If the internet were created solely by private businesses it would be nothing more than incompatible AOL networks for people to pick from. It would be utter shit.
Ding! And those of us who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s remember it being EXACTLY like this.
We had the FidoNet BBSes on the low end - which were cool because they were hobbyist-run and therefore did what the users wanted of them - and then on the high end, the incompatible "information services" like CompuServe, BIX, GEnie, The Well - which did what the companies wanted, not the users.
They were very much like the current Web 2.0 scene of Facebook et al: walled gardens with no incentive to share, and powerful disincentives to do even the most rudimentary interconnection. They had separate, proprietary, email systems, games, forums - nothing in common. And they all wanted to corner the market and take out their rivals. Users were merely pawns in the game. After all, where else were you going to go to get your email? Drop your account and you lost your inbox.
I had a CIS account in 1994 and I remember the squeals with which that company grudgingly started to acknowledge the Internet. And how apocalyptic and revolutionary the idea of a single universally routable email address, and this "hyperlink" thing, seemed. It was practically hippies dancing naked in the streets! Shameful! It would end civilisation! Nobody would be able to charge for anything anymore!
you can call a company out and stop doing business with it, but it's a lot harder to change your government.
1. It's hard to stop doing business with a monopoly, if they trade in a product with inelastic demand like food or oil or water. You either buy from them, or you starve/freeze/dehydrate, etc.
Admittedly death is a very effective form of boycott, but it does require extreme commitment from the consumer.
2. In a democracy, it is in fact extremely easy to change your government. You do it every four years in the USA, with midterms every two.
If you don't like the government you keep choosing, then perhaps you need to reexamine the choices you keep making?
Are you really more worried about warrantless wiretaps than about completely anonymous people on the internet having the ability to take over your computer?
Well, most completely anonymous people on the Internet don't, eg, have access to nuclear weapons and Navy SEALs.
Without a doubt, at an absolute minimum, some innocent person and/or family is going to pay for his arrogance, with torture and their life.
If you consider a) being a part of the American war machine to be "innocence", and b) refusing to submit to the secrecy demands of the American war machine to be "arrogance", then your statement may be correct.
But not everyone would agree with those two assumptions.
I am in the "We must FIX this" camp. Not because I have anything against higher temperatures... but because I am afraid of giant lizards. If the average temperature goes up, cold-blooded animals can become larger. And I really don't want giant alligators and snakes around me.
We are never going to get off this rock and expand into space, safeguarding our civilization in the process...
You could have stopped that sentence right there.
The dirty little secret of post-Apollo space, revealed by our unmanned probes, is that there are actually no useful resources out there at all helpful for mass human colonisation.
Well, when I say 'no' I mean 'a lot less than in Antarctica'. Want to volunteer to overwinter at McMurdo Base? For the rest of your life? You'd have a lot more fun doing that than living anywhere off-planet.
Luna: Airless, waterless rock desert of insta-death filled with corrosive sand and radiation. Mars: Frozen rock desert of insta-death with corrosive sand, radiation, and faint traces of CO2 and ice. Venus: Boiling hot sulphuric acid clouds of especially nasty insta-death Asteroids: lots of miniature airless waterless rock deserts of insta-death and maybe nuggets of pure gold! which you can't eat or breathe. Jupiter: giant ball of radiation and gravity insta-death Everywhere else: insta-death, insta-death, insta-death, cold, dark, insta-death, spam, liquid methane, and insta-death.
Not much of a future for the human race out there, is my point. Unless you redefine 'human race' to mean 'robot', at which point living in Antarctica is still cheaper and you get penguins for free.
Don't believe everything Heinlein and O'Neill sold you.
Civilizations fall. No need to hasten it or anything, but it will certainly happen.
You do realise we're communicating using the Roman alphabet?
Rome didn't exactly 'fall', just got a bit woozy and had to sit down for a bit. Then it woke up in a plane somewhere between London and Washington DC muttering 'man, that was some party. Hey, I got nukes now! Hoo-ah! Next round's on me!'
Even if it is 100% caused by man I don't see what they expect us to do about it. Given the choice between civilization and some abstract harm to people they don't know, most people are going to go with civilization.....
And given the choice between saving that civilisation by modifying it and standing by and watching the collapse of that civilisation by doing business-as-usual until the end, people will happily ride the collapse right up to the 'Oh shiiiii----' moment?
I hope you're wrong and we have a little more prescience than that.
Then after X years it will cool down again (as it has before), then warm up again......it's a vicious cycle!
Actually it were a vicious cycle it would intensify, trending in a direction hostile to life, in a self-reinforcing manner with each revolution - that's what the 'vicious' part means.
And this sort of confusion is exactly why BY-NC licences are not really worth the trouble. Everyone on Earth receives money - therefore is there anyone at all whose postings are truly noncommercial?
Either share, or don't. But don't try to half-share and then get angry when people interpret a vague clause differently.
SC has a similar law that is actually more vague and requires subversives register with the state or face 10 years.
Agent Jones, Federal Bureau of Subversion. We hear you've been, uh, demonstrating in favor of the government and engaging in some other, shall we say pro-American activities. We'd like to speak with you about that.
You don't like it? Don't consume it. It doesn't hurt you any.
Have you seriously considered what would be required for you to live for a day in an urban environment without 'consuming' any copyrighted media?
Avoiding consuming motion pictures would be reasonably easy, at least in first-run - just make sure you never step into a cinema.
Avoiding television, not quite so easy - you would need to boycott all your friends' lounges, and avoid walking past any electronics store windows. So no social life and no gadget shopping.
Avoiding iTunes and RIAA-licenced Compact Discs would be manageable - just never own a personal media player (and also boycott your friends' hi-fi systems - no parties, no clubs, no dinners).
Avoiding commercial radio, however - you'd practically need to avoid all shops in order to not passively consume any muzak. Oops.
Then there's posters, billboards, outdoor concerts and sculpture, all of which may well be copyrighted. You'd have to keep out of built-up places entirely.
The Unabomber, I think, and the Amish might be able to live a perfectly copyright-legal lifestyle in today's world. Everyone else? Not so much.
If intellectual property has value for multiple uses, why shouldn't the creator get paid each time it is used?
Because intellectual 'property' has value for infinite uses, not just 'multiple'. And because it collects in people's brains and taints everything they think from then on, so it replicates.
Are you really claiming that you have the moral right for everyone in the world to be your slaves, forever, until the end of time? Because that is what a strong view on copyright asserts.
Many people find this claim morally abhorrent.
Actually how ELSE would you pay a photographer, other than EVERY TIME you use one of the images they created?
Up front, for the work they did in producing the image, of course. What other way would make sense?
'Use' of an image is a very nebulous concept in a shared, networked world, where computers start to augment human brains at a deeply intimate level. Do you really want to get money each time someone thinks of an image you've shot? How about every time they click on an image on their laptop? Every time they post that image on their blog? Problem is, there's really no difference between those three use cases.
Seriously tracking 'usage' of information for copyright purposes requires such invasive apparatus of mental control as to be indistinguishable from thought police. This is not hyperbole. The existence of 'intellectual property' literally creates a category of 'thought crime'. This is something we really, really don't want to automate and globalise. It's not a livable future for any of us.
Would the first purchaser pay for all potential or possible use?
Yes. That's exactly what should happen, because fully tracking 'uses' of information on a global scale is morally unthinkable. The first purchaser pays for the production of the media; all uses of that media should then be free and open.
Does the last purchaser pay less because the photographer has already gained other revenue?
No, there is no 'last purchaser', there is only the first, who commissions the media's production. Everyone else are free riders, because that's how the physics of information naturally works. Don't like that? Take it up with the universe. We didn't make the rules.
And if an image is valuable, and inspires multiple uses, why shouldn't the photographer receive more compensation?
Because perpetual servitude of the entire planet to one person is morally reprehensible, because building the tracking and control infrastructure to monitor usage of every bit, thought and chunk of media, forever, would be an insanely inefficient bureaucratic nightmare, and if those thought experiments don't suffice to demonstrate, because both the physics and metaphysics of the idea of ownership of information are just plain wrong.
Your time doing other things is more valuable to you. So it is with photographs.
- You are not, in fact, able to do the work as well as the professional roofer. So it is with photographers.
- You are not, in fact, able to do it as cheaply with the same results as the professional. So it is with photographers.
Exactly correct. But you are talking about work-for-hire, not copyright. This is why creation of media should be compensated, not use of media.
You are talking about work that adds substantially to the market value to your house - that yields an "unearned" return beyond the value of his labor.
Well, or that having a non-leaky roof is valuable in and of itself, because you don't get rain on your couch.
Not everything in life is about market valuation and investment for resale.
Similarly, sometimes information is valuable just because it exists, and because of what can be created from it, and the fact that you can't sell it for money is meaningless if at the end of the day the world still has, say, Orion's Arm or Linux.
There seem to be a lot of people 'round here now for whom Windows is a universal and sole reference point.
That is entirely practical and will continue to be as long as Windows is the dominant legacy system.
But Windows Vista/7 have really broken some of the UI design which made Windows 95 and up great, so as long as GNOME isn't following Apple and Microsoft's trend toward making interfaces more obscure and less powerful, there's certainly room to improve.
(Seriously, Microsoft, wtf. You removed the 'go up one directory' button in the Windows Explorer, and why? I *use* that button! A lot.)
How does one do "suspected hacking"? With a potential laptop running Possibly Quite Small Linux on a Secretly Doesn't Believe In Grand Narratives Serial Bus drive?
I guess some people harbour angry feelings towards him for releasing that military video - something along the lines of loose lips might sink ships.
I don't get this. Why does anyone in the USA feel that these wars are in their interest at all?
I'm not American, but before Iraq I used to feel like the USA was if not a complete white knight, at least the least-worst big power in the world. But when GWB did his 'yeah, I'm proactively invading, and I like torture, who's gonna stop me?' circus show, suddenly something flipped inside me, and I realised that militaries are not fundamentally on anyone's side who is not in their immediate chain of command.
And the American people haven't been directly in the chain of command of the US military since Hiroshima. Not really even during WW2 - William Stephenson's British Security Coordination saw to a lot of secret propaganda to swing things so that war became cool. Ever read the very first issue of Superman in 1939? The villains were arms dealers trying to drag the USA into a European war. That attitude sure changed quickly, and it wasn't all due to a spontaneous change of heart in the voting public.
So: why this feeling in Main Street USA that anyone revealing war secrets is worse than prosecuting a bad war in the first place? Especially from people who often lean right and are fearfully distrustful of a Government they see as "men with guns" telling them how to live - yet when it comes to literalmen with guns, they're all for knuckling down and taking orders from the Commander In Chief right away! I can't get my head around that contradiction.
While in theory openness is good, it is only good if it is for the right reason. "Openness" for the sake of personal ulterior motives is just as bad if not worse than what it purports to fight.
So you're not in favour of Linux or the GPL, then? And you'll only use open source software which, in addition to being open, is also only open for the right reasons?
WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau.... This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.... It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members..
Publishing secret rites is "information vandalism" now? So Operation Clambake should never have released the Scientology OT-III papers about Xenu?
I, for one, don't find myself that worried by Wikileaks' behaviour in these cases.
And Spain and Portugal between them went on to do the Reconquista and Crusades, colonise South America, and have a pretty good shot at Taking Over The World (tm) until the Brits got all piratey on them.
Slashdot Mirror
If the internet were created solely by private businesses it would be nothing more than incompatible AOL networks for people to pick from. It would be utter shit.
Ding! And those of us who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s remember it being EXACTLY like this.
We had the FidoNet BBSes on the low end - which were cool because they were hobbyist-run and therefore did what the users wanted of them - and then on the high end, the incompatible "information services" like CompuServe, BIX, GEnie, The Well - which did what the companies wanted, not the users.
They were very much like the current Web 2.0 scene of Facebook et al: walled gardens with no incentive to share, and powerful disincentives to do even the most rudimentary interconnection. They had separate, proprietary, email systems, games, forums - nothing in common. And they all wanted to corner the market and take out their rivals. Users were merely pawns in the game. After all, where else were you going to go to get your email? Drop your account and you lost your inbox.
I had a CIS account in 1994 and I remember the squeals with which that company grudgingly started to acknowledge the Internet. And how apocalyptic and revolutionary the idea of a single universally routable email address, and this "hyperlink" thing, seemed. It was practically hippies dancing naked in the streets! Shameful! It would end civilisation! Nobody would be able to charge for anything anymore!
Good times, good times.
you can call a company out and stop doing business with it, but it's a lot harder to change your government.
1. It's hard to stop doing business with a monopoly, if they trade in a product with inelastic demand like food or oil or water. You either buy from them, or you starve/freeze/dehydrate, etc.
Admittedly death is a very effective form of boycott, but it does require extreme commitment from the consumer.
2. In a democracy, it is in fact extremely easy to change your government. You do it every four years in the USA, with midterms every two.
If you don't like the government you keep choosing, then perhaps you need to reexamine the choices you keep making?
Are you really more worried about warrantless wiretaps than about completely anonymous people on the internet having the ability to take over your computer?
Well, most completely anonymous people on the Internet don't, eg, have access to nuclear weapons and Navy SEALs.
The US government does.
Just sayin'.
Dude, Julian Assange is not a Jedi. He won't come back as a ghost after death to advise Luke. If you strike him down, he'll be dead
He has a death sentence in twelve systems!
No blasters! No blasters!
Without a doubt, at an absolute minimum, some innocent person and/or family is going to pay for his arrogance, with torture and their life.
If you consider a) being a part of the American war machine to be "innocence", and b) refusing to submit to the secrecy demands of the American war machine to be "arrogance", then your statement may be correct.
But not everyone would agree with those two assumptions.
I am in the "We must FIX this" camp. Not because I have anything against higher temperatures... but because I am afraid of giant lizards. If the average temperature goes up, cold-blooded animals can become larger. And I really don't want giant alligators and snakes around me.
Wait a minute -- I'll be dead. Never mind.
So then it'll be zombies and giant lizards?
We are never going to get off this rock and expand into space, safeguarding our civilization in the process...
You could have stopped that sentence right there.
The dirty little secret of post-Apollo space, revealed by our unmanned probes, is that there are actually no useful resources out there at all helpful for mass human colonisation.
Well, when I say 'no' I mean 'a lot less than in Antarctica'. Want to volunteer to overwinter at McMurdo Base? For the rest of your life? You'd have a lot more fun doing that than living anywhere off-planet.
Luna: Airless, waterless rock desert of insta-death filled with corrosive sand and radiation.
Mars: Frozen rock desert of insta-death with corrosive sand, radiation, and faint traces of CO2 and ice.
Venus: Boiling hot sulphuric acid clouds of especially nasty insta-death
Asteroids: lots of miniature airless waterless rock deserts of insta-death and maybe nuggets of pure gold! which you can't eat or breathe.
Jupiter: giant ball of radiation and gravity insta-death
Everywhere else: insta-death, insta-death, insta-death, cold, dark, insta-death, spam, liquid methane, and insta-death.
Not much of a future for the human race out there, is my point. Unless you redefine 'human race' to mean 'robot', at which point living in Antarctica is still cheaper and you get penguins for free.
Don't believe everything Heinlein and O'Neill sold you.
The fertility rate has dropped like a rock over the last 25 years. If it continues, we might well have negative population growth in another 25 years.
Those first negative babies are gonna be really mixed-up kids, you know.
Spoken like a typical Roman.
Civilizations fall. No need to hasten it or anything, but it will certainly happen.
You do realise we're communicating using the Roman alphabet?
Rome didn't exactly 'fall', just got a bit woozy and had to sit down for a bit. Then it woke up in a plane somewhere between London and Washington DC muttering 'man, that was some party. Hey, I got nukes now! Hoo-ah! Next round's on me!'
Even if it is 100% caused by man I don't see what they expect us to do about it. Given the choice between civilization and some abstract harm to people they don't know, most people are going to go with civilization.....
And given the choice between saving that civilisation by modifying it and standing by and watching the collapse of that civilisation by doing business-as-usual until the end, people will happily ride the collapse right up to the 'Oh shiiiii----' moment?
I hope you're wrong and we have a little more prescience than that.
Then after X years it will cool down again (as it has before), then warm up again......it's a vicious cycle!
Actually it were a vicious cycle it would intensify, trending in a direction hostile to life, in a self-reinforcing manner with each revolution - that's what the 'vicious' part means.
Which would not be a good thing.
Unfortunately Wikimedia Commons, the source for all the images on Wikipedia, does not guarantee that all the images it hosts can be redistributed
It doesn't? That seems like the exact opposite of what their license page says
Though perhaps you are referring to country-specific copyright expiry or non-copyright restrictions?
And this sort of confusion is exactly why BY-NC licences are not really worth the trouble. Everyone on Earth receives money - therefore is there anyone at all whose postings are truly noncommercial?
Either share, or don't. But don't try to half-share and then get angry when people interpret a vague clause differently.
SC has a similar law that is actually more vague and requires subversives register with the state or face 10 years.
Agent Jones, Federal Bureau of Subversion. We hear you've been, uh, demonstrating in favor of the government and engaging in some other, shall we say pro-American activities. We'd like to speak with you about that.
Conversely, if we cannot trust our government to make this decision, we need to do something about our government.
Correct, you don't, yes, you do, and what Julian Assange is doing is exactly "doing something about" it.
So your problem with him is...?
You don't like it? Don't consume it. It doesn't hurt you any.
Have you seriously considered what would be required for you to live for a day in an urban environment without 'consuming' any copyrighted media?
Avoiding consuming motion pictures would be reasonably easy, at least in first-run - just make sure you never step into a cinema.
Avoiding television, not quite so easy - you would need to boycott all your friends' lounges, and avoid walking past any electronics store windows. So no social life and no gadget shopping.
Avoiding iTunes and RIAA-licenced Compact Discs would be manageable - just never own a personal media player (and also boycott your friends' hi-fi systems - no parties, no clubs, no dinners).
Avoiding commercial radio, however - you'd practically need to avoid all shops in order to not passively consume any muzak. Oops.
Then there's posters, billboards, outdoor concerts and sculpture, all of which may well be copyrighted. You'd have to keep out of built-up places entirely.
The Unabomber, I think, and the Amish might be able to live a perfectly copyright-legal lifestyle in today's world. Everyone else? Not so much.
Still think perpetual copyright is moral?
If intellectual property has value for multiple uses, why shouldn't the creator get paid each time it is used?
Because intellectual 'property' has value for infinite uses, not just 'multiple'. And because it collects in people's brains and taints everything they think from then on, so it replicates.
Are you really claiming that you have the moral right for everyone in the world to be your slaves, forever, until the end of time? Because that is what a strong view on copyright asserts.
Many people find this claim morally abhorrent.
Actually how ELSE would you pay a photographer, other than EVERY TIME you use one of the images they created?
Up front, for the work they did in producing the image, of course. What other way would make sense?
'Use' of an image is a very nebulous concept in a shared, networked world, where computers start to augment human brains at a deeply intimate level. Do you really want to get money each time someone thinks of an image you've shot? How about every time they click on an image on their laptop? Every time they post that image on their blog? Problem is, there's really no difference between those three use cases.
Seriously tracking 'usage' of information for copyright purposes requires such invasive apparatus of mental control as to be indistinguishable from thought police. This is not hyperbole. The existence of 'intellectual property' literally creates a category of 'thought crime'. This is something we really, really don't want to automate and globalise. It's not a livable future for any of us.
Would the first purchaser pay for all potential or possible use?
Yes. That's exactly what should happen, because fully tracking 'uses' of information on a global scale is morally unthinkable. The first purchaser pays for the production of the media; all uses of that media should then be free and open.
Does the last purchaser pay less because the photographer has already gained other revenue?
No, there is no 'last purchaser', there is only the first, who commissions the media's production. Everyone else are free riders, because that's how the physics of information naturally works. Don't like that? Take it up with the universe. We didn't make the rules.
And if an image is valuable, and inspires multiple uses, why shouldn't the photographer receive more compensation?
Because perpetual servitude of the entire planet to one person is morally reprehensible, because building the tracking and control infrastructure to monitor usage of every bit, thought and chunk of media, forever, would be an insanely inefficient bureaucratic nightmare, and if those thought experiments don't suffice to demonstrate, because both the physics and metaphysics of the idea of ownership of information are just plain wrong.
Your time doing other things is more valuable to you. So it is with photographs.
- You are not, in fact, able to do the work as well as the professional roofer. So it is with photographers.
- You are not, in fact, able to do it as cheaply with the same results as the professional. So it is with photographers.
Exactly correct. But you are talking about work-for-hire, not copyright. This is why creation of media should be compensated, not use of media.
You are talking about work that adds substantially to the market value to your house - that yields an "unearned" return beyond the value of his labor.
Well, or that having a non-leaky roof is valuable in and of itself, because you don't get rain on your couch.
Not everything in life is about market valuation and investment for resale.
Similarly, sometimes information is valuable just because it exists, and because of what can be created from it, and the fact that you can't sell it for money is meaningless if at the end of the day the world still has, say, Orion's Arm or Linux.
There seem to be a lot of people 'round here now for whom Windows is a universal and sole reference point.
That is entirely practical and will continue to be as long as Windows is the dominant legacy system.
But Windows Vista/7 have really broken some of the UI design which made Windows 95 and up great, so as long as GNOME isn't following Apple and Microsoft's trend toward making interfaces more obscure and less powerful, there's certainly room to improve.
(Seriously, Microsoft, wtf. You removed the 'go up one directory' button in the Windows Explorer, and why? I *use* that button! A lot.)
How does one do "suspected hacking"? With a potential laptop running Possibly Quite Small Linux on a Secretly Doesn't Believe In Grand Narratives Serial Bus drive?
Sheesh, one of their top generals got fired just for expressing opinions! That's a fucking oppressive atmosphere.
A military is an organisation where people can legally get executed by their superiors for disobeying an order.
How can such an organisation be anything but oppressive, by definition?
I guess some people harbour angry feelings towards him for releasing that military video - something along the lines of loose lips might sink ships.
I don't get this. Why does anyone in the USA feel that these wars are in their interest at all?
I'm not American, but before Iraq I used to feel like the USA was if not a complete white knight, at least the least-worst big power in the world. But when GWB did his 'yeah, I'm proactively invading, and I like torture, who's gonna stop me?' circus show, suddenly something flipped inside me, and I realised that militaries are not fundamentally on anyone's side who is not in their immediate chain of command.
And the American people haven't been directly in the chain of command of the US military since Hiroshima. Not really even during WW2 - William Stephenson's British Security Coordination saw to a lot of secret propaganda to swing things so that war became cool. Ever read the very first issue of Superman in 1939? The villains were arms dealers trying to drag the USA into a European war. That attitude sure changed quickly, and it wasn't all due to a spontaneous change of heart in the voting public.
So: why this feeling in Main Street USA that anyone revealing war secrets is worse than prosecuting a bad war in the first place? Especially from people who often lean right and are fearfully distrustful of a Government they see as "men with guns" telling them how to live - yet when it comes to literalmen with guns, they're all for knuckling down and taking orders from the Commander In Chief right away! I can't get my head around that contradiction.
While in theory openness is good, it is only good if it is for the right reason. "Openness" for the sake of personal ulterior motives is just as bad if not worse than what it purports to fight.
So you're not in favour of Linux or the GPL, then? And you'll only use open source software which, in addition to being open, is also only open for the right reasons?
Good to know.
WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. ... This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.... It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. .
Publishing secret rites is "information vandalism" now? So Operation Clambake should never have released the Scientology OT-III papers about Xenu?
I, for one, don't find myself that worried by Wikileaks' behaviour in these cases.
And Spain and Portugal between them went on to do the Reconquista and Crusades, colonise South America, and have a pretty good shot at Taking Over The World (tm) until the Brits got all piratey on them.
I guess the pacification didn't take.