If I design some nice web graphics and you download them an view them as part of visiting my website, do I get a chunk of this tax? You just downloaded and distributed my copyrighted material, right? What if it's Flash instead of graphics? What about the text on my site? That's my copyright.
Last time I checked, no one was advocating compulsories for web graphics: probably because there's no widespread alarm over infringement of web graphics.
We have a compulsory music license for radio. We don't have a compulsory *speech* license for radio. It's legal to play any song you can find on the radio (provided you've paid the levy), but it's illegal to read someone's book in its entirety over the radio.
We have many compulsory licenses in place that require auditing on these lines (live performance, radio, etc), and none of them are at odds with anonymity.
It seems like you're thinking that auditing for disbursement would have to be perfect, rather than representative. There are lots of ways imaginable for gathering statistical impressions of the traffic on P2P nets without mandatory loss of privacy:
* Paid Nielsen families who run spyware on their own HDDs
* Request monitoring at super-peers
* Network spidering
* A standards-defined API that clients can send an XML ping to, describing the tracks downloaded without any personal info
* Etc.
The anonymity argument is circular: we have no deployed technology in the field that can audit P2P networks without compromising anonymity *because* we have no compulsory license that demands such a system.
DRM is an enormous business that's sucking billions of dollars in capital and millions of talented engineer hours. If the need for DRM were obviated and a business were created for P2P auditing, do you really think that those engineers will be unable to come up with an anonymity-respecting system for deriving a good approximation of the relative popularity of digital music files on P2P nets?
What's more, there are a bunch of hidden costs that would be offset by an ISP levy that legalized filesharing:
* Legal compliance: ISPs are drowning in automated takedown/disclosure/termination notices from the recording industry to stop file-sharers. These aren't cheap to deal with and they're REALLY not cheap to litigate (check out the $millions that Verizon is spending to keep from having to disclose private customer info to rights-holders)
* Bandwidth: The primary design consideration in P2P design today is legal-attack-resistance. This makes superpeer, swarmloading and optimistic cacheing strategies very hard to implement. If P2P were legal, P2P developers could build tools that minimize the amount of non-local bandwidth used through optimistic cacheing and preferring downloads from nearby hosts on the same ISP's network. Given that bandwidth cost is the reason most often cited for ISP opposition to P2P, this should make a compulsory *very* attractive to ISPs.
There's a lot of worry about freeriders in such a system: "I don't download music, why should I pay for it," but your ISP is already *full* of freeriders. I have Earthlink DSL, but I manage my own mail on a server in a cage, and my own web-server on another server in another cage. Yet I still "pay" for these services. In some sense, I am subsidizing the activities of everyone with an @earthlink.net email address. But the cost of rebating my $0.50/month is more than $0.50/month: IOW, ditching the freeriders makes the service more expensive, not cheaper.
And FWIW, since I travel a lot, I use my "free" 20h of Earthlink dial-up nearly every month. Which means that I'm a freerider on Earthlink's dialup service, subsidized by DSL customers who never dial Earthlink from a hotel-room.
Let ISPs who don't want to offer file-sharing opt out of the levy. I could get DSL from another ISP, like RawBandwidth, which won't offer me POP or SMTP, but it's no cheaper than Earthlink's national DSL.
Fred doesn't say that all Internet users should pay -- rather, that we should collect a pool of money from Internet users. There are lots of mechanisms for this, including allowing ISPs to opt into bundling the compulsory fee into their line-charges in exchange for elimination of liability for sharing on their net. That way, users who wanted to share music and compensate artists could opt to use a royalty-paid ISP; other users who didn't want to download music would opt for another ISP (and that other ISP would continue to cooperate with the rightsholders to bust people who shared without paying the fee, an activity that would seem a lot less jerky if there was a cheap and legal alternative).
We live in a world of socialized costs. Copyright itself is a socialized cost: a government-created monopoly that exists to support the arts by giving creators limited control over their works. Constiutionally, we're charged with promoting the useful arts and sciences by affording artists a monopoly over their works.
The current structure of that monopoly is untenable. It just doesn't work in the face of Internet file-sharing. This isn't new: the same was true of radio, and the answer is much the same: you can either negotiate to pay for every single track you want to share (which basically means paying a laywer $200/hr to negotiate a $0.25 royalty, over and over again), or you can opt into a levy that gives you access to every song ever recorded.
The CARP royalties for Internet Streaming Radio are an interesting example. While the fees negotiated were *far* too high, the important piece was that the CARP deal allowed anyone to stream any song, and guaranteed that a portion of the fees would be paid directly to the artists, regardless of the terms of the artist's deal with his/her publisher.
The old model of compensating artists doesn't translate into the online world. In order to preserve that model, we need DRM technology, we need to police online communication, we need laws that mandate which devices can be built, we need to ban open source media-players, we need to outlaw circumvention. All of these carry tremendous social costs for every single Internet user, music downloaders or no.
A compulsory license and an optional levy are very different. They allow artists to be compensated for their work, and they don't require any regulation of technology.
I prefer to think of myself as a science fiction writer, not a content creator. As John Gilmore says, "Since nobody knows a definition for 'content,' you can say the most outrageous things about it and get away with it."
I work for a nonprofit, so my science fiction writing income actually accounts for a substantial chunk of my living.
I have never written an "original" word in my life. Every idea I've had has been inspired by those who came before me. I just released my first novel, both as a hardcover book and an ebook under the terms of a Creative Commons license. The novel is set in Walt Disney World, and revolves around the efforts of preservationists in a transhuman future who strive to keep the rides true to the original Imagineers' intent.
I take a lot of flak for my genuine admiration for the Disney Parks and films -- people want to know why I've thrown my lot in with the corporate crooks who've stolen the public domain out from under us. The fact of the matter is that Walt Disney is the poster child for the public domain. Walt's greatest works were built by taking off-the-shelf parts and stories and remixing them in novel and useful ways. Lessig notes that Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey cartoon, was a remix of a popular film called "Steamboat Bill." Exploring the bonus material on the latest DVD release of the cartoon shows that not only did Walt thrive on the public domain, but that the Disney Company's interest is in closing off that domain to everyone else:
"Orchestra starts playing opening verses of 'Steamboat Bill.' Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney, Inc.'s latest films with an opening that copies the music, and see how far your Walt Empire gets."
Any artist who claims that her work is 100% original is lying or self-deluded. Art is embedded in culture. Art is a web, and it is enmeshed with the art that came before it and comes after it. Deriding the public domain as the refuge of the unimaginative makes about as much sense as pissing on coders who don't write their own OSes (or invent their own non-Turing, non-Von Neumann, non-non-Von Neumann computing engines, for that matter).
Fox Studios' President of Engineering, Andy Setos, wrote the "Broadcast Flag" Proposal that was brought to the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. Then he, Intel and Mitsubishi gathered the biggest IT and CE companies in the world and asked them to agree to its provisions:
No digital output technology may be incorporated into DTV devices (including commodity general-purpose PCs) without Hollywood's permission
No digital removable media technology may be incorporated into DTV devices (including commodity general-purpose PCs) without Hollywood's permission
Setos described this as a "well-mannered marketplace." This is the kind of co-operation that Fox wants from technology: roll over, bare your belly, and build only those devices that Hollywood grants permission for.
Dan Gillmor, Victor Nemachek (from El Gato, makers of the OSX PVR eyeTV), JD Lasica (a journo working on a book on fair use), Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly and I (from EFF) did a panel on fair use, DRM, and the digital hub at O'Reilly's OS X con in Santa Clara yesterday. Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman blogged a transcript of the panel here,with lots more depth on the subject.
I just spoke with the COO of the IPEverywhere about this study, and confirmed that the methodology only established whether a node was running WEP (a "security measure" of dubious value).
That means that many of the "unsecured" nodes in this report may have had other means of securing themselves, from switch- or AP-based MAC filtering to captive portals such as NoCat. Moreover, the protocol for this study did not establish whether the open APs in question were handing out DHCP leases (or, indeed, whether they were connected to the Internet at all).
Finally, this study did not investigate in any depth whether the open APs were deliberately or accidentally left open. Many of us run open "community" networks around the world (I operate one in Toronto at King and Niagara, and three in San Francisco, two at 19th and Shotwell, and one on Sycamore near 17th and Mission). These networks are deliberately "unsecured" and are provided out of public-spiritedness, or even out of a political commitment to providing tools for anonymous speech on the Internet -- anonymous speech being fundamental to democratic discourse.
Since WEP is such a poor "security" measure, the best practice for wireless users is to use SSH and/or SSL tunnels to secure sensitive traffic to a proxy (either remote or on your own network). In fact, if you're a promiscuous user of any network -- conference centers, airport lounges, hotel rooms, schools, etc -- you should assume that unless your messages are encrypted, they will be sniffed on the wire.
The primary "security" concern about open wireless seems to be that a "rogue" AP will be installed behind a firewall. The firewall, of course, is hardly sufficient in and of itself for securing a network. It's based on the presumption that everyone on one side of the firewall is trustworthy, and everyone on the other side is untrustworthy. We know, though, that this is a fallacy. Getting inside the firewall -- either through physical intrusion (think of visitors to your office plugging into the the network to check mail) or virtually, by 0wning a box on the network with a trojan -- is not difficult for a determined intruder. Meanwhile, the legitimate users of your network resources are often outside your firewall (mobile execs at a client site, for example) and thus not only walled off from the rest of the network, but also vulnerable to attack, since their machines' first line of defense is the firewall, which they are suddenly out of.
Security is hard. The proper place to draw your network perimiter isn't around your office, but around each machine. Personal firewalls, regular applications of security patches, good passwords and user education provide genuine security. Firewalls (and FUD about open APs) doesn't.
So, mea culpa, I wrote the bit about the FCC before Aug 8, which meant that what the FCC ended up accouncing differed slightly from what I suggested there.
Chairman Powell is has opened rulemaking proceedings on a Broadcast Flag mandate, but he's said that he's not taking the BPDG proposal as his starting point. During the announcement, the FCC invited the BPDG co-chairs to submit their proposal for the record, but said that it wouldn't be considered ahead of any other comments or proposals.
You can read lots more about the Broadcast Flag on "Consensus at Lawyerpoint," the EFF's BPDG blog, http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org.
Likewise, you can sign up to get information on what you can do to submit *informed* objections (i.e., not "Hot Grits!") to the FCC by visiting action.eff.org.
As I pointed out, this isn't just fair use, it's my *own work*. I wrote the original Boing Boing post, and then pasted it here on Slashdot. No use is fairer than that.
Leaving aside whether there is a legitimate interest in Web businesses preventing deep linking, such an interest wouldn't apply to NPR. NPR is not based on a "business model of 'free content with revenue generatioin via paid ads.'" NPR radio and NPR online do not carry advertising. NPR derives its revenue from private donations.
NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.
The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.
However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.
Unpacking that:
The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.
This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.
We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.
Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.
We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.
You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.
This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.
No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.
NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.
How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.
In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."
To those of you who conclude that these copy-prevention technologies will only be mandated in the US, leaving the rest of the world free to carry on with the business of innovating at will, I offer the current draft of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, to which the co-chairs (from Intel, Fox and Mitsubishi) have added the following language:
Scope
This document sets forth requirements to be imposed on certain products that receive
unencrypted digital terrestrial broadcast content to protect such content against
unauthorized redistribution [outside of the home or personal digital network
environment].2 The document assumes that the requirements will apply in the United
States, although it is anticipated that the requirements could be modified, as necessary,
for use in other jurisdictions.
Got that? The conspiracy knows that it's going to have to extra-territorialize if its going to acheive its ends, and it's rarin' to go.
In a speech last week, [Commerce Department undersecretary for intellectual property] Rogan said that "negotiations are presently underway among hardware manufacturers and content owners to develop improved means for protecting online content," and legislators should wait for results before voting on a proposal such as the Hollings bill.
"Before Congress rushes into the imposition of a legislative solution," Rogan said, "I hope its members will grant more time for the free market to find its own middle ground."
Those negotiations are the BPDG, a consipiracy of 15-some tech and entertainment companies. They're writing a "standard" that they've asked Hollings to give the FCC the power to give the force of law to. It will be illegal to manufacture or distribute any device or software that can access digital broadcast TV if it doesn't meet the "standard."
And what will the "standard" require? Well, for starters, all tech will have to be "tamper-resistant," which means that you won't be able to tinker with the hardware and software you own. Open source will be illegal.
Those devices that are allowed will only be permitted to incorporate cables and media that limit copying. And new technologies will only be added to the list of permitted tech if Hollywood says so (the standard that the studios have proposed for evaluating new tech is "We'll know it when we see it").
Imagine it: HDTV devices and computers that interface with them will only be allowed to incorporate broken technologies that Hollywood permits. If your computer monitor doesn't include the "approved" inputs, it will be against the law for your computer to output a digital video stream to it. The manufacturer will have two choices:
Add a second input that uses a "protected" method (you'll need two wires to connect your computer to your monitor)
Take away the "unprotected" input and just use one, "protected" wire, which means that you won't be able to buy a computer that allows you to do anything you want with the video that you make on your own
We all got upset about the Hollings Bill because it would use the force of law to control how a computer could be made. The BPDG will do exactly that -- it's not a "free market middle-ground," it's Hollywood's absolute dominion over your machine.
Don't let 'em fool you -- CBDTPA is just another way of spelling BPDG, and it's a-comin' soon. The BPDG says it'll have its standard finalized by May 17, and no one's even noticing. The BPDG meetings are public (though they cost $100 to attend). There's one coming up in LA on Monday, and wouldn't it be sweet if a couple hundred of us showed up to tell 'em what we think?
I'm writing today to voice my support for Amazon's innovative used-book program. I'm a professional science fiction writer and journalist, the recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and the author of two novels forthcoming from Tor Books and a short-story collection forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows. I also spent my adolescence working in book stores and libraries.
I'm quite distressed at the Authors Guild's reactionary position on Amazon's used-book service. As a new author whose books will be published as $25+ hardcovers, my principal challenge will be to find a way to introduce my work to new readers. The intershelving of used and new books has been shown to be an effective means of driving sales of new authors -- I discovered this myself when I was a bookseller, and it's an experience that has been replicated in many bookstores, from corner operations like my local genre bookstore, Borderlands Books, all the way up to Powell's Books, the largest bookstore in the world.
What's more, the Amazon used-books service does not push the bounds of established copyright law or practice *at all*. The right of a consumer to resell the property s/he's lawfully acquired (called the Doctrine of First Sale) is the reason that we are able to have used bookstores at all. Also, yard-sales, charitable donations, library discard sales, collectibles sales, etc and so forth.
Indeed, one of the most revolting characteristics of many e-book technologies is that they abridge this right -- think of all the tens of millions of books donated to schools and libraries, sent to prisons and literacy programs, passed from friend to friend or within a family. The Doctrine of First Sale makes all of this possible.
Amazon's used-book service only reduces the friction involved in a used-book sale. When I worked at Bakka, a science fiction bookstore with new and used stock, young sf fans with tight budgets would often request popular titles that were available new on the shelf as used copies on their wish-lists. These are precisely the readers whose disappearance that we science fiction writers lament at every sf con as we look around at our greying ranks and wonder whether the genre is disappearing. Amazon's service makes this kind of thing easier and better for those readers -- why would we, as authors, wish to stop Amazon from extending the service?
Arguably, this is what the Internet is *for* -- connecting people at low cost, finding new market niches and exploiting them, reducing friction.
Copyright is a bargain between the public domain and creators -- we are able to create well and profit by our creations because we are able to benefit from the commons created by the works of those who came before us, which have entered the public domain. The bargain allows us to be effective creators, and it allows others to be innovative consumers.
Here Amazon and its customers (who are providing every one of those used books!) are building an innovative secondary market that will improve the overall economy. The bargain allows our *creative* expression, it allows their *innovative* expression.
To quote one of my colleagues:
> Companies should be lauded for extracting additional value from the formerly > fallow copyright resources that belong to the public (like first sale and > fair use).
In short, keep your disapprobation to yourself -- I want to work *with* my readers, not *against* them.
Thank you,
Cory Doctorow, Former Canadian Regional Director, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
Bruce Sterling said it best, in his address to the 1991 Computer Game Developers' Conference:
Don't become a
well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull.
Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle.
Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the
muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge
plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's
off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.
If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read
about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites
and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of
extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have
always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the
apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You
didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're
here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried
because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable
or uncomfortable or dangerous.
And when it comes to studying art, well, study it, but study it
to your own purposes. If you're obsessively weird enough to be a
good weird artist, you generally face a basic problem. The basic
problem with weird art is not the height of the ceiling above
it, it's the pitfalls under its feet. The worst problem is the
blundering, the solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized,
the rotten spots that you skid over because you're too freaked
out and not paying proper attention. You may not need much
characterization in computer entertainment. Delineating
character may not be the point of your work. That's no excuse
for making lame characters that are actively bad. You may not
need a strong, supple, thoroughly worked-out storyline. That
doesn't mean that you can get away with a stupid plot made of
chickenwire and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make
sure you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the heights
of professionalism. Just make sure you're a professional *game
designer.*
You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by
knocking it off with the bullshit. Popular media always reek of
bullshit, they reek of carelessness and self-taught clumsiness
and charlatanry. To live outside the aesthetic laws you must be
honest. Know what you're doing; don't settle for the way it
looks just cause everybody's used to it. If you've got a palette
of 2 million colors, then don't settle for designs that look
like a cheap four-color comic book. If you're gonna do graphic
design, then learn what good graphic design looks like; don't
screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer blithe ignorance.
If you write a manual, don't write a semiliterate manual with
bad grammar and misspellings. If you want to be taken seriously
by your fellows and by the populace at large, then don't give
people any excuse to dismiss you. Don't be your own worst enemy.
Don't put yourself down.
Damn, I never expected that/. would actually pick up the story -- hell, I musta made 15 submissions on techy subjects before this, without a peep, and my little vanity story gets picked up.
I'm totally overwhelmed by the positive response here (and, of course, wincing at the negative ones... Yah, I shoulda closed the <i> tag, I need to fix the stylesheet, I shoulda linked to Vinge, etc etc etc), especially from old friends and other nominees.
Thanks folks. If you're interested in more information on the notion that "piracy" is in fact the future of media-distribution, have a look at the software company I founded last year, openCOLA -- yes, we're the same people who are releasing an open source softdrink.
National Post:...John Henson, the 24-year-old chief technology officer...
John is 27. He only acts like a 24-year-old.
Actually, John is 26, and he mostly acts like a hyperintelligent six-year-old on a sugar-high who's been force-fed every movie the Marx Brothers ever made.
Also, his title isn't Chief Technology Officer, it's CETI -- Chief Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or, as we like to say, "Far-Out Man."
There's an excellent piece in the AI text "In the Age of Intelligent Machines" where the author discusses this very problem. He reaches the conclusion that chess is, in fact, unsolvable.
This conclusion is based on a calculation that demonstrates that there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the Universe -- you'd have nowhere to store your candidate games while you evaluated their perfectness.
Though, as someone pointed out upstream, there's no reason to keep every game in memory.
I did an interview with Gibson a couple months ago for The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. We talked about Japan-cool, popculture strip-mining, humanism in sf, and other nerdy subjects.
You can read the interview (and download a Palm doc of it) here. The raw transcript is here.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, no one was advocating compulsories for web graphics: probably because there's no widespread alarm over infringement of web graphics.
We have a compulsory music license for radio. We don't have a compulsory *speech* license for radio. It's legal to play any song you can find on the radio (provided you've paid the levy), but it's illegal to read someone's book in its entirety over the radio.
This isn't binary.
We have many compulsory licenses in place that require auditing on these lines (live performance, radio, etc), and none of them are at odds with anonymity.
It seems like you're thinking that auditing for disbursement would have to be perfect, rather than representative. There are lots of ways imaginable for gathering statistical impressions of the traffic on P2P nets without mandatory loss of privacy:
* Paid Nielsen families who run spyware on their own HDDs
* Request monitoring at super-peers
* Network spidering
* A standards-defined API that clients can send an XML ping to, describing the tracks downloaded without any personal info
* Etc.
The anonymity argument is circular: we have no deployed technology in the field that can audit P2P networks without compromising anonymity *because* we have no compulsory license that demands such a system.
DRM is an enormous business that's sucking billions of dollars in capital and millions of talented engineer hours. If the need for DRM were obviated and a business were created for P2P auditing, do you really think that those engineers will be unable to come up with an anonymity-respecting system for deriving a good approximation of the relative popularity of digital music files on P2P nets?
What's more, there are a bunch of hidden costs that would be offset by an ISP levy that legalized filesharing:
* Legal compliance: ISPs are drowning in automated takedown/disclosure/termination notices from the recording industry to stop file-sharers. These aren't cheap to deal with and they're REALLY not cheap to litigate (check out the $millions that Verizon is spending to keep from having to disclose private customer info to rights-holders)
* Bandwidth: The primary design consideration in P2P design today is legal-attack-resistance. This makes superpeer, swarmloading and optimistic cacheing strategies very hard to implement. If P2P were legal, P2P developers could build tools that minimize the amount of non-local bandwidth used through optimistic cacheing and preferring downloads from nearby hosts on the same ISP's network. Given that bandwidth cost is the reason most often cited for ISP opposition to P2P, this should make a compulsory *very* attractive to ISPs.
There's a lot of worry about freeriders in such a system: "I don't download music, why should I pay for it," but your ISP is already *full* of freeriders. I have Earthlink DSL, but I manage my own mail on a server in a cage, and my own web-server on another server in another cage. Yet I still "pay" for these services. In some sense, I am subsidizing the activities of everyone with an @earthlink.net email address. But the cost of rebating my $0.50/month is more than $0.50/month: IOW, ditching the freeriders makes the service more expensive, not cheaper.
And FWIW, since I travel a lot, I use my "free" 20h of Earthlink dial-up nearly every month. Which means that I'm a freerider on Earthlink's dialup service, subsidized by DSL customers who never dial Earthlink from a hotel-room.
Let ISPs who don't want to offer file-sharing opt out of the levy. I could get DSL from another ISP, like RawBandwidth, which won't offer me POP or SMTP, but it's no cheaper than Earthlink's national DSL.
Fred doesn't say that all Internet users should pay -- rather, that we should collect a pool of money from Internet users. There are lots of mechanisms for this, including allowing ISPs to opt into bundling the compulsory fee into their line-charges in exchange for elimination of liability for sharing on their net. That way, users who wanted to share music and compensate artists could opt to use a royalty-paid ISP; other users who didn't want to download music would opt for another ISP (and that other ISP would continue to cooperate with the rightsholders to bust people who shared without paying the fee, an activity that would seem a lot less jerky if there was a cheap and legal alternative).
We live in a world of socialized costs. Copyright itself is a socialized cost: a government-created monopoly that exists to support the arts by giving creators limited control over their works. Constiutionally, we're charged with promoting the useful arts and sciences by affording artists a monopoly over their works.
The current structure of that monopoly is untenable. It just doesn't work in the face of Internet file-sharing. This isn't new: the same was true of radio, and the answer is much the same: you can either negotiate to pay for every single track you want to share (which basically means paying a laywer $200/hr to negotiate a $0.25 royalty, over and over again), or you can opt into a levy that gives you access to every song ever recorded.
The CARP royalties for Internet Streaming Radio are an interesting example. While the fees negotiated were *far* too high, the important piece was that the CARP deal allowed anyone to stream any song, and guaranteed that a portion of the fees would be paid directly to the artists, regardless of the terms of the artist's deal with his/her publisher.
The old model of compensating artists doesn't translate into the online world. In order to preserve that model, we need DRM technology, we need to police online communication, we need laws that mandate which devices can be built, we need to ban open source media-players, we need to outlaw circumvention. All of these carry tremendous social costs for every single Internet user, music downloaders or no.
A compulsory license and an optional levy are very different. They allow artists to be compensated for their work, and they don't require any regulation of technology.
I work for a nonprofit, so my science fiction writing income actually accounts for a substantial chunk of my living.
I have never written an "original" word in my life. Every idea I've had has been inspired by those who came before me. I just released my first novel, both as a hardcover book and an ebook under the terms of a Creative Commons license. The novel is set in Walt Disney World, and revolves around the efforts of preservationists in a transhuman future who strive to keep the rides true to the original Imagineers' intent.
I take a lot of flak for my genuine admiration for the Disney Parks and films -- people want to know why I've thrown my lot in with the corporate crooks who've stolen the public domain out from under us. The fact of the matter is that Walt Disney is the poster child for the public domain. Walt's greatest works were built by taking off-the-shelf parts and stories and remixing them in novel and useful ways. Lessig notes that Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey cartoon, was a remix of a popular film called "Steamboat Bill." Exploring the bonus material on the latest DVD release of the cartoon shows that not only did Walt thrive on the public domain, but that the Disney Company's interest is in closing off that domain to everyone else:
"Orchestra starts playing opening verses of 'Steamboat Bill.' Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney, Inc.'s latest films with an opening that copies the music, and see how far your Walt Empire gets."
Any artist who claims that her work is 100% original is lying or self-deluded. Art is embedded in culture. Art is a web, and it is enmeshed with the art that came before it and comes after it. Deriding the public domain as the refuge of the unimaginative makes about as much sense as pissing on coders who don't write their own OSes (or invent their own non-Turing, non-Von Neumann, non-non-Von Neumann computing engines, for that matter).
- All open source digital TV and Software Defined Radio applications will be illegal
- No digital output technology may be incorporated into DTV devices (including commodity general-purpose PCs) without Hollywood's permission
- No digital removable media technology may be incorporated into DTV devices (including commodity general-purpose PCs) without Hollywood's permission
Setos described this as a "well-mannered marketplace." This is the kind of co-operation that Fox wants from technology: roll over, bare your belly, and build only those devices that Hollywood grants permission for.Dan Gillmor, Victor Nemachek (from El Gato, makers of the OSX PVR eyeTV), JD Lasica (a journo working on a book on fair use), Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly and I (from EFF) did a panel on fair use, DRM, and the digital hub at O'Reilly's OS X con in Santa Clara yesterday. Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman blogged a transcript of the panel here,with lots more depth on the subject.
I just spoke with the COO of the IPEverywhere about this study, and confirmed that the methodology only established whether a node was running WEP (a "security measure" of dubious value).
That means that many of the "unsecured" nodes in this report may have had other means of securing themselves, from switch- or AP-based MAC filtering to captive portals such as NoCat. Moreover, the protocol for this study did not establish whether the open APs in question were handing out DHCP leases (or, indeed, whether they were connected to the Internet at all).
Finally, this study did not investigate in any depth whether the open APs were deliberately or accidentally left open. Many of us run open "community" networks around the world (I operate one in Toronto at King and Niagara, and three in San Francisco, two at 19th and Shotwell, and one on Sycamore near 17th and Mission). These networks are deliberately "unsecured" and are provided out of public-spiritedness, or even out of a political commitment to providing tools for anonymous speech on the Internet -- anonymous speech being fundamental to democratic discourse.
Since WEP is such a poor "security" measure, the best practice for wireless users is to use SSH and/or SSL tunnels to secure sensitive traffic to a proxy (either remote or on your own network). In fact, if you're a promiscuous user of any network -- conference centers, airport lounges, hotel rooms, schools, etc -- you should assume that unless your messages are encrypted, they will be sniffed on the wire.
The primary "security" concern about open wireless seems to be that a "rogue" AP will be installed behind a firewall. The firewall, of course, is hardly sufficient in and of itself for securing a network. It's based on the presumption that everyone on one side of the firewall is trustworthy, and everyone on the other side is untrustworthy. We know, though, that this is a fallacy. Getting inside the firewall -- either through physical intrusion (think of visitors to your office plugging into the the network to check mail) or virtually, by 0wning a box on the network with a trojan -- is not difficult for a determined intruder. Meanwhile, the legitimate users of your network resources are often outside your firewall (mobile execs at a client site, for example) and thus not only walled off from the rest of the network, but also vulnerable to attack, since their machines' first line of defense is the firewall, which they are suddenly out of.
Security is hard. The proper place to draw your network perimiter isn't around your office, but around each machine. Personal firewalls, regular applications of security patches, good passwords and user education provide genuine security. Firewalls (and FUD about open APs) doesn't.
So, mea culpa, I wrote the bit about the FCC before Aug 8, which meant that what the FCC ended up accouncing differed slightly from what I suggested there.
Chairman Powell is has opened rulemaking proceedings on a Broadcast Flag mandate, but he's said that he's not taking the BPDG proposal as his starting point. During the announcement, the FCC invited the BPDG co-chairs to submit their proposal for the record, but said that it wouldn't be considered ahead of any other comments or proposals.
You can read lots more about the Broadcast Flag on "Consensus at Lawyerpoint," the EFF's BPDG blog, http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org.
Likewise, you can sign up to get information on what you can do to submit *informed* objections (i.e., not "Hot Grits!") to the FCC by visiting action.eff.org.
Cory Doctorow
As I pointed out, this isn't just fair use, it's my *own work*. I wrote the original Boing Boing post, and then pasted it here on Slashdot. No use is fairer than that.
Setting aside your ad-hominem attack for the moment:
RealMedia servers *can* accept start parameters, but they don't *have to* accept them.
Dude, I wrote the original and reposted it here. Last time I checked, you can't infringe upon yourself.
NPR isn't particularily tax-supported. It receives minimal competitive grant funding ($0.000001058/US taxpayer). See this discussion board.
Leaving aside whether there is a legitimate interest in Web businesses preventing deep linking, such an interest wouldn't apply to NPR. NPR is not based on a "business model of 'free content with revenue generatioin via paid ads.'" NPR radio and NPR online do not carry advertising. NPR derives its revenue from private donations.
NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.
Unpacking that:This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.
Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.
You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.
No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.
How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.
In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."
Also, live discussion on #infoanarchy on irc.openprojects.net
Scope
This document sets forth requirements to be imposed on certain products that receive unencrypted digital terrestrial broadcast content to protect such content against unauthorized redistribution [outside of the home or personal digital network environment].2 The document assumes that the requirements will apply in the United States, although it is anticipated that the requirements could be modified, as necessary, for use in other jurisdictions.
Got that? The conspiracy knows that it's going to have to extra-territorialize if its going to acheive its ends, and it's rarin' to go.
Those negotiations are the BPDG, a consipiracy of 15-some tech and entertainment companies. They're writing a "standard" that they've asked Hollings to give the FCC the power to give the force of law to. It will be illegal to manufacture or distribute any device or software that can access digital broadcast TV if it doesn't meet the "standard."
And what will the "standard" require? Well, for starters, all tech will have to be "tamper-resistant," which means that you won't be able to tinker with the hardware and software you own. Open source will be illegal.
Those devices that are allowed will only be permitted to incorporate cables and media that limit copying. And new technologies will only be added to the list of permitted tech if Hollywood says so (the standard that the studios have proposed for evaluating new tech is "We'll know it when we see it").
Imagine it: HDTV devices and computers that interface with them will only be allowed to incorporate broken technologies that Hollywood permits. If your computer monitor doesn't include the "approved" inputs, it will be against the law for your computer to output a digital video stream to it. The manufacturer will have two choices:
We all got upset about the Hollings Bill because it would use the force of law to control how a computer could be made. The BPDG will do exactly that -- it's not a "free market middle-ground," it's Hollywood's absolute dominion over your machine.
Don't let 'em fool you -- CBDTPA is just another way of spelling BPDG, and it's a-comin' soon. The BPDG says it'll have its standard finalized by May 17, and no one's even noticing. The BPDG meetings are public (though they cost $100 to attend). There's one coming up in LA on Monday, and wouldn't it be sweet if a couple hundred of us showed up to tell 'em what we think?
Here's my letter to the Authors Guild:
Dear Mr. Aiken,
I'm writing today to voice my support for Amazon's innovative used-book program. I'm a professional science fiction writer and journalist, the recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and the author of two novels forthcoming from Tor Books and a short-story collection forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows. I also spent my adolescence working in book stores and libraries.
I'm quite distressed at the Authors Guild's reactionary position on Amazon's used-book service. As a new author whose books will be published as $25+ hardcovers, my principal challenge will be to find a way to introduce my work to new readers. The intershelving of used and new books has been shown to be an effective means of driving sales of new authors -- I discovered this myself when I was a bookseller, and it's an experience that has been replicated in many bookstores, from corner operations like my local genre bookstore, Borderlands Books, all the way up to Powell's Books, the largest bookstore in the world.
What's more, the Amazon used-books service does not push the bounds of established copyright law or practice *at all*. The right of a consumer to resell the property s/he's lawfully acquired (called the Doctrine of First Sale) is the reason that we are able to have used bookstores at all. Also, yard-sales, charitable donations, library discard sales, collectibles sales, etc and so forth.
Indeed, one of the most revolting characteristics of many e-book technologies is that they abridge this right -- think of all the tens of millions of books donated to schools and libraries, sent to prisons and literacy programs, passed from friend to friend or within a family. The Doctrine of First Sale makes all of this possible.
Amazon's used-book service only reduces the friction involved in a used-book sale. When I worked at Bakka, a science fiction bookstore with new and used stock, young sf fans with tight budgets would often request popular titles that were available new on the shelf as used copies on their wish-lists. These are precisely the readers whose disappearance that we science fiction writers lament at every sf con as we look around at our greying ranks and wonder whether the genre is disappearing. Amazon's service makes this kind of thing easier and better for those readers -- why would we, as authors, wish to stop Amazon from extending the service?
Arguably, this is what the Internet is *for* -- connecting people at low cost, finding new market niches and exploiting them, reducing friction.
Copyright is a bargain between the public domain and creators -- we are able to create well and profit by our creations because we are able to benefit from the commons created by the works of those who came before us, which have entered the public domain. The bargain allows us to be effective creators, and it allows others to be innovative consumers.
Here Amazon and its customers (who are providing every one of those used books!) are building an innovative secondary market that will improve the overall economy. The bargain allows our *creative* expression, it allows their *innovative* expression.
To quote one of my colleagues:
> Companies should be lauded for extracting additional value from the formerly
> fallow copyright resources that belong to the public (like first sale and
> fair use).
In short, keep your disapprobation to yourself -- I want to work *with* my readers, not *against* them.
Thank you,
Cory Doctorow,
Former Canadian Regional Director,
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
And the Napster thing, apparently, is being directed at Bertelsmann -- a German company, bound by German law.
I'm totally overwhelmed by the positive response here (and, of course, wincing at the negative ones... Yah, I shoulda closed the <i> tag, I need to fix the stylesheet, I shoulda linked to Vinge, etc etc etc), especially from old friends and other nominees. Thanks folks. If you're interested in more information on the notion that "piracy" is in fact the future of media-distribution, have a look at the software company I founded last year, openCOLA -- yes, we're the same people who are releasing an open source softdrink.
John is 27. He only acts like a 24-year-old.
Actually, John is 26, and he mostly acts like a hyperintelligent six-year-old on a sugar-high who's been force-fed every movie the Marx Brothers ever made.
Also, his title isn't Chief Technology Officer, it's CETI -- Chief Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or, as we like to say, "Far-Out Man."
--
Cory (who actually is 28)
ROT26 my email address
This conclusion is based on a calculation that demonstrates that there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the Universe -- you'd have nowhere to store your candidate games while you evaluated their perfectness.
Though, as someone pointed out upstream, there's no reason to keep every game in memory.
You can read the interview (and download a Palm doc of it) here. The raw transcript is here.
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