Saving the Net 790
An anonymous reader writes "Doc Searls, editor at Linux Journal, has a very insightful editorial that brings it all together - the FCC media consolidation ruling, SCO vs. Linux, why broadband is under attack by telcos and cable systems, why we lost Eldred vs. Ashcroft, what's really interesting about Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a very astute observation about the vast gulf between Liberals and Conservatives."
Re:Terminator is trying to (Score:2, Informative)
Of course he can't be president without a constitutional ammendment allowing naturalized citizens to be president.
Re:liberal (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Terminator is trying to (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry but this is wrong. Actually Arnold is looking to run for the governership of the great state of California, which he declared that he would do if they recalled whatever-his-name-is.
Nobody cares (Score:3, Informative)
As another poster pointed out, it's plain and simple greed. The big media companies want perpetual copyright so they can continue to milk those works as long as possible. Copyright to a media company is the same as a manufacturing company's raw materials or even inventory. Manufacturing organizations are taxed on their inventory; if the big media companies want to own all that copyright, they should be taxed on it.
The real issue here is that the overwhelming majority of people at large are not aware of these issues. Anyone attempting to educate the masses on such things are immediately shut out as hippie radicals. The only people really working at these issues are the ones who stand to make a profit on them (i.e. the big media companies). Those same people working relentlessly for profit via copyright are the ones who are so quick to equate Linux, open source, anything public domain, etc to communism.
The cruel irony here is that the very people who label public domain as communism are the same people who are robbing our freedoms.
Sigh. Linux and the Internet were great while they lasted.
But isn't the phone system also end to end? (Score:2, Informative)
Worse, [the Internet] was designed as an end-to-end system, where all the power to create, distribute and consume are located at the ends of the system and not in the middle.
The Net's end-to-end nature is so severely anathema to cable and telco companies that they have done everything they can to make the Net as controlled and asymmetrical as possible.
But the phone system is also end-to-end in nature. Cable and telco companies know they are just selling access, same as they sell access to the phone system or the cable system (most cable providers produce little by way of content; that's left to people like USA Networks and HBO.)
I think the situation at the telcos and cablecoms is far more complicated than how the author protrays. Witness the trouble Verizon took recently to block the subpoena of a customer whom the RIAA wanted. And one of the megacorps is Sony who both sells music and produces devices to copy that music.
Re:Dean for President (Score:4, Informative)
Watch the name calling. You're apparently not such a scholar yourself.
The poster said "democratizing..." was "part of what the internet was all about", not that it was created for that purpose. It is not revisionist to point out that in the nascent days of the Net, the cited motivation was a strong component of the network's culture. It is this network that Doc Searle's argues needs "saving" from becoming a crass and commercialized content vector for media giants.
OTOH, If you'd called him out for failing to capitalize Internet, I would have applauded you.
Re:Terminator is trying to (Score:2, Informative)
Ummmm, quick refresher course in civics:
From Article II, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution: Not a joke people..
<Dr. Evil>Rrrrrrriiiiiiiiight.</Dr. Evil>
Re:Dean for President (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you should check here [isep.ipp.pt] or here [zakon.org] and learn, once and for all, that Internet was not designed to withstand physical attacks. It just was a by-product.
Oh, lest I forget, ad hominem attacks take weight of your assertions (even more when they are not quite correct).
'til next post...
Marcos (any likeness to chance is pure reality)
Re:Dean for President (Score:3, Informative)
This is simply not true [opensecrets.org]. The Republican Party leans heavily on large donations from individuals. These individuals generally are in the financial "upper crust", and generally benefit financially from a Republican administration (massive tax cuts, etc.).
The Republican Party is geared towards saving people money. This is the key issue for Republican politics, regardless of all the morality bullshit they spew. If you're greedy, you vote Republican, whether it's for an end to the estate tax or a $300 tax refund loan.
Re:Dean for President (Score:5, Informative)
The candidates win delegates in each state primary, and the results are tallied at the national convention. Delegates can vote contrary to how their state voted, but it's unusual.
It's not to hard to get 40,000 people who like you to give $20. Granted it's only $800,000 and not the 100+ mil or whatever obscene about the retard currently in office spent.
Try 60,000+ people giving an average of over $60... the Dean campaign collected something like 7 million in the last quarter. Bush, of course, has about 200 million... but once the Democratic lineup thins out, it'll be easier to raise funds.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like GNUnet [ovmj.org] might be something you would be interested of.
Re:Interview with Howard Dean (Score:3, Informative)
They do not have an official policy on the DMCA as of yet (I asked them) but they are formulating one, and I would suspect that it would be on the side of fair use and the right to tinker with what one owns.
As well, they are against the consolidation of the medis, for whatever that's worth.
Actually when it comes to tech, Dean is very close to Gingrich..which is not entirely a bad thing. Very strong on future tech and R&D.
Re:Terminator is trying to (Score:2, Informative)
There's already one in Congress [house.gov], co-authored and introduced by Rep. Barney Frank. It only applies those who have citizenship and have lived in the U.S. for at least twenty years. Of couse, it means nothing until it's ratified, but since Mr. Schwarznegger is a citizen and has lived in this country for more than twenty years, he would be eligible.
-Jennifer
What about Kucinich? (Score:2, Informative)
Check it out:
http://kucinich.us/issues/issue_10key.htm
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, I would want a whole nother IP network to run whatever stuff I liked on. With its own DNS servers, etc. Just like the current IP network runs over a physical network, this IP network would run over the current IP network. Literally an Internet over the current Internet. Probably using IPSec to link the nodes of the new network up to each other.
Re:liberal (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe, but at the same time, the words "Liberal" and "Libertarian" both come from a root of "Liber". Furthermore, if you go to WordNet, you'll see the first two definitions of liberal are...(1) a person who believes in progress, reform, and the protection of civil liberties (2) a person who favors an economic theory of laissez-faire and self-regulating markets.
There has been a strong drift in the meaning of the word "liberal". At the time of the founding of the US, the words "liberal" and "libertarian" would have been mostly redundant. Also, while I'm setting the record straight, the strict definition of "libertarian" is simply someone who holds to a philosophical concept of free will. The Libertarian Party and libertarianism are two completely different things.
As far as I'm aware, earlier in this century, the "progress" concept of liberalism led to people who called themselves "social liberals", and the term has since just become "liberal". Their ideology is radically different from classical liberal theory, but the moniker has stuck. It's important to note that saying the US was founded on liberal ideas is correct within many academic circles as "liberal" to them still refers to the philosophies of Smith et al. In fact, in 1997, I spent several weeks in a college-level European history class discussing the "collapse of liberalism" as a central ideology in the Western world. The professor was, of course, referring to classical liberalism, not modern liberalism.
Liberals today are for restricting free speech, under the idea of political correctness Liberalisms ugly offspring people; have to watch what they say or do at a university for fear of getting kicked out. Don't believe me? try to hang a confederate flag in you Dorm window.
Depends on whether or not that dorm is in South Carolina, really. Also depends on the university. I mean, it *IS* the university's dorm. They can do what they want with it.
The term "Libertarianism" did not exist when the USA was founded but the spirit did..
Linux propietary? (Score:2, Informative)
This statement is ludicrous. Linus owns the name Linux, not the operating system. There is a very big difference. He owns none of the code. He only has control over what can be called Linux. So far he seems to have been pretty lenient with that trademark as there are over a hundred distros and most, if not all of them, use the word Linux in some part of their name.
Try RONJA (Score:4, Informative)
(Exactly what you were talking about!)
Tony.
Re:Dean for President (Score:5, Informative)
$220 million directly donated to presidential campaigns by individuals under the law (hard money, not soft money large donations from individuals)...
$157 million to Republican candidates......
$63 million to Democratic candidates......
conclusion: your source is faulty.
Not for long... (Score:2, Informative)
About time too. Who needs to send troops to 'liberate' a foreign country when you can just send the Pres to kick some ass?
ADSL and Eldred Misconceptions (Score:2, Informative)
The author of the article makes some interesting speculations, but would have been better served by doing some research before waxing philosophical.
First, at least with DSL, the main reason that it's usually asymmetric in favor of download speed is a technical one -- issues arise with crosstalk. Check out http://www.commweb.com/article/COM20011010S0005 [commweb.com] for a more thorough discussion.
Also, the reason the Supreme Court ruled the way it did in Eldred v. Ashcroft wasn't because of confusion about what kind of right copyright is or anything so abstract. The court said that since the term of copyright enacted by the Sonny Bono CTEA was still limited, it was constitutional. It's not the court's job to decide what length of term is appropriate to protect innovation; that's why Congress was given that charge by the Constitution. If you, like most thinking human beings, don't agree with the copyright term lengths, your representatives are where you should look for relief.
In short, it seems that much of what the author is attributing to Big Media changing the notion of copyrights and the nature of the 'Net is due to technical concerns of one kind or another. Does that mean the threat isn't there? No, but we're not going to get anywhere by misunderstanding its origins.
Thomas Jefferson said ... (Score:2, Informative)
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
The War of Information (Score:5, Informative)
Every time a new distribution media comes along it is usually controlled easily and readily because startup costs and production tended to be centralized. Publishing companies need printing presses, music and TV need studios, etc. People who want to control the distribution can easily do so by cutting it off or regulating it at the source. Distribution was also easily controlled since transportation cartels tended to be monopolies or oligopolies that would make deals with producers or get taken over by them. Localized distrubitors could be bullied with threats of price wars or bribed with treats of guarenteed monopolies in their area (much as states do with wine distribution contracts these days). Yet the internet is an entirely different entity, in that distributor and publisher have been combined into one and that no one corporation can hope to realistically control even the majority of computer-based infrastructure.
As with any new medium, test cases arise that will set precedent for how to approach this new medium. Companies with the money are bribing Congressional officials to guarentee their copyrights and change the nature of them from honorable, respectable, limited right to an exact piece material into exclusive right to repress any and every idea even remotely based on the original idea for 75-100 years. Innovation has slowed dramatically as a result, and this would decimate engineering and scientific progress if the same ideas ever became law in those fields. Yet now people can readily copy material and distribute (publish) it with the click of a mouse. There's no time to tax it, regulate it, put it through a middleman, or anything else. Copyright laws were changing even before the internet came about, and music oligopolies were exploiting the populace for decades, but now they can be circumvented with ease. This infuriates the companies since fair-market value for their material turns out to be so much lower than their formerly enforcable prices were. Thus, in a backlash, they now want to charge more to "make up for lost profit" and have Draconian copyrights and copyright enforcement laws to protect their material ad infinitum whether it is justifiable or not.
What really makes this tricky is that the infrastructure is diverse and the battlefield is international. Laws are limited only to the country they are made in. Ultimately it would take the UN to write legislation for anything realistic to apply to the entire planet, so the companies are going for the next-best thing: arresting or bankrupting anyone in the US involved in "copyright violation" and trying to force other countries to do the same. They do this by threatening trade sanctions by bemoaning their loss of revenues due to "pirates", legitimate or otherwise, and getting pity from some of the populace. It also helps that these same companies also tend to own TV and news stations as well as many congressmen who rely on those sources to get re-elected.
It will be difficult to fight this war from our end since we lack the resources and congresmen of these giant companies. How do we fight back legally? First, get some like-minded friends together and write your congressmen and see if they won their last election by a thin margin. If they are not solidly rooted in their district, they will very likely listen to what you and your voting friends have to say. Second, if you are not already, get regist