Also check out this video interview with one of the organizers.
Re:i don't get it?
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
Yes, GPL includes rights that PBS does not normally grant, namely you can redistribute and edit or make derivative works. No show that I am aware of grants these rights.
You don't seem impressed with the rights so I'll explain a little more.
Redistribution - A show runs on PBS once or twice and might never run again or disappear from their website. You may have made a personal copy for yourself but most people will not have done that so it effectively disappears. With the right to redistribute it doesn't disappear.
Editing - the examples of editing you gave aren't very compelling from the creative perspective. More interesting is using excerpts in another work, finding footage is one of the hardest things about video production.
For more in depth explanation of the GPL see the philosphy section of the Free Software Foundation Website.
I do share your scepticism about this being a buzz kind thinig because they are only releasing shows in 120kbps, not even VHS quality. That limits its usefulness significantly.
There is a large potential audience for a GPL'd show not on the Internet via public access cable tv. For those not familar with it public access cable is a channel on most cable system that allows anyone it that locality to submit and run programming.
If a full res version was available for download all the public access station would have to do is download and air it. Many stations now have mpeg2 playback so they might not even have to put it too tape.
However, it doesn't sound like this will happen
If any networks outside the U.S. would like to run a broadcast quality version of "NerdTV," please get in touch with me because we could sure use the money.
It sounds to me like this is traditional TV workings, PBS wants exclusive broadcast rights in the US.
So it seems in practice that a low quality (120kbps) version will be gpl'd but "The Show" itself is not free in the sense of "here's a piece of information, share it with everyone who wants to share it".
First I'd like to say I abhor the racism that you have experienced. Thank you for sharing your experiences, its very widespread and something that most Americans don't acknowledge.
A friend just related a story to me the other day about going through a toll booth and the attendant saying "We're going to get you and your friends."
I am curious about the statement you made:
the only true muslim (as I am not) ally doesn't play games with USA
This doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can see, I'd love to hear your feedback. Turkey has and will continue to use its strategic location with respect to Iraq and as a path for a pipeline for Caspian oil to gain US support and silence for its suppression of the Kurds. It is very clear that a condition of use of bases in Turkey to remove the Iraqi regime is that a Kurdish state not be formed from northern Iraq.
The x10 is a piece of trash, what you really want is one of these. 3ccd minidv camera that hasa wireless broadband adapter over which you can stream mpeg4. And it runs Linux.
Its not really a broadcast media, bandwidth cost scales linearly, the person "transmitting" pays more for each person that receives. It just so happens that the pricing model allows the traffic that most people experience to be accomodated in a relatively cheap cost. Most pricing plans for small scale traffic are retail, so they'll sell you a package for up to X GB/month but their markup and support charges are higher than the bandwidth cost. If your traffic gets out 1 or 1.5 standard deviations from the average traffic, say past 10,000 visitors, you're bandwidth cost will dominate the pricing plan.
Say you can keep a person occupied with text page and a couple images, say 50KB, for 10 minutes. To keep someone occupied with, say, 40KBps of video for 10 minutes requires about 24MB or 500 times as much bandwidth. So you see that cost scale pretty quickly, with bandwidth dominating the cost to provide beyond trivial use (notice how many service centers will give you one or two streams with a package, but you have to pay for each additional).
I totally agree with you on the value of multicast. But, I ask myself, "Self, why would AOL/ATT/Comcast make the investment necessary to upgrade their networks to be multicast enabled if that would mean that all of their customers could compete with them?"
Even assuming that they had to make no investment, they could just lock down their routers, to not just prevent multicast (or maybe a similar app level service), but to slow down content coming from their competitors, as suggested by the Center for Digital Democracy.
While there are still a few things going on in the courts and before the FCC they don't want to do anything like this that would attract attention. But being proactive to put forward technologies that would strengthen civil society is not in the cards.
Neither Vivendi nor Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is American. Don't you think they are doing exactly the same calculating that ATT and AOL are doing? John Malone, the American cable magnate, has been trying real hard to crack the European cable market. EuroDisney. Do you feel safe from them where you live?
Europe will of course be safer than the developing world where the big guys are going in before there is a mature market to crack. Many countries might never get to experience a 'net with a frontier, it will be like the walled garden Compuserve of the mid/late 80's. Murdoch is especially agressive in this area, having a lock on global satellite distribution outside of the US. Most media markets are protected in some way from foreign ownership,, these protections are under attack, being on the WTO's agenda for the next round of negotiations. Brazil recently amended its constitution to allow for foreign ownership.
So, if you live outside of the US, you should watch what goes on here closely and make sure it doesn't happen where you live.
The placement of this policy is not intended to hamper the RIAA's piracy elimination agenda or advocate Internet piracy, but to ensure the safety of our customers' data attached to our network from hackers or corporate espionage hidden by the veil of RIAA copyright enforcement.
They are only resisting denial of service attacks not DMCA required action of suspending user accounts.
Declan has certainly been accused of being a troll before, like when he got kicked off the Appraising Microsoft list.
This article is not a piece about anti-DMCA advocacy, it is deliberately targeted at provoking geekivists. Its not a balanced piece, he picks the facts to support his arguement and downplays those that don't (handwaving over the Felten case, "HP notwithstanding").
He's columnist now, not a journalist like he was a Wired. I'm sure that was one of his conditions for moving to CNET. Looks like he's "our" John Stossel.
Could be that AOL uses the companies being sued for transit to China. Why pay your engineers to update your own routers when you can sue someone else to fix it on theirs?
Besides, the issue of making tier 1's responsible for content going through their network dwarfs this little mp3 site.
People who think libertarianism is a cover for the rich and powerful often forget that those people don't like the free market either.
Its true, I have great difficulty telling the difference between a market fundamentalist (in the sense that George Soros means it) and a libertarian, the rhetoric that gets used is so similar. I'm still not sure which the poster to whom you replied is.
Still the patronizing tone. If you were speaking with someone about this in real life would you use it? *sigh*
... socialists such as yourself...
I wouldn't characterize myself as a socialist. I think everything I've said so far fits comfortably within the notion of being a democrat (small "d").
You equate democracy with government. That's not true. Democracy is "of the people".
I associate wealth with disproportionate power, government is a mechanism for correcting this.
The number of impoverished people gets smaller, and has gotten smaller, almost every year.
Actually, in the 1970 census 12.6 percent lived below the poverty line, in the 2000 census it was 12.7 percent.
... socialists want a guaranteed outcome...
Unfettered power by the wealthy guarantees an outcome. Most economists agree that monopolies are bad and support regulation of them. Whose freedom do you choose in this case?
Frankly, being referred to as warped is offensive. I'm going to respond to you to give you the opportunity to apologize.
If you get rich, it doesn't have to be at my expense, but it is possible to do so. I think you'd agree that the spate of scandals we've seen lately involves a very few rich people get rich at others' expense. That's just an existence proof, but I think its not warped.
One could go into the current round of scandals and the bubble burst as evidence of manipulation by the rich and that the media is only noticing because they got too greedy but do that all the time etc. I think there's good evidence there, but as a line of arguement its easy to get bogged down in details so I'll make a more general point.
I don't have the stats at my finger tips, but over the last 30 years, the top 1/4 of society has seen an enormous increase in wealth, getting more disproportionate as you go up the scale. Everyone else has been pretty flat. Is it really the case that that those people at the top are exclusively responsible for adding wealth to our society? Its certainly the case that the working class have made great increases in productivity, one would think they would benefit too. Could it instead be possible that wealth for workers has been flat because labor unions have had a severe decline in power over that period?
Power is at the heart of the Marxist critique. Those in power will make the rules to continue their power, seems pretty self evident to me. Democracy involves the idea that this doesn't have to be the case, that some expressions of power should be made without regard to wealth. One of the prime occupations of libertarians, as far as i can tell, is to attempt to place limits on where democratic power can be exercised, like the example before us. They appear to be much less interested in placing limits on the power exercised by the rich.
I think it was quite canny of chrisd to contrast Declan w/ Lessig, it brings out a crucial idealogical theme that runs through the tech community.
Declan is a libertarian, as such, he is in favor of small government and on priniple doesn't like using the government as an agent in shaping society. Lessig on the other hand is a democrat (note the small "d"). As such he holds out hope that masses of people can express a collective set of values that does not cede rights or nonmaterial values to corporate interests.
Generally I dislike libertarianism as it is often used as what I perceive as cover for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense. I read the WSJ, the Economist and Cato stuff pretty regularly and find that that doesn't generally get addressed. I think the reaction so far here points to the lack of that in Declan's piece.
The story that we get taught in school is that democracy is supposed to be this thing that "the people" participate in, Declan says don't bother. Is this story a myth or not? History tells us that its very hard for democracy to work like in that story, ie, the civil rights struggle or the pitched battles for the 8 hour day early in 1900's.
A more modern example that we can look at is the environmental movement. Environmentalism has made politcal headway because of hard work by millions working hard over decades. It hasn't "won" by any means, but it does have impact.
Are geektivists up to this kind of organization and campaigning? Well we have the ability to be far more organized that any political movement ever. This can't be underestimated. Anyway, I think Declan has thrown down the gauntlet.
Well I'm biased but I don't like ifilm. I don't think they can be described as "independent", their investors include Sony, Eastman Kodak and Paul Allen. A lot of their content is stuff that's 3rd rate mainstream tv fodder. What's the point of being independent if you attempt to emulate bad mainstream stuff, that's not very interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
As the article says, this is what the Ecuadorians asked for.
Indymedia Ecuador, CONFEUNASSC,and Action Ecologica are the main groups that are being worked with. What are you're comments on them?
Also check out this video interview with one of the organizers.
Yes, GPL includes rights that PBS does not normally grant, namely you can redistribute and edit or make derivative works. No show that I am aware of grants these rights.
You don't seem impressed with the rights so I'll explain a little more.
Redistribution - A show runs on PBS once or twice and might never run again or disappear from their website. You may have made a personal copy for yourself but most people will not have done that so it effectively disappears. With the right to redistribute it doesn't disappear.
Editing - the examples of editing you gave aren't very compelling from the creative perspective. More interesting is using excerpts in another work, finding footage is one of the hardest things about video production.
For more in depth explanation of the GPL see the philosphy section of the Free Software Foundation Website.
I do share your scepticism about this being a buzz kind thinig because they are only releasing shows in 120kbps, not even VHS quality. That limits its usefulness significantly.
This is going to be 120kbps which will limit your derivative works to that or less which is not great.
There is a large potential audience for a GPL'd show not on the Internet via public access cable tv. For those not familar with it public access cable is a channel on most cable system that allows anyone it that locality to submit and run programming.
If a full res version was available for download all the public access station would have to do is download and air it. Many stations now have mpeg2 playback so they might not even have to put it too tape.
However, it doesn't sound like this will happen
If any networks outside the U.S. would like to run a broadcast quality version of "NerdTV," please get in touch with me because we could sure use the money.
It sounds to me like this is traditional TV workings, PBS wants exclusive broadcast rights in the US.
So it seems in practice that a low quality (120kbps) version will be gpl'd but "The Show" itself is not free in the sense of "here's a piece of information, share it with everyone who wants to share it".
Guess you haven't looked on the smiley originators
web page.
First I'd like to say I abhor the racism that you have experienced. Thank you for sharing your experiences, its very widespread and something that most Americans don't acknowledge.
A friend just related a story to me the other day about going through a toll booth and the attendant saying "We're going to get you and your friends."
I am curious about the statement you made:
the only true muslim (as I am not) ally doesn't play games with USA
This doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can see, I'd love to hear your feedback. Turkey has and will continue to use its strategic location with respect to Iraq and as a path for a pipeline for Caspian oil to gain US support and silence for its suppression of the Kurds. It is very clear that a condition of use of bases in Turkey to remove the Iraqi regime is that a Kurdish state not be formed from northern Iraq.
The x10 is a piece of trash, what you really want is one of these. 3ccd minidv camera that hasa wireless broadband adapter over which you can stream mpeg4. And it runs Linux.
Its not really a broadcast media, bandwidth cost scales linearly, the person "transmitting" pays more for each person that receives. It just so happens that the pricing model allows the traffic that most people experience to be accomodated in a relatively cheap cost. Most pricing plans for small scale traffic are retail, so they'll sell you a package for up to X GB/month but their markup and support charges are higher than the bandwidth cost. If your traffic gets out 1 or 1.5 standard deviations from the average traffic, say past 10,000 visitors, you're bandwidth cost will dominate the pricing plan.
Say you can keep a person occupied with text page and a couple images, say 50KB, for 10 minutes. To keep someone occupied with, say, 40KBps of video for 10 minutes requires about 24MB or 500 times as much bandwidth. So you see that cost scale pretty quickly, with bandwidth dominating the cost to provide beyond trivial use (notice how many service centers will give you one or two streams with a package, but you have to pay for each additional).
I totally agree with you on the value of multicast. But, I ask myself, "Self, why would AOL/ATT/Comcast make the investment necessary to upgrade their networks to be multicast enabled if that would mean that all of their customers could compete with them?"
Even assuming that they had to make no investment, they could just lock down their routers, to not just prevent multicast (or maybe a similar app level service), but to slow down content coming from their competitors, as suggested by the Center for Digital Democracy.
While there are still a few things going on in the courts and before the FCC they don't want to do anything like this that would attract attention. But being proactive to put forward technologies that would strengthen civil society is not in the cards.
Big media is global.
Neither Vivendi nor Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is American. Don't you think they are doing exactly the same calculating that ATT and AOL are doing? John Malone, the American cable magnate, has been trying real hard to crack the European cable market. EuroDisney. Do you feel safe from them where you live?
Europe will of course be safer than the developing world where the big guys are going in before there is a mature market to crack. Many countries might never get to experience a 'net with a frontier, it will be like the walled garden Compuserve of the mid/late 80's. Murdoch is especially agressive in this area, having a lock on global satellite distribution outside of the US. Most media markets are protected in some way from foreign ownership,, these protections are under attack, being on the WTO's agenda for the next round of negotiations. Brazil recently amended its constitution to allow for foreign ownership.
So, if you live outside of the US, you should watch what goes on here closely and make sure it doesn't happen where you live.
Actually it would be quite high if you have to leave the continent as the fiber connects to another base which is able to see a geosync satellite.
Agreed. Article is weak on tech, heavy on copy and paste from the marketing material.
Shoddy journalism.
The placement of this policy is not intended to hamper the RIAA's piracy elimination agenda or advocate Internet piracy, but to ensure the safety of our customers' data attached to our network from hackers or corporate espionage hidden by the veil of RIAA copyright enforcement.
They are only resisting denial of service attacks not DMCA required action of suspending user accounts.
Declan has certainly been accused of being a troll before, like when he got kicked off the Appraising Microsoft list.
This article is not a piece about anti-DMCA advocacy, it is deliberately targeted at provoking geekivists. Its not a balanced piece, he picks the facts to support his arguement and downplays those that don't (handwaving over the Felten case, "HP notwithstanding").
He's columnist now, not a journalist like he was a Wired. I'm sure that was one of his conditions for moving to CNET. Looks like he's "our" John Stossel.
why not get the real ip of the gateway and mail the netblock contact?
Could be that AOL uses the companies being sued for transit to China. Why pay your engineers to update your own routers when you can sue someone else to fix it on theirs?
Besides, the issue of making tier 1's responsible for content going through their network dwarfs this little mp3 site.
People who think libertarianism is a cover for the rich and powerful often forget that those people don't like the free market either.
Its true, I have great difficulty telling the difference between a market fundamentalist (in the sense that George Soros means it) and a libertarian, the rhetoric that gets used is so similar. I'm still not sure which the poster to whom you replied is.
Still the patronizing tone. If you were speaking with someone about this in real life would you use it? *sigh*
I wouldn't characterize myself as a socialist. I think everything I've said so far fits comfortably within the notion of being a democrat (small "d").
You equate democracy with government. That's not true. Democracy is "of the people".
I associate wealth with disproportionate power, government is a mechanism for correcting this.
The number of impoverished people gets smaller, and has gotten smaller, almost every year.
Actually, in the 1970 census 12.6 percent lived below the poverty line, in the 2000 census it was 12.7 percent.
Unfettered power by the wealthy guarantees an outcome. Most economists agree that monopolies are bad and support regulation of them. Whose freedom do you choose in this case?
Frankly, being referred to as warped is offensive. I'm going to respond to you to give you the opportunity to apologize.
If you get rich, it doesn't have to be at my expense, but it is possible to do so. I think you'd agree that the spate of scandals we've seen lately involves a very few rich people get rich at others' expense. That's just an existence proof, but I think its not warped.
One could go into the current round of scandals and the bubble burst as evidence of manipulation by the rich and that the media is only noticing because they got too greedy but do that all the time etc. I think there's good evidence there, but as a line of arguement its easy to get bogged down in details so I'll make a more general point.
I don't have the stats at my finger tips, but over the last 30 years, the top 1/4 of society has seen an enormous increase in wealth, getting more disproportionate as you go up the scale. Everyone else has been pretty flat. Is it really the case that that those people at the top are exclusively responsible for adding wealth to our society? Its certainly the case that the working class have made great increases in productivity, one would think they would benefit too. Could it instead be possible that wealth for workers has been flat because labor unions have had a severe decline in power over that period?
Power is at the heart of the Marxist critique. Those in power will make the rules to continue their power, seems pretty self evident to me. Democracy involves the idea that this doesn't have to be the case, that some expressions of power should be made without regard to wealth. One of the prime occupations of libertarians, as far as i can tell, is to attempt to place limits on where democratic power can be exercised, like the example before us. They appear to be much less interested in placing limits on the power exercised by the rich.
I think it was quite canny of chrisd to contrast Declan w/ Lessig, it brings out a crucial idealogical theme that runs through the tech community.
Declan is a libertarian, as such, he is in favor of small government and on priniple doesn't like using the government as an agent in shaping society. Lessig on the other hand is a democrat (note the small "d"). As such he holds out hope that masses of people can express a collective set of values that does not cede rights or nonmaterial values to corporate interests.
Generally I dislike libertarianism as it is often used as what I perceive as cover for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense. I read the WSJ, the Economist and Cato stuff pretty regularly and find that that doesn't generally get addressed. I think the reaction so far here points to the lack of that in Declan's piece.
The story that we get taught in school is that democracy is supposed to be this thing that "the people" participate in, Declan says don't bother. Is this story a myth or not? History tells us that its very hard for democracy to work like in that story, ie, the civil rights struggle or the pitched battles for the 8 hour day early in 1900's.
A more modern example that we can look at is the environmental movement. Environmentalism has made politcal headway because of hard work by millions working hard over decades. It hasn't "won" by any means, but it does have impact.
Are geektivists up to this kind of organization and campaigning? Well we have the ability to be far more organized that any political movement ever. This can't be underestimated. Anyway, I think Declan has thrown down the gauntlet.
He's a libertarian, of the Cato Institute variety. He expressed a through and through libertarian position.
Well I'm biased but I don't like ifilm. I don't think they can be described as "independent", their investors include Sony, Eastman Kodak and Paul Allen. A lot of their content is stuff that's 3rd rate mainstream tv fodder. What's the point of being independent if you attempt to emulate bad mainstream stuff, that's not very interesting.
Check Indymedia video page with material from 90 grassroots indie groups worldwide and my new project, a video portal using a hacked version of Scoop.