| Glitch |
[Dec. 5th, 2007|10:49 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | civil liberties, copyright, drm, economy, movies, mpaa, music, net neutrality, news, p2p, politics, rant, technology | ] |
Listen, Glick, the movie industry is already doing the one thing that guarantees I will never illegally download their 'products', namely they are now making such deficient, low-brow, half-assed, worthless, over-hyped, over-funded, overwritten, sub intellectual, inadequate, substandard, ridiculous, inferior, scoff-worthy, malodorous, cringe-making, mismanaged, shoddy, insufferable, incompetent and defective low-com-dom crap, that I would never ever even consider wasting one single byte of my precious bandwidth on any of it. I would be perfectly happy to see every last bit of your meritless trash forever erased from the internet were it not for the fact that you are trying to do it by introducing a radically disproportionate mechanism: ending Network Neutrality!
Don't cover your ears Glickster, you need to hear this: Shrek 3 is not important enough to bring an end to our freedom. The only reason the movie industry can say it's losing money now is because they spent way too much on producing something that nobody actually needs and nobody really wants. The Western World will not crumble because they can't turn a profit, but it might if we lose the integrity and security of the single most important communications tool in history.
One way or another the IP delusional industries are one the way out. It's only a matter of time before the average consumer figures out that their 'entertainment' just isn't worth it any more, that the busker on the street outside the cinema is a hell of lot more creative, interesting and memorable than the claptrap movie they just walked out of. How long do you think they'll watch their technology subverted, their personal data ransacked, their legally purchased media disintegrating, and their communications tapped and blocked before they think: "But I didn't even like the Bourne Appendectomy!"
Anyone invested in the movie or recording industries with even an iota of common sense should be selling up now, while their stock is still worth the ferromagnetic material it's stored on. You know it can't go on like this. It just isn't reasonable in consider this a survivable scenario for anyone involved. I mean it. Get out now. This is going to end badly, and you know it.
Glicky, you are not adding to our culture in any positive way beyond uniting the rest of us against you. You are not curing any horrible diseases. You are not on a crusade of righteousness. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are not welcome here. |
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| Intellectual Poison |
[Nov. 14th, 2007|12:52 am] |
Is it my imagination or is the recording industry doing the copyfight a favour?
Crunch time may be on us sooner than any of us could hope if the industry continues to make enemies this way. Think of it, they are vilifying themselves to an entire generation, poisoning their own imagined future consumer base in a vain effort to reverse time. There is are nations of kids leaving college over the next few years that have been cajoled and threatened by these idiots, that have lived in fear of being sued, of having their education taken away from them, both individually and now collectively, have seen their own technology broken by absurd legal conditions, seen their computers subverted and turned against them. These kids have seen a dying industry savagely clawing at their freedom in its efforts to preserve its own rotting carcass, becoming so ferocious and incoherent that the only possible future is self-destruction and dissolution. We don't want them around, the kids don't want them, their own artists want out, even being associated with the names of these companies has become a grave offence.
But we're far from done. We still need to see them fail and fall, broken, liquidated down to the last paper-clip to pay back the money they've extorted from music lovers, to pay for the anguish and misery they've caused, to reimburse us for the efforts we have all had to make to work around the god-awful technological atrocities they've inflicted on the world, and not least to pay for the coming apocalypse in the industries they have been stringing along for so long on the promise of a physical future, a promise which now sounds like the delusion of a fancied industrial renaissance.
Anyone who has tied their assets to the recording industry will be facing some stark choices in the next few years. Those with any sense will get out now, and get out fast.
There is no coming back from this.
The future is free. |
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| The Blanket License: A Modest Proposal |
[Oct. 25th, 2007|05:11 pm] |
According to a report from ArsTechnica the fabled Blanket License has once again reared its head, this time in Denmark:
Andy Oram over at O'Reilly Radar noted the recent moves in Denmark to create a system where every ISP user might pay a monthly fee in order to access unlimited P2P music legally.
The proposal has drawn positive feedback from an unlikely source—the local "Piratgruppen."
"It's good that they admit that they cannot solve the problem of falling CD sales by suing their own fans," said Sebastian Gjerding from the Piratgruppen. "It looks like they have understood that they should offer something that is competitive compared to other, free music sources. It is an entirely new admission that hasn't spread internationally yet. IFPI Denmark is on the forefront in this matter. But it is annoying that no action has been taken so far to save many teenagers million-krone fines." ArsTechnica.com
The article notes some obstacles to the proposal. For instance, will this cover just 'local' bands or include international sources? The former would simply prove unenforceable - they'd have less luck detecting where they were downloading from than they currently have detecting if they have downloaded anything at all - while the latter would be a logistical zombie movie complete with everyone dying at the end! Another question is whether this will be a voluntary payment or amount to a tax on all users regardless of whether they ever download music or not?
Despite these sorts of issues, I consider the Blanket License to be the most equitable and, more importantly, most moral alternative to the current media distribution model. Fundamentally it is a concept that makes the most of current technology and encourages further development, while at the same time protecting our right to make use of our own hardware and data.
The problems mentioned in the article are trivial. Yes, the BL should cover artists worldwide but it should be stipulated that they make the claim to receive anything. Yes, the BL should be a mandatory payment, including for businesses - they don't want to make use of it, that's up to them, but since it's there why not let their employees share media on their network without a legal care in the world?
My main problem with the Danish plan is its hopelessly narrow vision, covering only music and only one country. It is comically ineffectual.
Here's the real plan:
The Blanket License should cover all media, it should, in fact, cover anything that can be encoded, uploaded, downloaded or otherwise redistributed, music, movies, TV shows, books, newspapers, 3d printer files, essentially any media that can be rendered as data. It should be run as an opt-in for content creators alone and strictly prohibit music cartels, charities and other non-root content providers. It should also provide a means for those artists who build on the work of others to indicate and reward their contributors.
But there is one element that is by far the most important: the Blanket License must be directly democratic. By this I mean that the distribution of the revenue derived from the BL should be based on what the users are listening to, watching and using, not on some even division or some educated guess informed by random polling. We should literally be voting for our choices and the results of these votes used to calculate the creators' share.s Of course one vote a week is hardly going to be a fair measure, instead we would need at least a hundred votes a week which we could distribute as we see fit (say a maximum of five votes per voter for any one creator). This voting could allow for a mix of voluntary voting (specific choices regardless of what a user has actually downloaded) and user-controlled automated voting (a system that allows vote assignments based on the usage statistics from a media player). No one would be forced to vote, but it would be in their interests to encourage their favourite bands, actors photographers, writers and so on, and automatic voting could allow users to contribute without any real effort.
There will still be a place for record labels as marketing brokers, contracting artists for flat fees or a percentage of their earnings in return for their expertise in development and marketing their creations.
This real Blanket License would be no small undertaking, requiring the development of an international infrastructure and region-by-region legislation to remove the existing legal hurdles faced by users. But the result would be a totally egalitarian forum, the likes of which has not been seen since some mug took a handful of loose change and sang to a wax cylinder. All that would be required for an artist to make money would be to make music and find people who like it enough to vote for it, no contracts, no physical distribution, and most significantly, no risk.
It's ambitious, and naturally it glosses over some real problems. Technically, there are issues with the security involved in electronic voting, ensuring that the votes are genuine rather than the result of malicious software running on client systems, and preventing any third party from accessing usage data and putting user privacy at risk (a premise I call Regime Proofing - designing the system so that should it fall under someone else's control there will not be enough information recorded to identify individual users, though there should still be enough to identify tampering and vandalism [a paradox, I know]). And naturally the entire system would need to be totally transparent if it is to be trusted by artists and consumers.
The environment that this Blanket License could create is an exciting one. It would encourage a far greater range of cultural experience for users, exposing them to a vast library of content without restriction and without the increasingly hegemonic filtering of the incumbent distribution businesses. Since each user has already paid for all their downloading there can be none of this quibbling over the rights involved in time- and format-shifting. Download once and the data is yours to do with as you please., you will be free to invent new ways of accessing your culture that have yet to be even dreamed of, and without fear of the shadow of monetisation.
Radiohead's independent venture into alternative digital distribution model was laudable, a worthy experiment, but one dependant on the duality of our current attitude to online media, both legal and illicit. What they received for their effort was charity: not a long term solution, but a round of applause for a worthy effort. In the end we cannot expect to support artists through benevolence alone. How many 'micro-patrons' can we expect to find and persuade to keep giving? Radiohead simply walked out into a new and forbidding wilderness, if anyone is going to follow, we're going to need to build them some roads.
I've previously discussed the impact of unlimited digital distribution on the existing content industry, namely the rapid and near total destruction of physical production interests. Other commentators have suggested that such a vision is unnecessarily apocalyptic, that, for instance, paper books will never disappear, and to an extent I agree. But consider a world in which you can access any book, at any time, for free; can we really expect already struggling publishers to survive that? There will always be a market for dead tree, just as there is still a market for vinyl, but there will also be a reckoning in the market that will see it reduced to little more than a niche. Now consider this situation extended to cover not only book sellers, but music stores, tv stations, cinemas and all the services that depend on them. A whole set of industries is at stake, countless jobs, and a huge chunk of the Western economy.
The Blanket License promises an almost unimaginable upheaval in the 'business of culture', a vision that the entrenched business interests will likely do anything to escape. But consider also that the openness it could bring will foster new technologies and new businesses to exploit those technologies and even new ways of doing business - the economic environment might then be changed rather than destroyed.
I am convinced that, if we are to avoid handing over control of our lives to big business, then this is the way it must be. It is the Blanket License or (without exaggeration) cultural totalitarianism. |
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| Universal Licence |
[Jun. 29th, 2006|02:05 am] |
This is a fascinating (if short) editorial based on this article (both at the very badly designed typicallyspanish.com via /.) about proposed changes to Spain's legal recognition of Intellectual Property Delusions. The proposed law will demand a mandatory levy on blank media as in Canada and Finland - strangely including memory sticks, mobile phones and scanners but excluding hard drives - with the resulting revenue distributed to copyright holders. How this revenue will be distributed in this instance remains unclear.
There are arguments that this is an indiscriminate tactic to regain the supposed lost revenue of the content industries, when there are many uses of the taxed products that do not infringe copyright. For instance, this law would mean that people backing up their own data to DVD-R are paying copyright holders for nothing.
But, there is another way to look at this: if you have already paid the copyright holder then surely you have the right to use the copyright holder's work. This tax can be seen as a universal licence to copy and to distribute copyrighted content. This might be considered analogous to the proposed (and subsequently shot down), broadband tax in France that would have made it legal to share copyrighted material over P2P networks. The Spanish levy is a socialistic response to the problem of IP in a capitalistic environment where such property can be reproduced infinitely and distributed globally at virtually no cost and very little effort.
The most interesting thing in the editorial are the quoted statistics on Internet use in Spain. Telefonica, which is not only the largest corporation in Spain but the also the largest telephony company in the world, has estimated that 90% of the traffic on its network is Internet use, and that 80% of that Internet traffic is P2P. There's a claim that the average Spaniard now buys only one CD a year (and who can blame them if that one turns out to be Shakira?) and that DVD sales have dropped by almost 30% between 2004 and 2005 (though for the life of me I'm not sure what they are supposed to have bought in that period). It may seem, from first appearances, that the Spanish government is reacting to this new reality by offering a way for both the content industry and the consumer to get what they want without a litigation war.
However, as mentioned in the article neither broadband connections nor HDs are to be covered by this tax - very strange, I think you'll agree, seeing as HDs have far more storage capacity and DSL lines are far better for distribution than any of the other media mentioned... unless transmitting copyrighted material over a DSL line and storing it on a HD will continue to be treated as infringement. I have to wonder what this will mean for HD based media players?
Under these circumstances this new levy is essentially just fleecing consumers while knocking a few more nails into physical media's coffin by making it more expensive and less attractive. At the same time it continues to allow the content industries to victimise their own customers and keep their broken business model afloat for a few more years.
Ultimately this is nothing to get excited about, it's Germolene on a spinal injury. Taxing physical products can only push consumers away and encourage the concept of data divorced from any particular medium, and that can only encourage the use of P2P. It promises a market where the CDs and DVDs are merely the means of transporting purchased data from the point of sale to the customers networked media player, and from there it's only a small step to online-only distribution.
I very much doubt that the companies behind the new (and already far too expensive) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be happy with this proposal. Out of the cradle, into the grave, as it were. |
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| Who's the WTO's Daddy? |
[Jun. 4th, 2006|12:55 am] |
If you're harbouring any doubts regarding the malignant hubris of the IP delusionals in the music industry, here's where you should pay close attention:
PARIS, June 1 - Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, except for one important detail: The site may well be illegal.
So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that American trade negotiators darkly warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization. - NYTimes (via BoingBoing)
These people are actually willing to toy with the future of an entire nation (the largest economy currently outside the WTO) just to satisfy American pigopolists and their busted-ass business models. Granted the WTO has a whole lot of problems regarding ethical conduct, but for better or worse, we cannot ignore the weight of its authority and the advantages it can bring to an economy as a whole. But this isn't oil we're discussing, this isn't energy, it's neither food nor minerals nor weapons, it's just data, just regular data that happens to translate into the sounds pumped out through speakers heedlessly across the entire globe, the vast majority of which you will hear then instantly forget. This is the Sword of Damocles that hangs over Russia's head: not political stability or terrorism or human rights, but Brittany Spears, Cliff Richard and Justin Timberlake.
In other news Iran's proposed membership may be rejected by the WTO unless it halts efforts to produce weapons grade Uranium! The lack of perspective is truly staggering.
So this is the madness you pay for when you buy from these idiots. My conscience couldn't take it. Can yours? |
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| Groceries Order Rescinded |
[Nov. 8th, 2005|10:52 pm] |
The Irish Groceries Order has finally been abolished! (via finfacts.com)
The Groceries Order was a prohibition against the sale of grocery goods below list price. It meant that the seller had to pass the full cost on to the customer including insurance, transport, etc if they were included in the net value. The idea was to prevent the huge supermarket chains from undercutting the smaller independent stores. However it became one of the main reasons that the cost of living in Ireland is so damn high (other reasons are that taxes are too high and Irish business is riddled with dishonesty and crime).
It's being reported that this could cut the groceries budget of the average family by €500 per year!
About time too. |
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| Heroic Measures |
[Jun. 25th, 2005|10:38 pm] |
Homes and Businesses bulldozed for not making enough money. Monkeys taught to use currency.
"[T]he U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to home and small business owners throughout the country by allowing the government to use eminent domain to take homes so that businesses can make more money off that land and possibly pay more taxes as a result." "The red research assistant "sells" grapes and the blue research assistant "sells" Jell-o cubes, with each piece of food costing a coin from the monkey's budget. A capuchin reveals its preferences. The capuchin must make a decision analogous to a grocery-store shopper's: how much of their budget to spend of grapes and how much to spend on Jell-o."
Do you think, perhaps, it's time to remove Capitalism's feeding tube? |
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tarmle's journal
Oh, such pollution we had... it was delicious!