The End of Innovation? 323
Simone writes: "2001 has been a bad year not just for dot-coms but also for people interested in preserving the public's right to fair use of copyright materials. From the shutdown of Napster and the DeCSS case to the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, federal prosecutors and U.S. courts have acted in support of copyright interests and against the public's ability to use technology to secure fair-use rights. OpenP2P.com editor Richard Koman talks about these turns of events with Lawrence Lessig." Not particularly coincidentally, Lessig has a new book coming out on this very topic.
DeCSS and P2P (Score:2, Interesting)
Stuff distributors wrap their stuff up. Hackers create breaking technology to free it and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets freed, even if its in the privacy of an individual's home.
Then another technology comes along (P2P) that allows the Stuff to be shared: it gets shared and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets published anonymously from the individual's home into the homes of thousands of others.
So a law (DMCA) says, there's a (usually broken) technology to protect our Stuff, but you can't break it or allow others to break it. Too late, the stuff is out there, and will always continue to be out there.
Even if you add another law that says 'you can't share Stuff'. How do you stop people using Freenet to anonymously make Stuff public? That new law would be totally unenforcable.
So the next step of the corporate-backed lawmakers is to come up with a Better Law - even better than the appalling DMCA: the 'We own the Net: We own your Computer' law.
This law makes it mandatory on Operating System writers and vendors to include a reporting mechanism that can send back details on request of anyone's machine (what hardware, what software is running) to a central enforcement agency.
Further, it is mandatory on network owners to supply to this agency details of the ports and message protocols being used from anyone's machine.
If you're spotted running unapproved software or using unapproved ports or protocols, you are subject to investigation.
That's the only way to go! Look out for this law at a government near you.
Re:Some people WANT their stuff downloaded... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this? Because of a loophole in copyright law that allows these records to be recorded as "hired works". A "hired work" is when someone asks you to write a song for them about x, y or z, etc., not when a record label says they will distribute your music.
An entire underground music community existed before Napster and will exist afterwards, sport.
Yes, and will the community get as much exposure with such a huge potential distribution method turned off for them? Read my other posts on this thread if you want to know how I feel about Napster (inc.).
No, they don't represent artists, and they've never claimed to.
Why then is that a major benefit listed by record labels when trying to sign independent artists?
You would do yourself a lot of good to actually educate yourself about the music industry.
Most of the above-mentioned independent artists which I reference are friends of mine, describing to me the trouble they have. Oh, and owners of small record labels which aren't part of the RIAA. As for protesting business practices, the only way to do that effectively is to put someone out of business. When the business practices go hand-in-hand with the law, there is little place to protest.
But that would take some foresight and empathy for the greater social welfare
The greater social welfare? Whose welfare? Just as there was an independent music community before the Internet, there was a flourishing music community before the Recording Industry.
When laws can be bought, social welfare goes out the window. And as for "Libertarian feelings", in what way are the opinions I've expressed here Libertarian? Private property is greatly espoused in the Libertarian philosophy. It would make more sense if you called my opinions (in this case at least) Commie-leftist propaganda.
As I've suggested elsewhere on this thread, you should read Thomas Jefferson's deliberation on copyright. It was intended to be a limited monopoly granted to an individual for a limited period of time. Individual. Limited. It was to encourage innovation. I don't see current copyright law and current recording industry business practices encouraging innovation in any way.
Solving Sociological Problems Technologically (Score:4, Interesting)
copied directly from this article [openp2p.com] without permission, with all due credit, and with unknown intentions.
Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different [italics added]. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.
end quote
This statement interests me, because it seems that there is an even stronger statement to be made, namely that: Replacing the responsibility of the individual to obey the law with the inability of the individual to break the law not only encourages an ignorance of the law, but also encourages a lack of basic moral judgement.
Now for some justification.
Historically, moral philosophy has often considered the ability to reason practially about ethical and moral issues to be a sign of some maturity. Rousseau's Emile encourages this view especially with respect to children when it presents the advice that one not command a particular behavior from a child; rather, make it impossible for the child to misbehave. Similar thought has gone into modern society in every niche from electrical-outlet-covers to child-safety car-door locks. The underlying principle at work is that a child has not developed the practial reason required to go from an abstract commanded behavior pattern (Don't stick the scissors into the outlet) to the benefits (not getting electrocuted) without experimentation.
Very much simplified, in the case of persons without the ability to reason practically about ethical and moral issues (those who cannot understand *why* they should obey a guiding principle) technology is an oft-used preventative measure.
With respect to children, the profoundly impared, and other similar cases, no one argues that the use of technology to prevent a harmful outcome is innapropriate; however, I would argue that the continued use of technology to make impossible the breaking of a rule frees the faculty of reason from having any connection with that rule.
In other words, utilizing high technology to keep people from being able to commit a crime does not in any way educate the moral faculties of the people being so protected from their impulses. In fact, I would argue that through reliance on that protection, people become inherently less able to distinguish the moral reasoning behind the rule being enforced. Instead, it would be much like your telling me "It's illegal to fly by jumping up into the air and flapping your wings". Should you say that, I would give the moral reasoning behind it no thought simply because I can't accomplish the deed.
Certainly in such an imaginative case, giving the reasoning behind the law no thought would do no great harm; however, in a society where we are all in theory responsible for the health of our democracy (I seem to recall hearing that once with respect to the American legal/judical system) an inability to clearly reason about the morality and justification of the social contract under which we live spells the eventual end of that social contract.
Perhaps
it is better that way.
What is this innovation you speak of...? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Some people want ..." != Napster 1% legit (Score:4, Interesting)
First, relatively few major artists encourage or allow bootlegging. Second, those bands which do invariably have vastly better organized websites and ftp sites dedicated exclusively to that pursuit. I am a DMB fan, and I would far prefer to go to from the dedicated ftp/www sites, where I can download entire/full/non-corrupt albums, than a disorganized system like napster, where anything I searched for (any time during its existence) would result largely in his COMMERCIAL recordings. Third, given that most of the legitmate uses are not from well known/signed artists and the fact that Napster's user base absolutely plummetted after they blocked the various signed artists, how can you reasonably claim that even a reasonable minority was using it for legitimate means?
I hear all this crap about protecting the little guy, well that's fine and good. But the little guys interests needs to be balanced against the interests of society at large (and the legal claims of, what is in economic terms, the real majority). When the vast majority of the use is for piracy and the minority can have their legitimate claims answered by alternative means, in a superior way nonetheless, why bother? Even if we accept P2P as being important, P2P does not necessarily mean that we need a system of total anarchy, whereby any content is allowed. Napster could have implimented a system of trust for the much-hyped little guy, where they could register their songs and allow them complete access to the system, but they choose not to. I have very little sympathy for them.
"guilty before proven innocent" (Score:1, Interesting)
A good part of the problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know for other countries, but in France, for example, while the commercial rights on the content belong to the producer, the intellectual rights belong to the author. There, a producer can't force an author to change the content in a way supposed to make it sell better if the author doesn't want to (alright, so that might explain a few things as well...
Of course, slightly less stupid laws doesn't mean less stupid lawsuits, but that's still something worth pondering, I think, since those laws do extend to software authoring.
Lawrence Lessig = Wanker (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it both amusing and disturbing that he can be so strongly in favor of fair-use, reverse engineering, and against the DMCA, among other hot button
Re:huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
1: I buy a cd, make a tape recording of it, and give you the tape so you can listen to it. You don't pay me. No money exchanges hands. Next week I make another copy for another friend. That's fair use as defined by the courts. That's why VCR's and Cassette tapes are not contraband.
2: I by a cd, rip it to mp3, and send you the files so you can listen it. Next week I send copies of the same mp3's to another friends. No one ever pays me. No money every exchanges hands. How is it fundamentally different? The quality of the copy is irrelevent. This is *NOT* fair use?
Using an application to distribute my copies to you more efficiently should have not affect on its legality. Napster, and P2P in general, only makes sharing copies -- a legally protected fair use -- easier and increases its volume.
That's what these current lawsuits are trying to do -- make efficient implementation of fair use practices illegal.
On contrary, innovation starting again (Score:3, Interesting)
past four years as people were rushing to bring
startups to IPO. Most people doing this were in
for the money, not the technology. And the tech
guys had worked 80 hour weeks developing boring,
me-too apps. Now there is time to be creative
again.
Never has the foundation been stronger-
2 GHZ, 1 GB computers for a grand, decent OS'es
with a maturing Linux and MS XP, decent development
language like Java and C#, and so on.