Actually, I'm pretty sure I've missed quite a few more cases of potentially unlawful communications.
Do also bear in mind that 'legal'/'lawful' doesn't stipulate the jurisdiction - it could be 'Lowest common denominator', e.g. discussion concerning the weather and praise for the king could remain the only legal communications in all jurisdictions.
Believe it or not, but copyright infringement isn't illegal either (the holder of the privilege can sue to exclude, but unless they do, the infringement isn't illegal per se).
Frankly, 'packets not yet determined to be legal' is quite sufficient to route them via a network node with indefinite latency.
Copyright is already making illegal speech that should be free, so I don't know where you get your confidence that 'legal' isn't a major communications discriminator.
The best mechanism for achieving neutrality is to have MORE unregulated network providers - to prevent cartels & monopolies, etc. Given a choice between an ISP that throttled BitTorrent and another that didn't, the latter would win the custom of those who used it, and the former the custom of wealthy couch potatoes.
Anyone who thinks government can regulate communication to ensure everyone can say what they like and that no speech suffers discrimination is living in cloud cuckoo land.
All that happens is that government says "Ok, if you really, really want us to regulate your speech, we will - reluctantly".
And then you end up with a system of censorship at the infrastructure level that China would wet its knickers over.
Network neutrality is everything everyone is asking for EXCEPT what they're expecting to get, i.e. all packets may still be discriminated against for purposes of state control and commercial expediency, but all those packets that the state and infrastructure owners wouldn't really have cared to fuss over are assured equality (which they would have had anyway).
'Network neutrality' is 'Turkeys voting for Xmas' - very sad, but that's turkeys for you; brain the size of a pea.
Once the turkeys get what they wished for, the guano will hit the plucking machines and they'll all come running to the hackers for help and salvation. The Internet then gets yet another layer to route around censorship, another layer of inefficiency. And the cycle repeats itself...
Lawful means: 1) Unencrypted (or encrypted with TSA backdoor) 2) Not infringing copyright, or involved in facilitating/inducing infringement 3) Not unauthorised communication of military/industrial secrets 4) Not relating to terrorism, extremism, drugs, porn, anarchy/sedition, blasphemy, etc. 5) Not unauthorised communication of personal data 6) Not transmitted to/received from banned sites, organisations, persons, IP addresses, networks, etc.
Other than that, and except for network optimisation purposes, all packets will be treated equally.
Have you considered the possibility that they recognise it will fail too?
It is quite possible they must first demonstrate paywall failure in order to expedite and escalate the bailout option: what we recognise as an Internet tax, but they prefer to call a compulsory license fee.
Sometimes you have to be seen to have tried and failed at every possible solution before you are rescued by the taxpayer.
Of course, the one solution the newspapers won't try is the one that cuts them out of the value chain, i.e. where the readers miss out the newspaper altogether and pay the journalists (bloggers) directly (to write - not to read).
It's already happened with software (copyleft) where the coders are paid directly, and copies can be freely made. News International aren't interested in this option and hope no-one notices it hasn't been tried. They have to hurry the introduction of an Internet tax long before anyone starts paying journos directly. That's why it's worth throwing millions away on a grand moonshot in order that the spectacular/disastrous failure sanctions popular support for a very lucrative tax. The paywall also helps establish their preferred price for news in order that they get as much of the eventual tax as possible (fighting for their share along with every other digitisable industry).
Also see the discussion at http://bit.ly/dtsT44 which touches on Diaspora ($100k+) and Humble Indie Bundle ($1m+) as examples of the future business model for the exchange of intellectual work and the money of the multitudes who want it produced.
Laws protecting the people's rights aren't quite the same thing as regulations applying to corporations.
A corporation may well pretend it is subject to the same laws as people in order to insinuate itself as a person (to similarly enjoy the Constitution's care for people). That way it can pretend that regulations are laws, and that congress is similarly constrained in its regulation of immortal psychopaths as it is in the government of human beings.
A constitution empowers a government to secure the natural rights of its human citizens (which should not be confused with immortal entities legally recognised as persons, such as corporations).
A corrupt legislature grants privileges (which are termed as legal rights these days, or simply 'rights', usually in order to claim that the monopoly of copyright is a legal right to exclude others from making copies of your published works, or 'exclusive right' for short).
However, your (natural) right to exclude others from your writings and designs is of course perfectly natural (you lock your house, car and briefcase to achieve this), and should indeed be additionally secured by the government.
However, you do not have a natural right to exclude others from making copies of their own possessions, e.g. the books or bread slicers you have sold them. For that you need the privilege of a monopoly.
Jefferson recognised the ills of monopolies and that's why he proposed (to Madison) adding monopolies in literary and technological works to the bill of rights (so they'd at least be recognised as such, and could be abolished when people people finally realised that monopolies weren't something the constitution was supposed to be able to sanction). Unfortunately, his ploy didn't work. Copyright and patent were simply legislated without fuss.
And now that the people have the means to copy books and build bread slicers, they now discover their liberty to do so was suspended (in 1790, 3 years after the Constitution empowered congress to protect people's liberty).
Your 'problem' still exhibits the misguided principle that copyright is the natural law, and that its infringement is theft. It is actually the other way around. Copying is the natural law (speech/communication) and its prohibition is an unethical constraint (suspension of liberty).
Copyright was unethically and even unconstitutionally legislated because it was expeditious: lucrative to press owners, and attractive to states who would gladly have legislation that effectively controlled the press.
If you stop thinking of selling copies (in spite of the fact no-one needs to buy them) for a minute, and focus instead on selling intellectual work, you'll see that the producer's customers are interested in purchasing their work (rather than copies of it). So it's not a question of selling a copy. It's a question of selling the work to those who want to buy it. That means communicating with the buyers and making a deal. Or conversely, that means the buyers need to communicate with the seller and make a deal. It's more a paradigm inversion than a shift.
Or do you really want to tell me that an artist on one side and an audience of a thousand or even a million on the other can stare across a chasm and refuse to do a simple deal: Art for money, money for art?
It's a new or unfamiliar kind of deal certainly, probably inconceivable to many, but it's not an impossible one. The deal everyone's used to is 'a copy for money, money for a copy', but this only worked whilst a) only a few people had copying/printing machines, and b) there was a monopoly that kept the price up.
Now that an artist can communicate with their audience en masse, we can look forward to them doing a deal with their audience, i.e. an exchange of intellectual work for money. Moreover, such artists will realise that the first thing they should do is to emancipate their audience from the completely unhelpful shackles of copyright. That way their audience (and a secondary market) covers the cost of manufacturing copies (books/CDs etc.), distributing them (file-sharing), and promoting the artist.
Unfortunately, those still wedded to the anachronistic monopoly of copyright don't fancy this new way of doing things - it's a revolutionary upheaval of everything they've come to believe in.
If you really must insist on concrete evidence of how these new deals will be enabled well, I'm working on that with the http://contingencymarket.com/. You can check out my site http//digitalproductions.co.uk for further discussion and links to many others exploring non-copyright based business models and revenue mechanisms.
I've acknowledged in other comments that copyright (and variations thereof) existed in Europe for many years prior, finally established by the statute of Anne in 1710.
Of course US copyright was largely based upon the British legislation.
However, even the British form of copyright was recognised not to be a natural right. The US constitution could only recognise natural rights, not privileges - even if some framers might have had the expectation that such privileges as copyright could be subsequently legislated
The most the constitution could do was to recognise an author's natural exclusive right, not any grant of a post-publication monopoly. It certainly couldn't recognise British legislation.
An author's natural exclusive right may well have little in it to attract a printer, but then this is why the proper securing of that right was abandoned and a transferable monopoly was granted instead - the printers had the ear of the government (as RIAA/MPAA has the ear of the Swedish court).
It is clear that a reproduction monopoly is highly lucrative to a printer, but this doesn't make it a natural right, nor consequently, a right that is or can be recognised by the constitution.
Just as with alcohol prohibition, the privilege of copyright will be abolished as the law must defer to the people's rightful exercise of their liberty.
There is nothing in the constitution that grants authors a transferable reproduction monopoly, nor even that permits the government to make such a grant, however, at least authors can then look forward to legislation that properly secures the exclusive right to their writings, i.e. makes IP theft a crime.
The constitution does not grant any rights, it recognises them and empowers a government to protect them.
It is only because the term 'right' has now deteriorated to encompass privileges such as copyright, that the modern use of the term 'exclusive right' means 'legal right to exclude others from performing or reproducing a covered work'.
People then confuse that modern meaning with its older constitutional meaning of 1787 (pre-copyright) as an author's natural exclusive right (a natural ability to exclude others from their private writings).
So the monopoly of copyright is then (through linguistic extension of 'right' to include 'privilege') conflated with the natural right, and people believe that the meaning of the term 'exclusive right' in the constitution is the same as the copyright conflated meaning of 'exclusive right' that people take from that term two centuries later.
To believe that the framers wrote the constitution in our modern language is to believe in time travel.
The constitution only empowered the securing of the natural right 'exclusive right', not the privilege of monopoly 'copyright' that so many have come to know and love.
Again, you have found neither the term 'copyright' nor copyright the legislation. You have simply found the constitution's recognition of an author's exclusive right. The latter is a natural right, one of several that the US government was created to protect, whereas copyright is a privilege, a reproduction monopoly that the US government granted for the commercial exploitation of printers (a privilege that printers had also been enjoying in Europe for some considerable time).
What you describe as splitting hairs can represent a considerable difference in individual liberty.
The constitutional clause recognising an individual's exclusive right is what the copyright lobbyists claim permits the government to enact copyright.
It does no such thing. The constitution cannot empower the government to grant monopolies without derogating from the very liberty the constitution creates the government to protect.
Even if in error, the constitution attempted to do this, it would have to state this explicitly. Only the corrupt would infer sanction from the constitution to grant such iniquitous privileges as monopolies.
The government has the power to secure an individual's exclusive right AND NO MORE. It cannot further grant monopolies, whether to incentivise publication or not, no matter the arrogant hypothesis that these monopolies may ultimately benefit the public.
No, copyright is government legislation that came after the constitution.
The constitution simply recognises the author's and inventor's exclusive right and specifies that the government should have power to secure it.
So the government, rather than creating legislation to secure that right, instead granted reproduction monopolies (one of the very things the framers of the constitution had sought to avoid). These require significant wealth and means beyond that of the common man to enforce, but then the printers and industrialists that sought them had the means, and knew that their costs would be greatly outweighed by the profits to be obtained in exploiting them.
This is of course until these monopolies became undermined by the public and their use of the instantaneous diffusion technology we know as the Internet.
Which is more ethical?
The securing of the exclusive right and liberty of the individual, or the enforcement of the publishing and manufacturing corporations' monopolies?
As you've so kindly demonstrated, copyright is not written into the constitution.
The commercial privilege of copyright was enacted later to grant a reproduction monopoly for the benefit of printers such that this would provide a commercial incentive for authors to release their work from their exclusive right, to deliver it via printers to the public.
You'll note that the government actually does a very poor job of securing authors' and inventors' exclusive right, i.e. against theft of their unpublished writings and designs. If their physical security is poor, they are effectively obliged to deliver their work to a publisher or patent office as soon as possible in order to obtain their protection. The government also provides no law against plagiarism.
Copyright and patent are privileges designed for printers and industrialists, at the expense of the public's cultural liberty. The people's exclusive rights remain largely neglected.
The more the people notice this derogation of their liberty, the more they will call for the abolition of the privileges that suspend it. Then the law can better reflect the protection of the people's natural rights as originally directed by the constitution.
Copyright is not written into the constitution. It would not be possible to write it in in any case, given a state granted monopoly could not be recognised as a natural right of the people.
People have a natural, exclusive right to their private property, which includes their unpublished writings and designs. This is the right that the constitution expressly empowered the government to secure.
The constitution can only recognise rights, it cannot grant them.
Granting of privileges (legal rights as some term them) is something the crown or government does, and unfortunately in the case of the US, unconstitutionally in the form of copyright and patent.
Copyright is not mentioned in the constitution. It is a commercial privilege that suspended the public's right to copy and was enacted later. The constitution concerned itself only with the recognition of the people's natural rights and the power a government should have in protecting these.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear!
Good luck.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I've missed quite a few more cases of potentially unlawful communications.
Do also bear in mind that 'legal'/'lawful' doesn't stipulate the jurisdiction - it could be 'Lowest common denominator', e.g. discussion concerning the weather and praise for the king could remain the only legal communications in all jurisdictions.
"can't discriminate LEGAL traffic" -- watch out for that critical qualifier won't you?
Believe it or not, but copyright infringement isn't illegal either (the holder of the privilege can sue to exclude, but unless they do, the infringement isn't illegal per se).
Frankly, 'packets not yet determined to be legal' is quite sufficient to route them via a network node with indefinite latency.
Copyright is already making illegal speech that should be free, so I don't know where you get your confidence that 'legal' isn't a major communications discriminator.
The best mechanism for achieving neutrality is to have MORE unregulated network providers - to prevent cartels & monopolies, etc. Given a choice between an ISP that throttled BitTorrent and another that didn't, the latter would win the custom of those who used it, and the former the custom of wealthy couch potatoes.
'Network neutrality' IS regulatory capture.
Anyone who thinks government can regulate communication to ensure everyone can say what they like and that no speech suffers discrimination is living in cloud cuckoo land.
All that happens is that government says "Ok, if you really, really want us to regulate your speech, we will - reluctantly".
And then you end up with a system of censorship at the infrastructure level that China would wet its knickers over.
Network neutrality is everything everyone is asking for EXCEPT what they're expecting to get, i.e. all packets may still be discriminated against for purposes of state control and commercial expediency, but all those packets that the state and infrastructure owners wouldn't really have cared to fuss over are assured equality (which they would have had anyway).
'Network neutrality' is 'Turkeys voting for Xmas' - very sad, but that's turkeys for you; brain the size of a pea.
Once the turkeys get what they wished for, the guano will hit the plucking machines and they'll all come running to the hackers for help and salvation. The Internet then gets yet another layer to route around censorship, another layer of inefficiency. And the cycle repeats itself...
Lawful means:
1) Unencrypted (or encrypted with TSA backdoor)
2) Not infringing copyright, or involved in facilitating/inducing infringement
3) Not unauthorised communication of military/industrial secrets
4) Not relating to terrorism, extremism, drugs, porn, anarchy/sedition, blasphemy, etc.
5) Not unauthorised communication of personal data
6) Not transmitted to/received from banned sites, organisations, persons, IP addresses, networks, etc.
Other than that, and except for network optimisation purposes, all packets will be treated equally.
Have you considered the possibility that they recognise it will fail too?
It is quite possible they must first demonstrate paywall failure in order to expedite and escalate the bailout option: what we recognise as an Internet tax, but they prefer to call a compulsory license fee.
Sometimes you have to be seen to have tried and failed at every possible solution before you are rescued by the taxpayer.
Of course, the one solution the newspapers won't try is the one that cuts them out of the value chain, i.e. where the readers miss out the newspaper altogether and pay the journalists (bloggers) directly (to write - not to read).
It's already happened with software (copyleft) where the coders are paid directly, and copies can be freely made. News International aren't interested in this option and hope no-one notices it hasn't been tried. They have to hurry the introduction of an Internet tax long before anyone starts paying journos directly. That's why it's worth throwing millions away on a grand moonshot in order that the spectacular/disastrous failure sanctions popular support for a very lucrative tax. The paywall also helps establish their preferred price for news in order that they get as much of the eventual tax as possible (fighting for their share along with every other digitisable industry).
Masnick's law strikes again.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Masnick's%20Law
Also see the discussion at http://bit.ly/dtsT44 which touches on Diaspora ($100k+) and Humble Indie Bundle ($1m+) as examples of the future business model for the exchange of intellectual work and the money of the multitudes who want it produced.
Laws protecting the people's rights aren't quite the same thing as regulations applying to corporations.
A corporation may well pretend it is subject to the same laws as people in order to insinuate itself as a person (to similarly enjoy the Constitution's care for people). That way it can pretend that regulations are laws, and that congress is similarly constrained in its regulation of immortal psychopaths as it is in the government of human beings.
Corporations aren't human beings.
A constitution empowers a government to secure the natural rights of its human citizens (which should not be confused with immortal entities legally recognised as persons, such as corporations).
A corrupt legislature grants privileges (which are termed as legal rights these days, or simply 'rights', usually in order to claim that the monopoly of copyright is a legal right to exclude others from making copies of your published works, or 'exclusive right' for short).
However, your (natural) right to exclude others from your writings and designs is of course perfectly natural (you lock your house, car and briefcase to achieve this), and should indeed be additionally secured by the government.
However, you do not have a natural right to exclude others from making copies of their own possessions, e.g. the books or bread slicers you have sold them. For that you need the privilege of a monopoly.
Jefferson recognised the ills of monopolies and that's why he proposed (to Madison) adding monopolies in literary and technological works to the bill of rights (so they'd at least be recognised as such, and could be abolished when people people finally realised that monopolies weren't something the constitution was supposed to be able to sanction). Unfortunately, his ploy didn't work. Copyright and patent were simply legislated without fuss.
And now that the people have the means to copy books and build bread slicers, they now discover their liberty to do so was suspended (in 1790, 3 years after the Constitution empowered congress to protect people's liberty).
Your 'problem' still exhibits the misguided principle that copyright is the natural law, and that its infringement is theft. It is actually the other way around. Copying is the natural law (speech/communication) and its prohibition is an unethical constraint (suspension of liberty).
Copyright was unethically and even unconstitutionally legislated because it was expeditious: lucrative to press owners, and attractive to states who would gladly have legislation that effectively controlled the press.
If you stop thinking of selling copies (in spite of the fact no-one needs to buy them) for a minute, and focus instead on selling intellectual work, you'll see that the producer's customers are interested in purchasing their work (rather than copies of it). So it's not a question of selling a copy. It's a question of selling the work to those who want to buy it. That means communicating with the buyers and making a deal. Or conversely, that means the buyers need to communicate with the seller and make a deal. It's more a paradigm inversion than a shift.
Or do you really want to tell me that an artist on one side and an audience of a thousand or even a million on the other can stare across a chasm and refuse to do a simple deal: Art for money, money for art?
It's a new or unfamiliar kind of deal certainly, probably inconceivable to many, but it's not an impossible one. The deal everyone's used to is 'a copy for money, money for a copy', but this only worked whilst a) only a few people had copying/printing machines, and b) there was a monopoly that kept the price up.
Now that an artist can communicate with their audience en masse, we can look forward to them doing a deal with their audience, i.e. an exchange of intellectual work for money. Moreover, such artists will realise that the first thing they should do is to emancipate their audience from the completely unhelpful shackles of copyright. That way their audience (and a secondary market) covers the cost of manufacturing copies (books/CDs etc.), distributing them (file-sharing), and promoting the artist.
Unfortunately, those still wedded to the anachronistic monopoly of copyright don't fancy this new way of doing things - it's a revolutionary upheaval of everything they've come to believe in.
If you really must insist on concrete evidence of how these new deals will be enabled well, I'm working on that with the http://contingencymarket.com/. You can check out my site http//digitalproductions.co.uk for further discussion and links to many others exploring non-copyright based business models and revenue mechanisms.
I quite agree.
So, let's exchange intellectual work for money. Not monopoly protected copies for money.
1787 was pre-US copyright.
I've acknowledged in other comments that copyright (and variations thereof) existed in Europe for many years prior, finally established by the statute of Anne in 1710.
Of course US copyright was largely based upon the British legislation.
However, even the British form of copyright was recognised not to be a natural right. The US constitution could only recognise natural rights, not privileges - even if some framers might have had the expectation that such privileges as copyright could be subsequently legislated
The most the constitution could do was to recognise an author's natural exclusive right, not any grant of a post-publication monopoly. It certainly couldn't recognise British legislation.
An author's natural exclusive right may well have little in it to attract a printer, but then this is why the proper securing of that right was abandoned and a transferable monopoly was granted instead - the printers had the ear of the government (as RIAA/MPAA has the ear of the Swedish court).
It is clear that a reproduction monopoly is highly lucrative to a printer, but this doesn't make it a natural right, nor consequently, a right that is or can be recognised by the constitution.
Just as with alcohol prohibition, the privilege of copyright will be abolished as the law must defer to the people's rightful exercise of their liberty.
There is nothing in the constitution that grants authors a transferable reproduction monopoly, nor even that permits the government to make such a grant, however, at least authors can then look forward to legislation that properly secures the exclusive right to their writings, i.e. makes IP theft a crime.
The constitution does not grant any rights, it recognises them and empowers a government to protect them.
It is only because the term 'right' has now deteriorated to encompass privileges such as copyright, that the modern use of the term 'exclusive right' means 'legal right to exclude others from performing or reproducing a covered work'.
People then confuse that modern meaning with its older constitutional meaning of 1787 (pre-copyright) as an author's natural exclusive right (a natural ability to exclude others from their private writings).
So the monopoly of copyright is then (through linguistic extension of 'right' to include 'privilege') conflated with the natural right, and people believe that the meaning of the term 'exclusive right' in the constitution is the same as the copyright conflated meaning of 'exclusive right' that people take from that term two centuries later.
To believe that the framers wrote the constitution in our modern language is to believe in time travel.
The constitution only empowered the securing of the natural right 'exclusive right', not the privilege of monopoly 'copyright' that so many have come to know and love.
Again, you have found neither the term 'copyright' nor copyright the legislation. You have simply found the constitution's recognition of an author's exclusive right. The latter is a natural right, one of several that the US government was created to protect, whereas copyright is a privilege, a reproduction monopoly that the US government granted for the commercial exploitation of printers (a privilege that printers had also been enjoying in Europe for some considerable time).
What you describe as splitting hairs can represent a considerable difference in individual liberty.
The constitutional clause recognising an individual's exclusive right is what the copyright lobbyists claim permits the government to enact copyright.
It does no such thing. The constitution cannot empower the government to grant monopolies without derogating from the very liberty the constitution creates the government to protect.
Even if in error, the constitution attempted to do this, it would have to state this explicitly. Only the corrupt would infer sanction from the constitution to grant such iniquitous privileges as monopolies.
The government has the power to secure an individual's exclusive right AND NO MORE. It cannot further grant monopolies, whether to incentivise publication or not, no matter the arrogant hypothesis that these monopolies may ultimately benefit the public.
No, copyright is government legislation that came after the constitution.
The constitution simply recognises the author's and inventor's exclusive right and specifies that the government should have power to secure it.
So the government, rather than creating legislation to secure that right, instead granted reproduction monopolies (one of the very things the framers of the constitution had sought to avoid). These require significant wealth and means beyond that of the common man to enforce, but then the printers and industrialists that sought them had the means, and knew that their costs would be greatly outweighed by the profits to be obtained in exploiting them.
This is of course until these monopolies became undermined by the public and their use of the instantaneous diffusion technology we know as the Internet.
Which is more ethical?
The securing of the exclusive right and liberty of the individual, or the enforcement of the publishing and manufacturing corporations' monopolies?
Here's a link: www.usconstitution.net. Navigate to that page and search for 'copyright'. I have a hunch you won't find it.
As you've so kindly demonstrated, copyright is not written into the constitution.
The commercial privilege of copyright was enacted later to grant a reproduction monopoly for the benefit of printers such that this would provide a commercial incentive for authors to release their work from their exclusive right, to deliver it via printers to the public.
You'll note that the government actually does a very poor job of securing authors' and inventors' exclusive right, i.e. against theft of their unpublished writings and designs. If their physical security is poor, they are effectively obliged to deliver their work to a publisher or patent office as soon as possible in order to obtain their protection. The government also provides no law against plagiarism.
Copyright and patent are privileges designed for printers and industrialists, at the expense of the public's cultural liberty. The people's exclusive rights remain largely neglected.
The more the people notice this derogation of their liberty, the more they will call for the abolition of the privileges that suspend it. Then the law can better reflect the protection of the people's natural rights as originally directed by the constitution.
Copyright is not written into the constitution. It would not be possible to write it in in any case, given a state granted monopoly could not be recognised as a natural right of the people.
People have a natural, exclusive right to their private property, which includes their unpublished writings and designs. This is the right that the constitution expressly empowered the government to secure.
The constitution can only recognise rights, it cannot grant them.
Granting of privileges (legal rights as some term them) is something the crown or government does, and unfortunately in the case of the US, unconstitutionally in the form of copyright and patent.
For more explanation see:
Constitutional Sanction
Mythologising Copyright
An Author's Exclusive Right
Copyright is not mentioned in the constitution. It is a commercial privilege that suspended the public's right to copy and was enacted later. The constitution concerned itself only with the recognition of the people's natural rights and the power a government should have in protecting these.