I agree with the article that hacking, like art, promotes ideas that challenge that status quo, and is therefore an effective form of activism. However, it's not enough to promote new ideas if those who are benefiting from the status quo you are challenging have the power to suppress them. Should artists who create controversial work which other people then want to ban just stick to creating the best art they can and let the "experts" decide whether anyone should be allowed to see it? Obviously not, artists sometimes need to be advocates for their work, and so do geeks.
The problem is, politics is selfish and irrational, while geeks as a whole tend to be an altruistic, reasonable bunch. The same qualities that make a good geek make a bad politician, which is a compliment to geeks. Look at our main advocacy organization, the EFF, they are too nice! They concentrate on grassroots education, not on lobbying. Meanwhile, the RIAA and MPAA are holding a financial gun to the head of Congress. It's not because there's any public support for the RIAA / MPAA position, there isn't even any public awareness of it, which is the problem. The RIAA / MPAA would never be able to generate public support for their position, but they can generate large checks that can buy elections.
I would not want the EFF to stoop to those tactics, but someone needs to stoop to them if we want to counter the RIAA / MPAA. Unfortunately, the closest thing I've heard of can't be taken seriously, if only because it's called GeekPAC. It sounds like some kind of a joke, and if you present yourself as a joke, you shouldn't be surprised if you're not taken seriously. So, I would like to say to the GeekPAC people, change your name, and get serious. Either that, or someone needs to start a serious, technology friendly, thouroughly disgusting lobbying organization.
The mice trying to get cheese without having their heads snapped off are thieves too! How are the mousetrap makers supposed to make a profit if the mice won't follow the contract they clearly agreed to by sniffing the cheese? I think we need a "Darn Mousetrap Circumvention Act" making it illegal for mice to figure out or discuss how mousetraps work or, worse yet, making their own cheese. Otherwise, all the mousetrap makers will go out of business and the world will be overrun by mice, causing the earth to implode from the sheer weight of mice upon it.
Pay per view content models are inefficient because (1) they result in artificial shortages of something which is available in unlimited supply and (2) most of them fail because they can't charge enough to meet their fixed costs, while those that succeed are not the ones with the best content but the ones who have figured out how to obtain a distribution monopoly (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.) and they wind up with windfall profits which they would never have been able to obtain without a monopoly. This results in needless rationing of information, lack of compensation for those who are truly creative and innovative, and gross overcompensation for the small number of groups that wind up in control. No matter what the cost per unit of content the economics are the same.
How about a model where goods and services such as computers and Internet access are taxed, with the money going into a trust fund, and the elimination of copyright altogether (dreaming, I know)? Of course some people will be screaming "what, another tax, no!" but which tax would you like better, a tax for public funding of content that would enable you to access anything you wanted on a sustainable basis at no additional cost, or the RIAA / MPAA / Microsoft tax you are currently paying for the privilege of being bilked, not to mention having your civil rights taken away by content industry purchased laws such as the DMCA not to even speak of the ten times worse if it ever became law SSSCA?
The question is how would that money be distributed? Nobody wants some committee, whether public or private, to decide who deserves to get paid for being creative, and no committee would have the wisdom to make such decisions anyway. However, why not use a free market approach? Let current content aggregators and distributors, and any new ones that emerge to fill this niche propose ways to distribute the money and let the people decide which way(s) make the most sense to them and serve their interests. So, the RIAA can propose to take 95% of the money it gets and keep it, and give the other 5% to whoever looks the prettiest / handsomest holding a microphone, and your local public library can propose to have an elected jury to distribute the money it gets, and some other company can come up with a metering system, and you decide which idea you like and who gets to distribute your money. This way people who are being creative and innovative can get paid again without having to sell their souls to media companies and without having to figure out how to manipulate page views, members of the public, whether rich or poor, can have access to all the information they want, and the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc. can go to hell.:-)
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I agree with the article that hacking, like art, promotes ideas that challenge that status quo, and is therefore an effective form of activism. However, it's not enough to promote new ideas if those who are benefiting from the status quo you are challenging have the power to suppress them. Should artists who create controversial work which other people then want to ban just stick to creating the best art they can and let the "experts" decide whether anyone should be allowed to see it? Obviously not, artists sometimes need to be advocates for their work, and so do geeks.
The problem is, politics is selfish and irrational, while geeks as a whole tend to be an altruistic, reasonable bunch. The same qualities that make a good geek make a bad politician, which is a compliment to geeks. Look at our main advocacy organization, the EFF, they are too nice! They concentrate on grassroots education, not on lobbying. Meanwhile, the RIAA and MPAA are holding a financial gun to the head of Congress. It's not because there's any public support for the RIAA / MPAA position, there isn't even any public awareness of it, which is the problem. The RIAA / MPAA would never be able to generate public support for their position, but they can generate large checks that can buy elections.
I would not want the EFF to stoop to those tactics, but someone needs to stoop to them if we want to counter the RIAA / MPAA. Unfortunately, the closest thing I've heard of can't be taken seriously, if only because it's called GeekPAC. It sounds like some kind of a joke, and if you present yourself as a joke, you shouldn't be surprised if you're not taken seriously. So, I would like to say to the GeekPAC people, change your name, and get serious. Either that, or someone needs to start a serious, technology friendly, thouroughly disgusting lobbying organization.
The mice trying to get cheese without having their heads snapped off are thieves too! How are the mousetrap makers supposed to make a profit if the mice won't follow the contract they clearly agreed to by sniffing the cheese? I think we need a "Darn Mousetrap Circumvention Act" making it illegal for mice to figure out or discuss how mousetraps work or, worse yet, making their own cheese. Otherwise, all the mousetrap makers will go out of business and the world will be overrun by mice, causing the earth to implode from the sheer weight of mice upon it.
Pay per view content models are inefficient because (1) they result in artificial shortages of something which is available in unlimited supply and (2) most of them fail because they can't charge enough to meet their fixed costs, while those that succeed are not the ones with the best content but the ones who have figured out how to obtain a distribution monopoly (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.) and they wind up with windfall profits which they would never have been able to obtain without a monopoly. This results in needless rationing of information, lack of compensation for those who are truly creative and innovative, and gross overcompensation for the small number of groups that wind up in control. No matter what the cost per unit of content the economics are the same.
How about a model where goods and services such as computers and Internet access are taxed, with the money going into a trust fund, and the elimination of copyright altogether (dreaming, I know)? Of course some people will be screaming "what, another tax, no!" but which tax would you like better, a tax for public funding of content that would enable you to access anything you wanted on a sustainable basis at no additional cost, or the RIAA / MPAA / Microsoft tax you are currently paying for the privilege of being bilked, not to mention having your civil rights taken away by content industry purchased laws such as the DMCA not to even speak of the ten times worse if it ever became law SSSCA?
The question is how would that money be distributed? Nobody wants some committee, whether public or private, to decide who deserves to get paid for being creative, and no committee would have the wisdom to make such decisions anyway. However, why not use a free market approach? Let current content aggregators and distributors, and any new ones that emerge to fill this niche propose ways to distribute the money and let the people decide which way(s) make the most sense to them and serve their interests. So, the RIAA can propose to take 95% of the money it gets and keep it, and give the other 5% to whoever looks the prettiest / handsomest holding a microphone, and your local public library can propose to have an elected jury to distribute the money it gets, and some other company can come up with a metering system, and you decide which idea you like and who gets to distribute your money. This way people who are being creative and innovative can get paid again without having to sell their souls to media companies and without having to figure out how to manipulate page views, members of the public, whether rich or poor, can have access to all the information they want, and the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc. can go to hell. :-)