They're pure evil. None of that mamby-pamby half-evil/half-poodle shit that Lucas puts out which could easily be thrown 60 yards on a forward pass. Geeze. Think about it. Any evil that can be "saved" after being the leader in the death of billions cannot be that evil in the first place. Sauron on the other hand, we can all be sure has a special place in Hell waiting for him after the One Ring has been destroyed.
My friends who played and myself were constantly scratching our collective heads wondering just why they kept doing things that seemed designed to drive people away from the game. Adding the new cards constantly, changing rules left and right with seemingly no rational (other than the constant, "It makes it easier for new people"), and don't get me started upon the Tourney scene once they stepped in and started sponsoring it. That was about the time I got out myself.
This article was a real eye-opener. It really showed what was going on in the company at this time. Everything that seemed so odd about the nearly monthly changes in the rules and cards reflected what was going on with the company itself. As what I had experienced as a new game, that was unattached to anything before it, began to die, so was the company in the form of the orginal people leaving, new manement styles changed by the week, etc. No, it makes sense now. Sad really.
I think we need to ensure that people serving in the jury have a minimum of education to ensure that they can weight the evidence in a rational manner. This would ensure that the facts are the most important part of the case, rather than the words of a fancy lawyer.
I agree, but the chances of this are small. Recent jury questionares have started asking for level of educations as well as specific areas of experetise. For instance, I have seen a grand jury questionare that asked if you had a degree in law, or a doctor's or nursing degree, and if you did, to recurse yourself from the jury immedately. For myself there are only two ways to think about this: The first being the lawyers invovled didn't want too smart of people involved, or want people that might be sympathetic to one side or the other.
Either way, it is somewhat doubtful that this will happen for several reasons, not the least of which is that in the US it is less than 25% of the population has ever gone to college to receive a degree.
I can't say that I actually agree with you. While there may indeed be posters that make insightful, well thought out comments and use their real names, there are also those that don't. Look at yourself for that. Here, your comment has been rated very highly, yet you are not using your real name.
As for making things more personal and intimate, that should be left to what the user wants. I know of several people that go online and use a nickname not to get closer to people but to push others away from themselves. Call it a need for space if you will, but when your job involves dealing with people face to face all of the time where you can't make very good boundaries, a little personal space where you can find it is an incredibly good thing. (And no, get your dirty little minds out of the gutters. I happen to be talking about pizza delivery in a very small, rural town.)
The internet is a tool, as are the "communities" that spring up on it. What they are used for and to what end is ultimatly up to the individual.
I have read the first three books of the series several times now, and have seen the two different verions of the original movie. That said, after watching the start of the mini-series last night I'm not sure what to think just yet. I am holding back on judging it just yet, seeing as I would like to watch all three episodes back to back to back w/o any commericals. Atleast that way, I would have a better sense of continuity and be able to make a better comparison between the three.
However I will say this about what I have seen so far:
The writers for the mini-series seem to have assumed that you are fairly familiar with the material of Dune before it even starts. Unlike the movie, which tries to explain everything as it goes along.
This mini-series does not quite have that exotic feel that the books and the other movie had. However, that is forgivable considering that they had to have some budget constraits.
The computer was good, and in general, the designs of the vehicles seem to be following the book well.
Let's say that they go thru with this deal, and only the payers get to "keep" their music. What's to stop me, once I have paid for the service, from turning around and giving away copies of music I just dl'ed from them for free? Or for that matter, getting together with a group of other people, pooling our money and buying a subscription.
Code? I'll make my own player after I exercise my right to backward engineer it.
Encrypt it? I'll break it myself, make my key for decryption public, or find somebody who already has done one of the first two. Despite what DMCA says, I believe that circumvention of "copy controls" is just as legal as tinkering with own car. (Despite the many, many propritary parts and tools I now need to do that)
It doesn't matter what they try. People will find ways to make it work for them.
There was a lot of effort made in making this treaty up. Unfortuantly none of that effort went into talking to people who have some real understanding as to what is going on, or what issues really need to be addressed.
The Internet was, and still is to some extent, about curiosity. It is about figuring out how things work, then telling everybody who wants to know. It is about the lack of geographical boundaries, or any 'real-life' bounds whatsoever. It is about being able to choose what you want to know about, and making that choice freely.
I've seen the Thomas Jefferson quote bandied about on all of the discussions with the upcommiing US presidental election. This discussion is IMHO a much better place to think about it.
Re:Didn't "they" say a lot of the same stuff...
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Trigger Happy
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It goes back all the way to the start of writing, possibly beyond that. Go back and read your Aristotle and Plato. They constantly argued whether or not the new invention of writing was going to ruin the world. Since this new media set down in stone (clay or wax actuuly, but you get the idea here...) what you said so that everybody who wanted to could read it and critize it without you being there to defend your words, Aristotle said that society would crumble. He also critized writing as being the causation of weak minds, since students no longer memorized their speaches, being able to instead read them from a written souce.
At the end of the day we don't need to invoke mysterious agents from the stars to explain the start of life on Earth. We already have both religious and scientific explanaitions that satisfy all rational criteria for the origin of life.
Yes, but most people aren't rational. If somebody thinks of it and convinces somebody else that it could have happened, then it is upon everybody to try and prove otherwise. That's how this sort of thing happens.
Makes me think of a line from The Rainbow Connection "Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it. Look at what it's done so far." The whole idea of life from space is the same sort of thing. And it doesn't matter whether or not it is right or wrong. People believe it, and that is simply the way it is.
Isn't the whole point of universities to share knowledge anyway?
Umm...actually, no it's not.
[rant-sarcasm]
I posed that same question/ideal to some professors I was doing work for, and they responded that, in fact, universities and other entities of "higher learning" are there to teach people how to learn. You read correctly, you are there to learn how to learn. You see, once you graduate (that is if you choose to not go on to an academic career, as that would allow the school to charge you even more money for the same classes that undergrads take) it is expected that those people who choose to employ you will give you the training to do the job they want you to do. If you actually spent time learning useful things that you could apply to the "real world", then the people that employ you would have to spend even more time de-programming the awful things (such as freedom in many forms) that you got to learn about in the "unfettered" enviros of the wonderful academic institution that you attened for many years.
[/rant-sarcasm]
The big problem when I but a lowly undergrad was the electron barrier...which I understood to be the theoretical limit to size of paths and gates was the diamater of the electron. All this other stuff is nice to know about, but when did the world stop worrying about the size of its electrons?
Oh, so Democracy relies on the basis of theft now does it? Actually all property relies upon theft, and private doubly so. Inorder to have property somebody else must not have that same property. For there to be freedom, some sort of system of property must exist, and there must exsit then within that system a method of taking the property away.
So to put in basic terms, it doesn't matter what you call the system of property because all property is theft.
So you'd rather have no science at all, because you feel that any logical framework used would be faulty?
I would rather that science be treated like the religion that it is, and like all religions have its problems talked about in a meaningful manner.
Or, the microscopic world is so different from the everyday macroscopic world where we live in, that we lack proper language to describe extremely small (or large) phenomena.
But what should scale have to do with anything? Any properly described event will happen the same way no matter how much, or how little, enery or matter is a part of the equation. That we recongize a difference is part of the problem.
I can tell you why, from personal experience.
The last couple of summers I worked at a helpdesk where I had to help deal with all sort of licensing issues and I asked this very question of my boss (aka head of IT there). His answer basicly came down to that thier parent company had deals in place from the way-back-when of Win3x and earlier that were done with arimes of lawers and the such. The problem then became that M$ reserved the rights to change the contracts when software got updated and the rights to extend these contracts whenever they felt like it.
So all and all, mostly it's the companies involved own damn fault.
The biggest mistake that can be made logically here, is the same one you just made. That is, to asssume that the rules are all going to be used in the same way. ie, Copyright and Patents protecting the process of innovation, and not the actual innovation itself. In this case the DMCA being used, not as an assistance to the creation an enviroment of new and undreamt of tehcnological advancement, but as a deterant. However, I feel that I can assume that just about everybody reading this already knows this. With that said, props must be given to those who are looking beyond the abuse of the rules and are trying to make corrections. These hearing have pointed out that not everybody has had their head stuck in the sand pretending that nothing wrong is going on. And new rules for this game, if you will, are being created as we speak. While I cannot feel completely satified with an actual, written, legal document outlining what-is and what-is-not fair use (for obvious reasons) it is a step in the right direction. The idea that the market will determine what-is and what-is-not as per the RIAA and Sony reps put forth, is lost upon the factual friction that economics and all postulates there to is not the business (pun intended) of giving people rules to use ideas by.
Of course, there were problems with that method as a means of art/artisitic expression distribution:
Patronage kept a lot of the works litterally behind closed doors. A great deal of the works of classical musians and writers that we take for grated today were never heard by the general public when the artist was alive. Instead, the performances were held for the court(s) and their friends (ie, the rich and powerful of the day).
Commisioned words have much of the same problem: Who other than those who have can aford to get some? More to do with your example, is when was the last time you ordered a jingle to get that car you wanted or that job you deserved? Not lately I imagine. While on the surface it may sound good, the everyperson cannot begin to aford this.
Performances, well, that has been talked to death here, but I'm willing to beat it some more. I understand that this is how most bands make any sort of money at all. It is unfortunate that this is the way of the world right now. But that is not always the way it was. Until we had methods to record music, performances were by and large, free. To go back in time, and I mean more than a century, how many cases did the courts of europe hear of one muscian accusing another of "stealing" a song? Not ever as far as I know. If a song was good, and the people liked it, the muscian most likely got a room and some food. The next day the villiage had a new song to help pass the time. The song would mutate and change and go the course of everything else in the public. The muscian would have been laughed out of the courtroom for trying to claim it as theirs.
Care to explain why I can't be creative because Time-Warner can blackout "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? I mean really, this piece is full of buzz-words that have little meaning without specific interpretation/proof.
Glad to see that somebody else feels the same way! While I mostly enjoy reading Katz's artilces (if only to see how many argumentative hooks he puts in and how many people nab themselves with them) the few emails he and I have exchanged has not ever taken the veil away from mysteries like why he doesn't back up his words with more than the rhetoric of the 60's and 70's. Creativity is not dying. If it were I'd expect to be talking in doublespeak right now and thinking doubleplusungood thoughts about the professors at my school.
A few years ago I read an interview wherein you said that you weren't happy with the way the fifth book turned out and were considering that you might go on to write a sixth book. First, was that interview accurate, and second if it is accurate are you still considering writing a new book for the series?
Is exactly what the article is talking about. The point was not so much that some of the preported "leaders" (if anarchists can have such things) have had to change the way they think about the way in which the world may or may not work, but that the same leaders have now retruned to the point from which they first departed.
The article, well written IMHO in its neutrality, still has a sense of amazement that people can, and do, change their opinions and positions upon the subjects that are near and dear to them. I, for one, am not as amazed, but happily musing about what we will hear next from both the media-at-large (which will not pass up this chance to do what damage they can to any and all causes that they feel the techno-community fights for). People change, the world around us changes, and we can do well in learning to accept this and make it work for us. Which is exactly what is going on.
Now, to make this a bit more relevant, let us begin to discuss how this effects us. We have known for some time that technology, for all of its wonderful and life-giving uses, cannot and will not, save society unless society chooses to allow this to happen. Before the attempt was made to show that privacy was what was wrong. Not enough, that is to say. However, privacy in the form that was invisioned could not ever exist again, if indeed ever existed at all. So what was left? To build a new privacy? That's all fine and good, but what if people cannot understand how to make that kind of privacy to work? The tax forms, the medical records, etc already exist.
No, privacy, even through encryption will not solve the problem. We have to admit the fight starts a lot closer to home. To save what we have (if it worth saving indeed) we have to start the fight were it counts. We have to start changing ourselves. We have to admit to us that we are the problem. That is what was being said by the speakers at the conference. As much as technology may be the means to the salvation, the salvation, the change, will never come if we do not ourselves change along with it.
The basis for all "economic" laws is the prospect of the items that the laws proctect as being scarce. With the advent (or possibly the evolution depending on where one stands) of goods into a digital form, scarcity of those good disapear because of the inherent properties of the digital world. That is, the ability to create enough perfect copies of the good to actaully sate all possible desire for the good. What effect this had upon a market is simple: The market begins to devalue that good, in terms of market value, not personal or emotional value (see all of the toys and other collectables...there are literally millions of Star Wars action figures out there, but I can go to my local gaming store and find that any give one is well above original market value) and eventually expects it to be there as a part of the larger overall market for free or next to free (see paper, pencils, ink pens, etc). Those people, therefore, who are fighting the incomming digital world are fighting to keep thier goods scarce and by that, their ability to demand a certain price for their goods.
However it becomes easy to predict that this is a loosing battle. History shows us a previous example for such use: Look only at what happened to the value of home-made or cottage goods when mass industrial manufacturing became a dominate method of creation of goods. While it may have taken close to a century for the home clothing industry to disapear, it was a very hard faught battle, with both sides waging campagins of what we now call FUD. One side would claim that their goods were superior, the other would shout that your could rely upon theirs much more. There was no right or wrong about it, theirs' was simply a time of change. And both worlds survived. People still make their on clothes, taylors and seamstristes are still employed, and while it may have fallen by the marketable good wayside, such goods are still valued by the people who own them.
We are truly at a cross roads here, one that will define how the world will treat goods and the people that produce the goods of a digital market. With the ability to create as many goods as it will take to sate desire, we can for the first time in human history elmiate a form of want. Let us not waste it flippantly by claiming to be better than those who fight the future. In the end, both sides are needed for the future to occur.
Actually I think that you might be on to more than you realize right there. Let's project the adult's reaction into a wider societial area.
Who's in charge right now? The Baby Boomers. Those 40's and 50's-somethings that grew up durring the 1960's and made such a fuss about the wars and peace and love. Essentially they made a huge mess that took a while to clean up, and in all reality the mess is still here.
However they had this experience of shaking the foundations of their oppressive society. They have a underlying, if not basic, understanding of how this happened.
And because of that they understand what to look for to keep it from happening again.
Now before somebody thinks I'm paranoid, let me say this: I don't think that all of this is planned. Nor do I think that this is something that is seen on a consious level.
If you look at how Social Scientists examine cultures, they define the "purpose" of the adolesent as being one of discontent and challenging their parent's world. In turn the parent's usually try and socialize the youths to a norm and keep them from changing too much. In the end it became a form of keeping the status quo.
And who better to keep the status quo from changing than those who changed it once.
UMR charges for ehternet access, but doesn't charge for the dialup. If I remember correctly, they will also only support the card that the "official" bookstore sells. So, if you're a new student, want "fast" access to the Internet, you're looking to loose about $100 for everything. That is if you go their way. Back my freshman year, some friends of mine, in an unwired dorm decided to network all of their computers together. They kept things out of the way until one night, one of the guys who wasn't part of the little net decided to get drunk and pull everything down. Of cource, this was right in front of the RA. If memmory severs correctly, the school was pretty pissed because one of the computer was constantly dialed in, thus providing an "alternative" to UMR's connection. All in all, it was pretty silly. But not as slilly as the two different times that cops showed up to take away the illegally gotten fake street signs.:)
There has been one overriding and ingnored point throughout all of these debates. One that has not been discussed because then we might have to forget about our all important internet and focus on what the real world is doing.
And that is simply that this is not a new problem.
Everything that has been talked about here, from the inadequacies of the notion of IP to the woefully anti-consumer laws that have sprung up to protect it, but it is nothing new. We have seen people, and even Katz himself, quote Jefferson from over two centuries ago. And yet nobody picks up that this is not new.
The Internet has not caused this problem, and quite frankly, the Internet is not going to solve this problem.
So far every solution proposed has been that some sort of change is going to have to happen. From the one extreme of simply giving up the various ideas of property through the spectrum of changing the ways we pay artists and thinkers to the opposite extreme of creating technological ways to make sure everybody pays no matter the thought used. Yet, none of these will be satisfactory to everybody invovled.
So here is what I propose.
Let's go back to the tired and true method that was used centuries ago. Patronship.
Why does this work? Well, people (the public at large) got to view/hear/touch/whatever the works the artists and thinkers produced. The artists/thinkers invovled got paid, a roof over their heads and a creative outlet. Everybody was more or less happy with the arragnement. If, as an artist/thinker didn't like your patron. You put yourself up as work for hire and ran out the time with your patron. Then you got the patron you wanted, and if you were important enough, your new patron would give you whatever you wanted. The patrons got the prestige of saying that you worked for them, and mostly fell overthemselves keeping you happy.
And in the end, the public could take your ideas, apprecate them, and build off of them if they could afford (in terms of material, not licencing) if they so desired.
Think about it: How many current artists have been inspired by works like the Cistine (sp?) chapple? How many by Beethoven and Handel? That's the system they used. It worked for them.
Why should publishers be able to ignore the parts of the law that they don't like?
This is the sort of question that cannot be answered because everybody is guilty of the same thing at any given point in their own lives. For instance, when was the last time you were speeding? Your question applies here; why should you get to do what you want at the expence of the other drivers? Granted that IP and speeding laws are two different kettles of fish, however the philosophical principle is the same.
I'm not trying to defend the CSS in this case, I'm just trying to point out that the argument is basicly null. A better argument in my opinion is this: If company X can profit off of me, why can I not turn that around and profit off of company X? Applying that here would mean that if that company can get me to pay for what it is selling (the content of the DVD disk) why can't I enjoy that product (the content of the same DVD disk) as I choose? It's not like the DVD is a replacable good. I can't go out and choose a diferent format of digital media to view the same movie on. I have to buy a DVD if I want that "quality" that it is supposed to provide. I can buy a "lesser" product, the VHS version, but it is not the same thing (or so we are told).
So it comes down to that one basic idea that nobody can truly define for everybody else. Fair. What that can mean to the consumer is different from what it means to the company that is doing the selling. So what is fair in this case? Can we use the argument that the DVD player and the content is like a car and that we can take it apart and alter it as we see if? Do we have to treat it differently because it is a different technology? Does the consumer have the ability to comprehend the complexity of the situation here, and what impact does that have ultimatly on the decisions of the parties involved? There is alot to consider here, and none of it is very simple at all.
So far my guide thoughout all of this has been that the consumers will, in the end, make the decision about what is fair and what isn't. And being a consumer, I know that I have to tell other people about what I feel to be right and wrong. This is what I have done. I have told my friends and family. I have written my newspaper's editoral column. I have explained things to people that were curious and I have explained things to people who were not curious. And most importantly I have voted with my dollars. If you can come up with something that is more fair than that, you are a better person than I.
Slashdot Mirror
This article was a real eye-opener. It really showed what was going on in the company at this time. Everything that seemed so odd about the nearly monthly changes in the rules and cards reflected what was going on with the company itself. As what I had experienced as a new game, that was unattached to anything before it, began to die, so was the company in the form of the orginal people leaving, new manement styles changed by the week, etc. No, it makes sense now. Sad really.
I agree, but the chances of this are small. Recent jury questionares have started asking for level of educations as well as specific areas of experetise. For instance, I have seen a grand jury questionare that asked if you had a degree in law, or a doctor's or nursing degree, and if you did, to recurse yourself from the jury immedately. For myself there are only two ways to think about this: The first being the lawyers invovled didn't want too smart of people involved, or want people that might be sympathetic to one side or the other.
Either way, it is somewhat doubtful that this will happen for several reasons, not the least of which is that in the US it is less than 25% of the population has ever gone to college to receive a degree.
I can't say that I actually agree with you. While there may indeed be posters that make insightful, well thought out comments and use their real names, there are also those that don't. Look at yourself for that. Here, your comment has been rated very highly, yet you are not using your real name.
As for making things more personal and intimate, that should be left to what the user wants. I know of several people that go online and use a nickname not to get closer to people but to push others away from themselves. Call it a need for space if you will, but when your job involves dealing with people face to face all of the time where you can't make very good boundaries, a little personal space where you can find it is an incredibly good thing. (And no, get your dirty little minds out of the gutters. I happen to be talking about pizza delivery in a very small, rural town.)
The internet is a tool, as are the "communities" that spring up on it. What they are used for and to what end is ultimatly up to the individual.
However I will say this about what I have seen so far:
Okay, fine.
Let's say that they go thru with this deal, and only the payers get to "keep" their music. What's to stop me, once I have paid for the service, from turning around and giving away copies of music I just dl'ed from them for free? Or for that matter, getting together with a group of other people, pooling our money and buying a subscription.
Code? I'll make my own player after I exercise my right to backward engineer it.
Encrypt it? I'll break it myself, make my key for decryption public, or find somebody who already has done one of the first two. Despite what DMCA says, I believe that circumvention of "copy controls" is just as legal as tinkering with own car. (Despite the many, many propritary parts and tools I now need to do that)
It doesn't matter what they try. People will find ways to make it work for them.
There was a lot of effort made in making this treaty up. Unfortuantly none of that effort went into talking to people who have some real understanding as to what is going on, or what issues really need to be addressed.
The Internet was, and still is to some extent, about curiosity. It is about figuring out how things work, then telling everybody who wants to know. It is about the lack of geographical boundaries, or any 'real-life' bounds whatsoever. It is about being able to choose what you want to know about, and making that choice freely.
I've seen the Thomas Jefferson quote bandied about on all of the discussions with the upcommiing US presidental election. This discussion is IMHO a much better place to think about it.
It goes back all the way to the start of writing, possibly beyond that. Go back and read your Aristotle and Plato. They constantly argued whether or not the new invention of writing was going to ruin the world. Since this new media set down in stone (clay or wax actuuly, but you get the idea here...) what you said so that everybody who wanted to could read it and critize it without you being there to defend your words, Aristotle said that society would crumble. He also critized writing as being the causation of weak minds, since students no longer memorized their speaches, being able to instead read them from a written souce.
At the end of the day we don't need to invoke mysterious agents from the stars to explain the start of life on Earth. We already have both religious and scientific explanaitions that satisfy all rational criteria for the origin of life.
Yes, but most people aren't rational. If somebody thinks of it and convinces somebody else that it could have happened, then it is upon everybody to try and prove otherwise. That's how this sort of thing happens.
Makes me think of a line from The Rainbow Connection "Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it. Look at what it's done so far." The whole idea of life from space is the same sort of thing. And it doesn't matter whether or not it is right or wrong. People believe it, and that is simply the way it is.
Isn't the whole point of universities to share knowledge anyway?
Umm...actually, no it's not.
[rant-sarcasm]
I posed that same question/ideal to some professors I was doing work for, and they responded that, in fact, universities and other entities of "higher learning" are there to teach people how to learn. You read correctly, you are there to learn how to learn. You see, once you graduate (that is if you choose to not go on to an academic career, as that would allow the school to charge you even more money for the same classes that undergrads take) it is expected that those people who choose to employ you will give you the training to do the job they want you to do. If you actually spent time learning useful things that you could apply to the "real world", then the people that employ you would have to spend even more time de-programming the awful things (such as freedom in many forms) that you got to learn about in the "unfettered" enviros of the wonderful academic institution that you attened for many years.
[/rant-sarcasm]
The big problem when I but a lowly undergrad was the electron barrier...which I understood to be the theoretical limit to size of paths and gates was the diamater of the electron. All this other stuff is nice to know about, but when did the world stop worrying about the size of its electrons?
Oh, so Democracy relies on the basis of theft now does it?
Actually all property relies upon theft, and private doubly so. Inorder to have property somebody else must not have that same property. For there to be freedom, some sort of system of property must exist, and there must exsit then within that system a method of taking the property away.
So to put in basic terms, it doesn't matter what you call the system of property because all property is theft.
So you'd rather have no science at all, because you feel that any logical framework used would be faulty?
I would rather that science be treated like the religion that it is, and like all religions have its problems talked about in a meaningful manner.
Or, the microscopic world is so different from the everyday macroscopic world where we live in, that we lack proper language to describe extremely small (or large) phenomena.
But what should scale have to do with anything? Any properly described event will happen the same way no matter how much, or how little, enery or matter is a part of the equation. That we recongize a difference is part of the problem.
To quote from the defendant's papers:
We agree with plaintiffs and the Court that the authority of the copyright owner is a matter of law, not a matter of fact.
Am I reading this correctly?
That they actually acknowledge that copyrights, et. al. are actually legal fiction that is foisted upon the public at large?
Wow.
I can tell you why, from personal experience.
The last couple of summers I worked at a helpdesk where I had to help deal with all sort of licensing issues and I asked this very question of my boss (aka head of IT there). His answer basicly came down to that thier parent company had deals in place from the way-back-when of Win3x and earlier that were done with arimes of lawers and the such. The problem then became that M$ reserved the rights to change the contracts when software got updated and the rights to extend these contracts whenever they felt like it.
So all and all, mostly it's the companies involved own damn fault.
The biggest mistake that can be made logically here, is the same one you just made. That is, to asssume that the rules are all going to be used in the same way. ie, Copyright and Patents protecting the process of innovation, and not the actual innovation itself. In this case the DMCA being used, not as an assistance to the creation an enviroment of new and undreamt of tehcnological advancement, but as a deterant. However, I feel that I can assume that just about everybody reading this already knows this.
With that said, props must be given to those who are looking beyond the abuse of the rules and are trying to make corrections. These hearing have pointed out that not everybody has had their head stuck in the sand pretending that nothing wrong is going on. And new rules for this game, if you will, are being created as we speak. While I cannot feel completely satified with an actual, written, legal document outlining what-is and what-is-not fair use (for obvious reasons) it is a step in the right direction. The idea that the market will determine what-is and what-is-not as per the RIAA and Sony reps put forth, is lost upon the factual friction that economics and all postulates there to is not the business (pun intended) of giving people rules to use ideas by.
Of course, there were problems with that method as a means of art/artisitic expression distribution:
Patronage kept a lot of the works litterally behind closed doors. A great deal of the works of classical musians and writers that we take for grated today were never heard by the general public when the artist was alive. Instead, the performances were held for the court(s) and their friends (ie, the rich and powerful of the day).
Commisioned words have much of the same problem: Who other than those who have can aford to get some? More to do with your example, is when was the last time you ordered a jingle to get that car you wanted or that job you deserved? Not lately I imagine. While on the surface it may sound good, the everyperson cannot begin to aford this.
Performances, well, that has been talked to death here, but I'm willing to beat it some more. I understand that this is how most bands make any sort of money at all. It is unfortunate that this is the way of the world right now. But that is not always the way it was. Until we had methods to record music, performances were by and large, free. To go back in time, and I mean more than a century, how many cases did the courts of europe hear of one muscian accusing another of "stealing" a song? Not ever as far as I know. If a song was good, and the people liked it, the muscian most likely got a room and some food. The next day the villiage had a new song to help pass the time. The song would mutate and change and go the course of everything else in the public. The muscian would have been laughed out of the courtroom for trying to claim it as theirs.
Care to explain why I can't be creative because Time-Warner can blackout "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? I mean really, this piece is full of buzz-words that have little meaning without specific interpretation/proof.
Glad to see that somebody else feels the same way!
While I mostly enjoy reading Katz's artilces (if only to see how many argumentative hooks he puts in and how many people nab themselves with them) the few emails he and I have exchanged has not ever taken the veil away from mysteries like why he doesn't back up his words with more than the rhetoric of the 60's and 70's.
Creativity is not dying. If it were I'd expect to be talking in doublespeak right now and thinking doubleplusungood thoughts about the professors at my school.
A few years ago I read an interview wherein you said that you weren't happy with the way the fifth book turned out and were considering that you might go on to write a sixth book. First, was that interview accurate, and second if it is accurate are you still considering writing a new book for the series?
Is exactly what the article is talking about. The point was not so much that some of the preported "leaders" (if anarchists can have such things) have had to change the way they think about the way in which the world may or may not work, but that the same leaders have now retruned to the point from which they first departed.
The article, well written IMHO in its neutrality, still has a sense of amazement that people can, and do, change their opinions and positions upon the subjects that are near and dear to them. I, for one, am not as amazed, but happily musing about what we will hear next from both the media-at-large (which will not pass up this chance to do what damage they can to any and all causes that they feel the techno-community fights for). People change, the world around us changes, and we can do well in learning to accept this and make it work for us. Which is exactly what is going on.
Now, to make this a bit more relevant, let us begin to discuss how this effects us. We have known for some time that technology, for all of its wonderful and life-giving uses, cannot and will not, save society unless society chooses to allow this to happen. Before the attempt was made to show that privacy was what was wrong. Not enough, that is to say. However, privacy in the form that was invisioned could not ever exist again, if indeed ever existed at all. So what was left? To build a new privacy? That's all fine and good, but what if people cannot understand how to make that kind of privacy to work? The tax forms, the medical records, etc already exist.
No, privacy, even through encryption will not solve the problem. We have to admit the fight starts a lot closer to home. To save what we have (if it worth saving indeed) we have to start the fight were it counts. We have to start changing ourselves. We have to admit to us that we are the problem. That is what was being said by the speakers at the conference. As much as technology may be the means to the salvation, the salvation, the change, will never come if we do not ourselves change along with it.
To carry the theme a bit more...
The basis for all "economic" laws is the prospect of the items that the laws proctect as being scarce. With the advent (or possibly the evolution depending on where one stands) of goods into a digital form, scarcity of those good disapear because of the inherent properties of the digital world. That is, the ability to create enough perfect copies of the good to actaully sate all possible desire for the good. What effect this had upon a market is simple: The market begins to devalue that good, in terms of market value, not personal or emotional value (see all of the toys and other collectables...there are literally millions of Star Wars action figures out there, but I can go to my local gaming store and find that any give one is well above original market value) and eventually expects it to be there as a part of the larger overall market for free or next to free (see paper, pencils, ink pens, etc). Those people, therefore, who are fighting the incomming digital world are fighting to keep thier goods scarce and by that, their ability to demand a certain price for their goods.
However it becomes easy to predict that this is a loosing battle. History shows us a previous example for such use: Look only at what happened to the value of home-made or cottage goods when mass industrial manufacturing became a dominate method of creation of goods. While it may have taken close to a century for the home clothing industry to disapear, it was a very hard faught battle, with both sides waging campagins of what we now call FUD. One side would claim that their goods were superior, the other would shout that your could rely upon theirs much more. There was no right or wrong about it, theirs' was simply a time of change. And both worlds survived. People still make their on clothes, taylors and seamstristes are still employed, and while it may have fallen by the marketable good wayside, such goods are still valued by the people who own them.
We are truly at a cross roads here, one that will define how the world will treat goods and the people that produce the goods of a digital market. With the ability to create as many goods as it will take to sate desire, we can for the first time in human history elmiate a form of want. Let us not waste it flippantly by claiming to be better than those who fight the future. In the end, both sides are needed for the future to occur.
Actually I think that you might be on to more than you realize right there. Let's project the adult's reaction into a wider societial area.
Who's in charge right now? The Baby Boomers. Those 40's and 50's-somethings that grew up durring the 1960's and made such a fuss about the wars and peace and love. Essentially they made a huge mess that took a while to clean up, and in all reality the mess is still here.
However they had this experience of shaking the foundations of their oppressive society. They have a underlying, if not basic, understanding of how this happened.
And because of that they understand what to look for to keep it from happening again.
Now before somebody thinks I'm paranoid, let me say this: I don't think that all of this is planned. Nor do I think that this is something that is seen on a consious level.
If you look at how Social Scientists examine cultures, they define the "purpose" of the adolesent as being one of discontent and challenging their parent's world. In turn the parent's usually try and socialize the youths to a norm and keep them from changing too much. In the end it became a form of keeping the status quo.
And who better to keep the status quo from changing than those who changed it once.
UMR charges for ehternet access, but doesn't charge for the dialup. If I remember correctly, they will also only support the card that the "official" bookstore sells. So, if you're a new student, want "fast" access to the Internet, you're looking to loose about $100 for everything. That is if you go their way. Back my freshman year, some friends of mine, in an unwired dorm decided to network all of their computers together. They kept things out of the way until one night, one of the guys who wasn't part of the little net decided to get drunk and pull everything down. Of cource, this was right in front of the RA. If memmory severs correctly, the school was pretty pissed because one of the computer was constantly dialed in, thus providing an "alternative" to UMR's connection. All in all, it was pretty silly. But not as slilly as the two different times that cops showed up to take away the illegally gotten fake street signs. :)
There has been one overriding and ingnored point throughout all of these debates. One that has not been discussed because then we might have to forget about our all important internet and focus on what the real world is doing.
And that is simply that this is not a new problem.
Everything that has been talked about here, from the inadequacies of the notion of IP to the woefully anti-consumer laws that have sprung up to protect it, but it is nothing new. We have seen people, and even Katz himself, quote Jefferson from over two centuries ago. And yet nobody picks up that this is not new.
The Internet has not caused this problem, and quite frankly, the Internet is not going to solve this problem.
So far every solution proposed has been that some sort of change is going to have to happen. From the one extreme of simply giving up the various ideas of property through the spectrum of changing the ways we pay artists and thinkers to the opposite extreme of creating technological ways to make sure everybody pays no matter the thought used. Yet, none of these will be satisfactory to everybody invovled.
So here is what I propose.
Let's go back to the tired and true method that was used centuries ago. Patronship.
Why does this work? Well, people (the public at large) got to view/hear/touch/whatever the works the artists and thinkers produced. The artists/thinkers invovled got paid, a roof over their heads and a creative outlet. Everybody was more or less happy with the arragnement. If, as an artist/thinker didn't like your patron. You put yourself up as work for hire and ran out the time with your patron. Then you got the patron you wanted, and if you were important enough, your new patron would give you whatever you wanted. The patrons got the prestige of saying that you worked for them, and mostly fell overthemselves keeping you happy.
And in the end, the public could take your ideas, apprecate them, and build off of them if they could afford (in terms of material, not licencing) if they so desired.
Think about it: How many current artists have been inspired by works like the Cistine (sp?) chapple? How many by Beethoven and Handel? That's the system they used. It worked for them.
Why should publishers be able to ignore the parts of the law that they don't like?
This is the sort of question that cannot be answered because everybody is guilty of the same thing at any given point in their own lives. For instance, when was the last time you were speeding? Your question applies here; why should you get to do what you want at the expence of the other drivers? Granted that IP and speeding laws are two different kettles of fish, however the philosophical principle is the same.
I'm not trying to defend the CSS in this case, I'm just trying to point out that the argument is basicly null. A better argument in my opinion is this: If company X can profit off of me, why can I not turn that around and profit off of company X? Applying that here would mean that if that company can get me to pay for what it is selling (the content of the DVD disk) why can't I enjoy that product (the content of the same DVD disk) as I choose? It's not like the DVD is a replacable good. I can't go out and choose a diferent format of digital media to view the same movie on. I have to buy a DVD if I want that "quality" that it is supposed to provide. I can buy a "lesser" product, the VHS version, but it is not the same thing (or so we are told).
So it comes down to that one basic idea that nobody can truly define for everybody else. Fair. What that can mean to the consumer is different from what it means to the company that is doing the selling. So what is fair in this case? Can we use the argument that the DVD player and the content is like a car and that we can take it apart and alter it as we see if? Do we have to treat it differently because it is a different technology? Does the consumer have the ability to comprehend the complexity of the situation here, and what impact does that have ultimatly on the decisions of the parties involved? There is alot to consider here, and none of it is very simple at all.
So far my guide thoughout all of this has been that the consumers will, in the end, make the decision about what is fair and what isn't. And being a consumer, I know that I have to tell other people about what I feel to be right and wrong. This is what I have done. I have told my friends and family. I have written my newspaper's editoral column. I have explained things to people that were curious and I have explained things to people who were not curious. And most importantly I have voted with my dollars. If you can come up with something that is more fair than that, you are a better person than I.