Re:Preaching to the American Choir
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Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
I just read Breakfast of Champions last night. I took something different from the book than you did, but I guess that's the benefit of a subtle, inspired novel. I've never heard of the movie.
And I suppose that I wouldn't call my perception of Mononoke an "honest" critique, nor am I a platonic "critic." Like all critics, I base my final judgement by taking everything possible into account, including myself; unlike a platonic critic, I don't know everything.
The reason I mentioned the fact that I don't know jack about anime is because I wonder if what seems like heavyhanded ecology and nature-religion diatribe to an American doesn't fade into the background of a Japanese created movie in Japanese culture. Was Mononoke created for Japanese culture, and by porting it to Americanese, was it done a disservice because of Americans' different understandings of religion and nature?
eg. I made a movie as a graduation gift for my friends which to outside viewers may come across as heavyhanded, boring sentimentality, but in the intended audience it has different, diverse effects. If you are only going to make a critique of the movie based on your being an outsider, you might not be giving the movie the credit it deserves, or will be judging the movie on merits that may not have struck the creator as significant, etc.
And, again, my criticisms rely on the audience of a piece, both intended and accidental. Maybe the movie was only intended for "average Americans" because Anime fanatics would find it pedantic. While both audiences should be taken into account, perhaps the needs of the intended audience reflect more honestly on the movie.
You make a good point about logical arguments, but I must say that, in my opinion, "average Americans" have no respect for them. Children, on the other hand, are a little more open minded, on the whole.
Preaching to the American Choir
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
I had this argument with my SO for weeks after seeing Mononoke. We struggled with the need for balance between a subtle, yet effective storyline and the need to actually penetrate American's thick skulls.
I'm not very anime-oriented, so I really only know anything about the Americanized version. To me, a heavy handed plot is justified if it manages to attack with any success the common American culture or convince a few Americans to reconsider their lifestyle (specifically when the attack is one I consider worthwhile. This is my criteria, after all).
While a more moderate plot might have been mentally stimulating for me and people who already understand the importance of protecting the planet, I fear that an uninitiated American would miss the point entirely and any social gain that might have resulted from the film is wasted preaching to the choir.
So I would argue that there were plenty of elements in the movie to keep the choir entertained and sacrificing the subtlety is not a crime. If, on the other hand, I found the movie heavy handed AND unentertaining in most other respects, I wouldn't give it quite the leeway.
Consider Battlefield Earth: for some people it might be a thrill-a-minute action flick, but to me it's a heavy-handed scientology flick with no redeeming values, so it doesn't get the same sort of leeway as Mononoke does.
Of course this is all premised on my lowly opinion of Americans (myself being one). I understand that places like cluetrain have a different perspective. It will take a lot to restore my faith in the Average American, but I'm certainly open to suggestions to the contrary.
This depends on whether you consider a language something people use to communicate internal thoughts or as an independent list of rules and structures.
Sure, Plato may be kicking back right now with Strict English for Dummies, but we'll never know what it says. Or maybe the King Of England gets to dictate what constitutes proper English. If nobody uses either of these standards, then there is only one person to call it English: the standards-keeper. Everyone else uses what they call English, and can happily understand one another, if not agree on strict useages.
Thus, what the lone standards-keeper calls English and what the language utilizing community calls English are disparate, and all you have then is an authority game. I tend to side with the people actually using the language, though the standards keeper serves the useful funtcion of maintaining a modicum of stability as the language evolves.
Email me, I have some poorly-written Philosophy of Language papers I'd be happy to share.
See my above post: they need no additional legal protection from copyright violations, they are already against the law. What, do they want them double-illegal?
So there must be "unauthorized uses" that are lawful but don't fit into TW/AOL's idea of a profitable society.
See my previous post on the License Economy as well. The idea is that there are several ways to increase the profitability of a good or service. The proponents of the DMCA have decided to persue a method that increases the Return on Investment by legislating obstacles into the path of the consumer, forcing them to purchase the use of a good rather than the good itself. What was previously free to do, Fair Use, under the DMCA becomes a profitable proposition. They get more money for the exact same product by being permitted by our government to charge for the "authorized use."
Put simply, we once had a say in what the copyright holders would be in a position to authorize, but it's been turned on its head. Now they're the ones with the rulebook, not us.
Really, they are being bad capitalists, not good ones, and the congress/the citizens haven't called them on it.
Your local newspaper will take story ideas, call them during business hours tomorrow, they may actually be happy to hear from someone who isn't a paid publicist looking to have their press release run.
Offer to write an editorial after you've explained the location and purpose of the story. They will be unlikely to cover the story themselves--instead they will take your suggestion to mean: "look for this story on the wire for the next two days." If it doesn't make Reuters or the AP, you probably won't see it in your paper. If they are at all interested in the story, they might want to see an editorial in case the story doesn't surface or as a tie-in to the wire copy. Local editorials on a timely issue are more valuable than an archive or wire editorial, and cheaper. If you are "credentialed" all the better.
We in the twin cities that have a local econ professor battling the stadium builders tooth and nail through editorials. The point being that his modest credentials (prof at a community college), combined with his rhetoric have earned him quite a loud voice in the region.
Have URLs handy (2600.com, opendvd.org slashdot) to start the editors on the right track. Give them the MPAA/RIAA's webpage too, so they can feel they're being complete.
I hate to steal a page from the 2nd amendment lobbyists on this issue, but TW/AOL is begging for it:
There is already a body of law that prohibits "unauthorized use" of copyrighted materials in all domains: Copyright law.
Rather than allow our rights to be bled by further legislation, TW/AOL has a right to help the federal government enforce the laws that already exist. To do anything more, particularly in the form of the DMCA, unconstitutionally inhibits fair use of copyrighted materials in favor of stronger rights for copyright holders.
If TW/AOL wants to protect themselves against "unauthorized use" they should either increase their contribution to the federal government so they can afford to pursue their valid claims (do they have any?) of copyright violation by loosening their accounting standards to indicate a higher taxable income (a simple numbers manipulation), or they should make their product in a manner that does not encourage the market to ignore their copyright and create a grey market for their copyrighted goods (less expensive, copy-prohibitive media such as cave walls, or not selling it).
I think that this editorial does a smooth job of a New To Slashdot FAQ, times being what they are.
Be prepared, however, to be quoted in the media as representative of the entire community (which you should know is a no-win situation). There are generally n+1 opinions on a given subject on Slashdot, where n is an arbirarily large number.
Personally, I would have liked to see more ruminations on the legal situation. Certainly the Andover people have met with a lawyer and have a little insight into their position.
Personally, I think the solution is simple. Fair use applies to copyrighted works, so make the publication of the code fit into fair use specifications, ie. for research or criticism. Give an equal fraction of the code to posters and have them repost the code with their comments attached. Then no single person has reposted the entire source and each individual portion is fair use. Leave it as an exercise for the reader to concatenate the posts; a trivial task but one that should easily evade any copyright issues.
Then have someone deal with the "trade secret" issue and someone with the "licensed text" issue.
This problem is easily one for the OS crowd: with many eyes, all legal technicalities become trivial.
If he gets squeezed out of his shorts, its cool, because his property and revenue will have gone up.
Except he has to use his new equity and revenue to cover his shorts... cutting into his profit, netting him $0, or worse. Doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me. Unless you have a crystal ball beowulf cluster, you're better off not investing at all.
I can't imagine shorting something unless there were a reason to expect it to decrease in value, because I expect every worthwhile investment to increase in value in the long term. The risk in shorting an investment is infinite, the risk in going long equals the initial investment; the benefits of the two are inverse.
2600.com has an entertaining record of legal minutae in the form of a transcript of their lawyer talking to the MPAA lawyer and the judge on a conference call.
Mr. Garbus seems pretty motivated by this case. The EFF has done 2600 and the 1st amendment a great service.
My girlfriend and I were discussing the movie Gladiator last night. To get directly to the point, the argument turned to the relationship between an author, an audience, and a critic.
Based on my premises that an author writes for an Ideal Audience, and not for the entire audience or for a critic (though there is some interplay between an IA and a critic), she pointed out that today "Everyone is a critic." and then pointed directly to our ADSL gateway.
While I don't necessarily agree with her in the context of last night's topic -- I still think a critic is a special class of audience member -- she had a point.
The internet encourages publishing. Feedback forums like slashdot and ZDNET, doubly so because of their ease of use. People publish what they know. People know their opinions.
The end result is a horrible cacophony of "whiners" or terribly misinformed, uninformed or irrelevant opinion. To me, somehow, this is what seperates an audience member from a critic: the ability to more fully justify an opinion than the median audience member.
I doubt that time will change this affliction. The only solution is to accept the WWW with it's faults and the irritating effect it has on people. The benefit of getting to weed out the nonsensical, strange and meritless to reach the "insightful" "interesting" or the "underrated" is preferrable to having none of it at all.
But I think we're arguing the same thing from opposite sides.
You say that anyone can be investigated by Authorities and they don't have to be a terrorist, I say that everyone who's investigated by Authorities is by definition a terrorist and it can include anyone who it is in fashion to fear or suspect.
I disagree that he government doesn't have to justify their actions, though. This is the information age. It is too easy to communicate a message or political idea (my American biases are seeping). An Authority could go and cover a violation of their own laws and practicies, but I argue that that is the act of an immature/dumb authority. The more elegant, easy and nonparadoxical way to go about it is to have a justification ready that sounds plausible. It is similar to a Somebody Else's Problem field. You don't allay fears about corrupt Authorities by encouraging the possibilities that they are internally conflicted and violate their own guidelines, you do it by denying that such paradoxes exist. Everything is going as planned, nothing more to see here. Consumers crave that. As long as someone is telling them everything is OK (maybe it can be a law! Consititutional Amendment: Everything is OK!) it is so, doubly so if it is an Authority telling them.
I admit, though that I have no background on the case. I just read the article you linked me to and treated it with the standard skepticism.
The capitalist system has begun an evolution. Spurred by corporate power, we have entered a new economic system I'll call License Economy.
The waning form of capitalism, the one where goods and services are exchanged for units of value, slowly yields to the new capitalism. In the new capitalism there are no goods, only services. Services are services. Goods are services. Maybe even money will be a service.
The necessity for the License Economy is clear--As the digital media companies have discovered, as the complete cost to reproduce a good approaches zero there is no incentive to purchase the good. In order to profit from a "good" in the License Economy, the goods must magically become a service; therefore converting the good into a revokable and scarce commodity, creating "value" where none existed in the economic sense.
The trick is that the License Economy will seep out of the digital domain. Licensing reliably increases margins on every non-consumable good put into the market. After all, isn't the idea behind capitalism that as the domain of the economy expands, the cost to produce a good approaches zero because of competition and trade (ignoring for the moment as economists like to do, the depletion of natural resources)?
e.g.: My client is an architect. The plans he drew for your house are an expensive combination of engineering/drafting school, knowledge of local and national code, and art, too. In fact, so very much went into your house: the blood of the construction workers and the marketing of the mortgage company, that, well, you need to pay a royalty of just 1% of your montly payment to these hardworking artisans in perpetuity. In addition, if you should ever sell the house, this does not negate the hard work and creativity put into building that house, so your buyer will need take over paying the royalties. Should you care to make an addition to the house, well, you will need to run it by the architect--to make sure it is in line with his artistic vision. He certainly has the right to control how his art is used!
What? You want to defraud these craftspeople? How will they make their living?! Etc, etc...
All long-winded allegory beside, as long as descretely ubiquitous licensing is permitted when purchasing software, it will certainly follow elsewhere, mutating goods into services as we relinquish our notions of personal property and of ownerwhip to the corporations. Sure we'll get to buy our toothpaste and other consumables, but the moment we decide to avail ourselves of a product that might stand a change of outlasting us--a corporation will be set to lease it to you, with certain provsions (for example, upon your death posession is transferred back to the parent company... Those ConGlomCo shareholders worked hard hours to assemble those raw materials into a telephone and hey certainly have a right to profit from it in perpetuity!)
NDAs are licenses for knowledge. The corporate battle against the expiry of copyright will continue to encourage the unending license of all recorded works. Oh, and does anyone remember having to lease a telephone from MaBell? Well, that's the work of a pathetic internet startup compared to the intrusions we can expect with corporate oligopolies in every corner of the market. (Here, I'm mostly talking to those pro-monopolists who decry the MS trial with "Back when ATT was in one piece was the last time I could orgasm.")
Ownership is obsolete. The money's in licenses -- and not just because you can disclaim everything under the sun; you can do that, and still own what you're "selling" too!
Does any of this sound strangely like a certain... underappreciated economic model?
You don't need to patent something defensively. If you do something but don't patent it, nobody else can patent it afterwords because of a little caveat called "Prior Art."
There is no such thing as a defensive patent. Either you patent something and use it like a club on those in your industry, or you don't and it's a little like copyleft.
Furthermore, Microsoft, if it were really interested in not being sued, would have settled the anti-trust case. They are now subject to a million points of litigation that rely directly on the judge's findings of fact--specifically that microsoft behaves in a manner unbefitting a monopolist. The appelate court can only overturn the remedies or demand a revisitation of certain conclusions. The facts are in and almost unbesmirchable.
Frankly, both of your premises need work. "Microsoft wants to avoid lawsuits" and "Defensive patents protect against lawsuits." are both false.
That example does little to disprove my point, though I accept yours that a vigilant eye must be kept on local authorities.
The victim was a target of surveillance for an intelligence unit of a local police force. I can't imagine any/every local police force instituting a national internet screening project. There are not enough law enforcement officials in the world.
Yes, you should be aware of what those in authority are doing with their authority, you won't hear me argue otherwise.
Furthermore, this article's headline claims that the victim was surveyed for 15 years, but the evidence presented later in the article only seems to suggest that the person's picutre was taken once about 12 years ago, and that a decetcive had become aware of his existance 15 years ago, and with no explicit or implicit surveillance in between. I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the article didn't report it. To me, this smacks of a sensational headline without the article containing anything to support it.
The victim's premesis was then wrongfully searched--an injustice with no causal relationship to surveillance that may or may not have occurred. Anyone can be wrongfully searched, arrested, or killed by an authority or non-authority gone amuck without any reliance on first invading their privacy.
Furthermore, you missed my point entirely.
Every invasion of privacy and subsequent police action under Echelon and the UK surveillance system will be justified. I purport that the justification will be economic--and that the justification will be "reasonable" because economic justifications will be law and will sound like common sense to a consumerist society.
Maybe what I did not make clear is that over time, the economic justifications will be less immediately correlated to the true justification, and that members of protest groups and "peace-loving organizations" will soon be typical targets of the economically-justified surveillance because their actions will be counter to the capitalist will. You don't have to be planning to DOS Yahoo to be an economic terrorist, you can be planning a rally at your local Daytons against fur, or publishing material informing consumers what practices Disney uses to produce movies...
I did not mean to indicate that everyone surveyed will be canonical economic terrorists, just that every Enemy of the State will be an economic terrorist, where economic terrorist has a broader and broader definition.
Lastly, I never said I was okay with a national eavesdropping project, so I don't know what gave you that impression.
You, sir, should wake up, because no one is out to get you. Not as long as you're a good consumer.
Yes, and under who's direction will the government act? Who will be protected by the legislation or executive order that permits such eavesdropping?
The government passes laws and enforces them for a reason, you know. There must be a benefactor that the government believes itself to assist, or there would be no motivation to invade privacy. No government would legislate in a vaccuum. Or put even more plainly, there is a market for invasions of privacy; since the governments have a monopoly, only the most prized industries can afford to purchase it (that includes you,.mil).
The portions of, at least American, law that are focused on the protection of civil liberties for individuals are slowly being dwarfed by the body of law that is intended to protect businesses.
When was the last time the government became interested in the content of an email or website that pertained to the conduct of a business? Were they interested because they decided it would be a good way to spend time, or because they were compelled to by economic and political forces? Now try to remember a time any government cared about a website's or email's content that did not pertain to the conduct of a business.
...
Think of a single instance? I can't.
These invasions of privacy will be only carried out in cases of National Security. This sounds grave and dire enough so most people will think it justified, as I'm sure you agree. The point we disagree upon is when such a justification will be invoked. For some reason it sounds as if you think anyone and everyone is capable of arousing suspicion. I think that your paranoia is still too broad and mis-focused.
Suspicion will not be randomly meted out and privacy invasions be taken lightly, as it is not in the national interest (read: corporate interest). A scared consumer is a timid consumer is a tightwad consumer. Instead, it will be invoked when a corporation's public or private interests are threatened, likely because there will be laws against such things in due time. This way the privacy invasions will sound justified to a world of consumers.
Which sounds justified: "We had to intercept their communications because their continued collaboration would have brought an end to our burgeoning economy!" or "Thanks to our multi-billion dollar eavesdropping unit, we've collared a unit of 1337 21-st century vandals who intended to plaster underpasses with 'Hack the world' bumper stickers."
The first would be far more profitable and in Society's Best Interest than eavesdropping on arbitrary citizens.
I'm sorry to threaten your obviously firm beliefs, but you're atacking a consumerist tarbaby. No government cares about your email to HairyBear66990@aol.com... unless you're conspiring to overthrow the economy. Such economic terrorists are more dangerous, easier to target and more valuable than petty miscreants, vandals, dissenters whose impact on consumers are minimal and short-lived, or bombers, whose attacks are unlikely to be intercepted if they are communicated at all.
h2g2 is more than an online digital library, it is a community editable online digital library. Anyone can add entries.
In theory, it is the most complete library imagineable. In practice, well, not everyone contributes so its reach is finite.
However, they plan to develop handheld, wireless devices to access the h2g2... with Don't Panic written soothingly on the cover. Maybe they'll make a springboard device.
So instead of complaining that there are no good digital libraries, just contribute everything you know to h2g2 and it will be more complete than any other.
But since you brought up Handspring, I wonder what this means for their future devices? Because they use Palm OS, and future versions of Palm OS will run on different chips, will Handspring be forced to change chips to keep pace?
What if Palm managed to get a volume or other business deal with the new manufacturer, and Handspring can't produce their devices affordably anymore? Would handspring be forced to scramble to change their vision? "Sure PalmOS was good for starters, but now we're moving in a whole new direction!" or "All future handspring devices will be identical in function because we are unable to upgrade the operating system... but look forward to some funky new colors!"
Not really. Who devises of legislation? Or, more to the point, in whose best interest is strong IP legislation?
IP owners. Corporations.
A unified and informed populace would have the means to combat unwanted IP legislation. Just like a unified and informed corporate culture can get what it wants.
Which do you think is happening now?
Go back and read my post again, I think you'll see I am perfectly aware how laws come to be, and who enforces them.
Everything you see is sujected to your mindset anyway. The least you can do is be aware of it and understand how it shapes your understanding of the world.
If I wanted to describe every movie I saw in terms of its relation to my big toe, I can, and if I had a Big Toe website I might do it.
There's nothing like a liberal arts education to encourage this sort of linking behavior. Acknowledging the interconnectedness of all things is a Good Thing, especially when it gets you a per diem, because it's true. Finding connections and analogs and parallels not only can simplify things and and create depth of understanding, it can also yield facinating, new results -- broadening understanding.
Fighting against this mode of learning and sharing is just a form of informational luddism. Saying that nothing relates to anything else and decrying the act of finding new applications for old knowledge, experience or art kills the mind.
Let me just point out that just because the artist didn't intend for there to be analogues to other ethics, mindsets, or situations doesn't mean that it's not true.
I believe that the word that describes a work of art that does this is "trancendant."
I could say Brazil reminds me of my life as a carrot farmer in the 1920s. Just because Gilliam didn't indend for that to happen doesn't make it untrue.
Slashdot Mirror
I just read Breakfast of Champions last night. I took something different from the book than you did, but I guess that's the benefit of a subtle, inspired novel. I've never heard of the movie.
And I suppose that I wouldn't call my perception of Mononoke an "honest" critique, nor am I a platonic "critic." Like all critics, I base my final judgement by taking everything possible into account, including myself; unlike a platonic critic, I don't know everything.
The reason I mentioned the fact that I don't know jack about anime is because I wonder if what seems like heavyhanded ecology and nature-religion diatribe to an American doesn't fade into the background of a Japanese created movie in Japanese culture. Was Mononoke created for Japanese culture, and by porting it to Americanese, was it done a disservice because of Americans' different understandings of religion and nature?
eg. I made a movie as a graduation gift for my friends which to outside viewers may come across as heavyhanded, boring sentimentality, but in the intended audience it has different, diverse effects. If you are only going to make a critique of the movie based on your being an outsider, you might not be giving the movie the credit it deserves, or will be judging the movie on merits that may not have struck the creator as significant, etc.
And, again, my criticisms rely on the audience of a piece, both intended and accidental. Maybe the movie was only intended for "average Americans" because Anime fanatics would find it pedantic. While both audiences should be taken into account, perhaps the needs of the intended audience reflect more honestly on the movie.
You make a good point about logical arguments, but I must say that, in my opinion, "average Americans" have no respect for them. Children, on the other hand, are a little more open minded, on the whole.
I had this argument with my SO for weeks after seeing Mononoke. We struggled with the need for balance between a subtle, yet effective storyline and the need to actually penetrate American's thick skulls.
I'm not very anime-oriented, so I really only know anything about the Americanized version. To me, a heavy handed plot is justified if it manages to attack with any success the common American culture or convince a few Americans to reconsider their lifestyle (specifically when the attack is one I consider worthwhile. This is my criteria, after all).
While a more moderate plot might have been mentally stimulating for me and people who already understand the importance of protecting the planet, I fear that an uninitiated American would miss the point entirely and any social gain that might have resulted from the film is wasted preaching to the choir.
So I would argue that there were plenty of elements in the movie to keep the choir entertained and sacrificing the subtlety is not a crime. If, on the other hand, I found the movie heavy handed AND unentertaining in most other respects, I wouldn't give it quite the leeway.
Consider Battlefield Earth: for some people it might be a thrill-a-minute action flick, but to me it's a heavy-handed scientology flick with no redeeming values, so it doesn't get the same sort of leeway as Mononoke does.
Of course this is all premised on my lowly opinion of Americans (myself being one). I understand that places like cluetrain have a different perspective. It will take a lot to restore my faith in the Average American, but I'm certainly open to suggestions to the contrary.
This depends on whether you consider a language something people use to communicate internal thoughts or as an independent list of rules and structures.
Sure, Plato may be kicking back right now with Strict English for Dummies, but we'll never know what it says. Or maybe the King Of England gets to dictate what constitutes proper English. If nobody uses either of these standards, then there is only one person to call it English: the standards-keeper. Everyone else uses what they call English, and can happily understand one another, if not agree on strict useages.
Thus, what the lone standards-keeper calls English and what the language utilizing community calls English are disparate, and all you have then is an authority game. I tend to side with the people actually using the language, though the standards keeper serves the useful funtcion of maintaining a modicum of stability as the language evolves.
Email me, I have some poorly-written Philosophy of Language papers I'd be happy to share.
I stand humbly corrected. For the sake of completeness, though, I didn't entirely hate to do it, either.
Let the sentence now read: "Let me replicate a page..."
So there must be "unauthorized uses" that are lawful but don't fit into TW/AOL's idea of a profitable society.
See my previous post on the License Economy as well. The idea is that there are several ways to increase the profitability of a good or service. The proponents of the DMCA have decided to persue a method that increases the Return on Investment by legislating obstacles into the path of the consumer, forcing them to purchase the use of a good rather than the good itself. What was previously free to do, Fair Use, under the DMCA becomes a profitable proposition. They get more money for the exact same product by being permitted by our government to charge for the "authorized use."
Put simply, we once had a say in what the copyright holders would be in a position to authorize, but it's been turned on its head. Now they're the ones with the rulebook, not us.
Really, they are being bad capitalists, not good ones, and the congress/the citizens haven't called them on it.
Your local newspaper will take story ideas, call them during business hours tomorrow, they may actually be happy to hear from someone who isn't a paid publicist looking to have their press release run.
Offer to write an editorial after you've explained the location and purpose of the story. They will be unlikely to cover the story themselves--instead they will take your suggestion to mean: "look for this story on the wire for the next two days." If it doesn't make Reuters or the AP, you probably won't see it in your paper. If they are at all interested in the story, they might want to see an editorial in case the story doesn't surface or as a tie-in to the wire copy. Local editorials on a timely issue are more valuable than an archive or wire editorial, and cheaper. If you are "credentialed" all the better.
We in the twin cities that have a local econ professor battling the stadium builders tooth and nail through editorials. The point being that his modest credentials (prof at a community college), combined with his rhetoric have earned him quite a loud voice in the region.
Have URLs handy (2600.com, opendvd.org slashdot) to start the editors on the right track. Give them the MPAA/RIAA's webpage too, so they can feel they're being complete.
Anyone have any more suggestions?
There is already a body of law that prohibits "unauthorized use" of copyrighted materials in all domains: Copyright law.
Rather than allow our rights to be bled by further legislation, TW/AOL has a right to help the federal government enforce the laws that already exist. To do anything more, particularly in the form of the DMCA, unconstitutionally inhibits fair use of copyrighted materials in favor of stronger rights for copyright holders.
If TW/AOL wants to protect themselves against "unauthorized use" they should either increase their contribution to the federal government so they can afford to pursue their valid claims (do they have any?) of copyright violation by loosening their accounting standards to indicate a higher taxable income (a simple numbers manipulation), or they should make their product in a manner that does not encourage the market to ignore their copyright and create a grey market for their copyrighted goods (less expensive, copy-prohibitive media such as cave walls, or not selling it).
The citizens that live in the capital don't even have elected federal representatives.
It's a federal district. Congress runs it, but there are no DC reps in congress.
Figure that one out.
...My kids just go to school now to learn how to clean and aim their semi-autos in classes provided by the NRA.
The only tool you need is a gun anyway--the pay scale is an order of magnitude higher than learning something from a book and then applying it.
Wait, what was your point again?
I think that this editorial does a smooth job of a New To Slashdot FAQ, times being what they are.
Be prepared, however, to be quoted in the media as representative of the entire community (which you should know is a no-win situation). There are generally n+1 opinions on a given subject on Slashdot, where n is an arbirarily large number.
Personally, I would have liked to see more ruminations on the legal situation. Certainly the Andover people have met with a lawyer and have a little insight into their position.
Personally, I think the solution is simple. Fair use applies to copyrighted works, so make the publication of the code fit into fair use specifications, ie. for research or criticism. Give an equal fraction of the code to posters and have them repost the code with their comments attached. Then no single person has reposted the entire source and each individual portion is fair use. Leave it as an exercise for the reader to concatenate the posts; a trivial task but one that should easily evade any copyright issues.
Then have someone deal with the "trade secret" issue and someone with the "licensed text" issue.
This problem is easily one for the OS crowd: with many eyes, all legal technicalities become trivial.
Except he has to use his new equity and revenue to cover his shorts... cutting into his profit, netting him $0, or worse. Doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me. Unless you have a crystal ball beowulf cluster, you're better off not investing at all.
I can't imagine shorting something unless there were a reason to expect it to decrease in value, because I expect every worthwhile investment to increase in value in the long term. The risk in shorting an investment is infinite, the risk in going long equals the initial investment; the benefits of the two are inverse.
Mr. Garbus seems pretty motivated by this case. The EFF has done 2600 and the 1st amendment a great service.
My girlfriend and I were discussing the movie Gladiator last night. To get directly to the point, the argument turned to the relationship between an author, an audience, and a critic.
Based on my premises that an author writes for an Ideal Audience, and not for the entire audience or for a critic (though there is some interplay between an IA and a critic), she pointed out that today "Everyone is a critic." and then pointed directly to our ADSL gateway.
While I don't necessarily agree with her in the context of last night's topic -- I still think a critic is a special class of audience member -- she had a point.
The internet encourages publishing. Feedback forums like slashdot and ZDNET, doubly so because of their ease of use. People publish what they know. People know their opinions.
The end result is a horrible cacophony of "whiners" or terribly misinformed, uninformed or irrelevant opinion. To me, somehow, this is what seperates an audience member from a critic: the ability to more fully justify an opinion than the median audience member.
I doubt that time will change this affliction. The only solution is to accept the WWW with it's faults and the irritating effect it has on people. The benefit of getting to weed out the nonsensical, strange and meritless to reach the "insightful" "interesting" or the "underrated" is preferrable to having none of it at all.
But I think we're arguing the same thing from opposite sides.
You say that anyone can be investigated by Authorities and they don't have to be a terrorist, I say that everyone who's investigated by Authorities is by definition a terrorist and it can include anyone who it is in fashion to fear or suspect.
I disagree that he government doesn't have to justify their actions, though. This is the information age. It is too easy to communicate a message or political idea (my American biases are seeping). An Authority could go and cover a violation of their own laws and practicies, but I argue that that is the act of an immature/dumb authority. The more elegant, easy and nonparadoxical way to go about it is to have a justification ready that sounds plausible. It is similar to a Somebody Else's Problem field. You don't allay fears about corrupt Authorities by encouraging the possibilities that they are internally conflicted and violate their own guidelines, you do it by denying that such paradoxes exist. Everything is going as planned, nothing more to see here. Consumers crave that. As long as someone is telling them everything is OK (maybe it can be a law! Consititutional Amendment: Everything is OK!) it is so, doubly so if it is an Authority telling them.
I admit, though that I have no background on the case. I just read the article you linked me to and treated it with the standard skepticism.
They were licensed.
The capitalist system has begun an evolution. Spurred by corporate power, we have entered a new economic system I'll call License Economy.
The waning form of capitalism, the one where goods and services are exchanged for units of value, slowly yields to the new capitalism. In the new capitalism there are no goods, only services. Services are services. Goods are services. Maybe even money will be a service.
The necessity for the License Economy is clear--As the digital media companies have discovered, as the complete cost to reproduce a good approaches zero there is no incentive to purchase the good. In order to profit from a "good" in the License Economy, the goods must magically become a service; therefore converting the good into a revokable and scarce commodity, creating "value" where none existed in the economic sense.
The trick is that the License Economy will seep out of the digital domain. Licensing reliably increases margins on every non-consumable good put into the market. After all, isn't the idea behind capitalism that as the domain of the economy expands, the cost to produce a good approaches zero because of competition and trade (ignoring for the moment as economists like to do, the depletion of natural resources)?
e.g.: My client is an architect. The plans he drew for your house are an expensive combination of engineering/drafting school, knowledge of local and national code, and art, too. In fact, so very much went into your house: the blood of the construction workers and the marketing of the mortgage company, that, well, you need to pay a royalty of just 1% of your montly payment to these hardworking artisans in perpetuity. In addition, if you should ever sell the house, this does not negate the hard work and creativity put into building that house, so your buyer will need take over paying the royalties. Should you care to make an addition to the house, well, you will need to run it by the architect--to make sure it is in line with his artistic vision. He certainly has the right to control how his art is used!
What? You want to defraud these craftspeople? How will they make their living?! Etc, etc...
All long-winded allegory beside, as long as descretely ubiquitous licensing is permitted when purchasing software, it will certainly follow elsewhere, mutating goods into services as we relinquish our notions of personal property and of ownerwhip to the corporations. Sure we'll get to buy our toothpaste and other consumables, but the moment we decide to avail ourselves of a product that might stand a change of outlasting us--a corporation will be set to lease it to you, with certain provsions (for example, upon your death posession is transferred back to the parent company... Those ConGlomCo shareholders worked hard hours to assemble those raw materials into a telephone and hey certainly have a right to profit from it in perpetuity!)
NDAs are licenses for knowledge. The corporate battle against the expiry of copyright will continue to encourage the unending license of all recorded works. Oh, and does anyone remember having to lease a telephone from MaBell? Well, that's the work of a pathetic internet startup compared to the intrusions we can expect with corporate oligopolies in every corner of the market. (Here, I'm mostly talking to those pro-monopolists who decry the MS trial with "Back when ATT was in one piece was the last time I could orgasm.")
Ownership is obsolete. The money's in licenses -- and not just because you can disclaim everything under the sun; you can do that, and still own what you're "selling" too!
Does any of this sound strangely like a certain... underappreciated economic model?
What an oxymoron.
You don't need to patent something defensively. If you do something but don't patent it, nobody else can patent it afterwords because of a little caveat called "Prior Art."
There is no such thing as a defensive patent. Either you patent something and use it like a club on those in your industry, or you don't and it's a little like copyleft.
Furthermore, Microsoft, if it were really interested in not being sued, would have settled the anti-trust case. They are now subject to a million points of litigation that rely directly on the judge's findings of fact--specifically that microsoft behaves in a manner unbefitting a monopolist. The appelate court can only overturn the remedies or demand a revisitation of certain conclusions. The facts are in and almost unbesmirchable.
Frankly, both of your premises need work. "Microsoft wants to avoid lawsuits" and "Defensive patents protect against lawsuits." are both false.
That example does little to disprove my point, though I accept yours that a vigilant eye must be kept on local authorities.
The victim was a target of surveillance for an intelligence unit of a local police force. I can't imagine any/every local police force instituting a national internet screening project. There are not enough law enforcement officials in the world.
Yes, you should be aware of what those in authority are doing with their authority, you won't hear me argue otherwise.
Furthermore, this article's headline claims that the victim was surveyed for 15 years, but the evidence presented later in the article only seems to suggest that the person's picutre was taken once about 12 years ago, and that a decetcive had become aware of his existance 15 years ago, and with no explicit or implicit surveillance in between. I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the article didn't report it. To me, this smacks of a sensational headline without the article containing anything to support it.
The victim's premesis was then wrongfully searched--an injustice with no causal relationship to surveillance that may or may not have occurred. Anyone can be wrongfully searched, arrested, or killed by an authority or non-authority gone amuck without any reliance on first invading their privacy.
Furthermore, you missed my point entirely.
Every invasion of privacy and subsequent police action under Echelon and the UK surveillance system will be justified. I purport that the justification will be economic--and that the justification will be "reasonable" because economic justifications will be law and will sound like common sense to a consumerist society.
Maybe what I did not make clear is that over time, the economic justifications will be less immediately correlated to the true justification, and that members of protest groups and "peace-loving organizations" will soon be typical targets of the economically-justified surveillance because their actions will be counter to the capitalist will. You don't have to be planning to DOS Yahoo to be an economic terrorist, you can be planning a rally at your local Daytons against fur, or publishing material informing consumers what practices Disney uses to produce movies...
I did not mean to indicate that everyone surveyed will be canonical economic terrorists, just that every Enemy of the State will be an economic terrorist, where economic terrorist has a broader and broader definition.
Lastly, I never said I was okay with a national eavesdropping project, so I don't know what gave you that impression.
You, sir, should wake up, because no one is out to get you. Not as long as you're a good consumer.
Yes, and under who's direction will the government act? Who will be protected by the legislation or executive order that permits such eavesdropping?
.mil).
The government passes laws and enforces them for a reason, you know. There must be a benefactor that the government believes itself to assist, or there would be no motivation to invade privacy. No government would legislate in a vaccuum. Or put even more plainly, there is a market for invasions of privacy; since the governments have a monopoly, only the most prized industries can afford to purchase it (that includes you,
The portions of, at least American, law that are focused on the protection of civil liberties for individuals are slowly being dwarfed by the body of law that is intended to protect businesses.
When was the last time the government became interested in the content of an email or website that pertained to the conduct of a business? Were they interested because they decided it would be a good way to spend time, or because they were compelled to by economic and political forces? Now try to remember a time any government cared about a website's or email's content that did not pertain to the conduct of a business.
...
Think of a single instance? I can't.
These invasions of privacy will be only carried out in cases of National Security. This sounds grave and dire enough so most people will think it justified, as I'm sure you agree. The point we disagree upon is when such a justification will be invoked. For some reason it sounds as if you think anyone and everyone is capable of arousing suspicion. I think that your paranoia is still too broad and mis-focused.
Suspicion will not be randomly meted out and privacy invasions be taken lightly, as it is not in the national interest (read: corporate interest). A scared consumer is a timid consumer is a tightwad consumer. Instead, it will be invoked when a corporation's public or private interests are threatened, likely because there will be laws against such things in due time. This way the privacy invasions will sound justified to a world of consumers.
Which sounds justified: "We had to intercept their communications because their continued collaboration would have brought an end to our burgeoning economy!" or "Thanks to our multi-billion dollar eavesdropping unit, we've collared a unit of 1337 21-st century vandals who intended to plaster underpasses with 'Hack the world' bumper stickers."
The first would be far more profitable and in Society's Best Interest than eavesdropping on arbitrary citizens.
I'm sorry to threaten your obviously firm beliefs, but you're atacking a consumerist tarbaby. No government cares about your email to HairyBear66990@aol.com... unless you're conspiring to overthrow the economy. Such economic terrorists are more dangerous, easier to target and more valuable than petty miscreants, vandals, dissenters whose impact on consumers are minimal and short-lived, or bombers, whose attacks are unlikely to be intercepted if they are communicated at all.
h2g2 is more than an online digital library, it is a community editable online digital library. Anyone can add entries.
In theory, it is the most complete library imagineable. In practice, well, not everyone contributes so its reach is finite.
However, they plan to develop handheld, wireless devices to access the h2g2... with Don't Panic written soothingly on the cover. Maybe they'll make a springboard device.
So instead of complaining that there are no good digital libraries, just contribute everything you know to h2g2 and it will be more complete than any other.
I don't think any MP3 modules exist... yet.
But since you brought up Handspring, I wonder what this means for their future devices? Because they use Palm OS, and future versions of Palm OS will run on different chips, will Handspring be forced to change chips to keep pace?
What if Palm managed to get a volume or other business deal with the new manufacturer, and Handspring can't produce their devices affordably anymore? Would handspring be forced to scramble to change their vision? "Sure PalmOS was good for starters, but now we're moving in a whole new direction!" or "All future handspring devices will be identical in function because we are unable to upgrade the operating system... but look forward to some funky new colors!"
IP owners. Corporations.
A unified and informed populace would have the means to combat unwanted IP legislation. Just like a unified and informed corporate culture can get what it wants.
Which do you think is happening now?
Go back and read my post again, I think you'll see I am perfectly aware how laws come to be, and who enforces them.
Everything you see is sujected to your mindset anyway. The least you can do is be aware of it and understand how it shapes your understanding of the world.
If I wanted to describe every movie I saw in terms of its relation to my big toe, I can, and if I had a Big Toe website I might do it.
There's nothing like a liberal arts education to encourage this sort of linking behavior. Acknowledging the interconnectedness of all things is a Good Thing, especially when it gets you a per diem, because it's true. Finding connections and analogs and parallels not only can simplify things and and create depth of understanding, it can also yield facinating, new results -- broadening understanding.
Fighting against this mode of learning and sharing is just a form of informational luddism. Saying that nothing relates to anything else and decrying the act of finding new applications for old knowledge, experience or art kills the mind.
Have a good day.
Let me just point out that just because the artist didn't intend for there to be analogues to other ethics, mindsets, or situations doesn't mean that it's not true.
I believe that the word that describes a work of art that does this is "trancendant."
I could say Brazil reminds me of my life as a carrot farmer in the 1920s. Just because Gilliam didn't indend for that to happen doesn't make it untrue.
I paid $60 for mine (It was a gift that I had to buy right away... so I bought it at Suncoast (gak)
Try this link, it's cheaper than I paid, but it looks like it's out of stock: DVD Express