing face new fines every other week. The telecom firms face stringent oversight from Congress. And the number of decisions every week handed down by legislators and regulators in this town that run counter to the interests of corporations is astounding.
In other words, while it's comfortable to relax in the platitudes of powerful corporate cronyism, in fact, corporate omnipotence is grimly overstated.
You write that "individuals do not have a coherent political agenda." This is true. Neither, however, do businesses. As direct as your superb laser/light bulb analogy is, it is not apt; businesses fight with one another, with consumer groups, with politicians and many other interests in this town. There is no "agenda" that would universally benefit corporations. Take the recent debate over cable open access, which has all but disappeared since the announcement of the AOL/TW merger. In that debate, Microsoft and AT&T fought hard against AOL and the ISPs. The lobbying on both sides was great sound and fury, but it amounted to nothing. There is no uniform corporate agenda at work.
You claim that "almost all profits go directly into the coffers of the corporations who distribute the music." You say sometimes just 1-3% of the profits from music goes to those involved in its creation. That's quite a misleading number, and I'm not sure where you got it. You make it sound as though BMI and ASCAP just gobble up 99 percent of the money. In fact, BMI is quite proud that over 80 percent of its income from licensing goes to those involved in making music.
You then go on to make a bit of a straw man argument, the heart of which is this: "The members of RIAA want to maintain their extremely lucrative stranglehold on the distribution mechanisms... The current plan for distribution is to create a system in which the consumer downloads music for free, and is only able to play the music on a device that bills the listener every time a song is played."
First, there is no "current plan for distribution"; everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do, and companies are going to experiment with new media and modes of distribution and alliances which we cannot now foresee. Of course RIAA (and other industry groups) are going to react in surprising (and even detrimental) ways to these changes - but I am confident that the technology will overwhelm the artificial limits put on it.
Finally, as for "mainstream media" being in the pocket of corporations, as much as Noam Chomsky would delight in hearing you say that, it is only partly accurate. Consider this: where do you actually hear all the bad things you have heard about corporations? From - surprise! - mainstream news media. The corporations report about and criticize one another. Power is not simply "wrested" (as you say) from individuals by big, evil corporations; it is give-and-take, and consumers (despite your lamentations) are willing participants - not helpless, powerless, victims as you would caricature them. That's why TV shows fail, movies flop and new musical genres develop - because we are in a system that encourages interaction and market exchange, instead of stifling it.
Katz, O Katz, O Katz, O Katz - How hast thou gone wrong? Let me count the ways...
1.
... unlike ordinary radio and TV broadcasters, Webcasters must pay royalties to record companies. Webcasts are limited to three songs from one album in any three-hour period.
This is false. Radio stations - like TV stations, cable networks, etc. - need to get licenses from performing rights groups like ASCAP or BMI. Even businesses and restaurants larger than a certain size (2000 sq. ft. and 3750 sq. ft., respectively) need to get licenses. Those licenses are not free - they are bought for millions of dollars sometimes, and the money from their purchase goes to the songwriters and performers.
2.
[The DMCA] also dramatically restricts the right of individual artists to have their works seen, heard and sold. That makes it a First Amendment as well as a corporate issue.
Well, duh. All copyright laws are First Amendment issues in part. All of them. Why? Because copyright laws are inherently about what you can and cannot do and say. The DMCA is no more especially a First Amendment matter than any other copyright law.
And recognizing that there are free-speech issues involved, the DMCA (like other copyright acts) leaves intact the "Fair Use" doctrine, which permits the use of copyrighted material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
3.
[The DMCA is] a back-door effort by lobbyists and politicians to circumvent debate or discussion entirely.
First of all, calling it a "back-door effort" ignores the facts that there were lobbyists and politicians on both sides of every part of the issue, and that comments and input were solicited from the online community and libraries and computer makers. What's more, some of the Act's provisions had been discussed and debated internationally, as part of a World Intellectual Property Organization treaty - and were first publicized years and years ago. Calling it secretive or "back-door" is plain inaccurate.
4.
... blind copyright protection that in no way takes into account the Net's unique nature, nor the rights and sensibilities of a generation that defines culture differently.
This is nonsensical. How is the DMCA "blind"? The point of the law, whether you like it or not, is that it does take into account the Net's unique nature, by recognizing that the Net can be used to disseminate information instantly everywhere. It isn't blind: it tries to stop some of that information from just disappearing into the ether, possibly leaving creators unpaid. What do you mean this generation "defines culture differently"? Every generation defines culture differently, and (if you'll allow me to follow your logic to its natural conclusion) every person defines culture differently. This is not a culture gap, and there is no acceptable reason for lawmakers, musicians and other copyright holders to be held hostage by people who don't want to pay for anything.
5.
Corporatism isn't the same as capitalism, or corporations. It's new, bigger, more global and vastly more powerful. It has acquired most mainstream media. It is the primary contributor to the political system.
Like the theory of phlogiston, your argument here sounds great. But, like the theory of phlogiston, there is not a great deal of empirical evidence to back it up. First of all, your statement about "mainstream media" is circular since you are defining mainstream media as "those media which are owned by corporations." Second, the primary contributor to the political system, in terms of money and in terms of vocal input, is the ordinary voting population; it contributes more money than any other contributing segment. In fact, even though nobody talks about this, corporations are not allowed to support candidates for federal office.
6.
... corporatism discourages creativity, pushes individuals to the margins and promotes conformity and control of software, hardware, intellectual content and culture.
O, Katz, come on. Compare the words you use for corporations (discourages, pushes, conformity, control, rampaging, drooling) with the words you use for geeks (free, diverse, individualized, unprecedented, unique). What propaganda!
Things are a whole lot more complicated than that. First of all, you refuse to admit the positive effects of the corporate control you so disdain. Thanks to AOL, 20 million people are online. Thanks to Microsoft, lots of confused non-techies are able to use these machines we take for granted. Thanks to WalMart, people have access to more and cheaper products.
How you can claim this is not capitalism is beyond me. With the exception of monopolistic behavior (the integrated-browswer debate is not worth getting into here), each of these companies is behaving as capitalist firms should - by offering products and services that consumers are drawn to.
What's more, it's ridiculous to cast corporations as an Evil Empire trying to crush the plucky, charming geeks who can see how "culture" is changing around them. Even as the Net lets people express themselves more individually, it also spreads a common culture, full of common language and terms and beliefs which can themselves become tyrannical. Before writing "Geeks," you should have sat down and read some Alexis de Tocqueville.
7.
The belief that even if laws restrict the Net, innovative software and hardware will triumph, is pervasive. The DMCA suggests that may be wishful thinking.
I disagree here again. Technology is extraordinarily powerful, and right now, it is shaping the law - not the other way around. (And if you believe Lawrence Lessig, in many ways, the technology is the law.) I expect that trend will continue for several decades.
8.
The primary political struggle of the 21st Century -- corporatism versus individualism -- has erupted right under our noses. And with little political consciousness or response, we seem to be losing the first big battle.
First of all, to claim that "corporatism versus individualism" is the "primary political struggle" of the next century demonstrates as much a sense of history as the people who called the O.J. Simpson trial the "trial of the century." Life always ends up amazingly unlike what we had supposed.
Second, again, you are unwilling to see political activism by geeks because you are defining "geeks" circularly - as those who are not politically active. There are many people, including many people here in Washington, D.C., who share the political and technological views of geeks, and are fighting every day to prevent new dumb laws from being passed. Most people are not politically conscious - not just geeks - and that's a wonderful thing. It's a sign of our freedom and safety. The places where political cognizance is a necessary good are places like Chechnya or Somalia or Cuba or China, where a lack of political sense can land you in jail.
I was able to think of four companies which, between them, have applied for 40,000 patents on parts of the human genome. Let's hope the patent offices do some serious rethinking about how biotech patents are offered. (There's an archive of related articles here.)
I recently suggested that maybe a new temporary patent should be developed for a certain class of biotech discoveries, so companies can still profit from their research but not at the cost of new research. While I usually eschew nutty suggestions for new "classifications" and paperwork, I really can't come up with any other simple solution.
All these recent copyright troubles are only one part of a much larger question -- How can intellectual property make sense in an Information Age?
The copyright war, which is still but neonatal, is one aspect of that problem. The National Research Council recently studied copyright and came up with no good solution for the problems Katz mentioned. They did conclude their report with an intriguing thought: perhaps we should rethink the notion of basing our intellectual property tradition on something like "copying" (as in "copyright") since information technologies completely change what copying is. (Click here for their press release.)
Copyright is just one part of something bigger; trademarks and patents, also ways of protecting intellectual property, are drastically changing too.
As far as patents go, consider the efforts of Amazon to patent its one-click shopping process (as has been amply discussed here on/.) and the efforts of companies like Celera, Incyte, HGS and Athersys to obtain thousands of patents on the human genome. (Click here for more on that problem, which is only partly related to information technology.) As someone appropriately said, were Columbus around today, he would try to patent America.
I know less about trademarks, but I understand there are parallel problems in that arena.
The solution doesn't seem to me to be corporation-bashing. (Indeed, having worked in the lobbying department of The McGraw-Hill Companies, I got to see how earnestly corporations care about keeping information accessible while still turning a profit.) Instead, we should do some real hard thinking about how intellectual property can survive in the Information Age -- and we should keep fighting against ridiculous cases, like the DeCSS case, brought on by people who just don't realize what a period of tremendous change this is.
The Clinton Administration has been extremely schizophrenic in its attempts to create and apply law enforcement policy on the Web. Compare this recent less-anonymity kick with its long-time no-strong-crypto stance. One one hand, the Administration wants communications to be less secure , more open to law enforcement prying. On the other hand (especially after the recent DDoS attacks) the Administration has been warning businesses to be as secure as possible. That seems pretty contradictory. Let's hope this less-anonymity idea was just being floated, and not seriously considered at any level.
We've just posted an archive of related articles (and we welcome any contributions you have) on our Law Enforcement Online page.
The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.
In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.
Just in case anyone comes back to this discussion (which has long since quieted), it seems NASA has taken satellite images of the aurora effect on Earth caused by the recent solar events. See here.
I wish more people on/. went around the site and tried to put up "last posts" instead of "firsts." How fun would that be?!
There are a number of companies already looking to make some money by designing protocols that protect personal or corporate e-mail. (By "protect," I mean, "destroy after a certain period.") One such company, calling itself "Disappearing Inc." is offering a self-destructing e-mail protocol, so your message is intact from birth till it deletes itself - and can never be saved or backed up.
Slashdot Mirror
You're partly right, partly wrong. As the Britannica article on copyright law points out, copyright did develop the way you said, and only became "modern" in 1710. It is striking, of course, that the spread of a specific technology (the printing press) and its eventual ubiquity was what drove copyright law to develop as it did - just as new technologies are forcing us to evaluate it anew.
But you're incorrect if you believe that the only intellectual property law is copyright. In fact, the Amazon dispute is about patents, not copyright. And patent laws go back at least to 1421 (again, read the appropriate Britannica article for yourself). I think a tradition at least 5.8 centuries old deserves some respect, but that may be just a personal blemish on my part.
I usually hate it when people use slavery as a metaphor, but you make an interesting argument. I see what your saying; my argument is a little circular. (So, too, is part of Katz's argument, where he says that "Corporations... exclude ... 'non-commercial' voices." Well, of course, because once they bring on a new "voice" it becomes, by definition, commercial.)
I suppose in some sense my argument about the rich history of invention and creation we have had under intellectual property protections is unknowable (at best) or circular (at worst). Yet I think I'll stick with it, having had firsthand experience with a publishing firm that worried every day about the integrity of the databases it published. If those databases were pirated (as they have been, on occasion), without strong copyright protection, the company lost money. If it happens again, the company will probably stop making the databases - and everyone, including the pirate, loses out in the end.
That's pretty much the point Katz was trying to get across in that passage where he quoted Lessig ("If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it"). But, unfortunately, it is incomplete. When you illegally copy a copyrighted work, you have deprived someone of something other than a mere monopoly. (In fact, it is the technology, not the "pirate" or "thief," which is responsible for revoking the monopoly.) The thing you have deprived the creator of is the potential to earn profit. We have to balance creators' needs against consumers', and Katz (and you) seem to tip the scale unfairly toward consumers.
There is certainly some truth in that. However, it is too narrow. Musicians are not the only people protected by intellectual property laws. If Stephen King's new book, which is to be published at midnight tonight over the Internet, is pirated and passed around freely by e-mail and mirrored on dozens of web sites, the copying will certainly be free "advertising" for King, but he will lose money. Maybe he would stop publishing online. If that happened, everyone would lose out in the end, including the people who got to read it for free.
I do agree with you that "theft" is too strong a word; as someone may or may not have hundreds of illicit MP3s stored on his computer (shhhh! the RIAA might be listening!) I certainly don't like considering myself a thief or pirate. (Actually, I kind of would like to be a pirate, although without the trite patch or the fruity parrot.) But we are living in an age when the pace of technological change makes us all accept a degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and fuzziness of terminology. So I don't mind all that much.
A. Keiper
Katz, you only reproduced part of Jefferson's quote. In the sentences preceding your excerpt, he makes it far more clear that he is speaking of abstract ideas. In fact, here's a larger version of the quote from an essay by John Perry Barlow. (I presume you've read this piece, which I just spent a very profitable few minutes doing.)
Certainly intellectual property needs to be reconceived so it reflects the ease with which "copying" (against which "copyright" protects) may be executed in our digital age. But people who create new information (artistic, for instance) or who add some value to information (perhaps by compiling or reorganizing it) must be paid for their efforts lest they lose incentive. This is not an abstract point. Consider the Feist Supreme Court case wherein a company's database was stolen in its entirety, and the Court ruled that, since facts cannot be copyrighted, the stolen database is not protected by copyright - despite the thousands of hours of work that went into its compilation. Since then, database makers have waged war in Washington, hoping to get from Congress the profit-producing protection that the Court stripped away.
Lessig notwithstanding, corporations will find technological ways to preserve (or create artificial) scarcity of information, since scarcity is what gives something its value. Information and ideas no more long to be free than a pizza longs to be eaten. Certain benevolent and generous creators, like Ben Franklin with his eponymous stove, will decide not to pursue legal protection for new ideas, so they might be freely available to all. Why should others, like musicians whose originality is critically acclaimed, be forced to freely give out the fruits of their labor? I find that absurd, not the scenario you consider absurd.
(And you cannot validly argue that the $15 billion the music industry made last year is evidence that digital music transfers are not harming the music industry; perhaps they would have made $16 billion were it not for the transfers of MP3s that Jack Valenti goofily calls "pilfering.")
If you say ideas cannot be owned, then go a step further: Why can land be owned? Why can pencils be owned? There are people who would argue that neither can be. Some would argue that the only thing that can be owned is your own body (which brings to mind the passages where Hegel, that hideous fraud of a philosopher, talked about owning food only once you have eaten it). And some would go even further, saying that you cannot even own your body - but that it belongs to God or the state or some greater human good.
Clearly we need to carefully reconsider intellectual property in light of technological changes. And we must vigorously work to educate our government about the changes. But that's no reason to discard the system altogether, or to pretend that technology has discarded it for us.
Perhaps the second part of your post will consider these matters.
A. Keiper
Meanwhile, on a far more important note, I spent several minutes trying to figure out your Latin .sig line. Google brought me to the Aeneid in Latin (no translation), but - get this - it also brought me to several Slashdot articles you've written. (Same with Yahoo and Find.com.) In the end, the best I could come up with was from the Perseus Project, a line about how Dido never dreamed that love like that she shared with Aeneas could ever die. Is that about right?
A.K.
By quoting one Congressional aide (from among thousands and thousands), Katz supposedly gives us the point of view of the Old Guard. Concerned with things like theft and stealing and morality, such people seem not to understand (as Katz and many /.ers have argued) that the social shift going on here is vast, and that the technology itself is a driving force - not merely a "culture of thievery."
But that is not a fair representation of the Old Guard view. During my time in Washington, I've witnessed firsthand the plans and desires of trade groups and corporations concerned with the protection of intellectual property. Their paramount objective is not to quash the Internet and destroy the free flow of information - in fact, they see in information's freedom a tremendous opportunity for profit.
But information cannot be totally free, they argue. There must be some obstacle to reaching information (whether you mean literature or movies or economic data when you say the word "information"). That obstacle is the one where money is made.
Artists who cannot make money (and thereby feed themselves) will cease to be artists. Companies that collect economic data and publish it will no longer have an incentive to continue working. If information was totally free and Lexis-Nexis freely available to everyone, then the company that runs Lexis-Nexis (Reed-Elsevier) would no longer have a reason to run it. And not every business model can operate like Britannica's; it is not always possible to offer all your content and information online by slathering advertisements upon it. (And we should be glad of that.)
Theft is certainly a big fear, but the corporate and creative interests I've encountered here in Washington, D.C. are well aware that there may soon be technological solutions to technological problems. Lessig's book has been frequently misinterpreted (and perhaps here so by Katz) as arguing that nothing can be done counter to the code that defines cyberspace. But of course that code can be changed and built upon, and new methods of protecting intellectual property will be developed.
The traditional systems of protecting intellectual property have bequeathed upon us a rich history of invention and a marvelous universe of creativity which we must not squander by assuming that "anything goes." We must not arrogantly believe that recent technological changes completely undermine the value of safeguarding intellectual property. Certainly, the old system is under threat - the DMCA/DVD/DeCSS madness, the Amazon patent tribulations, even the debate over genome patents, all these prove that we must reconsider how we think about intellectual property.
But we needn't scrap our old notions entirely, in a rush to judgment we might regret later.
I look forward to the second half of Katz's post.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Socety
And you're quite right about multinational corporations' impressive power, and their extranational interests. In fact, that's why many of them employ spies of their own - to get a scoop on their competitors.
A. Keiper
And you should be commended for that - it shows that you have moral standards above those of the occasional thief.
But we're not talking about belongings kept in an apartment or house, of course. We're talking about secrets which affect the lives of millions of Americans and billions of others around the globe. Some of the information the U.S. intelligence community gathers secretly includes:
The location and number of Chinese nuclear missiles, more than a dozen of which could already hit U.S. targets.
The status of the nuclear weapons programs in Iraq.
The health of North Korea's economy, which is an important indicator of that country's stability - and therefore, of the entire region's safety.
The software piracy market in Hong Kong.
The relationship between Moscow corporate heads and the Kremlin leadership.
These are just a few examples of important intelligence collected secretly (or "stolen," as you say). I'm glad there are people finding these things out.
A. Keiper
First, there's economic intelligence. The U.S. intelligence community is permitted to collect economic intelligence, which includes broad economic data (labor productivit, interest rates, national debt, economic growth, trade imbalance, etc.) some of which is considered secret. This can help the U.S. prepare for economic troubles on the horizon, like a meltdown of the peso or the Asian currency crash. The U.S. government can try to avert the crisis, or use our intelligence to at least minimize the damage. Also, economic data is important in understanding other countries' political status; knowing about North Korea requires knowing that country's financial straits. Or knowing about a country's history of bribery.
Then there is industrial intelligence. This is illegal - meaning, U.S. intelligence agencies are not allowed to perform this activity. If they do, they should be prosecuted. Industrial intelligence involves finding out secrets about companies and trade negotiations and passing those secrets on to U.S. companies. This (for reasons I've addressed above) does not happen - or at least there has been no concrete evidence that it happens, and that is a reasonable standard of doubt.
The third kind, though, is the idea you raise here. Business intelligence, is information collected by spies hired by private companies. This happens lots of times - businesses hire people to go undercover and work for a competitor and report back. Supposedly, this costs companies billions of dollars each year. (But, presumably, it therefore makes billions of dollars each year for other companies.)
Since a key part of the definition of intelligence (used by the intelligence community in the U.S.) is that is must be collected and given to policymakers, neither industrial or business intelligence technically counts as "intelligence." And the CIA does neither. I'll begin to suspect them when I hear credible evidence from a company that believes its secrets have been stolen by a U.S. spy and given to a U.S. company. But we must not base our suspicions on the tenuous threads we have seen so far.
A. Keiper
First of all, others here on /. have been saying (as you and I both did) that many countries are involved in industrial espionage. This is true, and here's a 1998 report from the National Counterintelligence Center that lists some of the countries that perform industrial or economic espionage here in the U.S.
Second, under U.S. law, no member of the U.S. intelligence community is permitted to pass secrets on to private businesses. That is not allowed. If it is happening, it must (by law) be stopped, and the people doing it must (by law) be punished.
Now, let's take a moment to consider the sources. First, the person quoted in the article is former DCI James Woolsey. He left the CIA after two years on the job (1993-95), which were remarkable because they demonstrated huge clashes with Congress - and the worst spy scandal in recent history, the Aldrich Ames case, which he completely mishandled. I think it would not be too difficult to say he's not the best source for revelations. His time away from the job have probably led him to be imprecise with words, and he likely said things he didn't quite mean.
Second, who is the other source? The author of the article is Duncan Campbell, the man responsible - almost singlehandedly - for creating the furore over Echelon. He authored a few of the reports about Echelon, and seems to have something against the practice of collecting intelligence. He seems to enjoy fanning the flames of paranoia of the intelligence community, and sowing the seeds of discord between the U.S. and Europe. That is why, when you read the article we're discussing, he conflates and confuses economic and industrial espionage, two things which should be kept separate, and stresses Woolsey's remarks about Europe.
In fact, the only line in the entire article where Woolsey says anything controversial - that the U.S. commits industrial espionage - is brief and offhand, and it sounds more like a confused ramble than a straightforward, direct admission: "Would [...] somebody do a technological analysis of something from a friendly country, which had no importance, other than a commercial use, and then let it sit on the shelf because it couldn't be given to the American company? I think that would be a misuse of the [intelligence] community's resources. I don't think it would be done."
Finally, how is the intelligence community supposed to defend itself? They say they don't commit industrial espionage, but their critics will not accept that, nor any other level of assurance.
A. Keiper
Collecting economic intelligence is completely understandable - after all, economic crises are an incredible threat to the U.S. Collecting economic intelligence makes perfect sense; it can help us prepare for and manage economic catastrophe long before it happens.
Keep in mind that most of the information is OSINT (open source intelligence), and not intelligence obtained by spying. To quote the article: "Whether economic or military, most US intelligence data came from open sources, [Woolsey] said. But 'five percent is essentially secrets that we steal. We steal secrets with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites.'
The five percent he's talking about is the five percent of intelligence collected overall.
Let's get this straight: industrial espionage is illegal, and it does not happen. A huge part of the reason it is forbidden is that since business is international now, half the time you think you're helping an "American" business, you're actually helping a business abroad.
Illegal industrial espionage is produced for private businesses, but legal economic espionage is for policymakers. There are reasons of practice and politics and law and ethics that prohibit the U.S. from committing industrial espionge.
Meanwhile industrial espionage is committed by other countries - including Russia, China, France and Japan.
And, in case you're wondering, the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 makes industrial espionage against U.S. companies illegal. It used to be illegal in some states, but now the theft of trade secrets is illegal throughout the U.S.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
You can reach it here:
http://www.tecsoc.org/biotech/biotech.htm
Also, we have a brief "What is Biotechnology?" essay which explores some of the most important issues in that area.
A. Keiper
Probably the main reason the New York Times is considered iffy is the unrelenting criticism of China's human rights record by William Safire, who recently said China's leaders were double-crossers and certain political trends are "leading [China] toward a political earthquake".
I'd like to point out some brief excerpts from three of the comments. Others have rightly complimented the EFF comments - which we can probably assume will be a good indication of at least part of the approach EFF's team will use in the courtroom.
The heart of the EFF comment is this:
Second, the MPAA comments are extremely revealing - and will probably be important in the courtroom, too. In essence, they argue that CSS gives them important protection against more than just piracy:
And, the third (and final) excerpt I want to quote is this, from the Computer and Communications Industry Association. They point out an absurd conclusion that the law might lead to if there is is not a broad protection for interoperability.
Now, here's what happens next. The court cases are going to proceed - which I think is plainly thuggish behavior on the part of the MPAA and the Copy Control Authority. Court procedures are slow, but so is the regulatory process. It is conceivable that some of the court cases will be in the appeal stage before the Copyright Office makes any final decision.
Slashdot users can do two things:
The rules for sending reply comments appear here. If anyone is unclear about how to send these reply comments, or wants to send their comments in PDF format (which is not necessary), I would be willing to help clean them up or convert them to PDF and send them on to the Copyright Office as a service to the
2. Keep fighting the battle of public opinion. Most people don't know anything about this issue, and those who have heard of it largely don't grasp its importance. Tell your friends and family - and, if you can, write letters to your local newspaper. Anything you can do to move the battle from the online world to meatspace will help.
This is going to be a long fight.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
You can read the DOJ report for yourself here. CNN is somewhat correct - it does say that "existing substantive federal laws appear to be generally adequate." However, it emphasizes the dangers to security posed by anonymity, and it does not shut the door on new laws.
We've got an archive of other related articles on our Law Enforcement Online page.
A. Keiper
Just look at the Net access numbers. Less than 0.7 percent of the Arab world is online. South Africa and the Seychelles are the only parts of Africa with more than one percent penetration. The numbers aren't all that much better for South America, and, significantly, the world's most populous countries, China and India, lag behind the rest of Asia.
These percentages are not all that revealing, though. The important thing is the percentage of new Net users is climbing. In all those areas, the number of people with Net access is small, but the rate of increase is impressive.
Because of the infrastructure problems, only those who can afford Net access in each country spend money getting online. That means that only the very wealthy can reap the benefits of interconnectedness in those places - so, to answer your question, one of the early effects of Net access in many of these countries has been (and will continue be) the exacerbation of class disparities. We can only hope that will change, as Net access gets cheaper - but it will be terribly cruel for years as the impoverished around the globe see the fruits of the Net dangling in front of them, just beyond grasp.
There are other interesting implications, like the effects on cultural understanding. James Burke commented in an interview some years ago that he hoped the Internet would have the effect of forcing Americans to see how different the rest of the world is. I haven't noticed the kind of cultural broadening he imagined, but it may be forced upon other nations. So much of the Internet is in English, and so many important services and products originate in the English-speaking world, that late-comers to the Net may find their cultural identity under attack. One hopes that cultural-specific Net services will arise to meet their needs.
And, finally, there is little evidence as yet of the Net's liberalizing political influence. In fact, we are still in the awful early stage, where countries like China are placing stringent restrictions on Net access and are deciding which Web sites are acceptable for their population. Hopefully, this will diminish with time, but it is possible that these regimes may just grow more desperate as their control of information wanes - and desperation can lead to dangerous unpredictability.
We've got some more articles posted on our Equity page.
A. Keiper
I spent a few minutes looking for articles on the websites of newspapers, magazines and TV networks to disprove you, but I was hard pressed to find anything. I came across a few, like this at USA Today and another at CNN, but most of their coverage was articles culled from ZDNet, C|Net and IDG. I certainly hope their coverage improves, and I expect it will. Newspapers and TV networks sometimes do a superb job of reporting on controversies in their industry, and I hope that continues. I think my real point - that news groups owned by corporations often report against the alleged "corporate agenda" - is still valid.
I also agree with you that "Enforced copyrights and freedom cannot coexist in cyberspace." But it would have been just as true if you inserted "meatspace" instead. Copyright enforcement, like all intellectual property - or any law enforcement, for that matter - inherently involves limits on freedom. As precious as our current freedom in cyberspace is, it is going to be curtailed again and again in the coming years. We must accept that, and realize that it is incumbent upon us to make sure we influence the direction of those limitations, so as to minimize their authoritarian effect.
I also agree with what you said about me being a windbag; it's inherited.
Cheers.
You're quite right, I didn't mean to give the impression that corporations are somehow infallible. They screw up, and often. And I think they're seriously wrong on a lot of these intellectual property issues. But I'm just fed up with all the irrational, blind corporation bashing, and by Katz's penchant for describing those with whom he disagrees as mortal threats.
Good point, thanks.
I'm afraid you somewhat misunderstand me. (Or perhaps I you.) My central thesis is that the situation is not simple , so I'm unclear on how I can be oversimplifying. Corporations (I argued) are not necessarily evil, and corporatism (I argued) is not necessarily an evil force. Politicians (I argued) are not simply bought and sold like chattel. Consumers (I argued) are not simply passive, timid victims. Geeks (I argued) are not simply libertarian individualists. All are swept in the dizzying revolution, and all are complicit in the events propelling it, and in the insights and mistakes that let us leap and lurch along. I'm saying that things are not simple - and assuming that the worst possible scenario will develop from this nascent situation is inappropriate.
You are quite right to point out that corporations donate lots of money to nonprofit organizations, and find lots of other ways to have a voice, since our political process creates unnatural and ineffectual barriers to money in the political process. Do what you might, but money will find a way to get into politics - and the more arcane the "campaign finance reform" becomes, the more contortions corporations will perform. This is not "circumventing rules and regulations," but rather being whipped into laughable secrecy by campaign finance laws that create the silly fiction of a money-free political system.
It would be far better, in my opinion, to raise (or eliminate) all the restrictions on political moneygiving, so corporations and old rich people could all be less surreptitious about trying to achieve particular political ends.
But I strongly disagree with your claim that lobbyists can "buy" politicians, or that corporations can overwhelm the political process. That's wonderful jingoism, but empirically false. Even though it has spent millions of dollars on influencing the political process, Microsoft is still being bruised by the Justice Department. Lockheed and Boeing face new fines every other week. The telecom firms face stringent oversight from Congress. And the number of decisions every week handed down by legislators and regulators in this town that run counter to the interests of corporations is astounding.
In other words, while it's comfortable to relax in the platitudes of powerful corporate cronyism, in fact, corporate omnipotence is grimly overstated.
You write that "individuals do not have a coherent political agenda." This is true. Neither, however, do businesses. As direct as your superb laser/light bulb analogy is, it is not apt; businesses fight with one another, with consumer groups, with politicians and many other interests in this town. There is no "agenda" that would universally benefit corporations. Take the recent debate over cable open access, which has all but disappeared since the announcement of the AOL/TW merger. In that debate, Microsoft and AT&T fought hard against AOL and the ISPs. The lobbying on both sides was great sound and fury, but it amounted to nothing. There is no uniform corporate agenda at work.
You claim that "almost all profits go directly into the coffers of the corporations who distribute the music." You say sometimes just 1-3% of the profits from music goes to those involved in its creation. That's quite a misleading number, and I'm not sure where you got it. You make it sound as though BMI and ASCAP just gobble up 99 percent of the money. In fact, BMI is quite proud that over 80 percent of its income from licensing goes to those involved in making music.
You then go on to make a bit of a straw man argument, the heart of which is this: "The members of RIAA want to maintain their extremely lucrative stranglehold on the distribution mechanisms... The current plan for distribution is to create a system in which the consumer downloads music for free, and is only able to play the music on a device that bills the listener every time a song is played."
First, there is no "current plan for distribution"; everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do, and companies are going to experiment with new media and modes of distribution and alliances which we cannot now foresee. Of course RIAA (and other industry groups) are going to react in surprising (and even detrimental) ways to these changes - but I am confident that the technology will overwhelm the artificial limits put on it.
Finally, as for "mainstream media" being in the pocket of corporations, as much as Noam Chomsky would delight in hearing you say that, it is only partly accurate. Consider this: where do you actually hear all the bad things you have heard about corporations? From - surprise! - mainstream news media. The corporations report about and criticize one another. Power is not simply "wrested" (as you say) from individuals by big, evil corporations; it is give-and-take, and consumers (despite your lamentations) are willing participants - not helpless, powerless, victims as you would caricature them. That's why TV shows fail, movies flop and new musical genres develop - because we are in a system that encourages interaction and market exchange, instead of stifling it.
A. Keiper
Washington, D.C.
1.
This is false. Radio stations - like TV stations, cable networks, etc. - need to get licenses from performing rights groups like ASCAP or BMI. Even businesses and restaurants larger than a certain size (2000 sq. ft. and 3750 sq. ft., respectively) need to get licenses. Those licenses are not free - they are bought for millions of dollars sometimes, and the money from their purchase goes to the songwriters and performers.
2.
Well, duh. All copyright laws are First Amendment issues in part. All of them. Why? Because copyright laws are inherently about what you can and cannot do and say. The DMCA is no more especially a First Amendment matter than any other copyright law.
And recognizing that there are free-speech issues involved, the DMCA (like other copyright acts) leaves intact the "Fair Use" doctrine, which permits the use of copyrighted material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
3.
First of all, calling it a "back-door effort" ignores the facts that there were lobbyists and politicians on both sides of every part of the issue, and that comments and input were solicited from the online community and libraries and computer makers. What's more, some of the Act's provisions had been discussed and debated internationally, as part of a World Intellectual Property Organization treaty - and were first publicized years and years ago. Calling it secretive or "back-door" is plain inaccurate.
4.
This is nonsensical. How is the DMCA "blind"? The point of the law, whether you like it or not, is that it does take into account the Net's unique nature, by recognizing that the Net can be used to disseminate information instantly everywhere. It isn't blind: it tries to stop some of that information from just disappearing into the ether, possibly leaving creators unpaid. What do you mean this generation "defines culture differently"? Every generation defines culture differently, and (if you'll allow me to follow your logic to its natural conclusion) every person defines culture differently. This is not a culture gap, and there is no acceptable reason for lawmakers, musicians and other copyright holders to be held hostage by people who don't want to pay for anything.
5.
Like the theory of phlogiston, your argument here sounds great. But, like the theory of phlogiston, there is not a great deal of empirical evidence to back it up. First of all, your statement about "mainstream media" is circular since you are defining mainstream media as "those media which are owned by corporations." Second, the primary contributor to the political system, in terms of money and in terms of vocal input, is the ordinary voting population; it contributes more money than any other contributing segment. In fact, even though nobody talks about this, corporations are not allowed to support candidates for federal office.
6.
O, Katz, come on. Compare the words you use for corporations (discourages, pushes, conformity, control, rampaging, drooling) with the words you use for geeks (free, diverse, individualized, unprecedented, unique). What propaganda!
Things are a whole lot more complicated than that. First of all, you refuse to admit the positive effects of the corporate control you so disdain. Thanks to AOL, 20 million people are online. Thanks to Microsoft, lots of confused non-techies are able to use these machines we take for granted. Thanks to WalMart, people have access to more and cheaper products.
How you can claim this is not capitalism is beyond me. With the exception of monopolistic behavior (the integrated-browswer debate is not worth getting into here), each of these companies is behaving as capitalist firms should - by offering products and services that consumers are drawn to.
What's more, it's ridiculous to cast corporations as an Evil Empire trying to crush the plucky, charming geeks who can see how "culture" is changing around them. Even as the Net lets people express themselves more individually, it also spreads a common culture, full of common language and terms and beliefs which can themselves become tyrannical. Before writing "Geeks," you should have sat down and read some Alexis de Tocqueville.
7.
I disagree here again. Technology is extraordinarily powerful, and right now, it is shaping the law - not the other way around. (And if you believe Lawrence Lessig, in many ways, the technology is the law.) I expect that trend will continue for several decades.
8.
First of all, to claim that "corporatism versus individualism" is the "primary political struggle" of the next century demonstrates as much a sense of history as the people who called the O.J. Simpson trial the "trial of the century." Life always ends up amazingly unlike what we had supposed.
Second, again, you are unwilling to see political activism by geeks because you are defining "geeks" circularly - as those who are not politically active. There are many people, including many people here in Washington, D.C., who share the political and technological views of geeks, and are fighting every day to prevent new dumb laws from being passed. Most people are not politically conscious - not just geeks - and that's a wonderful thing. It's a sign of our freedom and safety. The places where political cognizance is a necessary good are places like Chechnya or Somalia or Cuba or China, where a lack of political sense can land you in jail.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
I recently suggested that maybe a new temporary patent should be developed for a certain class of biotech discoveries, so companies can still profit from their research but not at the cost of new research. While I usually eschew nutty suggestions for new "classifications" and paperwork, I really can't come up with any other simple solution.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
The copyright war, which is still but neonatal, is one aspect of that problem. The National Research Council recently studied copyright and came up with no good solution for the problems Katz mentioned. They did conclude their report with an intriguing thought: perhaps we should rethink the notion of basing our intellectual property tradition on something like "copying" (as in "copyright") since information technologies completely change what copying is. (Click here for their press release.)
Copyright is just one part of something bigger; trademarks and patents, also ways of protecting intellectual property, are drastically changing too.
As far as patents go, consider the efforts of Amazon to patent its one-click shopping process (as has been amply discussed here on /.) and the efforts of companies like Celera, Incyte, HGS and Athersys to obtain thousands of patents on the human genome. (Click here for more on that problem, which is only partly related to information technology.) As someone appropriately said, were Columbus around today, he would try to patent America.
I know less about trademarks, but I understand there are parallel problems in that arena.
The solution doesn't seem to me to be corporation-bashing. (Indeed, having worked in the lobbying department of The McGraw-Hill Companies, I got to see how earnestly corporations care about keeping information accessible while still turning a profit.) Instead, we should do some real hard thinking about how intellectual property can survive in the Information Age -- and we should keep fighting against ridiculous cases, like the DeCSS case, brought on by people who just don't realize what a period of tremendous change this is.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
We've just posted an archive of related articles (and we welcome any contributions you have) on our Law Enforcement Online page.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.
In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
I wish more people on /. went around the site and tried to put up "last posts" instead of "firsts." How fun would that be?!
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
We've got links to several related stories on our Personal Security page: http://www.tecsoc.org/persec/persec.htm
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society