Illicit reproduction of copyrighted material is infringement. It's not "piracy". Bah! piracy has been in common use for copyright infringment (on software anyway) since the days of the Apple][. It's not going away now...
Oh, I know that. I don't really expect the world and the courts to come to their senses and abandon a word they use so often, even if it is a linguisitic travesty. I an quite sure that people will continue to mis-use the word -- hence, the "obLostCause" prefacing my remark.
That doesn't make them correct, by the way.
Further quoth the poster:
I have yet to see even one validated, meaningful study of how many illegal MP3s are actually being traded using Naptser Most likely because Napster won't let you look at it's database. That's a "trade secret" (see the/. article a few days ago about napster using the DMCA in its own defense)
Oh, I'm sure. That doesn't matter. Without some objective, verifiable study of the issue, all we have anectdotes. Making public policy based on anectdotes -- especially public policy shifting the boundaries of intellectual property -- should done for rational reasons (is that redundant?). Rule by unsubstantiated anectdote is anathema to a truly democratic society.
The fact of the matter is, the burden of proof is on the accuser here. If the RIAA is convinced that Napster is merely a den of thieves with (essentially) no legitimate usage, they should have to prove that assertion. It's not enough to say, "Obviously,...". If they can prove, they should. If they can't, then sorry, they lose. If they can't prove it, we as citizenry can demand to know (a) why they believe it and (b) why on Earth we should believe them.
I think that's a pretty fundamental test for justice, especially in the States.
And once more,
I haven't even seen an analysis of the bandwidth monster it has apparently become. It's difficult to measure, because napster doesn't use one standard port, and traffic goes to many different places.
Again, if it can't be measured, how can you be sure it's happening? A coincidence between the availability of Napster and a surge in usage could be just that, a coincidence. If it happens at one school, it's a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Hey, if it happens at 100 schools, it begins to look pretty suspicious... but that's the sort of data that has simply not been offered.
I am not saying that there is no causal connection. I am saying that no one has made a convincing case yet. One could be made, perhaps, but it hasn't. In the absence of such a case -- an objective, detailed survey -- I think any policy judgments are woefully premature.
THIS WAS A SITE WITH LYRICS!! AND ONLY LYRICS! People are no longer permitted to write down the lyrics to songs so that others may know them???
Not to burst your bubble, but this has never been legal. The writer of a song gets copyright to the arrangement of the song. This copyright is distinct from the one held by, say, the recorder of a song.
[When did piracy] change from something people did furtively on IRC, to an absolute right of the people to have whatever they want, whenever they want?
obLostCause: Illicit reproduction of copyrighted material is infringement. It's not "piracy". Piracy is what you do with poofy shirts, sailing ships, a ring in your ear and a knife in your mouth. I would bet that almost none of the people illegally distributing MP3s actually say, "Gar! Avast!" At least, not too often.
Now, allowing the woefully-loaded term "piracy", that remains a crime. It is still wrong to infringe copyright and to reproduce for profit materials with permission of the copyright holder. So each and every person shown to be using Napster to transmit illegal copies should be prosecuted to the full extent of the copious and adequate laws that exist regarding copyright infringement.
But Napster is a tool and ownership or use of a tool in a legal manner is legal. Yes, it can be used to trade illegal MP3s. It can also be used to trade valid ones. A car can be used to get away in a bank heist. It can also be used for grocery shopping. Should we ban cars?
There is a lot of heat and lot of smoke about the "piracy" that Napster encourages. (Apparently all these moral people are hypnotically forced by Napster to break copyright laws or something...) I have yet to see even one validated, meaningful study of how many illegal MP3s are actually being traded using Naptser. I haven't even seen an analysis of the bandwidth monster it has apparently become. Until someone credible starts doing that research, all reasoning about it is happening in vacuum or worse in anecdotes. This is not a good mechanism for making rational, just decision.
Is it any surprise that the official mouthpeice for corporatism thinks that Microsoft runs "almost all" Web servers? The whole FSOS (Fres Software / Open Source) movement almost necessarily falls below the radar of corporatists. If it doesn't cost anything, and it can't be charged as a loss-leader, then it must not be important.
It is, in fact, this blindness that makes corporatism (a) so evil and (b) so futile in the long run. There are values that are not economic values, and they do have the strength to compete.
Now, these communities are privately owned, unambiguously. All property of Sony or AOL/Time/Warner or whoever.
Is it really so clear-cut? Oh, sure, there are licenses and such, but that's not an airtight case. One could argue, quite strenuously -- I'm not sure "successfully", but hey -- that the users of the online community become, in a sense, "authors" of the history of the community. And copyright law automatically grants rights to authors or co-authors. We might very well see an emerging conflict between different areas of IP law (oh, imagine that).
At some point, if the communities grow large enough and vibrant enough, Sony might find their ownership evaporating into mist.
It [money] only has value because the government says it does.
I'm no libertarian, but even I would argue that money has value only because the citizenry says it does. Money is backed by our faith in the economy. If a people decide the money is worthless, it soon becomes so (post-Communist Russia, anyone? For that matter, Communist Russia itself.) Look at what happened to Confederate currency: Richmond might have decreed that CS$1 had a certain value in gold, but that didn't mean people would trade gold for it.
In fact, even when the world was on the gold standard, money was virtual. It's time for people to clue in to this: Gold has no intrinsic value! Well, OK, it has some, because it can be used for wires and to make pretty things and so on. But these are far less than the value of gold on the specie exchange. Gold is only worth a lot because we all agree it's worth a lot. Gold is only stable because we all agree it is stable. In the end, gold is just as "virtual" as the current dollar or the EQ token (or whatever).
The key thing to remember is, economics is illusion. Seen in the light, the essentially contra-rational actions of people, corporations, and governments start to make more sense.
Show the article, let the readers make up their own minds without a set biased viewpoint shoved in their faces prior to it.
I don't see a problem with the intros. I fancy myself a clever enough reader to assay the submitter's bias and to filter it. I always end up reading straight from the source anyway. On the other hand, I think it's fair for the submitter to have a first say in which direction the discussion will go. If most people disagree, then it won't go that way.
Fundamentally, and for apparently no good reason, I believe in trusting the general intelligence of the readers. If they can't separate the opinion from the story on their own, then heck, we can't save 'em anyway.
A democracy absolutely requires an educated, intelligient, engaged citizenry. If we can't meet those criteria, the patient is too far gone for any patching to help.
The mechanism which should have been instituted was the same as was used for the empty lands in America's West: first to transmit into an area has broadcast rights to it. Thus anyone else is a trespasser. Then standard property rights would go into effect.
Maybe. I'm not sure the assumption here -- that the mechanism used in the West actually produced the most social good -- is true. I do concede that it would have made bandwidth more or less exactly like physical property, so at least we would know where the law stood. And for radio and TV, I can imagine being persuaded that bandwidth should be treated as physical property, since the same scarcity is involved.
But applying that to the 'Net: Would cybersquatting be OK, then? Real-world squatting certainly didn't help open up the West -- it can be argued that speculation delayed settlement considerably.
I didn't mean to give my own post a +1 bonus. (It was sort of weak, after all.) I was trying to vote to give the original post the bonus. So if you're a moderator, feel free to moderate me down for stupidity, but consider moderating up the original, 'cause it's still funny.
I am torn between amazement -- that this might be a carefully crafted ironic piece -- and horror -- that the poster actually believed what was said. If it's irony, then bravo! If not... well, I guess I have to assume it was meant literally and react to that. Sorry if my cluemeter is reading zero on the intent of the article.
Quoth the poster:
n today's world the true innovators and proponents of the net are the corporations, and it is their drive and vision which have turned the net from an academic's playground into the dynamic, exciting domain that it is today
The first part of that sentence is so ridiculous it can't even be analyzed. The second is more interesting. I'll concede that the Net began as "an academic's playground" (though I don't see why that should be bad, per se). Was it the "corporations" that turned it into the "dynamic, exciting domain" of today? No. It was all those poor, lamented academics -- the profs and the students -- who learned about email and found it made their lives easier and fuller, who came up with and embraced the Web to make their lives easier and fuller, who demanded that corporations and governments get online to make their lives easier and fuller. Without the "academics" pushing hard, nobody would believe the Net could yield a dollar, and thus, no business would have invested.
Let me be explicit: The Net had value long before it had corporations onboard. This is almost self-evident: Unless the corporations sniffed that money could be made, they would never have invested in the Net. But if the corporations aren't there until the money is there, where did the money come from? Those academics.
Quoth the poster:
The first victory of the corporations over the "ivory tower" academics jealously guarding their playground was the introduction of the IMG tag,
Hmmm. The Web was thought up at CERN, where one of the prevailing problems was the easy interchange across large distances of the text and graphs of nuclear theory. Yet they left out the IMG tag? Um, no. IMG was in HTML from either the very beginning or soon after -- at least as early as 1993 -- and was embraced long before there were corporations dictating standards.
Quoth the poster:
And what have the government done in all this?
Funding the research and underwriting the fiber that made the Internet possible in the first place?
Quoth the poster:
Since they are driven by market forces to provide what it is we, as customers, want from the internet it only makes sense for them to take a more active part in the control of net infrastructure and protocols, so that everyone can benefit from a more coherent and interactive experience.
This is a vision too horrifying to contemplate: a hundred or more corporations pushing standards to ensure their control, putting the dollars ahead of the data. The corporations are equipped only to give more of the same. Innovation, true innovation, changes the rules and risks invalidating the business models. They want to give us what they tell us to want, not what we want. Anything else is too random to fit on a bottom line.
Quoth the poster, in the most damning line:
The running of the net should not be left in the hands of aging hippies with fond memories of the Grateful Dead, it should be in the hands of more proactive organizations which will make the net something even better for
consumers than it is now.
Firstly, I don't know any geeks who fit the description, but actually, I'd be much happier with Jerry Garcia running things than Bill Gates, so if that was meant to insult it missed the mark. But most importantly, note whom the poster believes are the key people here. "Consumers".
Not "citizens".
Not "people".
But "consumers". From the view of corporatists, people have value in direct relation to their ability to purchase. Corporations love the rich not for being rich but for being able to buy stuff. All value is economic value, to a corporation, and those other human attributes -- ethics, honor, love -- are zero-value.
This is what makes corporatism evil.... not that it strips us of our human dignity. That it denies that there is human dignity, that people matter, that citizens are more than cogs in an economic machine.
Quoth the poster (and I'm nearly done, promise):
People can never truly grasp the entire structure of the moment - it is only corporations which have this vision, and as such they are the only possible force which can make sure the internet continues progressing and expanding.
It isn't clear to me how corporations focused on the bottom line in quarterly increments can have a "big picture" but that isn't even the point. Intentionally or not the poster has exposed the key issue: Corporations act like living beings and they play on a field that is insensitive to individuals. And their only criterion of "rightness" is the ability to keep "progressing and expanding".
If that vision doesn't keep you up at night, you're not paying attention.
Soon after widespread use of radio began, the FCC was formed to regulate who had the power to transmit
Um, the physical mechanism of radio generation -- especially in early days -- forced some means of allocating bandwidth (a term, I remind everyone, which originated in radio). Let's say I have a 100 kW transmitter operating at 102.7 MHz, and you, too, have such a transmitter, and we decide to broadcast at the same time. What results? An open market, wherein we present our respective positions/products/whatever and somehow the "better" one wins out, leading to a happy, socially-maximized situation?
No. What happens is that we effectively jam each other and no one gets any clear idea what either of us are saying/selling/whatever. And so everyone loses: you, me, and the society as a whole.
Limitations in radio and TV technology make, IMHO, some regulation necessary and desirable. You can't let everyone broadcast, because physical bandwidth really is a scarce and rare commodity. The Internet, on the other hand, allows universal publication -- not "broadcasting", since transfers are point-to-point, not one-to-many -- and anyone can put up their pages without impacting anyone else's.
That's one reason why the Net is a new force for human freedom, at least potentially. It's the first information medium that is intrinsically and by design a universal transmitter.
The poster argues that the problem is not that Pinkerton is a corporation, but that it is a corporation run by tormentors of geeks. I believe this be a serious, if understandable, error. Pinkerton is not acting out some midlife-crisis flashback to the glory days of high school for its executives. It's acting exactly like a corporation.
Corporations are their own life forms. The individual motivations of all the people making up Pinkerton are essentially irrelevant. The corporation is its own justification and operates according to its own overwhelming drives -- to survive, to expand, to make a profit. Its competitors aren't people -- the competitors are other corporations. Slashdot matters to Pinkerton only because it fitfully mistakes us for another corporation.
Freedom cannot matter to a corporation because freedom (as usually connotated) involves the rights of the individual, and corporations are not individuals. Individuals don't even activate their radar. Only if individuals organize into quasi-corporation-like organisms -- the Blue Ribbon Campaign, slashdot, etc. -- can a corporation notices them.
One of the images I have had lately -- admittedly biased and comforting -- is that corporations are dinosaurs, huge and overpowering. A dinorsaur would never be able to understand if a little mammal said, "But wait. We know you want to get dinner, but don't step on us -- that would be wrong." The dinosaur would wonder what the hell it even means to step on someone -- because to the dinosaur, if you are "someone", you are automatically too big to be stepped on. But of course, to the mammal, the world looks different.
This picture is self-indulgent and incomplete -- it's nice to think of myself as part of the evolutionarily-favored ones -- but it's got some aptness. Jon Katz' problem, as far as I could see, is that he saw people and assumed he was talking to individuals. But in fact he had been summoned by Pinkerton, not by its employees, and he failed to speak directly to it.
Is it my imagination, or is this just a waste of taxpayer's money, money which would be better spent on important social services like health care?
It's just your imagination.:)
This is done almost solely because it is cool. It's a neat, oddball thing that doens't quite fit into a narrow, compartmentalized network of higher priorities. It's done because, for whatever reason, it lifts the souls of many who hear of it. It's done because it vindicates the avant-garde geek Babbage. It's done... well, it's done because it's fun, and the world needs more fun.
What's the point of perfect health care if life is no longer worth living?
It works quite well, although it's hard and time-consuming to count the votes. But, no country use it as a national voting system, which probably says something.
It says one of four things: (a) National govt's have a well-founded suspicion about these things; (b) National govt's aren't willing to spend the money or time on this kind of system; (c) National govt's are stuck in the 18th century when the form of modern democracy was more or less set; (d) National govt's cynically feel that their voting population is too apathetic or too lazy to understand such a system.
Sadly, the evidence seems to be for a mixture of (c) and (d).
Are the people who are saying this the same people who are cheering the court ruling against Microsoft, one of whose supposed biggest sins is crushing a company by giving away a nearly identical product for free?
Ouch. That actually did cause me to stop for a moment and think, but in fact, I still see a difference. Microsoft gave away IE to bolster their profit-making dominant area, the OS. Also, the bundling was not the whole point. It was part of a mosaic of threats, retaliation, and aggression.
Besides, as I have insisted all along, IE isn't "free", even in the economic sense. It costs $0 but it limits my choices, which is a non-tangible cost. It also seemed, to me, to make the underlying system even more unstable, with real costs, too.
Napster is a tool which allows artists to be deprived of the revenue which allows them to make a living.
Videotapes are things that allow someone to deprive movie actors of their revenue. Of course, photocopiers are things that allow someone to deprive writers of their revenue. For that mattter, scanner software can be used for this, too, and then it's digital! So I suppose that we should also sue Xerox, or Maxell, or Adobe.
The argument is specious. Napster is a tool. It can be used to pirate. It can be used to distribute software legally. I don't feel particularly happy finding them as my ally... but the US and UK weren't ecstatic over allying with the USSR in WW II but it got the job done.
The issue, to me, is whether Napster can be used for legitimate transfer, whether it is used for legitimate transfer, and if any of its special functions have advantages when used for legitimate transfer.
Also quoth the poster:
If tools such as Napster and Gnutella hadn't encouraged this kind of rampant piracy then these laws would never have been bought into law in the first place.
Two things: (a) I have seen no one -- not even the RIAA -- offer any convincing statistical evidence that piracy is "rampant" (but I'd appreciate a link if I've missed it).
(b) The DCMA was passed in 1998, long before Gnutella and, to my knowledge, before Napster. But I wasn't following the issue then, to my everlasting chagrin, and I might be wrong on the date. Again, I'd appreciate a correction if one applies.
Instead of changing to a voting system that allows us to vote without fear of wasting our votes, the government is determined to keep the current system in place.
OK, I have a suspicion I'm going to be unpopular here, and I know that people from several European countries will heckle me, but for the most part I like the two-party system. The alternatives seem to be
(a) a one-party system. These generally don't function well for very long and they have a heck of a time with personal freedoms, = or = (b) a multi-party system. These seem -- to this admittedly distant observer -- to be perenially on the verge of dissolution. Coalitions never seem to be stable, and wild nuts with marginal support can assume huge importance because they happen to hold a swing vote in the parlaiment or assembly.
A lot of people bemoan the paralysis produced by a two-party system (and I'm often one of them), but they seem to forget that the underlying philosophy of the American system has historically been Hippocratic: First, do no harm. In other words, it's designed to do not much and that's more or less what we get.
It's about time we point out that the net was tiny before the invention of the web (in the UK)
Um, what are you talking about?
(a) The Net was not "tiny" before the Web -- there was superexponential growth long before 1993.
(b) The Web, in the sense it was "invented" anywhere, was invented at CERN.
(c) The Web only took off when someone called NCSA published an easy-to-use, graphical browser for it. Who was NCSA? The National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Whose "National Center"? The United States.
(d) The US still supplies and uses the most Internet bandwidth and resources; either recently or real soon, the rest of the world together will just about equal the US usage.
Like it or not, the Net was an American invention and remains a predominantly US space. It is changing, and rightly, but it isn't there and it's not entirely reasonable to ask the largest installed base to simply change.
Of course, the invention of a rational TLD system would do much to redress these inequities. After all, in the end, they're just numbers.
I can see that everyone is worried about privacy and a "Big Brother" coming to get you, but if you aren't doing anything to arouse suspicion, you shouldn't worry.
to which the best reply is the classic
In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me - and by that time no one was left to speak up.
(as found on this site, which includes an Internet version, too).
More directly, the poster also says:
I care a lot more that the e-mail of terrorists is being read at my small sacrifice than I care that the FBI sees that my friend and I are talking about burritos or whatever.
First, I happen not to feel it's a small sacrifice at all. I recognize your right to feel differently and I respect your exercise of that right... but I still think your valuation is wrong here.
Second, if these hypothetical terrorists are stupid enough to transmit in plaintext over unsecured routes, then they're so inept that the FBI would capture them without the email surveillance. Let's face it -- the proposed measures won't be effective against true, dedicated opponents. But they'd be perfect against the large, undereducated, unmotivated public.
Existing laws on surveillance, wiretapping, etc., have been (easily) extended to cyberspace. They protect, nominally at least, the rights of citizens. Although the FBI guy intended the oppositie, he's right: These things must be balanced. What worries me is that many (upper) law enforcement officials seem to place no value on citizens' privacy at all. They don't seem clued in as to why people get edgy about this.
Until the government does understand that privacy is a valuable right, I'd rather it not get any more powers to poke around my life.
t'll never happen. This is America. We're too busy lying to ourselves about our supposed "freedoms" to get up off our fat asses and establish any. If the Bill of Rights came up in Congress today, it would not pass. Everybody to the right of the Green Party would lobby against it night and day. Forget it.
Don't even waste your time talking about it.
And so the system persists and drifts toward disaster, because people aren't willing to expend an effort to save it...
I agree that, more likely than not, we will lose some -- maybe almost all -- the battles despite our best efforts. But without our efforts, we still lost them by default. As quixotic as it may be, I still believe the modern democracies are capable of self-government and that we can correct these anti-freedom tendencies. But it won't happen if the truly thinking people voluntarily remove themselves from the debate.
In the end, it's not the winning that matters. It's the fighting of the good fight that matters.
how do you explain why series 5 was so much worse than all the others?
I'm a B5 fan but I am also a heretic. Here's my take: Season 5 was so much worse because JMS wrote it. I know people feel that JMS' unprecedented authorship of more than two straight seasons gave B5 its touch of genius, but it's pretty clear that by the time Season 5 rolled around, he was simply tired.
Also, consider this: JMS had 200 pages of notes outlining the entire 5-year arc. But I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that that outline spent more time on the early seasons. The details for those would need to be fixed for the pitch to the networks. Being a true writer, JMS almost certainly left himself a lot of wriggle room to adjust to developments on the show in the later seasons. Alas, since being executive produce and universe god is a time-consuming job, it also meant that he never got to give them the attention those later seasons deserved.
Finally, let's remember JMS' ego (and he has one, quite a large one). By the third season, the story editor position quietly vanished. JMS became, on the Net at least, very sensitive to criticism. I can easily believe that no one at the show had the gumption to tell him, "Hey, JMS, this story -- Objects at Rest -- it stinks..." How do you tell off God?
This is all my opinion, of course, but I used to follow the show quite closely and I think I'm on target.
B5 had an awesome story, and complex characters, but you'd think they'd be able to spend some more to get realistic looking spacecraft!
Interestingly enough, other posters have commented that, though the graphics were great, the stories lacked. As a fan, I feel that neither is true. Sure, the pilot and the early seasons looked, well, sub-par. On the other hand, if you compare the graphics to other stuff on TV in 1993 (when the 1st season was filmed), you'll see that B5's effects were more "realistic" by far. And as the series progressed and they learned what they were doing, the graphics continued to get better and better.
Now, it's again been a few years since the last ep was made, so the graphics begin to look a little frayed around the edges. But the work done, then, was tremendously impressive and helped prove that CGI could be used to generate effects-intense shows on a reasonable budget.
In most American TV, each episode can stand alone. B5 RARELY had an epesode that, by itself, stands alone.
And we can all be grateful for that. The every-episode-alone facet of American TV is what makes most American TV mindless pabulum. And, yes, I am American, and I can enjoy mindless pabulum from time to time. But there is more you can do, and American TV rarely if ever does it.
The episodes of Babylon 5 were intended, from the very beginning, to form a novel-like saga spanning five years. There is payoff from the first episode in the last! Although it fell down in places, B5 managed to achieve the intended effect: A world that feels real because (a) things affect each other -- cause-and-effect not being abolished and (b) things CHANGE. (This is the whole point of the first season: set the board, then begin clearing the pieces...)
The greatest service B5 did for us is to show that television can be an art form. It rarely is, but it can be... Since B5, I haven't been able to watch any other show regularly (except ReBoot, and only when they adopted a similar interconnectedness). B5 ruined TV for me by raising my standards, and a finer service cannot be done.
Just to get thing exactly, the 10th Amendment reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It's sort of a catch-all. It is a defense against centralization, but it's far from invincible: The Congress can and will impose things on states, either (as mentioned) economically or through, say, the 14th Amendment's equal protections clause.
It's the interplay of these various principles that makes governance so interesting and, in my totally biased opinion, the American system so strong.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't make them correct, by the way.
Further quoth the poster:
Oh, I'm sure. That doesn't matter. Without some objective, verifiable study of the issue, all we have anectdotes. Making public policy based on anectdotes -- especially public policy shifting the boundaries of intellectual property -- should done for rational reasons (is that redundant?). Rule by unsubstantiated anectdote is anathema to a truly democratic society.The fact of the matter is, the burden of proof is on the accuser here. If the RIAA is convinced that Napster is merely a den of thieves with (essentially) no legitimate usage, they should have to prove that assertion. It's not enough to say, "Obviously, ...". If they can prove, they should. If they can't, then sorry, they lose. If they can't prove it, we as citizenry can demand to know (a) why they believe it and (b) why on Earth we should believe them.
I think that's a pretty fundamental test for justice, especially in the States.
And once more,
Again, if it can't be measured, how can you be sure it's happening? A coincidence between the availability of Napster and a surge in usage could be just that, a coincidence. If it happens at one school, it's a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Hey, if it happens at 100 schools, it begins to look pretty suspiciousI am not saying that there is no causal connection. I am saying that no one has made a convincing case yet. One could be made, perhaps, but it hasn't. In the absence of such a case -- an objective, detailed survey -- I think any policy judgments are woefully premature.
Now, allowing the woefully-loaded term "piracy", that remains a crime. It is still wrong to infringe copyright and to reproduce for profit materials with permission of the copyright holder. So each and every person shown to be using Napster to transmit illegal copies should be prosecuted to the full extent of the copious and adequate laws that exist regarding copyright infringement.
But Napster is a tool and ownership or use of a tool in a legal manner is legal. Yes, it can be used to trade illegal MP3s. It can also be used to trade valid ones. A car can be used to get away in a bank heist. It can also be used for grocery shopping. Should we ban cars?
There is a lot of heat and lot of smoke about the "piracy" that Napster encourages. (Apparently all these moral people are hypnotically forced by Napster to break copyright laws or something...) I have yet to see even one validated, meaningful study of how many illegal MP3s are actually being traded using Naptser. I haven't even seen an analysis of the bandwidth monster it has apparently become. Until someone credible starts doing that research, all reasoning about it is happening in vacuum or worse in anecdotes. This is not a good mechanism for making rational, just decision.
It is, in fact, this blindness that makes corporatism (a) so evil and (b) so futile in the long run. There are values that are not economic values, and they do have the strength to compete.
At some point, if the communities grow large enough and vibrant enough, Sony might find their ownership evaporating into mist.
In fact, even when the world was on the gold standard, money was virtual. It's time for people to clue in to this: Gold has no intrinsic value! Well, OK, it has some, because it can be used for wires and to make pretty things and so on. But these are far less than the value of gold on the specie exchange. Gold is only worth a lot because we all agree it's worth a lot. Gold is only stable because we all agree it is stable. In the end, gold is just as "virtual" as the current dollar or the EQ token (or whatever).
The key thing to remember is, economics is illusion. Seen in the light, the essentially contra-rational actions of people, corporations, and governments start to make more sense.
Fundamentally, and for apparently no good reason, I believe in trusting the general intelligence of the readers. If they can't separate the opinion from the story on their own, then heck, we can't save 'em anyway.
A democracy absolutely requires an educated, intelligient, engaged citizenry. If we can't meet those criteria, the patient is too far gone for any patching to help.
But applying that to the 'Net: Would cybersquatting be OK, then? Real-world squatting certainly didn't help open up the West -- it can be argued that speculation delayed settlement considerably.
I didn't mean to give my own post a +1 bonus. (It was sort of weak, after all.) I was trying to vote to give the original post the bonus. So if you're a moderator, feel free to moderate me down for stupidity, but consider moderating up the original, 'cause it's still funny.
OK, I'm going to use my magic +1 Mouse of Moderation and raise this post a bit, because heck, it's funny and elegant at the same time.
Quoth the poster:
The first part of that sentence is so ridiculous it can't even be analyzed. The second is more interesting. I'll concede that the Net began as "an academic's playground" (though I don't see why that should be bad, per se). Was it the "corporations" that turned it into the "dynamic, exciting domain" of today? No. It was all those poor, lamented academics -- the profs and the students -- who learned about email and found it made their lives easier and fuller, who came up with and embraced the Web to make their lives easier and fuller, who demanded that corporations and governments get online to make their lives easier and fuller. Without the "academics" pushing hard, nobody would believe the Net could yield a dollar, and thus, no business would have invested.Let me be explicit: The Net had value long before it had corporations onboard. This is almost self-evident: Unless the corporations sniffed that money could be made, they would never have invested in the Net. But if the corporations aren't there until the money is there, where did the money come from? Those academics.
Quoth the poster:
Hmmm. The Web was thought up at CERN, where one of the prevailing problems was the easy interchange across large distances of the text and graphs of nuclear theory. Yet they left out the IMG tag? Um, no. IMG was in HTML from either the very beginning or soon after -- at least as early as 1993 -- and was embraced long before there were corporations dictating standards.Quoth the poster:
Funding the research and underwriting the fiber that made the Internet possible in the first place?Quoth the poster:
This is a vision too horrifying to contemplate: a hundred or more corporations pushing standards to ensure their control, putting the dollars ahead of the data. The corporations are equipped only to give more of the same. Innovation, true innovation, changes the rules and risks invalidating the business models. They want to give us what they tell us to want, not what we want. Anything else is too random to fit on a bottom line.Quoth the poster, in the most damning line:
Firstly, I don't know any geeks who fit the description, but actually, I'd be much happier with Jerry Garcia running things than Bill Gates, so if that was meant to insult it missed the mark. But most importantly, note whom the poster believes are the key people here. "Consumers".Not "citizens".
Not "people".
But "consumers". From the view of corporatists, people have value in direct relation to their ability to purchase. Corporations love the rich not for being rich but for being able to buy stuff. All value is economic value, to a corporation, and those other human attributes -- ethics, honor, love -- are zero-value.
This is what makes corporatism evil.... not that it strips us of our human dignity. That it denies that there is human dignity, that people matter, that citizens are more than cogs in an economic machine.
Quoth the poster (and I'm nearly done, promise):
It isn't clear to me how corporations focused on the bottom line in quarterly increments can have a "big picture" but that isn't even the point. Intentionally or not the poster has exposed the key issue: Corporations act like living beings and they play on a field that is insensitive to individuals. And their only criterion of "rightness" is the ability to keep "progressing and expanding".If that vision doesn't keep you up at night, you're not paying attention.
No. What happens is that we effectively jam each other and no one gets any clear idea what either of us are saying/selling/whatever. And so everyone loses: you, me, and the society as a whole.
Limitations in radio and TV technology make, IMHO, some regulation necessary and desirable. You can't let everyone broadcast, because physical bandwidth really is a scarce and rare commodity. The Internet, on the other hand, allows universal publication -- not "broadcasting", since transfers are point-to-point, not one-to-many -- and anyone can put up their pages without impacting anyone else's.
That's one reason why the Net is a new force for human freedom, at least potentially. It's the first information medium that is intrinsically and by design a universal transmitter.
Corporations are their own life forms. The individual motivations of all the people making up Pinkerton are essentially irrelevant. The corporation is its own justification and operates according to its own overwhelming drives -- to survive, to expand, to make a profit. Its competitors aren't people -- the competitors are other corporations. Slashdot matters to Pinkerton only because it fitfully mistakes us for another corporation.
Freedom cannot matter to a corporation because freedom (as usually connotated) involves the rights of the individual, and corporations are not individuals. Individuals don't even activate their radar. Only if individuals organize into quasi-corporation-like organisms -- the Blue Ribbon Campaign, slashdot, etc. -- can a corporation notices them.
One of the images I have had lately -- admittedly biased and comforting -- is that corporations are dinosaurs, huge and overpowering. A dinorsaur would never be able to understand if a little mammal said, "But wait. We know you want to get dinner, but don't step on us -- that would be wrong." The dinosaur would wonder what the hell it even means to step on someone -- because to the dinosaur, if you are "someone", you are automatically too big to be stepped on. But of course, to the mammal, the world looks different.
This picture is self-indulgent and incomplete -- it's nice to think of myself as part of the evolutionarily-favored ones -- but it's got some aptness. Jon Katz' problem, as far as I could see, is that he saw people and assumed he was talking to individuals. But in fact he had been summoned by Pinkerton, not by its employees, and he failed to speak directly to it.
This is done almost solely because it is cool. It's a neat, oddball thing that doens't quite fit into a narrow, compartmentalized network of higher priorities. It's done because, for whatever reason, it lifts the souls of many who hear of it. It's done because it vindicates the avant-garde geek Babbage. It's done ... well, it's done because it's fun, and the world needs more fun.
What's the point of perfect health care if life is no longer worth living?
(a) National govt's have a well-founded suspicion about these things;
(b) National govt's aren't willing to spend the money or time on this kind of system;
(c) National govt's are stuck in the 18th century when the form of modern democracy was more or less set;
(d) National govt's cynically feel that their voting population is too apathetic or too lazy to understand such a system.
Sadly, the evidence seems to be for a mixture of (c) and (d).
Besides, as I have insisted all along, IE isn't "free", even in the economic sense. It costs $0 but it limits my choices, which is a non-tangible cost. It also seemed, to me, to make the underlying system even more unstable, with real costs, too.
The argument is specious. Napster is a tool. It can be used to pirate. It can be used to distribute software legally. I don't feel particularly happy finding them as my ally ... but the US and UK weren't ecstatic over allying with the USSR in WW II but it got the job done.
The issue, to me, is whether Napster can be used for legitimate transfer, whether it is used for legitimate transfer, and if any of its special functions have advantages when used for legitimate transfer.
Also quoth the poster:
Two things:(a) I have seen no one -- not even the RIAA -- offer any convincing statistical evidence that piracy is "rampant" (but I'd appreciate a link if I've missed it).
(b) The DCMA was passed in 1998, long before Gnutella and, to my knowledge, before Napster. But I wasn't following the issue then, to my everlasting chagrin, and I might be wrong on the date. Again, I'd appreciate a correction if one applies.
(a) a one-party system. These generally don't function well for very long and they have a heck of a time with personal freedoms,
= or =
(b) a multi-party system. These seem -- to this admittedly distant observer -- to be perenially on the verge of dissolution. Coalitions never seem to be stable, and wild nuts with marginal support can assume huge importance because they happen to hold a swing vote in the parlaiment or assembly.
A lot of people bemoan the paralysis produced by a two-party system (and I'm often one of them), but they seem to forget that the underlying philosophy of the American system has historically been Hippocratic: First, do no harm. In other words, it's designed to do not much and that's more or less what we get.
(a) The Net was not "tiny" before the Web -- there was superexponential growth long before 1993.
(b) The Web, in the sense it was "invented" anywhere, was invented at CERN.
(c) The Web only took off when someone called NCSA published an easy-to-use, graphical browser for it. Who was NCSA? The National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Whose "National Center"? The United States.
(d) The US still supplies and uses the most Internet bandwidth and resources; either recently or real soon, the rest of the world together will just about equal the US usage.
Like it or not, the Net was an American invention and remains a predominantly US space. It is changing, and rightly, but it isn't there and it's not entirely reasonable to ask the largest installed base to simply change.
Of course, the invention of a rational TLD system would do much to redress these inequities. After all, in the end, they're just numbers.
More directly, the poster also says:
First, I happen not to feel it's a small sacrifice at all. I recognize your right to feel differently and I respect your exercise of that rightSecond, if these hypothetical terrorists are stupid enough to transmit in plaintext over unsecured routes, then they're so inept that the FBI would capture them without the email surveillance. Let's face it -- the proposed measures won't be effective against true, dedicated opponents. But they'd be perfect against the large, undereducated, unmotivated public.
Existing laws on surveillance, wiretapping, etc., have been (easily) extended to cyberspace. They protect, nominally at least, the rights of citizens. Although the FBI guy intended the oppositie, he's right: These things must be balanced. What worries me is that many (upper) law enforcement officials seem to place no value on citizens' privacy at all. They don't seem clued in as to why people get edgy about this.
Until the government does understand that privacy is a valuable right, I'd rather it not get any more powers to poke around my life.
I agree that, more likely than not, we will lose some -- maybe almost all -- the battles despite our best efforts. But without our efforts, we still lost them by default. As quixotic as it may be, I still believe the modern democracies are capable of self-government and that we can correct these anti-freedom tendencies. But it won't happen if the truly thinking people voluntarily remove themselves from the debate.
In the end, it's not the winning that matters. It's the fighting of the good fight that matters.
Also, consider this: JMS had 200 pages of notes outlining the entire 5-year arc. But I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that that outline spent more time on the early seasons. The details for those would need to be fixed for the pitch to the networks. Being a true writer, JMS almost certainly left himself a lot of wriggle room to adjust to developments on the show in the later seasons. Alas, since being executive produce and universe god is a time-consuming job, it also meant that he never got to give them the attention those later seasons deserved.
Finally, let's remember JMS' ego (and he has one, quite a large one). By the third season, the story editor position quietly vanished. JMS became, on the Net at least, very sensitive to criticism. I can easily believe that no one at the show had the gumption to tell him, "Hey, JMS, this story -- Objects at Rest -- it stinks..." How do you tell off God?
This is all my opinion, of course, but I used to follow the show quite closely and I think I'm on target.
Now, it's again been a few years since the last ep was made, so the graphics begin to look a little frayed around the edges. But the work done, then, was tremendously impressive and helped prove that CGI could be used to generate effects-intense shows on a reasonable budget.
The episodes of Babylon 5 were intended, from the very beginning, to form a novel-like saga spanning five years. There is payoff from the first episode in the last! Although it fell down in places, B5 managed to achieve the intended effect: A world that feels real because (a) things affect each other -- cause-and-effect not being abolished and (b) things CHANGE. (This is the whole point of the first season: set the board, then begin clearing the pieces...)
The greatest service B5 did for us is to show that television can be an art form. It rarely is, but it can be... Since B5, I haven't been able to watch any other show regularly (except ReBoot, and only when they adopted a similar interconnectedness). B5 ruined TV for me by raising my standards, and a finer service cannot be done.
It's the interplay of these various principles that makes governance so interesting and, in my totally biased opinion, the American system so strong.