Re: Re: When will my country learn? Congress shall make no law!
There's a mistake in what you imply. Freedom of expression is not vulnerable to attack solely from state politicians or tyrannical dictators. It is also open to attack from the public community. The whole point about freedom of expression is that it gives the speaker the ability to insult anybody they like based on any grounds they like. The fact that the public would disapprove is not a good enough excuse to silence the speaker. This is why even the views of racists, homophobes, sexists, fascists, and just downright disgusting opinions need to be not just protected, but given extra protection due to the collective impulsive backlash to shut them up.
And this is because the rest of us with our more civilised states of mind would still benefit from the horrible speech. I come from a background in skepticism and pro-enlightenment, and one thing you learn is that science, or the pursuit of knowledge in general, is not just about finding out what is true as a matter of fact, but also what is false as a matter of fact. The knowledge that racism, for example, is a lie is something that is vital for humanity, and in order for humanity to be educated the best it can in regards to the issue you must allow racists to speak their minds so that we know what to resist. If they are silenced for whatever reason, it means that a society becomes that little bit more ignorant of the evils of this world and also harder to resonate with people outside the society who really do suffer at the hands of racist ideology.
This independent body that is being proposed is just an extension of something I already disagree with, which is Ofcom. That I fully understand. But I don't buy the original proposition; I cannot stand the idea that people regularly send in complaints to Ofcom based on the fact that a T.V. show is too offensive, putting a degree of censorial pressure on all T.V. media to "play down" and be polite. Where I come from, that's a very contemptible attitude to be having. It's the ideology of a society that wants a quiet life and does not want to face up to serious issues overseas. The whole point of free expression is that being offensive is a necessity.
And now we are saying we want to extend this principle to newspapers and magazines? Where any kind of mildly provocative dissent is condemned by a mob of people who were already determined to be offended? Come on. Get serious. I'm not going to be told by a bunch of uneducated loonies that they are good enough to tell me what I can and cannot read. I'm not a child.
When will my country learn? Congress shall make no law!
I tried asking this question on the BBC website and did not get a single answer: those asking for more regulation need to name one law this report is calling for in the way of protecting civil liberties that is not already in place right now.
If anything, we need less regulation: superinjunctions that stop women from calling out on their cheating husbands, disgraceful libel laws that allow Roman Polanski to sue Vanity Fair from France, jail time for offensive Twitter comments (but papers or websites who reproduce the offensive comments get no jail time), restrictions on religious criticism especially with Islam, and thought (sorry, "hate") speech bans that treat bomb-scarred war veterans like children by shielding their eyes from the supposedly horrendous image of burning poppies. All of this has to stop right now.
Crowdfunding is the nail in the coffin for the idea that copyright is the only way you can get incentives for creativity. You never hear about the "free-rider" problem specifically in relation to music gigs, cinema showings and theatre gigs because they use tickets: if enough pay for a gig to cover the costs of doing the gig, it goes ahead (all-or-nothing model) and if it doesn't matter how many people pay because the cost of production is negligible, e.g. the energy costs to project the movie onto a cinema screen, then you can collect whatever earnings are made (take-everything model). Crowdfunding has technically been around since the idea of admission by tickets, which is strong evidence for disproving copyright as a sole means of incentive collecting. Crowdfunding websites are the stage for creators, and the internet is the seating area.
The very name 'Kickstarter' indeed implies that the funds help to create the project, not to gather funds for the release of an already created project. But whether Kickstarter likes it or not, it will HAVE to go down this route, otherwise another crowdfunding website will just take its place, specifically one that offers the concept of a 'virtual ticket'. Remember, studios often spend millions of dollars on a calculated estimate that they will get profit from it (e.g. studios placed comfortable investments in The Dark Knight Rises based on success from the film before), but they can never know for sure. If an act of God messed up their profits, say an economic collapse, then it cannot be helped... but it doesn't stop them investing. It'll be the same idea with the 'virtual ticket' - promoters will take chances and invest in crowdfunding because people will naturally pay a minimum requirement by the creators if it means their film can get released after the 30 days or so is up to gather the funds. Also, this way means that the crowdfunding website has proof of creation, and scams are less likely.
Something to bear in mind as well: I do distinctly remember as a kid when Ebay first came onto the internet scene. Back then there were ALSO many horror stories of scams, either by selling false products or by not paying for them. Many of these circulated around the press, and there was speculation about how long Ebay could last in an untrustworthy environment. But what happened? Sellers became more trustworthy because of loyal business brand names and the consumer feedback system, as well as buyers weighing up the risks of being scammed and realising that the law would no doubt be on their side if the worst were to happen. It's going to be the same with Kickstarter or whatever crowdfunding virtual ticket website takes the top mainstream position. People will get over the scare stories and put their trust in recognised publishers/promoters, give feedback and have reasonable legal protection to fall back on.
Ba'athist ideology is rooted in fascism after all. And it "means war", as the old, hard Left used to say...
Now the Left lets proximity politics come into play, and insist that the U.S. government is the worst in the world despite never spending even a day under a totalitarian state of affairs abroad.
Now copyright industries have an excuse to attack Kickstarter whenever it starts disproving the idea of copyright being the only way for incentives so much.
I refuse to take seriously the English libel system, especially when it allows Roman Polanski to sue Vanity Fair from France via video link on the grounds that a few of its copies that hit the U.K., through Amazon/Ebay/something-else-unpolicable, suggested that he had invoked his dead wife's name in order to flirt with a woman, all while avoiding U.S. extradition for child sex offences and all supposedly, get this, in the name of the just cause of "protecting his reputation".
The poison pen argument does have some merit to it, but the U.S. libel system is far superior to the English libel system. And I am not entirely sure how you would go around policing something that can go viral such as this case here. How is it realistic to get your every day Twitter user to not have any libellous presupposition in his internet chat whatsoever? Even a casual comment voiced the wrong way might be up for grabs by the courts. Indeed, I would contend that if such logic were to be put forward about 10,000 Twitter users, then newspapers and websites who reproduce MILLIONS of printed items should be thrown in jail if they even so much as quote words from a Tweeter that were deemed to be "highly offensive" enough for prison. Because even by merely quoting the words, they have to fall under the category of "passing on the offensiveness", right?
The condition of keeping your libel lawsuits against the originator of the false claim, not the reproducers, may be a much better solution. I've read protests against this idea on the BBC that went along the lines of "Twitter isn't just your casual pub-banter - it is a public platform. It has to fall under the same terms as a mass media journalistic platform." Oh yeah? Just wait until that casual banter you could be having with your closest friend while walking down the street at night, potentially drunk, is recorded by somebody on a camera phone, intentionally or not, racks up millions of viral views on YouTube, and forces a lawsuit on your hands. Don't you tell me that state mentality will not fall into the slippery slope of "well, I guess you have to watch what you say everywhere then.. those drunken yobs, eh?".
(Sorry mods, I hit return instead of tab to get from subject box to comment box and sent a blank comment.)
I don't think I can let this word go by easily.
I am somebody who thinks of the religious, theocratic threat from Islam as a very serious danger to humanity as they have proven themselves in the ongoing civil wars in the Middle East and Asia, let alone the attacks on civil society in other countries around the world, such as East Timor, Spain, Nigeria, the USA and UK etc. And that secular values must be defended against with force against Orwellian, totalitarian, God-mandated regimes. This includes a very likely justified fight against Saddam Hussein and the military that enslaves North Korea. I am with the faction of the Left that stems back all the way to the 30's - the bunch that would proudly declare that "fascism means war" and that if there are ever any "just wars" in this world, it must be against all forms of totalitarianism that treat 1984 as a grand inspiration instead of a dire warning.
So, having said that, let me make this very clear: the use of the word "freehadist" as a means to compare the odd kid who does the equivalent of buying a DVD from ebay and selling it again for the same price as a religious fascist bent on death and destruction is a FUCKING DISGRACE. I have no choice but to treat with contempt those who compare your every day common-sense-minded person with theocrats. It is an absolute insult to everyone who ever questioned the idea of copyright and a filthy, revolting slander.
It is something I will not have said. And neither should anyone else here.
"If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility." - John Stuart Mill.
They often say the first step is admitting you have a problem.
This is excellent stuff. They've finally put the subject down on the table. It is a sign of revolutionary progress. It just goes to show that it can happen on the right as well as the left. I highly, highly doubt that this snowball will stop rolling downhill.
This is not like the war on drugs where culturally, it is difficult to portray the victims of the war as just that: victims. And that is due to the victims being drug users who may or may not bring their addictions upon themselves. There is still an imbalance here even in spite of the vast majority of people who agree that the war on drugs is unjust, because the drug "stigma" blocks out the vital step of really rattling the walls: creating images of suffering for the public to behold is not as easy when there's an element of prejudice towards your typical heroin user.
Copyright laws on the other hand have ended up embedding a lot of clear revolutionary images in the minds of it's critics: a new generation of young people who hate the laws and are aware of the viral resistance against SOPA, combined with the standardising of internet access as a human right. The clarity of the enemy and the victim is beyond doubt.
Lenin's definition of a revolutionary situation was "when the old order cannot go on in the new way, and the people do not want it to go on in the new way." It seems very, very fitting right now.
And to top it all off, the irrationality of the copyright lobbyists is getting the better of them: trying to criminalise reselling of MP3 files, patenting software to read head counts presumably for admission charges, bankrupting those who've done nothing more than the equivalent of letting their friends borrow their DVDs. I'm just waiting for them to do try and shut down deviantArt, next. Don't be tempted to say "they wouldn't be that stupid", irrationality makes oppression self defeating: matter of historic principle. These things do happen.
It's just one Ceaușescu moment after another with the copyright lobbyists. It means it's over. And it's just a matter of time.
It will piss people off if this gets thrown off the table due to lobbying, which in turn will annoy the Republicans who really need votes right now which in turn will start to put pressure on the Democrats to agree in order to take back those votes. Forward is the only direction right now.
I urge you all to follow the case surrounding ReDigi at the moment.
Needless to say, if ReDigi lose then the companies of the future will know what to do: encrypt media, stamp out the DVD player, and crush the DVD entirely.
"But digital downloads don't count as DVDs because... they are just different!" There comes a point where spelling out such piffle would be an insult to the intelligence of others.
And people don't believe me when I say there is a fight coming.
Patent trolling against Kickstarter (or, shall we say, patent trolling against the very concept of "tickets" to go see a gig, play or cinema movie) and now this.
There is a lot of work to be done. Start finding all the doublethinks and contradictions that come from copyright laws, make as many slogans as you can and march down your local streets and cities. This is reality grinding against an unjust system of incentive collection. We don't need it: we have the concept of a ticket soon to turn virtual with Kickstarter as the stage and the internet as the theatre.
Copyright encourages closed systems: you can see it in iOS, the new Windows OS and now this ridiculous construct. I mean, how far down the gutter do you have to be if you hear of the outcry "we can swap DVDs with each other which is more or less the same thing as swapping them over the internet" and then react "well we have to do something about those DVDs now, don't we?" This is insufferable.
Gamers should have been paying attention to this when they saw the slow depletion of PC gaming from retail ("you can't get a refund on this game, sir, the CD-Key is scratched off... no sir I don't think it will work even if you sell it to someone else), and surely they must be paying attention to it now with Sony and Microsoft's pushing to make their next consoles digital only (good on some suppliers refusing to stock said consoles if it happens, but I doubt that boldness will last when the marketing pressure kicks in). It's a bit counter-intuitive, but digital technology may INCREASE IP repression in some areas, not dent it from the piracy.
This is why I predict OUYA will blow everybody out the water. Copyright's defeat is ultimate.
Re: Re: You can't "fix" the country by allowing lies.
You are more right than you know. Remember when that preacher, I forget his name, claimed that the rapture would happen on several dates last year (changed the moment it did not happen, due to a "misreading" since the Bible is never clear), and many people across America gave up their possessions, valuables, money, everything they had because they were that convinced that they would, literally, float off to heaven?
There comes a point where you just have to say "stupidity is something we have to live with", and not try to dangerously escalate that stupidity by coming up with stupid censorship laws.
Yes, sure. But the whole analogy of "fire in a crowded theatre" is usually presented as a straw man, in the same way that its originator Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made it a straw man by locking up some Yiddish socialists who were calling for the U.S. to not get involved in the First World War. If anything, they were the real firefighters, shouting fire when there really was a fire in a crowded theatre. Bear this in mind, because it is important.
I hear it all the time in the debate over the Danish cartoons: "they knew what they were doing!", "is it really worth it?", "look at what they were inciting!".
But what many people forget is that as long as Christians and Jews do not start riots and try to destroy small democratic countries and their economies based on the fact that they are offended, we have every right to say that the same standard applies to Muslims, too. They also forget that there were many Muslims out there who did not take offense to the cartoons who could not make their voices heard over the intimidation.
And you have to remember: the cartoons were only part of the controversy a few months after their actual publication. There were Imams who deliberately hunted down even the mildest bit of satire against the religion's prophet, handing out copies of the cartoons to others in an effort to incite hatred of their own. Do you really think that these Imams handing out copies of the cartoons want the same censorship for themselves as they do for others? Of course not. This is a radical difference of interests: in this case, theocracy versus secularism.
This is why I have to treat the "fire" analogy with great skepticism.
You cannot cure stupidity like that. For instance, there were many people who went around acting like fools when Orson Welles' reading of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds was broadcast on radio, even after there were a good number of reassurances that the reading was from a fictional story.
You also have preachers, rabbis and imams to worry about. Not to mention the bogus rhetoric from tabloids about how coffee can both cure and stop cancer, along with every other thing known to man. You need to get real.
As the great Dr House always says, "Everybody Lies."
Also, I posted this on a YouTube video (Christopher Hitchen's almighty speech on freedom of expression: type "Christopher Hitchens Free Speech"), I hope it's fairly relevant in relation to the "fire" strawman:
"I'm tired of the "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy. Listen, if you think the potential for dangerous behaviour mandates censorship, do me this favour will you? Don't go to your government and protest for free speech limits: go to your government and protest for the banning of fire drills.
Lets see how fucking committed you are to this premise.
Anyone seen The Simpsons episode where everyone in the Nuclear Plant goes crazy over Mr Burns' fire drill? We all know what the point of that gag was."
Absolutely spot on with the idea that mainstream news is more to blame than the tweet itself. It sort of reminds me about how pathetic it is that people who tweet offensive content in the U.K. can get arrested, but the mainstream press who reprint the comments get away without any prosecution whatsoever.
This is why there must be no limits on opinions. There never has been a party who claimed to be able to police opinions for the good of the public who didn't fall into corruption, and there never will be.
You know the analogy that creators should be paid to create as a career, and not to monitor the royalties of copies, the definition of which would be something like a royalty-watching-career? I.e. a plumber is paid once to build the toilet, and not every time you flush it?
Well, I ask you guys this: would it not make sense for crowdfunding to provide incentives retroactively? What I mean by that is making an album from your own budget at first (with your band's own guitar, bass, drums), then once the album is made collect crowdfunded incentives for the RELEASE of that album, not its creation. In other words, give us $x and we will release the whole album on YouTube, here are a couple of singles we have on offer for demo. Because then they can use those funds to make the NEXT album, and repeat the process to get funds for the album after that. This way consumers can guarantee a release of content. Wouldn't that be the next step for a site like Kickstarter?
And wouldn't promoters/publishers see this, and tap into the idea by providing money to help promising bands along with initial costs in return for a share of the incentives? They surely must already do this to some extent by lending studio equipment on the bet that the album will make X sales.
IP law is a funny thing to truly revolt against, because everybody thinks that they need to support it in order to protect their potential at monopolised profits. But they don't stop and think that doing so makes them prisoners of their own actions because they deny themselves the right to derive from the works and discoveries of others, which is also just as huge a market. The fashion industry has achieved a state where the introduction of IP laws to this sector would seriously harm several jobs, companies, instate a culture of fear, etc (and I have read about some fools who regardless try and push for such legislation). The only real argument for IP is the free-rider problem, but it can be solved as long as you make conditions that prevent this problem from existing.
It's the same argument for why we need to be strict on free speech and not police opinions of any kind, even hateful ones. Because once you allow policing based on something as slippery as subjective offensiveness, people will gradually erode what is meant by "offensive" until oppressors have the ability to shoot at anything that moves. The founding fathers of the U.S. got this spot on and threw in the separation of church and state to boot, another cornerstone of civilisation, but unfortunately did not have enough historical context to make the same call in regards to the "exclusive rights" clause. Can anyone picture these enlightened people putting this clause in if they even glanced at something as gigantic as the internet?
I've said this before: arts and science (copyrights and patents) can be best expressed when you treat multimedia as a stage and not a market for selling dirt (where do you think the phrase "dirt-cheap" comes from?), and when you treat education as a social issue where everybody should contribute their fair share to humanity in regards to their relative fields, respectively. So crowdfunded virtual tickets and socialised R and D, in other words.
Next time you bump into a copyright maximalist, ask the question "what evidence would disprove copyright?" If they fail to answer this question, dodge it, or try to insist through circular logic that copyright is the only way to achieve incentives, politely say that their claim must be weak if it is an unfalsifiable one. I am from a background that values skepticism and science quite highly: I can definitely say that this is the right approach to take.
You would think physical property rights were self-evident: if everything was free, then nobody would win (however, that doesn't mean that each human being on the planet is not entitled to a fair share of resources on the planet: this is the origin of the left-right wing economic clash). So it is only fair that if I buy paper and ink, that paper and ink belongs to me.
However, intellectual property doesn't work like this: it hijacks physical property rights and transcends them. It means that if you were to write a book, a fraction of the ink and paper in my possession somehow "belongs" to you. And the ink and paper of everyone else in the country for that regard. Intellectual property can only make sense if there were some way to represent it without using physical property, if it in itself was a "thing", but it's not. You need physical property in order to represent intellectual property. Even if I read aloud a book I still have to use sound waves and air, and even if I did not write a word of the book and had the entire intellectual property in my mind, I still need the neurons in my brain to think about it, meaning that there is no way around the hijacking of physical property.
And technically copyright law would mean that you get to possess... a fraction of ALL the material there is in the universe. Even materials that cannot be branded as property, such as air, countryside grass, rain, snow, rocks, weeds and common dirt ("I saw this sign by the side of the road that said 'Dirt for sale.' Wow. What a country we live in, eh? 'DIRT... for sale!' Boy, how'd you like to get inside this guy's mind and look around for a while, huh? 'Oh my God! HONEEEYYY! Honey quit servin' waffles and come here baby! I'm gonna sell DIRT! Look! It's everywhere!' " - Bill Hicks) This is a behaviour in common with copyright lobbyists trying to take public domain works out of the public domain and copyrighting them again.
This is stupid. Obviously if you want to solve the free-rider problem stemming from the mismatch between the hard work of labour and the ease of copying, or the so-called "tragedy of the commons", you get your consumers to all pay simultaneously: all-or-nothing crowdfunding (and something similar for patents: socialised R and D that would benefit even better on a global scale). After all, all-or-nothing crowdfunding has been around since cinema-goers could claim refunds on their tickets if the movie gets cancelled for some reason. Same with music gigs, theatre gigs, book events, any kind of creative show! So we DO HAVE EVIDENCE that it works, and plenty of it.
On the post: In Wake Of NewsCorp Scandal, UK Says Press Must Be Regulated... But Free... But Not Exactly
Re: Re: When will my country learn? Congress shall make no law!
And this is because the rest of us with our more civilised states of mind would still benefit from the horrible speech. I come from a background in skepticism and pro-enlightenment, and one thing you learn is that science, or the pursuit of knowledge in general, is not just about finding out what is true as a matter of fact, but also what is false as a matter of fact. The knowledge that racism, for example, is a lie is something that is vital for humanity, and in order for humanity to be educated the best it can in regards to the issue you must allow racists to speak their minds so that we know what to resist. If they are silenced for whatever reason, it means that a society becomes that little bit more ignorant of the evils of this world and also harder to resonate with people outside the society who really do suffer at the hands of racist ideology.
This independent body that is being proposed is just an extension of something I already disagree with, which is Ofcom. That I fully understand. But I don't buy the original proposition; I cannot stand the idea that people regularly send in complaints to Ofcom based on the fact that a T.V. show is too offensive, putting a degree of censorial pressure on all T.V. media to "play down" and be polite. Where I come from, that's a very contemptible attitude to be having. It's the ideology of a society that wants a quiet life and does not want to face up to serious issues overseas. The whole point of free expression is that being offensive is a necessity.
And now we are saying we want to extend this principle to newspapers and magazines? Where any kind of mildly provocative dissent is condemned by a mob of people who were already determined to be offended? Come on. Get serious. I'm not going to be told by a bunch of uneducated loonies that they are good enough to tell me what I can and cannot read. I'm not a child.
On the post: In Wake Of NewsCorp Scandal, UK Says Press Must Be Regulated... But Free... But Not Exactly
When will my country learn? Congress shall make no law!
If anything, we need less regulation: superinjunctions that stop women from calling out on their cheating husbands, disgraceful libel laws that allow Roman Polanski to sue Vanity Fair from France, jail time for offensive Twitter comments (but papers or websites who reproduce the offensive comments get no jail time), restrictions on religious criticism especially with Islam, and thought (sorry, "hate") speech bans that treat bomb-scarred war veterans like children by shielding their eyes from the supposedly horrendous image of burning poppies. All of this has to stop right now.
On the post: New Kickstarter Rules Make Sense In Principle, But Raise Big Questions In Practice
"Ebay will eat itself!"
The very name 'Kickstarter' indeed implies that the funds help to create the project, not to gather funds for the release of an already created project. But whether Kickstarter likes it or not, it will HAVE to go down this route, otherwise another crowdfunding website will just take its place, specifically one that offers the concept of a 'virtual ticket'. Remember, studios often spend millions of dollars on a calculated estimate that they will get profit from it (e.g. studios placed comfortable investments in The Dark Knight Rises based on success from the film before), but they can never know for sure. If an act of God messed up their profits, say an economic collapse, then it cannot be helped... but it doesn't stop them investing. It'll be the same idea with the 'virtual ticket' - promoters will take chances and invest in crowdfunding because people will naturally pay a minimum requirement by the creators if it means their film can get released after the 30 days or so is up to gather the funds. Also, this way means that the crowdfunding website has proof of creation, and scams are less likely.
Something to bear in mind as well: I do distinctly remember as a kid when Ebay first came onto the internet scene. Back then there were ALSO many horror stories of scams, either by selling false products or by not paying for them. Many of these circulated around the press, and there was speculation about how long Ebay could last in an untrustworthy environment. But what happened? Sellers became more trustworthy because of loyal business brand names and the consumer feedback system, as well as buyers weighing up the risks of being scammed and realising that the law would no doubt be on their side if the worst were to happen. It's going to be the same with Kickstarter or whatever crowdfunding virtual ticket website takes the top mainstream position. People will get over the scare stories and put their trust in recognised publishers/promoters, give feedback and have reasonable legal protection to fall back on.
On the post: Syria Cut Off From The Internet Again
Now the Left lets proximity politics come into play, and insist that the U.S. government is the worst in the world despite never spending even a day under a totalitarian state of affairs abroad.
On the post: Company Sues Kickstarter Over 3D Printer Patent, Maligns 'Hackers And Makers'
Watch as the attacks will continue.
On the post: Lord McAlpine, Wronged By BBC, Demands 10,000 People On Twitter Pay Up
The poison pen argument does have some merit to it, but the U.S. libel system is far superior to the English libel system. And I am not entirely sure how you would go around policing something that can go viral such as this case here. How is it realistic to get your every day Twitter user to not have any libellous presupposition in his internet chat whatsoever? Even a casual comment voiced the wrong way might be up for grabs by the courts. Indeed, I would contend that if such logic were to be put forward about 10,000 Twitter users, then newspapers and websites who reproduce MILLIONS of printed items should be thrown in jail if they even so much as quote words from a Tweeter that were deemed to be "highly offensive" enough for prison. Because even by merely quoting the words, they have to fall under the category of "passing on the offensiveness", right?
The condition of keeping your libel lawsuits against the originator of the false claim, not the reproducers, may be a much better solution. I've read protests against this idea on the BBC that went along the lines of "Twitter isn't just your casual pub-banter - it is a public platform. It has to fall under the same terms as a mass media journalistic platform." Oh yeah? Just wait until that casual banter you could be having with your closest friend while walking down the street at night, potentially drunk, is recorded by somebody on a camera phone, intentionally or not, racks up millions of viral views on YouTube, and forces a lawsuit on your hands. Don't you tell me that state mentality will not fall into the slippery slope of "well, I guess you have to watch what you say everywhere then.. those drunken yobs, eh?".
On the post: New Book Makes The Case For Why Copyright Needs To Be Reformed
Re: Progressives vs. Libertarians on Copyright
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlEBh_98lIo
On the post: That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform
"Freehadist?"
I don't think I can let this word go by easily.
I am somebody who thinks of the religious, theocratic threat from Islam as a very serious danger to humanity as they have proven themselves in the ongoing civil wars in the Middle East and Asia, let alone the attacks on civil society in other countries around the world, such as East Timor, Spain, Nigeria, the USA and UK etc. And that secular values must be defended against with force against Orwellian, totalitarian, God-mandated regimes. This includes a very likely justified fight against Saddam Hussein and the military that enslaves North Korea. I am with the faction of the Left that stems back all the way to the 30's - the bunch that would proudly declare that "fascism means war" and that if there are ever any "just wars" in this world, it must be against all forms of totalitarianism that treat 1984 as a grand inspiration instead of a dire warning.
So, having said that, let me make this very clear: the use of the word "freehadist" as a means to compare the odd kid who does the equivalent of buying a DVD from ebay and selling it again for the same price as a religious fascist bent on death and destruction is a FUCKING DISGRACE. I have no choice but to treat with contempt those who compare your every day common-sense-minded person with theocrats. It is an absolute insult to everyone who ever questioned the idea of copyright and a filthy, revolting slander.
It is something I will not have said. And neither should anyone else here.
On the post: That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform
On the post: House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It's Time For Real Reform
They often say the first step is admitting you have a problem.
This is not like the war on drugs where culturally, it is difficult to portray the victims of the war as just that: victims. And that is due to the victims being drug users who may or may not bring their addictions upon themselves. There is still an imbalance here even in spite of the vast majority of people who agree that the war on drugs is unjust, because the drug "stigma" blocks out the vital step of really rattling the walls: creating images of suffering for the public to behold is not as easy when there's an element of prejudice towards your typical heroin user.
Copyright laws on the other hand have ended up embedding a lot of clear revolutionary images in the minds of it's critics: a new generation of young people who hate the laws and are aware of the viral resistance against SOPA, combined with the standardising of internet access as a human right. The clarity of the enemy and the victim is beyond doubt.
Lenin's definition of a revolutionary situation was "when the old order cannot go on in the new way, and the people do not want it to go on in the new way." It seems very, very fitting right now.
And to top it all off, the irrationality of the copyright lobbyists is getting the better of them: trying to criminalise reselling of MP3 files, patenting software to read head counts presumably for admission charges, bankrupting those who've done nothing more than the equivalent of letting their friends borrow their DVDs. I'm just waiting for them to do try and shut down deviantArt, next. Don't be tempted to say "they wouldn't be that stupid", irrationality makes oppression self defeating: matter of historic principle. These things do happen.
It's just one Ceaușescu moment after another with the copyright lobbyists. It means it's over. And it's just a matter of time.
It will piss people off if this gets thrown off the table due to lobbying, which in turn will annoy the Republicans who really need votes right now which in turn will start to put pressure on the Democrats to agree in order to take back those votes. Forward is the only direction right now.
On the post: Why Do We Even Have 'Distribution' As A Right Protected By Copyright?
Speaking of digital downloads...
Needless to say, if ReDigi lose then the companies of the future will know what to do: encrypt media, stamp out the DVD player, and crush the DVD entirely.
"But digital downloads don't count as DVDs because... they are just different!" There comes a point where spelling out such piffle would be an insult to the intelligence of others.
On the post: Copyright Maximalism: Turning Satirical Works Into Ridiculous Reality
And people don't believe me when I say there is a fight coming.
There is a lot of work to be done. Start finding all the doublethinks and contradictions that come from copyright laws, make as many slogans as you can and march down your local streets and cities. This is reality grinding against an unjust system of incentive collection. We don't need it: we have the concept of a ticket soon to turn virtual with Kickstarter as the stage and the internet as the theatre.
Copyright encourages closed systems: you can see it in iOS, the new Windows OS and now this ridiculous construct. I mean, how far down the gutter do you have to be if you hear of the outcry "we can swap DVDs with each other which is more or less the same thing as swapping them over the internet" and then react "well we have to do something about those DVDs now, don't we?" This is insufferable.
Gamers should have been paying attention to this when they saw the slow depletion of PC gaming from retail ("you can't get a refund on this game, sir, the CD-Key is scratched off... no sir I don't think it will work even if you sell it to someone else), and surely they must be paying attention to it now with Sony and Microsoft's pushing to make their next consoles digital only (good on some suppliers refusing to stock said consoles if it happens, but I doubt that boldness will last when the marketing pressure kicks in). It's a bit counter-intuitive, but digital technology may INCREASE IP repression in some areas, not dent it from the piracy.
This is why I predict OUYA will blow everybody out the water. Copyright's defeat is ultimate.
On the post: Fake Sandy Tweets Spark Widespread Debate About The Limits Of Free Speech
Re: Re: You can't "fix" the country by allowing lies.
There comes a point where you just have to say "stupidity is something we have to live with", and not try to dangerously escalate that stupidity by coming up with stupid censorship laws.
On the post: Fake Sandy Tweets Spark Widespread Debate About The Limits Of Free Speech
Re: Re:
I hear it all the time in the debate over the Danish cartoons: "they knew what they were doing!", "is it really worth it?", "look at what they were inciting!".
But what many people forget is that as long as Christians and Jews do not start riots and try to destroy small democratic countries and their economies based on the fact that they are offended, we have every right to say that the same standard applies to Muslims, too. They also forget that there were many Muslims out there who did not take offense to the cartoons who could not make their voices heard over the intimidation.
And you have to remember: the cartoons were only part of the controversy a few months after their actual publication. There were Imams who deliberately hunted down even the mildest bit of satire against the religion's prophet, handing out copies of the cartoons to others in an effort to incite hatred of their own. Do you really think that these Imams handing out copies of the cartoons want the same censorship for themselves as they do for others? Of course not. This is a radical difference of interests: in this case, theocracy versus secularism.
This is why I have to treat the "fire" analogy with great skepticism.
On the post: Fake Sandy Tweets Spark Widespread Debate About The Limits Of Free Speech
Re: You can't "fix" the country by allowing lies.
You also have preachers, rabbis and imams to worry about. Not to mention the bogus rhetoric from tabloids about how coffee can both cure and stop cancer, along with every other thing known to man. You need to get real.
As the great Dr House always says, "Everybody Lies."
On the post: Fake Sandy Tweets Spark Widespread Debate About The Limits Of Free Speech
"I'm tired of the "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy. Listen, if you think the potential for dangerous behaviour mandates censorship, do me this favour will you? Don't go to your government and protest for free speech limits: go to your government and protest for the banning of fire drills.
Lets see how fucking committed you are to this premise.
Anyone seen The Simpsons episode where everyone in the Nuclear Plant goes crazy over Mr Burns' fire drill? We all know what the point of that gag was."
On the post: Fake Sandy Tweets Spark Widespread Debate About The Limits Of Free Speech
This is why there must be no limits on opinions. There never has been a party who claimed to be able to police opinions for the good of the public who didn't fall into corruption, and there never will be.
On the post: How Being Very Transparent May Have Saved A 'Failed' Kickstarter Project
Well, I ask you guys this: would it not make sense for crowdfunding to provide incentives retroactively? What I mean by that is making an album from your own budget at first (with your band's own guitar, bass, drums), then once the album is made collect crowdfunded incentives for the RELEASE of that album, not its creation. In other words, give us $x and we will release the whole album on YouTube, here are a couple of singles we have on offer for demo. Because then they can use those funds to make the NEXT album, and repeat the process to get funds for the album after that. This way consumers can guarantee a release of content. Wouldn't that be the next step for a site like Kickstarter?
And wouldn't promoters/publishers see this, and tap into the idea by providing money to help promising bands along with initial costs in return for a share of the incentives? They surely must already do this to some extent by lending studio equipment on the bet that the album will make X sales.
On the post: Looking Beyond TPP: US & EU Planning More Bad IP Rules In 'US-EU Free Trade Agreement'
It's the same argument for why we need to be strict on free speech and not police opinions of any kind, even hateful ones. Because once you allow policing based on something as slippery as subjective offensiveness, people will gradually erode what is meant by "offensive" until oppressors have the ability to shoot at anything that moves. The founding fathers of the U.S. got this spot on and threw in the separation of church and state to boot, another cornerstone of civilisation, but unfortunately did not have enough historical context to make the same call in regards to the "exclusive rights" clause. Can anyone picture these enlightened people putting this clause in if they even glanced at something as gigantic as the internet?
I've said this before: arts and science (copyrights and patents) can be best expressed when you treat multimedia as a stage and not a market for selling dirt (where do you think the phrase "dirt-cheap" comes from?), and when you treat education as a social issue where everybody should contribute their fair share to humanity in regards to their relative fields, respectively. So crowdfunded virtual tickets and socialised R and D, in other words.
Next time you bump into a copyright maximalist, ask the question "what evidence would disprove copyright?" If they fail to answer this question, dodge it, or try to insist through circular logic that copyright is the only way to achieve incentives, politely say that their claim must be weak if it is an unfalsifiable one. I am from a background that values skepticism and science quite highly: I can definitely say that this is the right approach to take.
On the post: Copyright: The New Mercantilism
Copyright law is the true pirate of this world.
However, intellectual property doesn't work like this: it hijacks physical property rights and transcends them. It means that if you were to write a book, a fraction of the ink and paper in my possession somehow "belongs" to you. And the ink and paper of everyone else in the country for that regard. Intellectual property can only make sense if there were some way to represent it without using physical property, if it in itself was a "thing", but it's not. You need physical property in order to represent intellectual property. Even if I read aloud a book I still have to use sound waves and air, and even if I did not write a word of the book and had the entire intellectual property in my mind, I still need the neurons in my brain to think about it, meaning that there is no way around the hijacking of physical property.
And technically copyright law would mean that you get to possess... a fraction of ALL the material there is in the universe. Even materials that cannot be branded as property, such as air, countryside grass, rain, snow, rocks, weeds and common dirt ("I saw this sign by the side of the road that said 'Dirt for sale.' Wow. What a country we live in, eh? 'DIRT... for sale!' Boy, how'd you like to get inside this guy's mind and look around for a while, huh? 'Oh my God! HONEEEYYY! Honey quit servin' waffles and come here baby! I'm gonna sell DIRT! Look! It's everywhere!' " - Bill Hicks) This is a behaviour in common with copyright lobbyists trying to take public domain works out of the public domain and copyrighting them again.
This is stupid. Obviously if you want to solve the free-rider problem stemming from the mismatch between the hard work of labour and the ease of copying, or the so-called "tragedy of the commons", you get your consumers to all pay simultaneously: all-or-nothing crowdfunding (and something similar for patents: socialised R and D that would benefit even better on a global scale). After all, all-or-nothing crowdfunding has been around since cinema-goers could claim refunds on their tickets if the movie gets cancelled for some reason. Same with music gigs, theatre gigs, book events, any kind of creative show! So we DO HAVE EVIDENCE that it works, and plenty of it.
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