Possibly. I'm not making any claims about the quality of their products or the legitimacy of their patents - only saying that I don't think they're a patent troll, which I understand as a company whose business centers on licensing patents rather than developing technology or selling products.
I met with them earlier this year. I don't think they're patent trolls. They develop and sell products; though nothing came with it, they were interested in technical cooperation. For the businessman I spoke to, the patents were evidence of their technical innovation and a point of pride. Most of us on Slashdot see patents differently, but his perspective is how they have been seen in other industries and in the past. Of course, this was just one guy (though senior) and may not reflect the company as a whole - or their lawyers. I don't mean to defend the patents (I would be happy to see software patents abolished), but the company I saw was a technical firm, not a legal one.
The product they showed me lets you create a dictionary of common phrases (which can be very long), then retrieve and input them easily using their predictive input algorithm to drill down through multiple possibilities. The software sits on top of Windows, essentially between the keywoard and whatever app you're using. It reminded me somewhat of Stephen Hawking's system (which I vaguely recall having seen on TV once) or Chinese word processor software which allows you to type in a syllable, then pops up a list of matching characters and lets you pick one by typing a number (though the fellow I spoke with wasn't familiar with this). Example uses described to me included lawyers, who might want to pull up whole paragraphs of boilerplate text, and students (I don't recall the use case for this).
Whatever the merits of the argument, it doesn't look good for Linux to be linked to piracy. Imagine if FOSS advocates protested and the media got ahold of this: they would probably label Linux the "Pirate's OS". The guy broke the law; making him use Windows is the least of his punishments. Let this one slide.
Their position is absurd, but the argument leads somewhere useful. They say,
Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.
So when I view the ad, I'm giving the advertiser something. This is true. But then, being forced or tricked into viewing advertising is also theft.
The problem is that a copyright holder should not be reasonably expected to scrape all of YouTube and all other similar sites every day/hour to look for violations just to have somebody else repost the video after it is taken down. . . . YouTube doesn't want to invest the time and money to perform their due diligence, but expects copyright holders to do it for them.
But if YouTube is responsible, then the cost of enforcement is simply shifted from one set of copyright holders to another - i.e. to those who use YouTube legitimately. This enforcement increases the cost of providing hosting, which in turn results in fewer venues for creators to distribute their works. Only the largest most powerful companies (like Google) will be able to afford the costs. The end result in the centralization of publishing in powerful middle-man organizations, and the entrenchment of a power disparity between large media organizations and everyone else (since everyone else is or soon will be a creator).
If, however, the cost of checking for rights violations remains with the holder of those rights, then an effective presumption of openness obtains, with wider opportunities for creators to distribute a greater variety of works. Do you want to put the interests of the powerful ahead of those of everyone else?
A law this difficult to enforce (regardless of who's doing the enforcing) may entail costs that exceed its benefits. Though those costs might not put off the major media corporations, for the scenario you outline is entirely in line with their interests.
the industry doesn't make any more money than they do now, cos its capped . . . this service could never reach the same average sales cost
The average sale cost would only matter if demand were static - especially since the cost of producing each additional unit is zero. All that matters is total sales - which may be higher because prices are lower. Other possibilities:
Listeners seek out new artists in order to gain the satisfaction of discovering them while unknown and less expensive. ("I bought The Beatles when they were 20 cents!")
When an artist is discovered, the lower initial price results in a more rapid increase in popularity, thus more momentum and greater eventual success.
Experimenting with inexpensive songs results in a wider variety of consumption and thus greater demand for music overall.
Differential prices create a perception of value for more expensive tracks, making them even more popular.
Rights are inherent (or God-given, if you prefer).
This is a particularly extreme concept of rights. And while my disagreement may seem theoretical, it is not: keep in mind that copyright holders are also claiming "rights". Is it the 28 year or the life+70 year term that is inherent or God given? If you accept these rights as inherent, it becomes very difficult to argue from other positions (e.g. that maximalist copyright is economically inefficient, morally wrong, or impractical).
For all practical purposes, rights are not inherent. They are created by the actions of individuals and of society. True, the American Declaration of Independence reads, "all men are created equal . . . they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." First notice that this claim is only for "certain" rights, then read the next passage: "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". For Jefferson too, rights are something we create. Here is Terry Hoy in The Political Philosophy of John Dewey (1998, p. 85):
in Jefferson's view, property rights are created by a social compact and are not inherent moral claims that government is morally bound to maintain
If we make copyright rights, we can also unamke them. If we want to enhance our freedom and our society through wise rights regimes, we must actively fight for the appropriate structures and laws. It is no solution to fall back upon a claim of preexisting rights, for then we give up our own opinions, interests and right to participate.
I will leave you with a contrasting characterization of rights as a product of people's actions (Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy, 1982, p. xv):
. . . democracy understood as self-government in a social setting is not a terminus for individually held rights and values; it is their starting place. . . . Without participating in the common life that defines them and in the decision-making that shapes their social habitat, women and men cannot become individuals. Freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy are all products of common thinking and common living; democracy creates them.
Dennis Detwiller and others are already doing this with roleplaying games - though he himself provides free downloads once the ransom is filled. After being impressed by one of his previous releases, I plunked down $10 towards a future one. It was far more satisfying than buying something the traditional way: it made me feel a kind of responsibility for the work. This model transforms consumers into participants and enablers, which IMHO is at least as valuable as its economic success.
By the way, I recommend Detwiller's Music From a Darkened Room. It's is a great read.
Please refrain from relating everything with politics.
Everyday life has little overt connection to politics in any but the most repressive societies. Yet politics cannot be separated from that life, from transportation, and education to the state of the environment, consumer choice, employment and the market, the motivations for software development. This is so pervasive that it becomes invisible, and people become convinced that politics is all about same-sex marriage or celebrating Christmas in schools. This is as true in my country as in China. Yet when I was there, because it was new to me, I could sense politics all around. Chinese pride and insecurity (e.g. over the Italian appropriation of pasta), the extraordinary proliferation of flags on the national holiday, the assumption that because China would fight for Taiwain Canada would fight to keep Quebec (hah), the strange restriction on movement in and out of compounds (with old ladies clambering over gates after 8:00 carrying groceries). Similarly, when I visited New Orleans I noticed things because they were new to me: the all-black hotel staff whose smiling formality verged on unfriendly, the strict advice of where to and where not to go, the (black) restaurant workers with bad teeth. If someone came to Vancouver I'm sure they would detect undercurrents as well.
You can see Chinese people . . contributing to open-source projects. Have you seen people living in isolated countries like Iran or North Korea do that?
I have been to China and Taiwan, but not Iran. However, my city contains a large contingent of Iranian immigrants. Iran is not an "isolated" country by any means. Its public society is restrictive, but in private the character of the people is reveals itself. I have heard from multiple sources that Iranians have wild parties with Western music and the latest fashions - only they do it in private. Did you know that immediately following the invasion of Iraq, Iran was one of the most *pro American* muslim countries? (I suspect they still are.) Iran is a restrictive society, but it is not totalitarian by any means.
North Korea is another story of almost cartoonish horror.
I can tell you that as long as one does not talk about the independence of Tibet or Taiwan, or some controversial 'religions' (OK if you are a usual Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist), one has quite a lot of freedom.
I know. I read a banned book about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution while I was there, and had discussions about Tibet and Taiwan in a cafe with natives. It was no big deal. The goal of the Chinese government is not totalitarian ideological control as it was in the past, but the retention of their political power. In many ways the society is more free than it was. In others (slavery, see previous post, or abusive corporations and local party bosses, high unemployment and the loss of social supports), it is less free - often *because* central control is weakening.
Religion is a different matter. The consensus outside China is that Falung Gong is suppressed not because it's a bit cult-like (as Chinese friends tell me), but in order to prevent the rise of a movement whose power could challenge that of the communist party. More mainstream religions (e.g. Catholics) also protest at repression in China, though I don't know enough to evaluate their claims.
that's not your decision to make. That's the content owner's decision.
If you see the law as an absolute code differentiating objective right from wrong, you will end up with grotesque outcomes like this. The law is a mechanism for negotiating interests that cannot be resolved in other ways, and it's a standard or guideline to prevent conflicts from reaching that stage. The law tries to express rules in rational and objective terms (because that's an effective way to achieve consensus among the thousands of strangers in a large scale society), but it cannot possibly account for the complexity of human interaction, intention, and so on. The law has a spirit as well as a letter, and both are contestable. That's why the law must be interpreted and (in the common law tradition) changed through precedent.
The "ownership" of content isn't really ownership of content: it's the ownership of the copyright, which is something different. And that is not an absolute rule, but an expression of a social consensus plus the ability to apply for a remedy.
The best analogy for copyright infringement that I have seen is not theft, but trespassing. If those kids had poked their heads in the wrong cinema, or traipsed through the lobby after closing, or retrieved a ball kicked onto your lawn, do you think the law would care? Are these things serious enough? "That's not their decision to make; that's the property owner's decision", you might say - but in most cases, you would be wrong.
By the way, although I disagree with you I want to thank you for a thorough post that resulted in many interesting replies. Also, this is just my reasoning. Your remark just rings so false I want t ofigure out why. I have no background in the theory of law. If someone does (and I suspect most lawyers are the wrong folks to ask, as they are too close and dependent on the practice of law to be able to stand back and see its purpose), I would be most interested to hear from them.
Right at the end, the article suggests an alternative:
A new set of formats, perhaps based on a wedding of XHTML+, CSS 3.0, and RDF, or perhaps an interoperable enhancement of ODF, is in order.
Earlier on, the article talks about how it's too expensive to "rip out and replace" MS Office with ODF. Well yeah. Often in technology, a new technology doesn't have to be better - it has to offer something compelling that the old one doesn't, such as a lower price, convenience, mobility, or networking. The new technology gains a foothold in its niche, then starts to expand beyond it - without necessarily ever completely replacing the older technology. Thus we have cell phones displacing land lines, YouTube pressuring television (despite its crappy quality), MP3s replacing CDs, laptops gaining on desktops, digital cameras edging out film, etc.
So it seems to me that the strategy of perfect emulation is a strategy for failure: if ODF does exactly th same thing, is the freedom it offers enough to compel organizations to switch? (We might say yes, but then we know the consequences of lock-in and we don't have to make the up-front investment.) On the other hand, for all its weaknesses, HTML offers all sorts of things that Word lacks (e.g. accessibility and reformatting for differetn devices, universal browser support, Net-friendly, strong semantics), and is probably good enough for most uses. Thoughts?
I know plenty of people who stopped going to theaters because of how easy it is to download movies
Anecdotes are not data, but I'll answer yours with one of my own: I pretty much stopped going to theaters. One significant reason is the bad taste I have in my mouth knowing I'm giving money to the culture pirates in Hollywood.
For many people, pirating often comes down to how easy or difficult it is. Once a process is simpler, more people do it.
You're right on the money. Except harassing cinema patrons makes going to the movies more difficult, while it does very little to increase the difficulty of watching a pirated copy.
I have a hefty DVD collection, but I still enjoy the theater experience on the whole. It isn't the screen or audio . . . but rather being surrounded by an excited group who have been geeking out in anticipation of a movie.
So you'll always keep going. But casual filmgoers are theirs to lose (like me - I don't care for sticky floors, lineups, or obnoxiously loud sound; when I used to frequent the cinema, it was as a social experience with friends). Your geeks are one of our better hopes. The value of many films is created by its audience and fans. If geeks build their enthusiasm around alternatives, then perhaps we can replace the culture of control of the MPAA and their ilk with a culture of freedom.
China is so complicated and so tragic. The control of the central government there is weakening. Much of the evil in China is a consequence of that loss of control. Recently, for example, up to 53,000 slave workers were discovered in the brick industry Shanxi province. That's 50,000 pepole in one industry in one province. The central government doesn't want this. Nor does it sanction the kidnapping and mutilation of children used as beggars, or the sale of women in the countryside or any of the many other terrible things that happen in a country encompassing over a fifth of the word's population.
What do you do if you have political power in a place like China? Do you try to further weaken the control of the central government? Or do you try to work within the system? There aren't a lot of alternatives in a system that does not permit other power bases and where capitalism appears to be in its most destructive, dynamic, and materialistic phase. This is a place where one of my first impulses on arriving in Beijing a decade ago was that the pollution was so bad that cleaning the air was more important than democracy. I can't bring myself to blanket the human beings running China with the label "evil". Some of them, I'm certain, are heroes.
The government has lost the moral authority of Communist ideology, so it's trying to leverage nationalism without letting it get out of control. China has a deep-seated sense of historical wrong, a memory of millenia when it was the only civilized place in the world, and an insecurity about the disrespect of the West that wronged it (and don't doubt that our ancestors did). China makes me very sad, but it also scares the hell out of me. If it collapses, watch out: the first half of the 20th century saw the horrors of a fragmented out-of-control China. Right now, I fear it looks at least a little bit like pre-war Germany.
Being dependent on an outside source of software and putting their infrastructure in the hands of a western company are both unappealing. This was the original impetus for Red Flag Linux itself.
You're absolutely right, both about the motivations and benefits of maintaining independece from Microsoft. However, I have a suspicion that to the government hierarchy in China (and equally for many corporations everywhere), free and open source software may also appear to be outside their control. It's an alien form of organization to them, one not amenable to the forms of influence to which they are accustomed. In that vein, the interests of China are not identical with the interests of the people making the decision. Microsoft may be able to offer them inducements, while the FOSS community will offer them nothing.
These days, the Chinese government is in the business of making deals with corporations; they may be betting that their power is sufficient to guarantee their interests. Given the recent phenomenon of corporations "going along to get along" in China, they may be right. Eric Raymond's remark (from the TechRepublic article) that "any 'identification' between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud" points to a risk - China's influence on Linux might have been anything but positive, either symbolically or in practice. We may have dodged a bullet. China, on the other hand, may have lost an opportunity to address (at least in a small way) its tragic situation.
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users. But with Trusted Computing, Microsoft may be able to offer exactly that capability.
For a government concerned about control, Microsoft's obvious motivations (control and profit) may be both more familiar, more predictable - and because Microsoft is centralized, mor tractable. This in comparison to the diverse coalition of interests making up the free and open source community.
I'm afraid you do, though I think it's a matter of not expressing yourself clearly.
2. . ..the fact the protectionism is BAD economics is pretty basic to understand
Sometimes protectionism can benefit a country. Witness the success of MITI in Japan. Beyond that, however, you must ask the question "bad for whom"? What is it that your economics is trying to maximize? Equality? National wealth? Global wealth? Well being? Sustainability? That's a moral choice, whose answer depends on your ethical framework.
Finally, you provide a hypothetical illustration of one form of bureaucratic inefficiency. This is nothing more than anecdotal evidence... except it's not even anecdotal. It's about on the level of, "Take an American worker who watches some TV. If he's watching TV, he's not working. But the poor Chinese peasant seldom watches TV - he's always working. The Chinese also has to focus on the bottom line, because if he is inefficient he'll starve - the American will just end up on welfare."
If you want to show that goverment is "horribly inefficient" - or, more importantly, that it is less efficient than the market - then you need to compare more than just one possible form of government behavior. There are many ways of organizing economic activity, corporations, and governments. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which vary depending on the government, th esociety in which it operates, the specific activity in question, etc. - and which must be judged relative to what ever standard you choose for efficiency (which is again an ethical question). If you want to show that government is "horribly inefficient" - or that it is more or less efficient than the market for a particular activity - you need to explain what you mean by "inefficient" and then you need to actually make a comparsion - not just cherry-pick an example, then smack your hands together with glee exclaiming: "see! they're horribly inefficient!"
It may be attractive to look for cute "laws" like "the less tax the better". But they don't exist. What you're stating there is not an objective characterization of the worth of goverment: it's a subjective ethical claim. If you really care about this kind of thing, you would be well advised to read some thoughtful arguments by people with varying perspectives, not run around calling people "dolts".
As it happens, I'm with you in this particular case: I susspect it's pernicious corporate welfare. Though frankly, it's small beans compared to many other goverment activities (software patents, copyright extension, barriers to third world agricultural products, etc.).
The whole idea of XHTML was to provide a segueway into an altogether new way of distributing content. . . . What does XHTML fail to deliver . . . ?
It has failed to deliver adoption. We can argue about why (IE's lack of support, no compelling features), but the fact remains that a standard is worthless unless it actually becomes, you know, standard. Standardization is less a technical matter than a social one. Most of HTML's value derives not from its technical strengths, but from its ubiquity.
To date, the new way of distributing content that you cite has not succeeded. XML was advertised as a solution to interoperability, but in reality it solved the easy problems - e.g. syntax, not the hard ones - e.g. agreement about meaning. XHTML's ambition to mix multiple XML vocabularies in a single document is worthy (and in the longer term worth pursuing), but the subset of vocabularies that would be widespread enough to matter would be small.
What HTML 5 offers, and what XHTML did not deliver, is further agreement about meaning. It provides standard ways to do what people are already doing. For example, it specifies unambiguous ways to mark up navigation menus and time. These are small things, but small things matter. Look at HTML's declarative links - also a small thing: they have made possible applications like Google (imagine if links were all scripted instead!).
Meanwhile, HTML 5 can be serialized as XML. Why not simply make it XHTML 5? Again, we can argue about the relative benefits, but the best answer is that it would be a barrier to adoption - and thus to the central benefit of standardization.
Despite all of this, I certainly wouldn't call XHTML a failure. If you consider it outside the browser it is very useful (for server processing, embedding in Atom, etc.). In the medium to long term, it seems likely to gain in popularity. At this point, though, it is clear that non-XML HTML serialization is not going to go away. I think there are good (social) reasons for that; regardless, making that HTML better is a good thing.
Thank you for posting that. What's really unfortunate here is that the incendiary language in the Information Week article quotes Linus out of context thereby reinforcing divisions in the free and open source software community without helping to address what are important concerns.
The FOSS community, as Linus implicitly argues, is a coalition of people with different agendas, whether those are developing quality software, making money, or increasing freedom. We work with each other because we all benefit, even though we may not all agree. We do need to discuss our divisions - moral, political, etc. We don't need to create pointless division by demonizing Linus, RMS, or anyone else.
Now I don't agree with Linus's position on GPL3. It seems to me that Linus's reasining is based on an idealized conception of individual freedom that fails to take into account the practical limitations on that freedom and the context in which choices are made. I believe his conclusions are very wrong, and some of his argument is badly worded (I'm not certain whether he's being very aggressive or just unclear) - but much of what is quoted in the article and Slashdot summary is taken out of context and deliberately used to dramatize the situation. In particular, Linus does not call RMS & co. totalitarians or fanatics. He quite rightly uses that characterization for anyone who equates morality with the law. If you ask me, it's a strawman argument. It's that argument we need to dismiss, not Linus
I agree completely. But I have three points: 1) the paper doesn't make a general claim about efficiency, only a specific claim when certain requirements are set; 2) it is expensive to make a network non-neutral; 3) the neutral network is more valuable because it has more bandwidth.
First, let's be careful: the paper does not claim that a "Class of Service" (non-neutral) net is more efficient in general. It lays out a specific objective, then determines how much more bandwidth a neutral net would require to achieve it. If your goals are different (e.g. you're willing to accept a different level of performance assurance), their conclusion may not hold.
We compare the capacity requirements of a Diffserv environment providing service for applications that require delay or loss assurances in comparison to a network that provides classless (i.e., besteffort) service and still has to meet the same performance assurances.
As your post suggests, this is not a general claim about efficiency. It's a claim about efficiency for a spefic purpose. If you're #1 non-negotianble requirment for the net is video-on-demand, their analysis may be correct. But then you may build a network that is less efficient for other purposes, such as reading Slashdot, sending instant messages, or buying books on Amazon.
Second, a non-neutral network does not cost the same as a neutral network: it costs a whole lot more. Prioritizing traffic costs bandwidth, infrastructure, maintenance, etc. Some have claimed the cost of implementing QoS exceeds the cost of increasing bandwidth. Furthermore, there is an opportunity cost: the more complex infrastructure may be more costly to maintain, guard against attack and failure, and may be more rigid in the face of new applications.
Third, a neutral net with twice as much bandwidth has twice as much bandwidth! It is, by definition, more valuable than the non-neutral network with half the bandwidth. That extra bandwidth is not wasted; it doesn't exist solely to provide the quality of service for video on demand. It can - and will - be used for other things.
The monopoly isn't in any intellectual sense interesting, it isn't in any ethical sense tolerable, it isn't in any economic sense necessary, it's simply a thing that happened to happen, and that we will soon be finished making no longer there.
What a put-down. The slight complexity of the last two phrases ("happened to happen" and "we will soon be finished making no longer there") is deliberate. It makes you pay attention and drives the point home. Language like this draws you in: it makes you think, and because you have to work a little it makes you a participant. Frankly, you need to think and you need to participate because there is so much depth behind his words. There are so many ideas, so many necessarily unanswered questions, that I would even say - and I mean this as high praise - that at some point or at some level you need to disagree.
By 1916, the ideal transmitter based on technology available at the time required licenses of patents held by Marconi, AT&T, General Electric (GE), and a few individuals. No licenses were in fact granted. The industry had reached stalemate. When the United States joined the war, however, the navy moved quickly to break the stalemate, effectively creating a compulsory cross-licensing scheme for war production . ..
I agree with you that rules shouldn't be the focus of play. The indie games are worth checking out. But I have significant doubts about the indie game crowd's focus on "story". Story is a rather high-level concept, something you don't necessarily see unless you step back from the experience of playing. The most satisfying moments I have experienced and witnessed in RPGs have been more immediate: the excitement of diving out the window just as the bomb goes off, the players huddled around the candle flame as some Thing stalks their characters through the abandoned house, the shock on his comrades' faces as the religious fanatic torches the planetary stabelizer as "evil technology".
Don't get me wrong: theme and plot and narrative and all that good stuff can certainly enhance the experience of playing, and it's certainly worth trying to do something else with the medium. But for most players I suspect the immediate experience matters more. The indie game designers seem to be aiming to produce Art - which is great; for them story may be what they really want to achieve. However, I think they get a bit too wrapped up in the narrative structure that's usually necessary in traditional forms that are experienced by an audience rather than participants.
I do take issue with your suggestion that structure is something used by GMs to control the players. Some have argued quite the opposite (players use rules to fend off GM fiat), while I think they're the framework that aids the GM so s/he can focus on the other creative aspects of play that rules cannot provide. If you can run a creative game off-the-cuff with little or support, you're a better GM than I - I'd love to play in your game sometime. It's quite ironic that you diss too much structure in one breath, then praise indie games in the next - because indie games (with their "system matters" rallying cry) often introduce carefully tailored structures and rules to support specific kinds of story (e.g. the excellent Dogs in the Vineyard). Often they narrow play far more dramatically than "traditional" games like D&D.
Personally, I find d20 way too complex; for me, Call of Cthulhu, with its minimal menu of rules, is far easier to run because it's far easier to wing it without worrying about the rules (it also helps that the players' position is unequal from the start, so there's no need for "balance"). Many of the indie games I have looked at are so focused that they don't easily support that kind of freedom or long term play. My impression - though there are some excellent counter examples (e.g. Shadow of Yesterday, the rules-heavy Burning Wheel) - is that many of the games most focused on "story" are weak when it comes to supporting open-ended campaigns that go in unexpected directions.
What the industry wanted was a DCMA type act in Canada. They didn't get that and they won't get that. Instead they settled for an anti-camcording law.
I hope you know something I don't. With regards to the anti-camcording bill, the head of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association[2] said it "is really the first step - not only for the movie industry - where the government has shown it will seriously address the whole area of intellectual property theft." Reports are that the government intends to go ahead with a DMCA-style "reform". Bev Oda, one of the two ministers responsible for copyright, has previously said Canada will ratify international treaties, implying that includes the WIPO treaty on which the DMCA is based[1]. The 2007-2008 Report on Plans and Priorities lists "copyright reform" as a priority to which the government has "previously committed". Given the
On the up side, now is not the time to give up: the significant opposition to stronger copyright provisions seems be having an effect. While the RPP's statement on the issue points towards anti-circumvention legislation and a flawed conception of copyright as a simple conflict between creators and consumers (when in fact there are creators on both sides, and citizens and the public interest are directly affected), it avoids committing to any paricular course of action:
even though technological advances open the way for innovation and renewed creativity, they do bring with them challenges for the arts and cultural community and for government, especially in terms of balancing the rights of creators and consumers. . . . Actions: reforming copyright; . ..
I wrote to her in January and received a similarly ambiguous reply: "the Government is continuing to consider the concerns of all Canadians . . . The Government wants to ensure that the rights of Canadian creators are adequately protected by law, and that these rights are balanced with the ability of the public to access works."
[1] I should point out that Canada is under no obligation to ratify the WIPO treaty. Even if we do, the treaty's anti-circumvention provisions don't require all of the excesses of the DMCA:
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
[2] For the most part we don't make Canadian films, we distribute American ones. For the distributors, maximalist intellectual monopoly laws are in their interests even if they inhibit the production of Canadian films.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly. I'm not making any claims about the quality of their products or the legitimacy of their patents - only saying that I don't think they're a patent troll, which I understand as a company whose business centers on licensing patents rather than developing technology or selling products.
I met with them earlier this year. I don't think they're patent trolls. They develop and sell products; though nothing came with it, they were interested in technical cooperation. For the businessman I spoke to, the patents were evidence of their technical innovation and a point of pride. Most of us on Slashdot see patents differently, but his perspective is how they have been seen in other industries and in the past. Of course, this was just one guy (though senior) and may not reflect the company as a whole - or their lawyers. I don't mean to defend the patents (I would be happy to see software patents abolished), but the company I saw was a technical firm, not a legal one.
The product they showed me lets you create a dictionary of common phrases (which can be very long), then retrieve and input them easily using their predictive input algorithm to drill down through multiple possibilities. The software sits on top of Windows, essentially between the keywoard and whatever app you're using. It reminded me somewhat of Stephen Hawking's system (which I vaguely recall having seen on TV once) or Chinese word processor software which allows you to type in a syllable, then pops up a list of matching characters and lets you pick one by typing a number (though the fellow I spoke with wasn't familiar with this). Example uses described to me included lawyers, who might want to pull up whole paragraphs of boilerplate text, and students (I don't recall the use case for this).
Whatever the merits of the argument, it doesn't look good for Linux to be linked to piracy. Imagine if FOSS advocates protested and the media got ahold of this: they would probably label Linux the "Pirate's OS". The guy broke the law; making him use Windows is the least of his punishments. Let this one slide.
Their position is absurd, but the argument leads somewhere useful. They say,
So when I view the ad, I'm giving the advertiser something. This is true. But then, being forced or tricked into viewing advertising is also theft.
Like polonium?
Depending on who you are, there may be benefits to expensive and difficult.
I wonder if this is hard to test for.
But if YouTube is responsible, then the cost of enforcement is simply shifted from one set of copyright holders to another - i.e. to those who use YouTube legitimately. This enforcement increases the cost of providing hosting, which in turn results in fewer venues for creators to distribute their works. Only the largest most powerful companies (like Google) will be able to afford the costs. The end result in the centralization of publishing in powerful middle-man organizations, and the entrenchment of a power disparity between large media organizations and everyone else (since everyone else is or soon will be a creator).
If, however, the cost of checking for rights violations remains with the holder of those rights, then an effective presumption of openness obtains, with wider opportunities for creators to distribute a greater variety of works. Do you want to put the interests of the powerful ahead of those of everyone else?
A law this difficult to enforce (regardless of who's doing the enforcing) may entail costs that exceed its benefits. Though those costs might not put off the major media corporations, for the scenario you outline is entirely in line with their interests.
The average sale cost would only matter if demand were static - especially since the cost of producing each additional unit is zero. All that matters is total sales - which may be higher because prices are lower. Other possibilities:
This is a particularly extreme concept of rights. And while my disagreement may seem theoretical, it is not: keep in mind that copyright holders are also claiming "rights". Is it the 28 year or the life+70 year term that is inherent or God given? If you accept these rights as inherent, it becomes very difficult to argue from other positions (e.g. that maximalist copyright is economically inefficient, morally wrong, or impractical).
For all practical purposes, rights are not inherent. They are created by the actions of individuals and of society. True, the American Declaration of Independence reads, "all men are created equal . . . they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." First notice that this claim is only for "certain" rights, then read the next passage: "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". For Jefferson too, rights are something we create. Here is Terry Hoy in The Political Philosophy of John Dewey (1998, p. 85):
If we make copyright rights, we can also unamke them. If we want to enhance our freedom and our society through wise rights regimes, we must actively fight for the appropriate structures and laws. It is no solution to fall back upon a claim of preexisting rights, for then we give up our own opinions, interests and right to participate.
I will leave you with a contrasting characterization of rights as a product of people's actions (Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy, 1982, p. xv):
Dennis Detwiller and others are already doing this with roleplaying games - though he himself provides free downloads once the ransom is filled. After being impressed by one of his previous releases, I plunked down $10 towards a future one. It was far more satisfying than buying something the traditional way: it made me feel a kind of responsibility for the work. This model transforms consumers into participants and enablers, which IMHO is at least as valuable as its economic success.
By the way, I recommend Detwiller's Music From a Darkened Room. It's is a great read.
Everyday life has little overt connection to politics in any but the most repressive societies. Yet politics cannot be separated from that life, from transportation, and education to the state of the environment, consumer choice, employment and the market, the motivations for software development. This is so pervasive that it becomes invisible, and people become convinced that politics is all about same-sex marriage or celebrating Christmas in schools. This is as true in my country as in China. Yet when I was there, because it was new to me, I could sense politics all around. Chinese pride and insecurity (e.g. over the Italian appropriation of pasta), the extraordinary proliferation of flags on the national holiday, the assumption that because China would fight for Taiwain Canada would fight to keep Quebec (hah), the strange restriction on movement in and out of compounds (with old ladies clambering over gates after 8:00 carrying groceries). Similarly, when I visited New Orleans I noticed things because they were new to me: the all-black hotel staff whose smiling formality verged on unfriendly, the strict advice of where to and where not to go, the (black) restaurant workers with bad teeth. If someone came to Vancouver I'm sure they would detect undercurrents as well.
I have been to China and Taiwan, but not Iran. However, my city contains a large contingent of Iranian immigrants. Iran is not an "isolated" country by any means. Its public society is restrictive, but in private the character of the people is reveals itself. I have heard from multiple sources that Iranians have wild parties with Western music and the latest fashions - only they do it in private. Did you know that immediately following the invasion of Iraq, Iran was one of the most *pro American* muslim countries? (I suspect they still are.) Iran is a restrictive society, but it is not totalitarian by any means.
North Korea is another story of almost cartoonish horror.
I know. I read a banned book about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution while I was there, and had discussions about Tibet and Taiwan in a cafe with natives. It was no big deal. The goal of the Chinese government is not totalitarian ideological control as it was in the past, but the retention of their political power. In many ways the society is more free than it was. In others (slavery, see previous post, or abusive corporations and local party bosses, high unemployment and the loss of social supports), it is less free - often *because* central control is weakening.
Religion is a different matter. The consensus outside China is that Falung Gong is suppressed not because it's a bit cult-like (as Chinese friends tell me), but in order to prevent the rise of a movement whose power could challenge that of the communist party. More mainstream religions (e.g. Catholics) also protest at repression in China, though I don't know enough to evaluate their claims.
If you see the law as an absolute code differentiating objective right from wrong, you will end up with grotesque outcomes like this. The law is a mechanism for negotiating interests that cannot be resolved in other ways, and it's a standard or guideline to prevent conflicts from reaching that stage. The law tries to express rules in rational and objective terms (because that's an effective way to achieve consensus among the thousands of strangers in a large scale society), but it cannot possibly account for the complexity of human interaction, intention, and so on. The law has a spirit as well as a letter, and both are contestable. That's why the law must be interpreted and (in the common law tradition) changed through precedent.
The "ownership" of content isn't really ownership of content: it's the ownership of the copyright, which is something different. And that is not an absolute rule, but an expression of a social consensus plus the ability to apply for a remedy.
The best analogy for copyright infringement that I have seen is not theft, but trespassing. If those kids had poked their heads in the wrong cinema, or traipsed through the lobby after closing, or retrieved a ball kicked onto your lawn, do you think the law would care? Are these things serious enough? "That's not their decision to make; that's the property owner's decision", you might say - but in most cases, you would be wrong.
By the way, although I disagree with you I want to thank you for a thorough post that resulted in many interesting replies. Also, this is just my reasoning. Your remark just rings so false I want t ofigure out why. I have no background in the theory of law. If someone does (and I suspect most lawyers are the wrong folks to ask, as they are too close and dependent on the practice of law to be able to stand back and see its purpose), I would be most interested to hear from them.
Oops! That was poorly phrased. Your interpretation is correct.
Right at the end, the article suggests an alternative:
Earlier on, the article talks about how it's too expensive to "rip out and replace" MS Office with ODF. Well yeah. Often in technology, a new technology doesn't have to be better - it has to offer something compelling that the old one doesn't, such as a lower price, convenience, mobility, or networking. The new technology gains a foothold in its niche, then starts to expand beyond it - without necessarily ever completely replacing the older technology. Thus we have cell phones displacing land lines, YouTube pressuring television (despite its crappy quality), MP3s replacing CDs, laptops gaining on desktops, digital cameras edging out film, etc.
So it seems to me that the strategy of perfect emulation is a strategy for failure: if ODF does exactly th same thing, is the freedom it offers enough to compel organizations to switch? (We might say yes, but then we know the consequences of lock-in and we don't have to make the up-front investment.) On the other hand, for all its weaknesses, HTML offers all sorts of things that Word lacks (e.g. accessibility and reformatting for differetn devices, universal browser support, Net-friendly, strong semantics), and is probably good enough for most uses. Thoughts?
Anecdotes are not data, but I'll answer yours with one of my own: I pretty much stopped going to theaters. One significant reason is the bad taste I have in my mouth knowing I'm giving money to the culture pirates in Hollywood.
You're right on the money. Except harassing cinema patrons makes going to the movies more difficult, while it does very little to increase the difficulty of watching a pirated copy.
So you'll always keep going. But casual filmgoers are theirs to lose (like me - I don't care for sticky floors, lineups, or obnoxiously loud sound; when I used to frequent the cinema, it was as a social experience with friends). Your geeks are one of our better hopes. The value of many films is created by its audience and fans. If geeks build their enthusiasm around alternatives, then perhaps we can replace the culture of control of the MPAA and their ilk with a culture of freedom.
China is so complicated and so tragic. The control of the central government there is weakening. Much of the evil in China is a consequence of that loss of control. Recently, for example, up to 53,000 slave workers were discovered in the brick industry Shanxi province. That's 50,000 pepole in one industry in one province. The central government doesn't want this. Nor does it sanction the kidnapping and mutilation of children used as beggars, or the sale of women in the countryside or any of the many other terrible things that happen in a country encompassing over a fifth of the word's population.
What do you do if you have political power in a place like China? Do you try to further weaken the control of the central government? Or do you try to work within the system? There aren't a lot of alternatives in a system that does not permit other power bases and where capitalism appears to be in its most destructive, dynamic, and materialistic phase. This is a place where one of my first impulses on arriving in Beijing a decade ago was that the pollution was so bad that cleaning the air was more important than democracy. I can't bring myself to blanket the human beings running China with the label "evil". Some of them, I'm certain, are heroes.
The government has lost the moral authority of Communist ideology, so it's trying to leverage nationalism without letting it get out of control. China has a deep-seated sense of historical wrong, a memory of millenia when it was the only civilized place in the world, and an insecurity about the disrespect of the West that wronged it (and don't doubt that our ancestors did). China makes me very sad, but it also scares the hell out of me. If it collapses, watch out: the first half of the 20th century saw the horrors of a fragmented out-of-control China. Right now, I fear it looks at least a little bit like pre-war Germany.
You're absolutely right, both about the motivations and benefits of maintaining independece from Microsoft. However, I have a suspicion that to the government hierarchy in China (and equally for many corporations everywhere), free and open source software may also appear to be outside their control. It's an alien form of organization to them, one not amenable to the forms of influence to which they are accustomed. In that vein, the interests of China are not identical with the interests of the people making the decision. Microsoft may be able to offer them inducements, while the FOSS community will offer them nothing.
These days, the Chinese government is in the business of making deals with corporations; they may be betting that their power is sufficient to guarantee their interests. Given the recent phenomenon of corporations "going along to get along" in China, they may be right. Eric Raymond's remark (from the TechRepublic article) that "any 'identification' between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud" points to a risk - China's influence on Linux might have been anything but positive, either symbolically or in practice. We may have dodged a bullet. China, on the other hand, may have lost an opportunity to address (at least in a small way) its tragic situation.
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users. But with Trusted Computing, Microsoft may be able to offer exactly that capability.
For a government concerned about control, Microsoft's obvious motivations (control and profit) may be both more familiar, more predictable - and because Microsoft is centralized, mor tractable. This in comparison to the diverse coalition of interests making up the free and open source community.
I'm afraid you do, though I think it's a matter of not expressing yourself clearly.
Sometimes protectionism can benefit a country. Witness the success of MITI in Japan. Beyond that, however, you must ask the question "bad for whom"? What is it that your economics is trying to maximize? Equality? National wealth? Global wealth? Well being? Sustainability? That's a moral choice, whose answer depends on your ethical framework.
Finally, you provide a hypothetical illustration of one form of bureaucratic inefficiency. This is nothing more than anecdotal evidence... except it's not even anecdotal. It's about on the level of, "Take an American worker who watches some TV. If he's watching TV, he's not working. But the poor Chinese peasant seldom watches TV - he's always working. The Chinese also has to focus on the bottom line, because if he is inefficient he'll starve - the American will just end up on welfare."
If you want to show that goverment is "horribly inefficient" - or, more importantly, that it is less efficient than the market - then you need to compare more than just one possible form of government behavior. There are many ways of organizing economic activity, corporations, and governments. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which vary depending on the government, th esociety in which it operates, the specific activity in question, etc. - and which must be judged relative to what ever standard you choose for efficiency (which is again an ethical question). If you want to show that government is "horribly inefficient" - or that it is more or less efficient than the market for a particular activity - you need to explain what you mean by "inefficient" and then you need to actually make a comparsion - not just cherry-pick an example, then smack your hands together with glee exclaiming: "see! they're horribly inefficient!"
It may be attractive to look for cute "laws" like "the less tax the better". But they don't exist. What you're stating there is not an objective characterization of the worth of goverment: it's a subjective ethical claim. If you really care about this kind of thing, you would be well advised to read some thoughtful arguments by people with varying perspectives, not run around calling people "dolts".
As it happens, I'm with you in this particular case: I susspect it's pernicious corporate welfare. Though frankly, it's small beans compared to many other goverment activities (software patents, copyright extension, barriers to third world agricultural products, etc.).
It has failed to deliver adoption. We can argue about why (IE's lack of support, no compelling features), but the fact remains that a standard is worthless unless it actually becomes, you know, standard. Standardization is less a technical matter than a social one. Most of HTML's value derives not from its technical strengths, but from its ubiquity.
To date, the new way of distributing content that you cite has not succeeded. XML was advertised as a solution to interoperability, but in reality it solved the easy problems - e.g. syntax, not the hard ones - e.g. agreement about meaning. XHTML's ambition to mix multiple XML vocabularies in a single document is worthy (and in the longer term worth pursuing), but the subset of vocabularies that would be widespread enough to matter would be small.
What HTML 5 offers, and what XHTML did not deliver, is further agreement about meaning. It provides standard ways to do what people are already doing. For example, it specifies unambiguous ways to mark up navigation menus and time. These are small things, but small things matter. Look at HTML's declarative links - also a small thing: they have made possible applications like Google (imagine if links were all scripted instead!).
Meanwhile, HTML 5 can be serialized as XML. Why not simply make it XHTML 5? Again, we can argue about the relative benefits, but the best answer is that it would be a barrier to adoption - and thus to the central benefit of standardization.
Despite all of this, I certainly wouldn't call XHTML a failure. If you consider it outside the browser it is very useful (for server processing, embedding in Atom, etc.). In the medium to long term, it seems likely to gain in popularity. At this point, though, it is clear that non-XML HTML serialization is not going to go away. I think there are good (social) reasons for that; regardless, making that HTML better is a good thing.
Thank you for posting that. What's really unfortunate here is that the incendiary language in the Information Week article quotes Linus out of context thereby reinforcing divisions in the free and open source software community without helping to address what are important concerns.
The FOSS community, as Linus implicitly argues, is a coalition of people with different agendas, whether those are developing quality software, making money, or increasing freedom. We work with each other because we all benefit, even though we may not all agree. We do need to discuss our divisions - moral, political, etc. We don't need to create pointless division by demonizing Linus, RMS, or anyone else.
Now I don't agree with Linus's position on GPL3. It seems to me that Linus's reasining is based on an idealized conception of individual freedom that fails to take into account the practical limitations on that freedom and the context in which choices are made. I believe his conclusions are very wrong, and some of his argument is badly worded (I'm not certain whether he's being very aggressive or just unclear) - but much of what is quoted in the article and Slashdot summary is taken out of context and deliberately used to dramatize the situation. In particular, Linus does not call RMS & co. totalitarians or fanatics. He quite rightly uses that characterization for anyone who equates morality with the law. If you ask me, it's a strawman argument. It's that argument we need to dismiss, not Linus
I agree completely. But I have three points: 1) the paper doesn't make a general claim about efficiency, only a specific claim when certain requirements are set; 2) it is expensive to make a network non-neutral; 3) the neutral network is more valuable because it has more bandwidth.
First, let's be careful: the paper does not claim that a "Class of Service" (non-neutral) net is more efficient in general. It lays out a specific objective, then determines how much more bandwidth a neutral net would require to achieve it. If your goals are different (e.g. you're willing to accept a different level of performance assurance), their conclusion may not hold.
As your post suggests, this is not a general claim about efficiency. It's a claim about efficiency for a spefic purpose. If you're #1 non-negotianble requirment for the net is video-on-demand, their analysis may be correct. But then you may build a network that is less efficient for other purposes, such as reading Slashdot, sending instant messages, or buying books on Amazon.
Second, a non-neutral network does not cost the same as a neutral network: it costs a whole lot more. Prioritizing traffic costs bandwidth, infrastructure, maintenance, etc. Some have claimed the cost of implementing QoS exceeds the cost of increasing bandwidth. Furthermore, there is an opportunity cost: the more complex infrastructure may be more costly to maintain, guard against attack and failure, and may be more rigid in the face of new applications.
Third, a neutral net with twice as much bandwidth has twice as much bandwidth! It is, by definition, more valuable than the non-neutral network with half the bandwidth. That extra bandwidth is not wasted; it doesn't exist solely to provide the quality of service for video on demand. It can - and will - be used for other things.
Actually, I find him wonderfully eloquent and inspiring. Lawrence Lessig calls him "the truly inspired rhetorician of our age". Here's one passage that struck me:
What a put-down. The slight complexity of the last two phrases ("happened to happen" and "we will soon be finished making no longer there") is deliberate. It makes you pay attention and drives the point home. Language like this draws you in: it makes you think, and because you have to work a little it makes you a participant. Frankly, you need to think and you need to participate because there is so much depth behind his words. There are so many ideas, so many necessarily unanswered questions, that I would even say - and I mean this as high praise - that at some point or at some level you need to disagree.
This is a well known phenomenon, referred to as the Tragedy of the Anticommons. Yochai Benkler describes how multiple patent holders delayed the development of radio until the U.S. government intervened:
I agree with you that rules shouldn't be the focus of play. The indie games are worth checking out. But I have significant doubts about the indie game crowd's focus on "story". Story is a rather high-level concept, something you don't necessarily see unless you step back from the experience of playing. The most satisfying moments I have experienced and witnessed in RPGs have been more immediate: the excitement of diving out the window just as the bomb goes off, the players huddled around the candle flame as some Thing stalks their characters through the abandoned house, the shock on his comrades' faces as the religious fanatic torches the planetary stabelizer as "evil technology".
Don't get me wrong: theme and plot and narrative and all that good stuff can certainly enhance the experience of playing, and it's certainly worth trying to do something else with the medium. But for most players I suspect the immediate experience matters more. The indie game designers seem to be aiming to produce Art - which is great; for them story may be what they really want to achieve. However, I think they get a bit too wrapped up in the narrative structure that's usually necessary in traditional forms that are experienced by an audience rather than participants.
I do take issue with your suggestion that structure is something used by GMs to control the players. Some have argued quite the opposite (players use rules to fend off GM fiat), while I think they're the framework that aids the GM so s/he can focus on the other creative aspects of play that rules cannot provide. If you can run a creative game off-the-cuff with little or support, you're a better GM than I - I'd love to play in your game sometime. It's quite ironic that you diss too much structure in one breath, then praise indie games in the next - because indie games (with their "system matters" rallying cry) often introduce carefully tailored structures and rules to support specific kinds of story (e.g. the excellent Dogs in the Vineyard). Often they narrow play far more dramatically than "traditional" games like D&D.
Personally, I find d20 way too complex; for me, Call of Cthulhu, with its minimal menu of rules, is far easier to run because it's far easier to wing it without worrying about the rules (it also helps that the players' position is unequal from the start, so there's no need for "balance"). Many of the indie games I have looked at are so focused that they don't easily support that kind of freedom or long term play. My impression - though there are some excellent counter examples (e.g. Shadow of Yesterday, the rules-heavy Burning Wheel) - is that many of the games most focused on "story" are weak when it comes to supporting open-ended campaigns that go in unexpected directions.
I hope you know something I don't. With regards to the anti-camcording bill, the head of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association[2] said it "is really the first step - not only for the movie industry - where the government has shown it will seriously address the whole area of intellectual property theft." Reports are that the government intends to go ahead with a DMCA-style "reform". Bev Oda, one of the two ministers responsible for copyright, has previously said Canada will ratify international treaties, implying that includes the WIPO treaty on which the DMCA is based[1]. The 2007-2008 Report on Plans and Priorities lists "copyright reform" as a priority to which the government has "previously committed". Given the
On the up side, now is not the time to give up: the significant opposition to stronger copyright provisions seems be having an effect. While the RPP's statement on the issue points towards anti-circumvention legislation and a flawed conception of copyright as a simple conflict between creators and consumers (when in fact there are creators on both sides, and citizens and the public interest are directly affected), it avoids committing to any paricular course of action:
I wrote to her in January and received a similarly ambiguous reply: "the Government is continuing to consider the concerns of all Canadians . . . The Government wants to ensure that the rights of Canadian creators are adequately protected by law, and that these rights are balanced with the ability of the public to access works."
[1] I should point out that Canada is under no obligation to ratify the WIPO treaty. Even if we do, the treaty's anti-circumvention provisions don't require all of the excesses of the DMCA:
[2] For the most part we don't make Canadian films, we distribute American ones. For the distributors, maximalist intellectual monopoly laws are in their interests even if they inhibit the production of Canadian films.