Hey folks! Just to clarify: I said that the UK would renegotiate its relationship to the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) and Iain (reasonably enough, given the noisy room) heard OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Just a minor clarification, but I'd appreciate an upvote so confused people see it.
I'm a UK taxpayer and I conduct a lot of business with the US west coast. Presently, we're 8 hours apart for most of the year, and that means that I can *just barely* squeeze in a conference call with Californian colleagues (I'm co-owner of boingboing.net and all my partners are in LA and San Francisco) and still get out of the office in time to get my daughter from day-care and get home for dinner.
If the timezone difference goes to 9 hours, I'm buggered. The additional hour will have a direct, negative impact on my net income, as it will either require me to participate less in these transatlantic ventures (for example, it would probably mean no more freelance assignments for US editors, all of which generate UK taxes) or hire expensive babysitters to fetch the kid from day-care (something I also would rather not do for sentimental reasons having nothing to do with the economy).
I'm the Boing Boing editor who posted the image that the OP claims violated the Creative Commons license.
Read the OP closely: he's not saying that it was *his* image I took -- rather, that he was affronted on behalf of the photographer.
Except that the photographer in this case is my friend and colleague Jennifer Trant, and I used the photo with her permission, and then reproduced the entire CC license so that other people would know what terms they could use it on.
So, anonymous poster: how about the next time you decide to smear someone for infringing Creative Commons in the name of defending someone's copyrights, you actually make sure that the creator hasn't authorized the use?
Oh, if only ! Intel and AMD were (and are) enthusiastic participants in the creation of "trusted computing" architectures that allows data-files to discriminate against different playback/rendering software and operating systems, hardware configs, BIOSes, etc.
Registering a trademark -- or trade-dress -- does NOT confer the right to stop others form using it commercially. It confers the right to stop commercial users from using the mark/dress in a way that confuses or misleads the public about the origin of goods or services (actually, you get that even without registering; registration mostly ups the ante for statutory damages).
More important, it's absolutely, positively untrue that commercial use of a mark without permission automatically leads to losing the mark.
Here is a demonstration:
* Slashdot is a commercial site
* It makes money from ads
* Ford ford mustang focus ford ford forditty ford ford!
By your reasoning, Ford's failure to threaten me for posting the above will now cost it its priceless trademarks.
Trademark lawyers LOVE to bruit about the legend that a failure to pay them over and over again to harass anyone who takes your name in vain will cost you your trademarks. It's just a self-serving fairy tale.
* I didn't found Boing Boing -- I co-edit it with Mark Frauenfelder (who *did* found it, along with Carla Sinclair), Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz
* I didn't use the word AIDS in the article, and I don't think that this is comparable to AIDS; I used "autoimmune disorder," as in "allergy" or even "lupus" -- that is, any time when the systems that are supposed to protect you end up attacking you
Otherwise, many w00ts for this making it to the/. front door!
I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to get T-bird 2 to bring in my settings from Thunderbird 1.5. I'm running Ubuntu Edgy Eft (for the moment, Feisty Fawn next week). When I first launched TB2, it asked me if I wanted to import settings, but didn't give any options for where to import from. I'm guessing this is incredibly easy and obvious, but the knowledge base isn't much help on this score. Any advice appreciated!
Do they really want us to believe that today's musicians will record more music if they get 95 years of copyright? Is there a musician (who doesn't write his own songs -- compositions get life ) for whom the deciding factor on recording a song is the infinitesimal chance that her song will be commercially viable after 50 years?
The risk that a musician is so dispirited by only getting 50 years of copyright on the recordings of her work is wholly theoretical. No one can point to such a musician. That musician, btw, isn't tomorrow's artist -- it's all recording artists since the term of phonogram monopoly was set at 50 years. Every song recorded for for the 20th century was produced with that incentive (or less).
However, there are two very real, non-theoretical groups of musicians for whom the existing term of 50 years is too long:
* Samplers and remixers. This is a non-theoretical, concrete and visible group of working musicians. They are unable to incorporate other works from culture into theirs without paying -- and not just paying, either. It's nearly impossible for an artist outside of the label system to clear samples from the labels' catalogues. That's because the labels give preferential treatement to one another in a mutually assured destruction dynamic (if EMI doesn't license its samples to Sony, then Sony can refuse to license to EMI). The effect of this for samplers and remixers in the UK is that they have to either:
1. Be criminals
2. Not make art
3. Sign up for the deal the labels offer, assign copyright in their works to the labels, and take the crummy "recoup"-based payment scheme the labels offer.
Talk about creating a buyer's market for what musicians have to sell!
* The other group of musicians harmed by the overlong term is those whose work is forgotten -- orphaned by society. In these cases, either the label still holds the copyright but won't reissue the musician's work (Universal's Decca warehouse in London holds the entire, unreleased catalogue of roots music, back to steel cylinders, and Universal hasn't even catalogued that collection, let alone made plans to re-release it); or no one knows who hold the copyright, because the deal was done so long ago.
At a recent Future of Music conference, Alanis Morrisette's attorney said that in his research, over 80% of all music recorded is not in the stream of commerce. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court fount that *ninety eight percent* of all copyrighted works are "orphans".
For these musicians, alive or dead, there is a fate worse than penury: obscurity. Their works -- the art they cherished and midwifed -- have been eliminated from the historical record. We have piled their recordings up in a huge bonfire and burned them in slow motion.
Finally, there's another non-hypothetical, real, visible group of artists for whom term extension is directly harmful: composers.
People who write songs get a much longer term of copyright than those who perform them. When Elvis goes into the public domain and his records are re-issued, the black songwriters whose work he performed *still* get paid by the reissuers. Right now, these composers are hostage to Elvis's label: if they don't re-release, the composers don't get a cheque. But the elimination of the majors from the equation makes it possible for a much more diverse population of entrepreneurs to arrange for such a re-release.
It's pure sophistry to wring your hands about some theoretical economic situation that will arise for musicians in 2056 when their present-day copyrights expire; that would be fine if there weren't great groups of concrete, present-day musicians crying out to have this happen.
The holders of today's 50 year copyrights fall into three groups:
* Holders of commercially non-viable copyrights (almost all of them fall into this category) -- this group receives direct harm from term extension
* Giant corporations that non-negotiably forced their artists to assign all copyright t
I don't understand -- it's not effective, it creates real harm, and yet you support it because the thing it's meant to stop (that it won't be effective at stopping) is bad? If you really hate child porn, shouldn't you reserve your support for proposals that have a chance of working?
Logistically, it's implausible that this will be undertaken by Canadian ISPs. Looking at every page on every site on the Internet to decide if it's child porn or not isn't the kind of thing an ISP has the resources for. More likely, Canada will outsource its blacklist to the same companies that provide blacklists for US libraries and corporations, as well as repressive national governments in Syria, the UAE and elsewhere. These companies, like Secure Computing, make filters like SmartFilter, and hire roomsful of Middle-American bluenoses to make their own determinations about the Internet. Their criteria are opaque, their appeals process a closed book.
The list they produce will be kept secret -- but not because it will constitute a guide to child porn online. These companies treat their lists as trade secrets and refuse to disclose them to anyone, including their customers. Instead, you can query them to ask if your URL is censored, but not get a list of all censored links.
How will the appeals process (which you count as the only means by which this official censorship will keep from growing to encompass material that isn't child porn) work in this world? You won't be able to see the sites that are blocked, so you won't be able to argue for their blockage being inappropriate. Initiating the appeals process will require you to out yourself as a suspected consumer of child porn (and if your appeal is denied, then it means that you ARE a consumer of child porn, right?).
If a site is removed from the list, will it stay off? What if it had child porn yesterday, has no child porn today, and has child porn tomorrow. I'm sure that there are days when Blogger manages to get rid of all the child porn, and days when it can't. If you want to see the site today, but the appeal takes place tomorrow, when the porn is back, do you get to see it or not? Do you have to ask for an appeal again the day after, when the porn comes back?
As to inadvertent exposure to child porn: I am at least six sigmas above normal for adventuresome web-surfing. I edit an eclectica site (Boing Boing), that has me roving far and wide online. In all my years of web-browsing, I have happened on accidental child porn on a website maybe twice. Not little kids, but "Maybe the model in that pop-up window was more like 15 than 18." I have never, in all my days, happened on the classic kiddy porn online (spam is a different matter, but this system won't stop child porn in spam).
I suspect that if you get infected with spyware, this might happen more often, but the problem there is spyware. If that's the problem, then the government should put tax money into fighting spyware (of course, a good start would be if Heritage Minister Bev Oda would drop Bill C-60 and take a stand against spyware in DRM), not into making ineffectual blacklists that *only* pose a serious impediments for people who aren't engaged in illicit acts.
I think that Michael's being entirely too sanguine about a secret blacklist of content. Having had my own material censored by such blacklists at the national and local level, I'm a lot less trusting of these systems.
The idea is fundamentally broken. First of all, it seems to me that keeping a secret list of "evil" content is inherently subject to abuse. This is certainly something we've seen in every single other instance of secret blacklisting: axe-grinding, personal vendettas, and ass-covering are the inevitable outcome of a system in which there is absolute authority, no due process, and no accountability.
The appeals process is likewise flawed. If the self-appointed censors opt to block, for example, material produced by and for gay teens about their sexuality (a common "edge-case" in child porn debates), then teens will have to out themselves as gay to avail themselves of the appeals process.
Notwithstanding this, it's hard to imagine how an appeals process would unfold. How could someone who wanted a site unblocked marshal a cogent argument for his case unless he could see the content and determine whether it was being inappropriately blocked?
Likewise, there is no imaginable way in which such a system could possibly be comprehensive in blocking child porn. It will certainly miss material that is genuinely child pornography. The Internet is too big for such a list to be compiled, and the censorship problems are compounded as the lists grow.
If, for example, Canada were to import Australia's secret list of bad sites, then Canadians would then be subject to the potential abuses of unscrupulous (or unintelligent) censors in Australia, as well as in Canada. You'd have to trust the Canadian censor-selector process, and the Australian one. The longer lists that would emerge from the merger process would be harder to audit -- the haystacks of real porn larger, the needles of censorship smaller.
Worst of all is the problem of site-level blocking for user-created content sites like Blogger, Typepad, Geocities, YouTube, etc. These sites inevitably contain child porn and other objectionable material, because new, anonymous accounts can be created there by people engaged in bad speech. However, these sites are also the primary vehicle by which users express their own feelings and beliefs and are frequently posted to anonymously by whistle-blowers, rape victims, dissidents in totalitarian states and others who have good reason to hide their identities.
Site-level blacklisting can't cope with these sites. They can try to block by subdomain or directory (e.g. childporn.typepad.com or blogger.com/childporn) but these URLs are very easy to change. The general response of net-censors to these sites is to block them entirely, or demand that they adhere to some imposed code of conduct that calls for eliminating anonymity and close monitoring of content.
Finally, these methods only stop stupid child pornographers from gaining access. Smart child pornographers use Tor, or IRC, or BitTorrent, or Usenet, or email to get their material. Any dedicated child pornography collector will not be stymied by Cleanfeed.
Like so many other systems that "keep honest users honest," Cleanfeed will only serve to keep honest users in chains, and allow bad actors to skip off without any substantial inconvenience.
"Rather than telling people not to use any of these products and convincing a few people with privacy paranoia they should be concentrating on improving the protections that information will have."
EFF is concentrating on this: they've announced a major lawsuit against AT&T for participating in the government's illegal wiretapping program.
But the surveillance powers of the state have expanded many times through the Bush Administration (and Clinton was hardly a friend of privacy, for that matter). So while it's important to put corporations on notice that their participation in surveillance might land them in hot water, it's likewise important to let the public know that corporations are often left with no choice, and required to surveil them secretly (e.g., because of FISA warrants, or through CALEA wiretapping).
EFF isn't pursuing a monotonic "stop sharing your information" strategy. It's approaching this on many prongs: lobbying the government to sunset the PATRIOT Act, asking the Supreme Court to strike it down, suing companies that participate in surveillance, publishing best-practices documents for privacy-friendly server-logging, and warning the public about the potential for privacy ruptures arising from law and practice.
It's unfair to characterize EFF as merely wagging its fingers at the public. The organization is pursuing this on every possible front.
At the end of the day, this screws iPod owners more than anyone else. Like Honda Civic owners, we have enjoyed a rich ecosystem of aftermarket products that pay dividends on our iPod investment. An iPod with the right third-party accessories can be a recorder, a transmitter, a boom box -- even a laser-pointer. Buying an iPod paid out well, because the iPod was a platform for innovation.
Apple's closing of the open market can only retard innovation. The space of accessory-makers willing to pay and ask for permission is necessarily smaller than the space of all potential accessory-makers. That means less competition for iPod accessories, which means higher prices and less innovation. That means that The Steve just devalued our investment in iPods.
One question: once permission is required, mightn't it be withheld? Can we be certain that Apple will allow all comers to buy a license? After all, they already threatened to sue a competitor, Real, that wanted to add new features to the iPod. What other new features -- features that iPod owners can benefit from -- might Apple veto?
"But it is no secret that I have no love for Cory. I think his milatant attitude is not helping the cause for copyright reform and relastic DRM soltutions."
It's news to me, anyway. Does that mean you don't want your birthday present? Crap. What am I going to do with this Speak and Spell I modded to include "soltutions" and "milatant"?
I've laid out Someone Comes to Town in two PDFs (one in A4 and one in Letter) that are optimized for very low-paper-consumption printing; if you have a duplexing printer, you can get my whole 300+ page novel onto fewer than 70 sheets and then side-staple them.
Many publishers are distributing advanced reading copies to blurbers, chain-buyers and reviewers in this format. I find it very convenient since it let me carry around a dozen copies of the book in the months before it was coming out to give to reviewers and blurbers I met in my travels.
By contrast, the traditional system for ARCs (still in use in the majority of cases) is to print and bind a softcover facilime of the edition for advance distribution to the trade. These "proofs" or "bound galleys" cost more than the hardcover to print (on a per-unit basis) and are in perpetually short supply -- it's heartbreaking to get an inquiry from a major newspaper or magazine for a review copy of your book before it's printed and to find out that all the ARCs have been distributed and there's no budget to print more. The low cost and nonexistent setup charges for printing galleys laid out like the PDFs I'm distributing means that your editor's assistant can just print off and staple together another galley whenever there's a demand.
By selling these things off, they are basically telling the donors that while their intentions may have been good, they don't think their items were worth using.
You labour under a misapprehension. Clarion solicited goods for the auction. I, and all the other donors, made their donations in that spirit.
There's an EFF Action Center item about the DMCRA. Just enter your name and ZIP, rewrite the form letter (if you care to) and click -- the letter (which urges your individual congresscritters to support the bill, hence the ZIP code) goes straight to the Hill:
Dear Representative,
I am writing today to ask you to co-sponsor Rep. Boucher & Doolittle's Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107). I believe that our copyright law has become unbalanced and fails to address the interests of the public.
The DMCRA would protect consumers from buying "copy protected" audio compact discs that may not work in personal computers, cars, and other consumer devices. It would also codify a citizen's right to make fair uses of copyrighted material. I think that this is an absolutely fundamental step towards redressing the imbalances that have plagued copyright law in recent years.
I hope you will co-sponsor the DMCRA and show your support for the public's rights in digital media. Thank you for your time.
Oh puh-leeze. Remind me to stay the hell away from any business you start: "The customer was using the product incorrectly! It's his fault! Who told you to use the music-sharing feature we provided! It was meant to be for demonstration purposes only!"
If Apple wants to succeed in the market, it has to provide the products its customers want. None of Apple's customers want a system that breaks after they replace a CPU three times. I have files generated on my first Apple computer (an Apple ][+, bought in 1979) that execute and are readable on my G4, which is approximately my millionth Apple computer. I have owned and discarded literally over a million dollars' worth of Apple equipment, if you count the machines I signed purchase orders when I was a sysadmin). The very idea that I should have to take a special step -- beyond *actually preserving my data* -- to preserve my data offends reason.
The fact is, one of Apple's best customers, a risk-taker willing to buy the 1.0 of everything they shipped, was burned by Apple's decision to include "features" that added cost (in engineering dollars) and removed functionality, at the behest of a trust of price-fixing record execs whom the FTC busted for being an illegal cartel.
Who does Apple need to please to sell hardware: Record executives or its customers?
Yes, clearly, it's all the customer's fault that the manufacturer's equipment has failed.
In point of fact, I have an iPod. I have a Powerbook. I listen to them at different times. But you *can't* synch an iPod with another PowerBook -- IOW, if I wanted to keep my iPod up to date with the machine I was using while my PowerBook was in the shop, I would have to allow iTunes to delete all the music on the iPod, including my bought-and-paid-for iTMS singles, and replace it with only those files that could be played on my spare CPU (i.e., my MP3s and not my AACs).
I went to some lengths to ensure that my data was available to me while it was in the shop: in particular, I have a rotating backup to two different external drives, and a spare Powerbook I use if mine goes in for service.
My files were there, online and accessible, in a machine with the same OS, applications and versions. They were there, in my music player. The files that I bought and I paid for and went to great lengths to preserve, on hand, online and ready to go.
And they wouldn't play. Not because of any lack of foresight on my part. Not because I lacked the right equipment. But because Apple has deliberately reduced the functionality of its equipment, devoting engineering dollars and introducing new failure modes into a technology that not a one of its customers desires: none of us woke up this morning and said, "Shit, I wish there was a file format just like MP3 except b0rked in some really spectacular and inconvenient ways."
I'm as big an Apple apologist as you'll ever meet, but it's ridiculous to blame the user for the manufacturer's deliberate introduction of flaws into its technology.
Re:So many stories, so little time...
on
The Zenith Angle
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· Score: 1
Nobody gets paid for writing dustjacket blurbs. It's a gift economy, pure and simple. (Off to write a blurb for the new Sean Stewart novel, which is a corker).
I got an advance copy for blurbage at the same time as Charlie (Me: "What's a technothriller?" Sterling: "It's like a science fiction novel, but it's got the President in it."). Here's my dustjacket take:
"Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling."
"we already have this sort of tax: In canadia and also (I think) in germania there is a tax on all CD-R media that goes directly to the music industry."
This isn't the kind of policy that's being proposed: the Canadian and German levies don't have any compulsory: IOW, paying the levy doesn't get you the right to use copyrighted works.
The important part here is the *compulsory license* (which allows you to share any song ever recorded) not the *optional levy* (which you only pay if you intend to share songs).
Germany and Canada have mandatory levies (everybody pays) but no compulsory license (paying doesn't get you the right to rip/burn/share).
> 1) I don't see it working on the international level. I cannot > imagine (say) France paying the record companies in the US, for > example.
This is a failure of your imagination, then. France *already* does this. Billions of dollars are collected globally (including in France) by various rights societies as part of compulsory licensing schemes, for music companies.
> 2) I don't think a fair solution to dividing the money exists. > Any solution based on measurement of downloads or similar will > instantly create a small industry around 'download boosting'.
Another failure of imagination. We've had compulsory licensing since the Piano Roll was litigated in 1908, with rights-societies and disbursement. It doesn't have to be exact, just representative and fair. I think that the capability of technologists to create good stats from network traffic -- even decentralized netowrk traffic -- has been amply demonstrated (see Kelly Truelove's research when he was with Clip2, for some examples). The absence of a P2P auditing system is hardly surprising, given the absence of a compulsory licensing scheme (which would be the raison d'etre for such an auditing system), and is in no way indicative of the impossibility of such a system.
> 3) Why should it be limited to music and video's? Why not > software, books, patents, etc.?
Why should it be? There's a compulsory *music* license for radio that doesn't include any compulsory *text* license -- IOW, you can legally play any song you lay hands on on your levy-paid radio station, but you can't read a book aloud without an author's permission. No one is credibly threatening to regulate both general purpose PCs and the Internet out of existence to enforce copyright on books. Why would we solve a problem that didn't exist?
> 4) Would this just be for personal accounts, or also for > professional accounts? Would Microsoft have to pay a charge for > every employee that has an account on their system (or do we > simply assume that noone ever downloads anything at work?)? What > if I had a one-man company?
MSFT could pay the levy, if they want to allow their employees to download music. Given the legal liability companies like Sun have faced when nailed with takedown and disconnect notice for file-sharing by their employees, it might very well be cheaper to buy a low-cost blanket license than to do the enforcement (which is not only technically challenging, but invasive of privacy and requires Vader-like HR policy) to shield them from contributory infringement liability. If I was a CEO faced with a choice of spending $N to allow my employees to download MP3s with impunity or spending $N to lock down my network, reduce its functionality, train my employees, audit my system, etc, I know which one I'd choose.
>> 5) Who decides how much money the record industry will get? The > record industry themselves? The US government? The UN? How will > we stop them from lobbying for ever-increasing income (which > they will be sure to do)? How will we respond to lesser economic > conditions, like now?
This is a good question: it's the important one. The amount of the levy should be negotiated. This negotiation will be a lot easier to accomplish, presumably, than the alternative: negotiating which kinds of network technology and general-purpose PC hardware is lawful. Those are the negotiations we're undergoing on the Hill today: I know which negotiation I'd prefer.
>> 6) What incentive will exist for the record companies to create > saleable songs? They might just as well sell white-noise (song > argue they already do, but that's another point), once they have > a guaranteed
The music industry has been governed by compulsories since 1908. There are compulsories on reproduction, distribution, performance, broadcast and more. These compulsories certainly do change the way that record companies do business, but the idea that it would provide an incentive to produce tracks of dead air. For one thing, the levies collected for compulsories are proportionally disbursed: that is, the more popular your track is, the more money you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey folks! Just to clarify: I said that the UK would renegotiate its relationship to the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) and Iain (reasonably enough, given the noisy room) heard OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Just a minor clarification, but I'd appreciate an upvote so confused people see it.
I'm a UK taxpayer and I conduct a lot of business with the US west coast. Presently, we're 8 hours apart for most of the year, and that means that I can *just barely* squeeze in a conference call with Californian colleagues (I'm co-owner of boingboing.net and all my partners are in LA and San Francisco) and still get out of the office in time to get my daughter from day-care and get home for dinner.
If the timezone difference goes to 9 hours, I'm buggered. The additional hour will have a direct, negative impact on my net income, as it will either require me to participate less in these transatlantic ventures (for example, it would probably mean no more freelance assignments for US editors, all of which generate UK taxes) or hire expensive babysitters to fetch the kid from day-care (something I also would rather not do for sentimental reasons having nothing to do with the economy).
I'm the Boing Boing editor who posted the image that the OP claims violated the Creative Commons license.
Read the OP closely: he's not saying that it was *his* image I took -- rather, that he was affronted on behalf of the photographer.
Except that the photographer in this case is my friend and colleague Jennifer Trant, and I used the photo with her permission, and then reproduced the entire CC license so that other people would know what terms they could use it on.
So, anonymous poster: how about the next time you decide to smear someone for infringing Creative Commons in the name of defending someone's copyrights, you actually make sure that the creator hasn't authorized the use?
Oh, if only ! Intel and AMD were (and are) enthusiastic participants in the creation of "trusted computing" architectures that allows data-files to discriminate against different playback/rendering software and operating systems, hardware configs, BIOSes, etc.
Registering a trademark -- or trade-dress -- does NOT confer the right to stop others form using it commercially. It confers the right to stop commercial users from using the mark/dress in a way that confuses or misleads the public about the origin of goods or services (actually, you get that even without registering; registration mostly ups the ante for statutory damages).
More important, it's absolutely, positively untrue that commercial use of a mark without permission automatically leads to losing the mark.
Here is a demonstration:
* Slashdot is a commercial site
* It makes money from ads
* Ford ford mustang focus ford ford forditty ford ford!
By your reasoning, Ford's failure to threaten me for posting the above will now cost it its priceless trademarks.
Trademark lawyers LOVE to bruit about the legend that a failure to pay them over and over again to harass anyone who takes your name in vain will cost you your trademarks. It's just a self-serving fairy tale.
Hey there -- I wrote the FA, and for the record:
/. front door!
* I didn't found Boing Boing -- I co-edit it with Mark Frauenfelder (who *did* found it, along with Carla Sinclair), Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz
* I didn't use the word AIDS in the article, and I don't think that this is comparable to AIDS; I used "autoimmune disorder," as in "allergy" or even "lupus" -- that is, any time when the systems that are supposed to protect you end up attacking you
Otherwise, many w00ts for this making it to the
This worked like a charm -- thanks!
I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to get T-bird 2 to bring in my settings from Thunderbird 1.5. I'm running Ubuntu Edgy Eft (for the moment, Feisty Fawn next week). When I first launched TB2, it asked me if I wanted to import settings, but didn't give any options for where to import from. I'm guessing this is incredibly easy and obvious, but the knowledge base isn't much help on this score. Any advice appreciated!
Do they really want us to believe that today's musicians will record more music if they get 95 years of copyright? Is there a musician (who doesn't write his own songs -- compositions get life ) for whom the deciding factor on recording a song is the infinitesimal chance that her song will be commercially viable after 50 years?
The risk that a musician is so dispirited by only getting 50 years of copyright on the recordings of her work is wholly theoretical. No one can point to such a musician. That musician, btw, isn't tomorrow's artist -- it's all recording artists since the term of phonogram monopoly was set at 50 years. Every song recorded for for the 20th century was produced with that incentive (or less).
However, there are two very real, non-theoretical groups of musicians for whom the existing term of 50 years is too long:
* Samplers and remixers. This is a non-theoretical, concrete and visible group of working musicians. They are unable to incorporate other works from culture into theirs without paying -- and not just paying, either. It's nearly impossible for an artist outside of the label system to clear samples from the labels' catalogues. That's because the labels give preferential treatement to one another in a mutually assured destruction dynamic (if EMI doesn't license its samples to Sony, then Sony can refuse to license to EMI). The effect of this for samplers and remixers in the UK is that they have to either:
1. Be criminals
2. Not make art
3. Sign up for the deal the labels offer, assign copyright in their works to the labels, and take the crummy "recoup"-based payment scheme the labels offer.
Talk about creating a buyer's market for what musicians have to sell!
* The other group of musicians harmed by the overlong term is those whose work is forgotten -- orphaned by society. In these cases, either the label still holds the copyright but won't reissue the musician's work (Universal's Decca warehouse in London holds the entire, unreleased catalogue of roots music, back to steel cylinders, and Universal hasn't even catalogued that collection, let alone made plans to re-release it); or no one knows who hold the copyright, because the deal was done so long ago.
At a recent Future of Music conference, Alanis Morrisette's attorney said that in his research, over 80% of all music recorded is not in the stream of commerce. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court fount that *ninety eight percent* of all copyrighted works are "orphans".
For these musicians, alive or dead, there is a fate worse than penury: obscurity. Their works -- the art they cherished and midwifed -- have been eliminated from the historical record. We have piled their recordings up in a huge bonfire and burned them in slow motion.
Finally, there's another non-hypothetical, real, visible group of artists for whom term extension is directly harmful: composers.
People who write songs get a much longer term of copyright than those who perform them. When Elvis goes into the public domain and his records are re-issued, the black songwriters whose work he performed *still* get paid by the reissuers. Right now, these composers are hostage to Elvis's label: if they don't re-release, the composers don't get a cheque. But the elimination of the majors from the equation makes it possible for a much more diverse population of entrepreneurs to arrange for such a re-release.
It's pure sophistry to wring your hands about some theoretical economic situation that will arise for musicians in 2056 when their present-day copyrights expire; that would be fine if there weren't great groups of concrete, present-day musicians crying out to have this happen.
The holders of today's 50 year copyrights fall into three groups:
* Holders of commercially non-viable copyrights (almost all of them fall into this category) -- this group receives direct harm from term extension
* Giant corporations that non-negotiably forced their artists to assign all copyright t
I don't understand -- it's not effective, it creates real harm, and yet you support it because the thing it's meant to stop (that it won't be effective at stopping) is bad? If you really hate child porn, shouldn't you reserve your support for proposals that have a chance of working?
Logistically, it's implausible that this will be undertaken by Canadian ISPs. Looking at every page on every site on the Internet to decide if it's child porn or not isn't the kind of thing an ISP has the resources for. More likely, Canada will outsource its blacklist to the same companies that provide blacklists for US libraries and corporations, as well as repressive national governments in Syria, the UAE and elsewhere. These companies, like Secure Computing, make filters like SmartFilter, and hire roomsful of Middle-American bluenoses to make their own determinations about the Internet. Their criteria are opaque, their appeals process a closed book.
The list they produce will be kept secret -- but not because it will constitute a guide to child porn online. These companies treat their lists as trade secrets and refuse to disclose them to anyone, including their customers. Instead, you can query them to ask if your URL is censored, but not get a list of all censored links.
How will the appeals process (which you count as the only means by which this official censorship will keep from growing to encompass material that isn't child porn) work in this world? You won't be able to see the sites that are blocked, so you won't be able to argue for their blockage being inappropriate. Initiating the appeals process will require you to out yourself as a suspected consumer of child porn (and if your appeal is denied, then it means that you ARE a consumer of child porn, right?).
If a site is removed from the list, will it stay off? What if it had child porn yesterday, has no child porn today, and has child porn tomorrow. I'm sure that there are days when Blogger manages to get rid of all the child porn, and days when it can't. If you want to see the site today, but the appeal takes place tomorrow, when the porn is back, do you get to see it or not? Do you have to ask for an appeal again the day after, when the porn comes back?
As to inadvertent exposure to child porn: I am at least six sigmas above normal for adventuresome web-surfing. I edit an eclectica site (Boing Boing), that has me roving far and wide online. In all my years of web-browsing, I have happened on accidental child porn on a website maybe twice. Not little kids, but "Maybe the model in that pop-up window was more like 15 than 18." I have never, in all my days, happened on the classic kiddy porn online (spam is a different matter, but this system won't stop child porn in spam).
I suspect that if you get infected with spyware, this might happen more often, but the problem there is spyware. If that's the problem, then the government should put tax money into fighting spyware (of course, a good start would be if Heritage Minister Bev Oda would drop Bill C-60 and take a stand against spyware in DRM), not into making ineffectual blacklists that *only* pose a serious impediments for people who aren't engaged in illicit acts.
I think that Michael's being entirely too sanguine about a secret blacklist of content. Having had my own material censored by such blacklists at the national and local level, I'm a lot less trusting of these systems.
The idea is fundamentally broken. First of all, it seems to me that keeping a secret list of "evil" content is inherently subject to abuse. This is certainly something we've seen in every single other instance of secret blacklisting: axe-grinding, personal vendettas, and ass-covering are the inevitable outcome of a system in which there is absolute authority, no due process, and no accountability.
The appeals process is likewise flawed. If the self-appointed censors opt to block, for example, material produced by and for gay teens about their sexuality (a common "edge-case" in child porn debates), then teens will have to out themselves as gay to avail themselves of the appeals process.
Notwithstanding this, it's hard to imagine how an appeals process would unfold. How could someone who wanted a site unblocked marshal a cogent argument for his case unless he could see the content and determine whether it was being inappropriately blocked?
Likewise, there is no imaginable way in which such a system could possibly be comprehensive in blocking child porn. It will certainly miss material that is genuinely child pornography. The Internet is too big for such a list to be compiled, and the censorship problems are compounded as the lists grow.
If, for example, Canada were to import Australia's secret list of bad sites, then Canadians would then be subject to the potential abuses of unscrupulous (or unintelligent) censors in Australia, as well as in Canada. You'd have to trust the Canadian censor-selector process, and the Australian one. The longer lists that would emerge from the merger process would be harder to audit -- the haystacks of real porn larger, the needles of censorship smaller.
Worst of all is the problem of site-level blocking for user-created content sites like Blogger, Typepad, Geocities, YouTube, etc. These sites inevitably contain child porn and other objectionable material, because new, anonymous accounts can be created there by people engaged in bad speech. However, these sites are also the primary vehicle by which users express their own feelings and beliefs and are frequently posted to anonymously by whistle-blowers, rape victims, dissidents in totalitarian states and others who have good reason to hide their identities.
Site-level blacklisting can't cope with these sites. They can try to block by subdomain or directory (e.g. childporn.typepad.com or blogger.com/childporn) but these URLs are very easy to change. The general response of net-censors to these sites is to block them entirely, or demand that they adhere to some imposed code of conduct that calls for eliminating anonymity and close monitoring of content.
Finally, these methods only stop stupid child pornographers from gaining access. Smart child pornographers use Tor, or IRC, or BitTorrent, or Usenet, or email to get their material. Any dedicated child pornography collector will not be stymied by Cleanfeed.
Like so many other systems that "keep honest users honest," Cleanfeed will only serve to keep honest users in chains, and allow bad actors to skip off without any substantial inconvenience.
"Rather than telling people not to use any of these products and convincing a few people with privacy paranoia they should be concentrating on improving the protections that information will have."
EFF is concentrating on this: they've announced a major lawsuit against AT&T for participating in the government's illegal wiretapping program.
But the surveillance powers of the state have expanded many times through the Bush Administration (and Clinton was hardly a friend of privacy, for that matter). So while it's important to put corporations on notice that their participation in surveillance might land them in hot water, it's likewise important to let the public know that corporations are often left with no choice, and required to surveil them secretly (e.g., because of FISA warrants, or through CALEA wiretapping).
EFF isn't pursuing a monotonic "stop sharing your information" strategy. It's approaching this on many prongs: lobbying the government to sunset the PATRIOT Act, asking the Supreme Court to strike it down, suing companies that participate in surveillance, publishing best-practices documents for privacy-friendly server-logging, and warning the public about the potential for privacy ruptures arising from law and practice.
It's unfair to characterize EFF as merely wagging its fingers at the public. The organization is pursuing this on every possible front.
(Disclosure: I am a former EFF employee)
At the end of the day, this screws iPod owners more than anyone else. Like Honda Civic owners, we have enjoyed a rich ecosystem of aftermarket products that pay dividends on our iPod investment. An iPod with the right third-party accessories can be a recorder, a transmitter, a boom box -- even a laser-pointer. Buying an iPod paid out well, because the iPod was a platform for innovation.
Apple's closing of the open market can only retard innovation. The space of accessory-makers willing to pay and ask for permission is necessarily smaller than the space of all potential accessory-makers. That means less competition for iPod accessories, which means higher prices and less innovation. That means that The Steve just devalued our investment in iPods.
One question: once permission is required, mightn't it be withheld? Can we be certain that Apple will allow all comers to buy a license? After all, they already threatened to sue a competitor, Real, that wanted to add new features to the iPod. What other new features -- features that iPod owners can benefit from -- might Apple veto?
"But it is no secret that I have no love for Cory. I think his milatant attitude is not helping the cause for copyright reform and relastic DRM soltutions."
It's news to me, anyway. Does that mean you don't want your birthday present? Crap. What am I going to do with this Speak and Spell I modded to include "soltutions" and "milatant"?
Actually, I did one better: I released the book as printer-optimized PDFs, as well-formed XHTML, and as clean UTF-8 text. Converting from PDFs sucks.
Many publishers are distributing advanced reading copies to blurbers, chain-buyers and reviewers in this format. I find it very convenient since it let me carry around a dozen copies of the book in the months before it was coming out to give to reviewers and blurbers I met in my travels.
By contrast, the traditional system for ARCs (still in use in the majority of cases) is to print and bind a softcover facilime of the edition for advance distribution to the trade. These "proofs" or "bound galleys" cost more than the hardcover to print (on a per-unit basis) and are in perpetually short supply -- it's heartbreaking to get an inquiry from a major newspaper or magazine for a review copy of your book before it's printed and to find out that all the ARCs have been distributed and there's no budget to print more. The low cost and nonexistent setup charges for printing galleys laid out like the PDFs I'm distributing means that your editor's assistant can just print off and staple together another galley whenever there's a demand.
Well, the last time it happened, I scanned it back in and re-released it under a CC license.
You labour under a misapprehension. Clarion solicited goods for the auction. I, and all the other donors, made their donations in that spirit.
Oh puh-leeze. Remind me to stay the hell away from any business you start: "The customer was using the product incorrectly! It's his fault! Who told you to use the music-sharing feature we provided! It was meant to be for demonstration purposes only!"
If Apple wants to succeed in the market, it has to provide the products its customers want. None of Apple's customers want a system that breaks after they replace a CPU three times. I have files generated on my first Apple computer (an Apple ][+, bought in 1979) that execute and are readable on my G4, which is approximately my millionth Apple computer. I have owned and discarded literally over a million dollars' worth of Apple equipment, if you count the machines I signed purchase orders when I was a sysadmin). The very idea that I should have to take a special step -- beyond *actually preserving my data* -- to preserve my data offends reason.
The fact is, one of Apple's best customers, a risk-taker willing to buy the 1.0 of everything they shipped, was burned by Apple's decision to include "features" that added cost (in engineering dollars) and removed functionality, at the behest of a trust of price-fixing record execs whom the FTC busted for being an illegal cartel.
Who does Apple need to please to sell hardware: Record executives or its customers?
Talk about fallacious reasoning.
Yes, clearly, it's all the customer's fault that the manufacturer's equipment has failed.
In point of fact, I have an iPod. I have a Powerbook. I listen to them at different times. But you *can't* synch an iPod with another PowerBook -- IOW, if I wanted to keep my iPod up to date with the machine I was using while my PowerBook was in the shop, I would have to allow iTunes to delete all the music on the iPod, including my bought-and-paid-for iTMS singles, and replace it with only those files that could be played on my spare CPU (i.e., my MP3s and not my AACs).
I went to some lengths to ensure that my data was available to me while it was in the shop: in particular, I have a rotating backup to two different external drives, and a spare Powerbook I use if mine goes in for service.
My files were there, online and accessible, in a machine with the same OS, applications and versions. They were there, in my music player. The files that I bought and I paid for and went to great lengths to preserve, on hand, online and ready to go.
And they wouldn't play. Not because of any lack of foresight on my part. Not because I lacked the right equipment. But because Apple has deliberately reduced the functionality of its equipment, devoting engineering dollars and introducing new failure modes into a technology that not a one of its customers desires: none of us woke up this morning and said, "Shit, I wish there was a file format just like MP3 except b0rked in some really spectacular and inconvenient ways."
I'm as big an Apple apologist as you'll ever meet, but it's ridiculous to blame the user for the manufacturer's deliberate introduction of flaws into its technology.
Nobody gets paid for writing dustjacket blurbs. It's a gift economy, pure and simple. (Off to write a blurb for the new Sean Stewart novel, which is a corker).
"Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling."
BTW, Sterling called this kind of writing "Nowpunk" at his SXSW talk last week: http://craphound.com/sterlingsxsw04.txt
"we already have this sort of tax: In canadia and also (I think) in germania there is a tax on all CD-R media that goes directly to the music industry."
This isn't the kind of policy that's being proposed: the Canadian and German levies don't have any compulsory: IOW, paying the levy doesn't get you the right to use copyrighted works.
The important part here is the *compulsory license* (which allows you to share any song ever recorded) not the *optional levy* (which you only pay if you intend to share songs).
Germany and Canada have mandatory levies (everybody pays) but no compulsory license (paying doesn't get you the right to rip/burn/share).
> 1) I don't see it working on the international level. I cannot
> imagine (say) France paying the record companies in the US, for
> example.
This is a failure of your imagination, then. France *already* does this. Billions of dollars are collected globally (including in France) by various rights societies as part of compulsory licensing schemes, for music companies.
> 2) I don't think a fair solution to dividing the money exists.
> Any solution based on measurement of downloads or similar will
> instantly create a small industry around 'download boosting'.
Another failure of imagination. We've had compulsory licensing since the Piano Roll was litigated in 1908, with rights-societies and disbursement. It doesn't have to be exact, just representative and fair. I think that the capability of technologists to create good stats from network traffic -- even decentralized netowrk traffic -- has been amply demonstrated (see Kelly Truelove's research when he was with Clip2, for some examples). The absence of a P2P auditing system is hardly surprising, given the absence of a compulsory licensing scheme (which would be the raison d'etre for such an auditing system), and is in no way indicative of the impossibility of such a system.
> 3) Why should it be limited to music and video's? Why not
> software, books, patents, etc.?
Why should it be? There's a compulsory *music* license for radio that doesn't include any compulsory *text* license -- IOW, you can legally play any song you lay hands on on your levy-paid radio station, but you can't read a book aloud without an author's permission. No one is credibly threatening to regulate both general purpose PCs and the Internet out of existence to enforce copyright on books. Why would we solve a problem that didn't exist?
> 4) Would this just be for personal accounts, or also for
> professional accounts? Would Microsoft have to pay a charge for
> every employee that has an account on their system (or do we
> simply assume that noone ever downloads anything at work?)? What
> if I had a one-man company?
MSFT could pay the levy, if they want to allow their employees to download music. Given the legal liability companies like Sun have faced when nailed with takedown and disconnect notice for file-sharing by their employees, it might very well be cheaper to buy a low-cost blanket license than to do the enforcement (which is not only technically challenging, but invasive of privacy and requires Vader-like HR policy) to shield them from contributory infringement liability. If I was a CEO faced with a choice of spending $N to allow my employees to download MP3s with impunity or spending $N to lock down my network, reduce its functionality, train my employees, audit my system, etc, I know which one I'd choose.
>> 5) Who decides how much money the record industry will get? The
> record industry themselves? The US government? The UN? How will
> we stop them from lobbying for ever-increasing income (which
> they will be sure to do)? How will we respond to lesser economic
> conditions, like now?
This is a good question: it's the important one. The amount of the levy should be negotiated. This negotiation will be a lot easier to accomplish, presumably, than the alternative: negotiating which kinds of network technology and general-purpose PC hardware is lawful. Those are the negotiations we're undergoing on the Hill today: I know which negotiation I'd prefer.
>> 6) What incentive will exist for the record companies to create
> saleable songs? They might just as well sell white-noise (song
> argue they already do, but that's another point), once they have
> a guaranteed
The music industry has been governed by compulsories since 1908. There are compulsories on reproduction, distribution, performance, broadcast and more. These compulsories certainly do change the way that record companies do business, but the idea that it would provide an incentive to produce tracks of dead air. For one thing, the levies collected for compulsories are proportionally disbursed: that is, the more popular your track is, the more money you get.