A strange game: the only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Newton's third law applies to stupidity, too.
A strange game: the only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Thursday, April 09, 2009
I have just discovered the first last building block
the last age of materials is upon us--
from now on we only pay the price of friction
from now on we build using pure information
from now on our structures' value is in their potential energy
I have discovered the first last building block
and all the others will build themselves.
-eMansipater
from now on we only pay the price of friction
from now on we build using pure information
from now on our structures' value is in their potential energy
I have discovered the first last building block
and all the others will build themselves.
-eMansipater
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Why the Canadian DMCA doesn't matter
I'm sure anyone who knows me at all must have nearly fallen off their chair reading the title of this post, as I have been nothing if not the single most vocal critic in Canada of the new DMCA-like bill expected to be tabled tomorrow by Minister Jim Prentice. Why on earth would I suggest that this bill doesn't matter?
Well, fear not my friends. I have not changed my position on the matter of how so-called "intellectual property"has been poorly positioned in our society and how the current attempts of large media corporations and lobby groups to protect their outdated business models are threatening the very innovations that hold the path to survival, if not flourishment, in the digital age. The Canadian DMCA has been drafted at the beck and bidding of foreign corporate and political interests drastically at odds with the actual well-being of regular Canadians or indeed most anyone, and the restrictions it threatens to impose could hold real danger for many important uses of information, be it in schools and universities, cutting-edge software and business, or even for the use of music by music fans and thus the lifeblood of the Canadian artists they support. This law is bad. Period.
There is, however, a greater reality to be taken in here. From time to time recently, events have presented themselves which clarified and organised the nascent digital revolution that is forming on the web. One such event was the raid in Sweden on the Pirate Bay. Another was the battle on Digg over the attempted censoring of the "09 f9 11..." decryption code for hd-dvd's. In both and other cases, the mass response to circumstances made headlines, yes, but more than that they made budding intellectual property reformists aware of their power. In the case of the "09 f9 11" incident, for example, the code proved unstoppable despite DMCA takedown notices and what most consider to be its illegal status under U.S. law. The raw futility of trying to enforce the legislation against such things was an implicit victory for digital activists. It emboldened and empowered them rather than thwarting them the way it was intended to.
The Canadian DMCA is playing precisely the same role in Canada today. The reaction to the bill has become even more important than the bill itself. Opinions which lay scattered across the country, unspoken and isolated, are being coalesced into a greater and more powerful whole. What will happen to that growing whole if the Canadian DMCA is passed? If anything it will grow larger and bolder and even more active. The Canadian digerati have become aware of how large and powerful they are. Mere legislation cannot stop the tide that is forming, because that tide is backed by the unstoppable ocean of information itself, yearning to be free.
The Canadian DMCA is a dangerous and counterproductive piece of legislation, and we should do everything we can to stop it. But even if we cannot, it doesn't matter. In the true spirit of what we are fighting for, the information itself about who we are and what we can do has intrinsically freed us already.
Well, fear not my friends. I have not changed my position on the matter of how so-called "intellectual property"has been poorly positioned in our society and how the current attempts of large media corporations and lobby groups to protect their outdated business models are threatening the very innovations that hold the path to survival, if not flourishment, in the digital age. The Canadian DMCA has been drafted at the beck and bidding of foreign corporate and political interests drastically at odds with the actual well-being of regular Canadians or indeed most anyone, and the restrictions it threatens to impose could hold real danger for many important uses of information, be it in schools and universities, cutting-edge software and business, or even for the use of music by music fans and thus the lifeblood of the Canadian artists they support. This law is bad. Period.
There is, however, a greater reality to be taken in here. From time to time recently, events have presented themselves which clarified and organised the nascent digital revolution that is forming on the web. One such event was the raid in Sweden on the Pirate Bay. Another was the battle on Digg over the attempted censoring of the "09 f9 11..." decryption code for hd-dvd's. In both and other cases, the mass response to circumstances made headlines, yes, but more than that they made budding intellectual property reformists aware of their power. In the case of the "09 f9 11" incident, for example, the code proved unstoppable despite DMCA takedown notices and what most consider to be its illegal status under U.S. law. The raw futility of trying to enforce the legislation against such things was an implicit victory for digital activists. It emboldened and empowered them rather than thwarting them the way it was intended to.
The Canadian DMCA is playing precisely the same role in Canada today. The reaction to the bill has become even more important than the bill itself. Opinions which lay scattered across the country, unspoken and isolated, are being coalesced into a greater and more powerful whole. What will happen to that growing whole if the Canadian DMCA is passed? If anything it will grow larger and bolder and even more active. The Canadian digerati have become aware of how large and powerful they are. Mere legislation cannot stop the tide that is forming, because that tide is backed by the unstoppable ocean of information itself, yearning to be free.
The Canadian DMCA is a dangerous and counterproductive piece of legislation, and we should do everything we can to stop it. But even if we cannot, it doesn't matter. In the true spirit of what we are fighting for, the information itself about who we are and what we can do has intrinsically freed us already.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
The Webolution has begun!
Following is the full text from The Shirt:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
By reading this shirt, you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions:
IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY: These license terms are a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity) and the wearer of this shirt for the shirt on which this text is printed, which includes the English language sentence above and may include associated numbers, punctuation, and legalese (“Shirt”). YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT BY READING, SEEING, COPYING, REMEMBERING, HEARING, HEARING OF, TRANSLATING, OR OTHERWISE UNDERSTANDING OR INTERPRETING THE SHIRT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO READ, SEE, COPY, REMEMBER, HEAR, HEAR OF, TRANSLATE, INTERPRET, OR UNDERSTAND THE SHIRT.
You immediately and irrevocably release all Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, and other intellectual property of which you are the whole or partial owner or rights holder into the public domain. You agree to indemnify the wearer of the Shirt in any and all legal proceedings arising from and/or irrellevant to any legal action taken by you, your designates, or your wholly or partially owned or controlled business and non-business entities. You agree to enact policies, practices, and guidelines in any jurisdiction you hold, whether public, private, or interpersonal, to prevent
the further decline and abuse of digital law, as defined and interpreted by the wearer of the Shirt. You promise to be a better person, fight for world peace and the end of evil and tyranny, and to call your estranged mother to make things right.
This agreement (including any addendum or amendment to this agreement which is included with the Shirt) are the entire agreement between you and the wearer of the Shirt relating to the Shirt and they supersede all prior or contemporaneous oral or written communications, proposals and representations with respect to the Shirt or any other subject matter covered by this agreement. To the extent the terms of any other agreement conflict with the terms of this agreement, the terms of this agreement shall control. Long live the Shirt!
Remember, all profits from orders go to the EFF
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
By reading this shirt, you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions:
IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY: These license terms are a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity) and the wearer of this shirt for the shirt on which this text is printed, which includes the English language sentence above and may include associated numbers, punctuation, and legalese (“Shirt”). YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT BY READING, SEEING, COPYING, REMEMBERING, HEARING, HEARING OF, TRANSLATING, OR OTHERWISE UNDERSTANDING OR INTERPRETING THE SHIRT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO READ, SEE, COPY, REMEMBER, HEAR, HEAR OF, TRANSLATE, INTERPRET, OR UNDERSTAND THE SHIRT.
You immediately and irrevocably release all Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, and other intellectual property of which you are the whole or partial owner or rights holder into the public domain. You agree to indemnify the wearer of the Shirt in any and all legal proceedings arising from and/or irrellevant to any legal action taken by you, your designates, or your wholly or partially owned or controlled business and non-business entities. You agree to enact policies, practices, and guidelines in any jurisdiction you hold, whether public, private, or interpersonal, to prevent
the further decline and abuse of digital law, as defined and interpreted by the wearer of the Shirt. You promise to be a better person, fight for world peace and the end of evil and tyranny, and to call your estranged mother to make things right.
This agreement (including any addendum or amendment to this agreement which is included with the Shirt) are the entire agreement between you and the wearer of the Shirt relating to the Shirt and they supersede all prior or contemporaneous oral or written communications, proposals and representations with respect to the Shirt or any other subject matter covered by this agreement. To the extent the terms of any other agreement conflict with the terms of this agreement, the terms of this agreement shall control. Long live the Shirt!
Remember, all profits from orders go to the EFF
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Not so sly
If there's anything that large corporations are, it's out of touch. Mind you, we owe a bit of that to supply and demand. It hasn't taken a lot to pull the wool over our eyes on most issues historically, so there really hasn't been any reason to actually go to the work of designing a really insidious scam. Slowly, however, the brutes in suits are catching on. In the PR war raging over net neutrality(more on this later) down in ye olde U. S. of A. the ISPs looking to block any net neutrality legislation, or, more likely, push through legislation that will cement new capabilities for ISP's that have up until now been illegal, have realised that traditional P.R. might be ineffective on this issue and have instead targetted the issue with flash animated web comics apparently designed to look like a grass-roots effort to support them.
I really did have to emphasize that word slowly though. Here are the details:
1)because such a stupid thing would never spread on its own, they had to spend money promoting the site(s) through advertising spots on websites such as slashdot.
2)despite attempting to make the animation look hand-drawn, it's the most overproduced one I've ever seen. Among other things, the voiceover sounds like it's done by the same velvet voiced fellow who does high-paid tv ads, from the sound-studio quality to the "I'm-pretending-you're-either-in-second-grade-or-just-really-slow" pacing of the words to the little soundbytes and corporate-style 'explanations' and diagrams.
3)despite naming one of their sites with the catchy "dontregulate.org" name, they missed the number one(and number two) things every grass-roots campaign on the net ever has had: a forum and a petition.
So here's what I did. First, since I pay to be able to download whatever bytes I want with my bandwidth, I clicked on their ad about 300 times. Since most of those ads are pay per click, I figure that's got to start to 'ad' up. Also, you'll note that every time I click I'm opening up their bloated flash file in a background window and adding to their hosting costs by eating their bandwidth like a homebaked pie. Actually, since all of those files start playing one after the other and they all start with a humming bit, it sounds not unlike some sort of bizarre barbershop intro. If for nothing other than this unique musical experience, you owe it to yourself to find one of these ads(easily recognisable by the cartoon image with '2007 the future of the internet' written on it) and try this for yourselves. Oh yeah, and enjoy it. These might be the last days anyone has to pick their bytes this freely ever again. That is unless we can save our 'One dumb pipe.'
Why am I so worried about Net Neutrality, one might ask. Well, for one thing, it's bad enough that ISP's can overstate their bandwidth while overcharging for it(I pay for something like 4 mbps but rarely see 1 even in a spike. Meanwhile, North America is powers of ten behind Asia in the level of bandwidth they claim to offer at all, not to begin to mention the ratios of charges between the two continents) already. The last thing we need is ISP's able to claim 'Hi Speed with 100 mbps service' when what they really mean is the same 1mbps core line with a superfast side pipe for pay per view video. All this not to mention the extortion and censorship style activities this would open us up to(charging competitors more to deliver their content, or delivering it with poorer quality of service, etc.) The fact is, our 'one dumb pipe' has served us pretty well, just the way it was specifically designed to. To find out more, go to www.savetheinternet.com
I really did have to emphasize that word slowly though. Here are the details:
1)because such a stupid thing would never spread on its own, they had to spend money promoting the site(s) through advertising spots on websites such as slashdot.
2)despite attempting to make the animation look hand-drawn, it's the most overproduced one I've ever seen. Among other things, the voiceover sounds like it's done by the same velvet voiced fellow who does high-paid tv ads, from the sound-studio quality to the "I'm-pretending-you're-either-in-second-grade-or-just-really-slow" pacing of the words to the little soundbytes and corporate-style 'explanations' and diagrams.
3)despite naming one of their sites with the catchy "dontregulate.org" name, they missed the number one(and number two) things every grass-roots campaign on the net ever has had: a forum and a petition.
So here's what I did. First, since I pay to be able to download whatever bytes I want with my bandwidth, I clicked on their ad about 300 times. Since most of those ads are pay per click, I figure that's got to start to 'ad' up. Also, you'll note that every time I click I'm opening up their bloated flash file in a background window and adding to their hosting costs by eating their bandwidth like a homebaked pie. Actually, since all of those files start playing one after the other and they all start with a humming bit, it sounds not unlike some sort of bizarre barbershop intro. If for nothing other than this unique musical experience, you owe it to yourself to find one of these ads(easily recognisable by the cartoon image with '2007 the future of the internet' written on it) and try this for yourselves. Oh yeah, and enjoy it. These might be the last days anyone has to pick their bytes this freely ever again. That is unless we can save our 'One dumb pipe.'
Why am I so worried about Net Neutrality, one might ask. Well, for one thing, it's bad enough that ISP's can overstate their bandwidth while overcharging for it(I pay for something like 4 mbps but rarely see 1 even in a spike. Meanwhile, North America is powers of ten behind Asia in the level of bandwidth they claim to offer at all, not to begin to mention the ratios of charges between the two continents) already. The last thing we need is ISP's able to claim 'Hi Speed with 100 mbps service' when what they really mean is the same 1mbps core line with a superfast side pipe for pay per view video. All this not to mention the extortion and censorship style activities this would open us up to(charging competitors more to deliver their content, or delivering it with poorer quality of service, etc.) The fact is, our 'one dumb pipe' has served us pretty well, just the way it was specifically designed to. To find out more, go to www.savetheinternet.com
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
canadian website sued for publishing anonymous viewer comments
The website p2pnet.net is being sued for libel by a company called Sharman Networks for an article which contains quotes from this AP article and also some comments by an anonymous user of the site. The suit charges that by 'publishing' these comments p2pnet.net is defaming the characters of Sharman Networks and their CEO. The anonymous posters are also named as John and Jane Does in the suit.
The way the comment(s) were 'published' was that it was clearly stated they were anonymous posts to p2pnet.net, as reading the google cache will clearly show.
[update: google cache now gone, but yahoo cache still intact for now.]
The comments in question appear to be an insider releasing some tasty tidbits on CEO Nikki Hemming, claiming that she is a 'dupe' merely in place to distract attention or something like that(not the kind of thing someone would take seriously if it were false, so......?). I'm tempted to post the entire thing in question here, but I won't have to decide on that until the yahoo cache goes down.
The reason it is essential that this lawsuit fails is that if a precedent is set that internet sites are responsible for anonymous postings they 'publish' the entire online world is in trouble. For a few more details on what lawsuits of this type are generally intended to accomplish, check out this article.
The way the comment(s) were 'published' was that it was clearly stated they were anonymous posts to p2pnet.net, as reading the google cache will clearly show.
[update: google cache now gone, but yahoo cache still intact for now.]
The comments in question appear to be an insider releasing some tasty tidbits on CEO Nikki Hemming, claiming that she is a 'dupe' merely in place to distract attention or something like that(not the kind of thing someone would take seriously if it were false, so......?). I'm tempted to post the entire thing in question here, but I won't have to decide on that until the yahoo cache goes down.
The reason it is essential that this lawsuit fails is that if a precedent is set that internet sites are responsible for anonymous postings they 'publish' the entire online world is in trouble. For a few more details on what lawsuits of this type are generally intended to accomplish, check out this article.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Why real music fans fileshare
I just thought I'd post something here briefly on something many of you have heard me discuss in person. Many of those who question my position on filesharing have asked me how artists are supposed to get paid if we don't pay per copy of their song we obtain. My answer is this:
If we were genuinely concerned about musicians and their support, real fans would download the album and send the $20 directly to the artist. If anyone anywhere has a response to that (other than that they actually don't care about the artist, they're more worried about supporting the labels that own them), I would like to hear it.
If we were genuinely concerned about musicians and their support, real fans would download the album and send the $20 directly to the artist. If anyone anywhere has a response to that (other than that they actually don't care about the artist, they're more worried about supporting the labels that own them), I would like to hear it.
One step at a time...
Old news, I know, but I just can't believe that with all the research I've done on the topic I've never found these guys before: Among all the other great things at this site dedicated to destroying outdated views on intellectual property is this list of all the "nobody's"(a reference to my little debate with Jack Marshall over peer-to-peer ethics) who hold similar views to my own on the economic incentive program we misleadingly call intellectual 'property.'
As more and more people examine this issue critically, movements like this are certain to grow. Even if the only purpose they serve is to nudge people into doing their homework on the topic, that service is incredibly valued. On that note, take a look at this article (via p2punite.org) on the HD video format. Anyone considering making this 'upgrade' needs to look long and hard at what it actually encompasses and decide if they really 'need' a device in their home that is at the beck and call of our major corporations.
As more and more people examine this issue critically, movements like this are certain to grow. Even if the only purpose they serve is to nudge people into doing their homework on the topic, that service is incredibly valued. On that note, take a look at this article (via p2punite.org) on the HD video format. Anyone considering making this 'upgrade' needs to look long and hard at what it actually encompasses and decide if they really 'need' a device in their home that is at the beck and call of our major corporations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
