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?

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

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positioned in our society and how the current attempts of large media corporations and lobby groups to protect their outdated business models are threatening the very innovations that hold the path to survival, if not flourishment, in the digital age.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.

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

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

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.

Help Jon beat the lawsuit

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.

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.

Illegal immigration

I recently stumbled across this blog, which is penned by someone who is well-educated (PhD) and has an interest in things philosophical. So naturally, I thought I'd take issue with something he said.

Many of the posts on this blog (in fact, probably most) have to do with the topic of illegal immigration. Here are some excerpts(although I would encourage those who have the time to go over there and read the posts in full):

...we are told of the "basic human rights" of the illegal immigrant.

But what rights are these? Do they include the right to invade a sovereign nation and violate its laws? There is no right to be granted citizenship; it is privilege foreign-born persons must apply for. It is true that we are a nation of immigrants. But it is false that we are a nation of illegal immigrants.

There are certain actions, such as crossing the border without permission, that reasonable people deem unacceptable. So these actions are made illegal. These laws are reasonable and just and every country has them. So what do the good bishops propose? They would change the laws so that these very same unacceptable actions are no longer accounted illegal.

(samples quoted from here)


Let me first start by noting that there are a lot of 'easy comebacks' to this man's position which could be offered by those who disagree with him (for example, one might note that in whatever form the previous indigenous inhabitants of North America had a legal system, it would be hard to construe that it provided for large groups of people to attack and kill them and take over their land). However, what is possibly a little more intricate(and also much more valuable) would be to point out the fundamental mistakes that this man is making in his implicit and explicit assumptions.


To begin with I would question this blogger's assertion that "There are certain actions, such as crossing the border without permission, that reasonable people deem unacceptable." In its unclarified form, this statement is entirely untenable. If the blogger himself were to awake one day and find that his home had been neatly cordoned off and made a separate country so that a border existed around it, and that he was not to be permitted under any circumstances to cross it, I am certain that he would question the validity of this assertion in an amount of time less than or equal to the time that his groceries would last.

It is clear, then, that there are some borders which one ought to be able to cross without permission(such as the boundaries of one's home). Thus, this blogger must be inferring that some sort of non-arbitrary reason is in force for certain particular borders as regards his assertion. It would be improper of me to assume outright that I know what that reason is, but a clue might be given in his repeated use of the phrase 'a sovereign nation' throughout his blog. I think it would be fair to suggest that this blogger believes 'sovereign nations' have a degree of validity with regards to enforcement of their borders that arbitrary institutions or authorities do not have, such as if I personally were to define a border around this man's house.

So what is a sovereign nation? Dictionary.com defines sovereign as adj. Self-governing; independent: a sovereign state. So, is the implicit assumption of this blogger that having a community which is self-governing and independent gives it validity in asserting the requirement of permission over its borders? Again, we need only to turn to the possibility of being contained within one's own house to note the untenability of such an assertion. The simple fact of his neighbours organising themselves in a self-governing fashion would surely not be sufficient to allow them to doom this man to a slow death, would it? Perhaps a mere organisation of neighbours has not met the requirements for 'nation'? Let us then extend our little thought-experiment to the case in which this man's state were to organise and implement such a border. Would this then become a situation that the man (who, we assume, is a 'reasonable person') would deem acceptable? Perhaps neither of these situations suffice for our requirement of 'independent'? Then let us make the last and predictable step of extending our hypothetical to the situation in which this man's entire country cordons him off. It seems clear there is no change in our result.

It may be, however(and I think it is likely), that we have incorrectly determined the source of authority intended by the blogger for the establishment and traversal control of a border. I now venture a little further into the ether, but I would suggest there is a subtle implication in some of the bloggers comments that citizenship in his country is sort of like membership in a very special club which citizens have earned, and therefore it is unethical for others who have not earned that membership to take by their own means the benefits offered to those members. This blogger might say that the reason his own country would be unreasonable in cordoning him off from it is that he is a citizen of that country, and thus entitled not to be cut off from it. Lest this become a discussion of the concept of citizenship, let us suppose for the moment that this basis for enforcement of a border holds, since we are near to the definition of a citizen itself.

Finally, we can ask the question that is most pertinent to this discussion: is it fair? By which I mean, is it fair for there to be such a club which allows or denies membership and then enforces that membership strictly? Obviously, there is nothing inherently unfair in the existence of such an institution. However, the manner in which membership is determined may be executed in an unfair manner, i.e. under the influence of prejudice. Also, the actions of the club as an organisation may be unethical, although that is a different order altogether. So, how can we determine if prejudice is a relevant problem in our scenario? Well, a far greater wedge of 'reasonable people' than our good friend presented earlier might be inclined to agree with the assertion that such an institution is fair if any person who satisfies the requirements for membership is allowed to be a member, and if all are given equal opportunity to satisfy those requirements. It is at this point that we come to the essential point at which I personally would deny the 'fairness' of the institution in question: it is not in fact the case with this man's country that all are given equal opportunity to satisfy the requirements of membership. In most cases, what the citizens of this man's country have done to gain membership is simply to have been born into membership. Immediately and without any further forbearance, these people have been accepted for membership, whereas no matter what any person does who was born in another country, they are incapable of 'going back' and changing their selection of which country to be born in. Just as a human being is unable to select his or her skin colour, these people have no opportunity to fulfill the most common requirement of this man's country for citizenship: place of birth. If there were indeed legitimate requirements fairly levied against all would-be citizens of this man's country, including those born within it, such as personal contribution or something similar, which if not met would result in the refussal of acceptance equally in all cases, then we could say that this situation is fair. However, a situation which discriminates between people based on something they cannot choose or control, especially a situation having significant relevance for their health, well-being, and livelihood, cannot be called fair.

Phishing the murky depths

I've received a fair number of phishing attempts in my time, but this one beats them all on several accounts(read on to find out why I didn't even report it to Google!)

I have a new email address!
You can now email me at: [removed so you won't]

Dear Sir/madam,




US$250 million Dollar Agricultural Grant For Farmers and Ranchers





We offer Agricultural Grant of US$250 million dollar for Farmers and Ranchers from National Department of Agriculture (NDA) This Grant is for Experienced farmers and ranchers who are unable to obtain financing from commercial credit sources.


Loan amounts range from $ $2,000,000.00 to $100,000,000.00 and $100,000,000.00 to $250,000,000.00 (amount varies based on Applicant capability).


United Nation Development Project (UNDP) in Africa is the sponsor of this facility.


REASON FOR CONTACTING YOU:


My name is Dr. Thomas Quam and I am the Director of Farm Operations in the National Department of Agriculture (NDA). I need your assistance to hold on my behalf the sum of $4.5Million, which has been allocated to unexisting Farmer. It is my entire plan to have this done so that I can benefit from this opportunity.


YOU ROLE:


I will present you as foreign representatives to some of the farmers and Ranchers in charge of procuring imported farm equipments. so as to obtain clearance from the UNDP fund clearance office here. As soon as the clearance is obtained then the sum of $4.5Million will be transferred to you and all the records will be destroyed leaving no trace of the transaction.


YOUR GAIN:


You will be compensated with the sum of $1Million for your role in this transaction. If you are interested, please send your Names, Phone and fax number, your physical address, On receipt of this information I will call you immediately to clarify areas you are in doubt.


Expecting your response.


Yours faithfully,

Dr. Thomas Quam

Director, Operations

NDA.






- Thomas Quam

First of all, this little sucker actually managed to slip through Gmail's filter. That's a pretty incredible feat. In the entire time I've had my gmail account, I've had maybe 10 spams/phishers get through, and most of those by totally obfuscating their own message. Impressive!

Second of all, note that this phisher is inviting you to defraud a UNDP development project for farmers in legitimate need!! Can you believe this!

Third, note the incredible candor of someone(albeit a character in the scam) who is risking their job and their name to rip off the aid organisation they work for: "It is my entire plan to have this done so that I can benefit from this opportunity." Wow, no mincing words here.

Fourth, note that this character suggests actually convincing real farmers to allow the money to go overseas and then sticking it to them and running off!


My conclusion(and the reason I didn't report it)? Anyone evil enough to be drawn in by this scam absolutely one hundred percent deserves to lose as much money as they are willing to put up!!! If phishing switches over to this kind of mode in general I have to say we might not want to get rid of it!

the end is now

For along time, a standard component of my war on the current intellectual property system has been to point out how incredibly absurd our current laws will appear when computers can, with very little direction, churn out patentable and copyrightable material. That day is now. Popular Science has an article on a man(John Koza) who is using what is, at its heart, an incredibly simple machine(if composed of about 1000 cpu's) to brute-force new ideas until an 'innovative' one is found. One such idea has actually been successfully patented, one of the first ever patents granted to a machine designer(in reality, of course, the patent was granted to the human who uses the machine).

What if(as is likely within a short period of time) your average Joe has a computer of this power factor in his home and is able to run a similar program on it? Who gets the intellectual 'property' that is 'produced' by it? Does credit go to the program's designer, or to the man who typed in "find a good engine design, please, mr. computer."???? The natural progression of technology in this area will quickly blow our existing intellectual property system to shreds. Don't believe me? Take note of this: before designing the optical lense that was ultimately patented, Koza's beowulf cluster duplicated scores of already patented designs by starting from simple parameters with a simple goal(at no time was any portion of these designs in any way inputted). It seems patent offices everywhere are going to be scrambling to do the one thing I've been pointing out they are unable to do: define what exactly 'obvious' actually is.

Patent laws require patentable ideas to be 'non-obvious.' What that actually means nobody has the foggiest clue. Is a design obvious if a simple computer program can generate it automatically given a basic understanding of the target context? How about a complex program? How about a complex program run on a complex machine? How about a complex program run on a complex machine that is in everybody's offices and homes? The reality is that without the ability to pick and choose individually who will receive the incredible economic incentive that our intellectual 'property' laws actually are(and in most cases what we need here is a good weeding) our current patent and copyright laws are fundamentally meaningless. Unless we can redefine the transfer of intellectual 'property' as the service it actually is, our entire system of intellectual 'property' law is likely to end up in the biggest mess we've ever seen.

everything you need to know

I had this idea the other day to search for a common phrase that people use for lots of different topics on google and see what kind of results I would get, as a kind of cross section of the web. I selected the phrase 'everything you need to know' and my results were fabulous! In order, here were the first few topics the results had 'everything you need to know' about:

vampires
the giant panda
caffeine
babies
Lupus
travel
investing
space
job-seeking
Tiger OS for Mac
solid foods
spreadsheets
elk hunting
charity

item 15 was an episode from discovery channel entitled simply 'everything you need to know.' Nothing could top the very next entry, however, which stated in unequivocal terms:

No Episode with that information

This is deadly hilarious--and true!

Swarmcast Accelerator: what it is and why you should have it!

What is it?
Swarmcast Accelerator is a new, free product from Onion Networks which is magically capable of accelerating and improving the download of pretty much anything on the internet.

How does it work?
Swarmcast Accelerator uses a technology called swarmstreaming to redistribute the bandwidth necessary to download a file across all the people who are currently downloading it. Instead of all the information coming directly from one computer which is providing the file on the internet, much of this information is shared between the computers downloading the file so that all these computers can cumulatively receive the information much faster than if the first computer tried to send individual copies of all this information to each of the other computers all by itself.

This is, in fact, the concept used by all peer-to-peer programs. Swarmstreaming is different in one essential way, however, from all other programs to date. Instead of receiving different parts of a file in whatever random order they can be found, the process is specially coordinated so that the file arrives in perfect order, just like a regular download. That way, you can start to use the file, or play it if it is a media file, immediately without waiting for it to finish. Until now, this was the main superiority that regular internet downloads had over peer-to-peer downloads.

Why should anyone use it?
Alright, so this program sounds interesting, but why should anyone use it? This is only a marginal improvement over other peer-to-peer systems and who wants to deal with a specialised program and limited content?

This is where Swarmcast Accelerator really shines. Unlike other peer-to-peer systems, after the initial installation there are no special programs to run and no special network to use for files. The Swarmcast Accelerator meshes right in to your existing browser and can accelerate any file on the existing internet. It helps take the burden of large files on the internet and distribute it among the people who want those files, making online distribution of pretty much anything much more cost effective for everyone. And what's the net effect of this for the user? The internet simply starts to work magically faster.

Swarmstreaming is a technology that I've been waiting for for a long time, and I'm overjoyed that it's finally here. Congratulations, Onion Networks, for your amazing work. Now, everybody go here and download this program right now!

If you have more questions about Swarmstreaming technology, Onion Networks has more information here.

They don't call it theft, actually

The BBC got called on their error when they claimed on the air that filesharing, specifically copyright infringement, is theft. Hear their laudable and surprisingly transparent recovery here which notes, among other things, that

File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

Here's the paragraph for which I particularly applaud them, though:

Railways and canals

Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.

They ultimately retreat to the position that if filesharing goes encrypted the flood of encrypted traffic will prevent the government from effectively monitoring what goes on on the internet and baddies will be impossible to track.

I hear their point, but I think it's still a little misguided. First of all, any criminal worth catching is using some serious encryption. Now of course, much of this is still breakable by law enforcement, but it takes a huge amount of time and processing power, and given that many non-criminals(in fact, probasbly far more than criminals)use strong encryption for business or personal reasons it is probably already beyond feasibility for the government(s) to be monitoring strongly encrypted data at present.

Secondly, these people don't seem to understand how much encryption is already in use. Every time someone accesses a bank online, every time someone uses a secure website or any secure method of sending email, IM's, or files, and in the case of many games played online(to prevent cheating)there is encryption going on. Unless the governments of our various countries can afford more processing power than all the regular users in the world put together, it is fairly unlikely that they are able to monitor even the loosely encrypted communication going on over the web.

Most importantly, however, they have missed the primary point: the vast majority of encryption is not done for nefarious means. The reason ecnryption is so available is that it does have so many legitimate uses in generally making information processing and transfer mor effective. In the online world of a decade ago, this concern might have been relevant, but today it's simply not realistic. Ultimately, this concern is totally misplaced. The secure online world came and went a long time ago with pgp and similar technologies, and anyone who hasn't realised that is living in the past.

Google--good at search, bad at censorship

I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news, so I'll just fill you in and let you decide:

There has been a lot of hubbub recently over Google's creation of a self-censored search option(www.google.cn) for tightly restricted China, such as here.

Curious to see how this censorship would work in practice, I chose a suggested topic of controversy, "Falun Gong" and headed over to check it out. My first result was:

Falun Dafa & Falun Gong - [ 翻译此页 BETA ]
Falun Dafa and Falun Gong: what they are and why the Chinese government is terrified of them.
www.religioustolerance.org/falungong.htm - 14k - 网页快照 - 类似网页

hmmmm. Personally, I might have censored that. Clicking on the page I quickly found tidbits like these:

"The movement has experienced horrendous levels of persecution in China."

and

"The Chinese government has relentlessly suppressed religious groups since achieving power in 1949. The rest of the world is most familiar with its oppression of non-registered Christian groups. However, the government has also persecuted many types of new religious and spiritual groups, including the Falun Gong. In fact, its suppression extends beyond such groups to include organizations that teach only simple meditation and gymnastic techniques. The government appears to fear any national group that is capable of organizing its followers into direct action"

hmmmm. Again, I might have censored that.


I guess Google just needs a little more practice at not giving you the information you're looking for.

Sunday
Night, January 29th

the
place to be is the

OSBORNE
VILLAGE FREEHOUSE

for

Chelsea
Crawford's CD Release Party

debuting
the album THE
MASQUERADE

Doors
@ 8pm (No Cover)

This
will be an evening of great live music, including international
musicians,

great
food, drinks and lots of friends.

(If
you and your party would like a table you need to make reservations,
the place will fill up fast!)

 

 

"Chelsea's
music is lush and rich.  Listening to it, my immediate reaction
was that she has dusted off sultry jazz and brought it into the 21 st
 century. To my ears, her compositions are both nostalgic and
contemporary. ….   She's taken all that's good about
older jazz standards and somehow updated it for a new listening
audience. I kept thinking, this sounds 'new' to me."

                                                                         
  Nigel Moore of Café 100.7 - Winnipeg

This just in...and out!

Are you unhappy in your current job and wish you could earn a better living? Stratford Career Institute can offer you the perfect solution!

Honest, I swear!

They sent me a neat little letter and told me all about it. They must be really busy with all the people they're helping to become millionaires, because they even forgot to put my name on the envelope. They must know me, though, because their letter begins, "Dear Friend" and I'm not generally friends with people I don't know.

Because they had been kind enough to send me an exciting, albeit impersonal piece of undirected advertising, I did to them what I try to do to all my friends: I returned the favour. They had included a prepaid return envelope, so it was easy. I have plenty of advertising material sitting around, so I grabbed the closest piece and slipped it in. On the front it reads:

"Cremation. You might think it's the last decision you have to make..."

and on the back:

"What you don't know could make all the difference..."

Just to keep everything square, it too has a postage-paid tear-off reply option. It's going in the mail tomorrow. I don't know how my career has improved as a result of this letter, but I can certainly tell you my happiness has.

Just some extra information

By the way, although I didn't originally go out looking for stuff like this, I've gone to the trouble of tracking down some links and information people might find interesting.

There are other people out there of note promoting similar ideas to mine on filesharing, like Robert Hamilton, a professor on internet law at Ohio State, contrary to the suggestions in a recent debate that no one out there is promoting alternate views on filesharing. He was mentioned briefly at

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/03/11.6.03/filesharing_debate.html

Or, take a look at the ideas of Professor Larry Lessig of Stanford at

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/march17/fileshare-317.html

Not to mention, of course, the entire Open Source Culture movement.

Also, here are some sources that, whether they are right or not, share my interpretation of the Canadian ruling on filesharing:

http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5182641.html?tag=st_pop
-"In a far-ranging decision, the court further found that both downloading music and putting it in a shared folder available to other people online appeared to be legal in Canada."

http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/48323.html
-"A Canadian judge has dealt a blow to the global record industry's anti-piracy campaign by declaring that sharing music over the internet is not illegal"

http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051208.gtjkcolumndec8/BNStory/Technology/
-"that activity is still legal in Canada"

and finally,

http://www.mondaq.com/i_article.asp_Q_articleid_E_36846
-"The motions judge held that, with reference to subsection 80(1) of the Act, downloading a song for personal use does not amount to infringement. He also said that placing personal copies of songs onto shared directories, such that the songs were accessible by other computer users over the Internet, did not amount to authorization or distribution contrary to the Act."

Abstract concepts as services instead of property

Someone posted the following comment:

Anonymous said...

Please elaborate on how services are treated differently from property under the law and why you think intellectual property would be more aptly administered as intellectual service? In exactly what way would this be an improvement?

7:30 PM

Certainly. The main difference between property and services under the law is that property can be 'rented', whereas services are either performed or not, and any future actions resulting from the performance of services without rental of property do not necessarily need to be controlled by law.

The reasons I think this would be an immense improvement are many. One is that it is much easier to enforce a model based on treating intellectual 'property' as a service. Currently we have very complex models for trying to describe intellectual property in ways which differ from tangible property such as having expiry times on patents, allowances for 'fair use' requiring legal judgments on 'artistic value' and the 'obviousness' of abstract concepts, uncertain status of intellectual property between jurisdictions, unclear action in the case of simultaneous discoveries, punishment for coincidental but not derivative innovations, etc. By contrast, when describing intellectual 'property' as a service, all this complicated law can be boiled down to a simple economic incentive program where the government allows a certain entity the exclusive right to perform a service, or, in the event that such an incentive is deemed unnecessary, research can be funded by private entities with vested interests in the results or by donations after the fact from people who benefit from the innovation, all of which is simple to legislate and enforce. By contrast, when viewing abstract ideas as 'property' one is forced to try and monitor, for example, all data transferred over the internet, or all communications between people, which is not a feasible task.

An important feature of this new structure would be that the government would be able to remove these incentive programs in areas where they are no longer necessary to encourage innovation: for example in the area of computer software where technological advancements will soon render the human programmer an irrellevant component. Currently, because all intellectual 'property' is treated the same, the government is forced to spend enormous resources essentially enforcing private entities' particular business models' viabilities when in fact some of those models may be ready to be replaced in the market because of their inefficiency. These alternate models may be much better suited to a digital, interconnected world but currently we have no mechanism for selectively targeting our incentives in the areas that need the most development.

Possibly the most important advantage would be that treating the transfer of abstract ideas as a service rather than a transfer of property is much better suited to the digital world, which is becoming increasingly important as computers become part of every part of our lives. From a computational perspective, there is no difference between a mechanic reconfiguring the parts of a car from a less useful state, say where it doesn't drive around, to a more useful state where it does, and a programmer reconfiguring a computer from a less useful state, say where it can't manipulate text documents, to a more useful state where it does. The same thinking, in the language of the digital world, would apply to a builder reconfiguring a pile of raw materials into a house, or a doctor reconfiguring a person with a badly broken leg into a person with a good chance of recovery. Thinking in the language of information theory, it is easy to see that the idea of services translates well to the application of intellectual 'property' and that the idea of education, or teaching, translates well to the transfer of abstract concepts. When a student learns something in school, they are allowed to tell other people about those things. In the same way, unless the government chose to intervene with an incentive program or something, when information is transferred to a person or their computer, it would be their choice as to whether or not to 'teach' it to another person or their computer. The difference in the digital world? Computers are much better and faster at 'learning' from each other than humans are. Think of the benefit to society.

Another important note is that treating intellectual 'property' like this would help ease the problem of transferring abstract ideas, such as software, to developing nations where people cannot afford the premiums we currently charge. This would no doubt speed industrialization of these regions, significantly boosting the world economy.

Finally, as an aside to any and all critics, I am reasonably convinced that any sort of 'protection' currently offered for intellectual 'property' could be easily implemented under this alternate system if it was deemed necessary or useful to the function of society. It would, however, be much simpler in law and in enforcement, if one can manage to put up with such a difficult inconvenience.