The Parallel Politics of Copyright and Environment 128
zumaya100k writes "In recent months, Slashdot has covered the rise of
the Pirate Party and the battles in Europe over iPod
interoperability. Canada's Hill Times has an insightful
column from Michael Geist
that links these developments as the growing importance of copyright as
a political issue. He argues that copyright is now tracking the
environment as a mainstream political issue." (Geist is talking about Canada here, but much the same can be said about the U.S. and other places.)
This about sums it up for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Complexity is anathema to politics in most countries.
Re:This about sums it up for me (Score:5, Insightful)
To me it seems people will only notice things are becoming a police state when its a bit to late. Most
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As long as I don't do anything wrong why should I worry?
I agree with your basic premise (although I don't think we are anywhere near a police state as the phrase is normally used), but one thing we do need is a cleary stated and consice answer to the above question. There is an answer, but it *is* a fair question.
happily ignore things until it becomes and issue when the police turn up at the front door
And if your wife asks, "Why would they show up up the front door? Give me exact examples." what would you
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That's a very real problem. But it's not necessarily the fault of the person raising the issue. I often discover that even if you give people quite concrete examples they disregard them because they think that it's too farfetched. And that's mainly beca
Re:This about sums it up for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Change "making the threat seem real enough"
to "making the threat seem personal enough"
The quickest and easiest way to do that is to ask [Whoever] personal questions you know they aren't going to answer.
When [Whoever] refuses, ask them "As long as you didn't do anything wrong, why shouldn't you answer?"
The answer they give you is the same answer to the question "As long as I don't do anything wrong why should I worry?"
Once you change the way those people look at the issue, you can change the way they feel about it. To do that, you have to go after their fundamental assumption that Bad Guys != Their Community.
Re:This about sums it up for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the old days, the speed limit on the NYST was 55mph, like other limited-access highways. But NOBODY went 55mph, and in fact it was quite common to drive past police cars at 70mph, assuming they weren't driving right beside you at that speed, or faster.
In essence, EVERYONE was breaking the law. That also meant that had they wanted to, or if they had to fill a quota of some sort, they could stop ANYONE for at least a speeding ticket. Beyond that, they could probably add reckless endangerment, etc. But the reality is, since everyone was breaking the law, they could adopt alternate criteria for stopping you, say they don't like your looks, or your car's looks.
To be honest, I don't know that the system was ever abused in this way. I never heard of any abuse, that that doesn't mean that there was or wasn't any.
But the possiblity was there.
Now to bring it home to your wife...
Do you KNOW that you're not breaking any laws? When was the last time you sat down and read ALL the laws, to sort out which ones are applicable to you? How about Blue Laws? I've heard that some places have laws on the books that the Missionary Position is the only legal method for sexual intercourse. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do remember some time in the past few years, a high court ruling that upheld a law against sex toys in your own bedroom. There was recently a rider forbidding mail-order purchase prescription drugs from Canada, and it was tacked onto a completely unrelated bill. It turns out that sometimes these riders are added late in the process, too late to be in the version of the bill given to legislators for review. Things can sail right under the radar, leaving room for "selective enforcement."
In these days, I'd mostly fear not knowing enough about who I'm doing business with. In a completely innocent fashion, it's possible to "make material contributions to terrorist organizations," by simply buying something from the wrong people.
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The answer is very simple: If you have nothing to hide, why don't you send all your correspondence on postcards? The postage is cheaper, after all.
It's because we all have something to hide, even if we've done nothing wrong. The issue isn't secrecy, it's privacy.
You do nothing wrong when you have a quiet word with your boss about a co-worker, or your trade union representative about your boss, file your tax return, talk about your yeast infection with your doctor, go to the toilet, have sex, dance naked
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Bullshit. It is not a fair question.
OK, it's a fair question in the minds of those who ask it. Better? Cheer up. The Wii is coming. :)
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In the twentieth century alone, 100,000,000 people were murdered by their own governments. With a track record like that, the question should never be whether you're doing something wrong -- it should be whether they are.
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Not that this has anything to do with TFA, but most people misuse or do not understand the words "police state" [wikipedia.org]
"Security state" or "militarized state" more accurately describes what people like to biatch about.
[/offtopic]
Copyright isn't limited t
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Ask her if it's ok for the police to come into your home at any time and look through all your drawers and everything else at any time they like, and will jail you for telling them to go away or not letting them in.
what is her response then?
Re:This about sums it up for me (Score:4, Insightful)
You still overestimate the average person. They will say that the police would only do it to criminals, so they have no reason to fear the police having that authority. Seriously, I've tried to use this exact explanation. Somewhere along the line, people stopped believing that they themselves were the fundamental source of authority, and have come to believe that governments have inherent power. They believe that the government is always looking out for them, and beyond criticism. Somehow, they just don't get the fact the government is just a big group of people who are lazy, stupid, and power hungry as everybody else. Often, more so.
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To some extent, the freedoms that most Western countries (at least the U.S.--I have limited experience in other Western countries) have enjoyed for so long have become our own worst enemy, in a sense.
Because most of us in the U.S. have not had to fear our own government, we have adopted the mindset that our government *wouldn't* do the kinds of things that the Constitution was designed to prevent. Therefore, we don't care if Bush wiretaps in violation of the 4th amendment and FISA, if the Pat
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting [wikipedia.org]
It's a reform needed in the UK and the USA. Help moderate politics, keep government for all the people, support, argue, fight for compulsory balloting.
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And of course the answer to that we should all remember is: "Do you trust the govenment enough to not screw up. So you trust government enough to keep absolutely clean database records, and not have your name get attached to some violation or other."
That's the problem with unfettered, growing data collection on citizens... it becomes impossible to keep records pristine. Crosslinks with similar names, previous residents of you
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Read "Atlas Shrugged", and memorize the speech (is it Dagny Taggart's?) about how the government has no hold over law-abiding citizens, which is why the government passes so many laws covering so many different aspects of everyday life -- and often laws that conflict with each other -- that it's virtually impossible to "not do anything wrong". It's just that most of those laws are only enforced when it is convenient (for the government) to do so.
O
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I believe you mean this:
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Most People Want A Police State (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's look at the history of humanity. For most of human civilisation, and even before that, humans lived in societies without rights, equality, freedoms or justice. The powerful ruled, and if you objected, you would either be brutally beaten or killed outright. Not only that, your extended family could also be expected to suffer as well.
So with that in mind, lets consider the human "liberty loving" gene, the one that bristles when your rights are infringed upon. Do you think that is now a common gene? Do you think most human beings have retained a strong expression in genes like that one. Or do you think that rather, it is those humans who expressed more "quiet sheep" genes that proliferated throughout most of history.
Most people are descended from a long, long line of quiet, contented serfs. Ergo, most people will naturally act and behave like quiet, contented serfs. You are surrounded by them daily, choked by their suffocating apathy. They are individual only in the individual ways that they acquiesce to other humans who exude the "master" pheromone. Ultimately, democracy collapses under the dead weight of their inborn complacency
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Which is why the US is a constitutional republic and a representative democracy. In other words, we elect our masters and then we don't worry about anything unless our masters do something stupid.
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Oh, I suppose I could add a "geeks don't have wives/girlfriends" joke... so, here goes: HAHAHA ya rite l0s4r u wish. who is she, ur dog?
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To me it seems people will only notice things are becoming a police state when its a bit to late. Most
I take is as long as I don't do anything massively annoying or expensive to the government or companies; they'll mainly ignore me and leave me
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No good. Polygraphy [antipolygraph.org] is a completely subjective pseudo-science, used by government and industry to extract confessions. Exactly the sort of abuses of power we should be preventing. Why do you think a polygraph is completely inadmissible as evidence in any court in the land? When the two possible conclusions from such a test are "possibly deceptive" and "inconclusive", it's pretty obvious it's all crap.
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Biometric ID Cards ready for Trial in the UK -- Re:What's the problem? [slashdot.org]
The problem as ever is not: "If you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear." but rather "if your government never does anything wrong you have nothing to fear".
This is the angle you need to take with your wife and/or anyone else who spouts that sneaky ad hominem argument. (Yes, that's an ad hominem, or ad feminem as the case may be. It translate
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Main stream only now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Average people giving a crap, finally. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you hit the nail on the head: copyright has been a political issue for a while, but it's only recently that it's started to affect normal people. Thus they care, where they didn't give a damn before.
Most people don't care about things in the political realm, outside of the small sphere which they perceive as actually having a direct effect on their lives.
E.g., one of the reasons the gun lobby is so big in the U.S., is that there are a lot of people who own guns, and realize that changes in gun laws could directly affect their lives, and thus take an interest in it, one way or the other.
If you had as many bittorrent users as there are gun owners, and if those bittorrent users found their bittorrenting to be as important to them as gun owners find their gun ownership and its associated activities, then there's no reason why the "BitTorrent Lobby" wouldn't be equally powerful.
It's all about making average people care.
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Intellectual 'property' was a passable way to finance a miniscule part of the economy, but as the sector size grows its similarity to actual taxation of the economy and the debilitating inefficiency of state-protected monopolies becomes more obvious.
And taxes, as we all know, makes the average man care. Especially when they're sucking up so much of his wages that he has no chance to compete with foreign labour that doesnt have to pay the pro
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I live in Hollywood, I'm a Democrat and I'm represented by Henry Waxman. The Honorable Mr. Waxman is not going to make any waves in the copyright realm because: a) his seat is safe and he's got other fish to fry, and b) his fundraisng relies on Hollywood liberals who have, what I would describe as, an unenlightened view about copyrights and the degree to which digital encumbrances have ventured into absurdities. And me voting for a Republican, even if his or her views on copyright are closer to my thinking?
Civil rights...not environment... (Score:5, Insightful)
And similarily, landmark court decisions and not legislation will probably determine the direction that copyright will take us...back to the slave owning days, or to a future of equal opportunity.
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It is much easier to justify copyright infringement by putting a corporate face on it, but you are untimately acting against an individual.
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Now, to clarify my earlier point, I wanted
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Both deal with the obligations of an individual to respect the interests (if not legally the rights) of the rest of the world. Intellectual property is essentially the intellectual equivalent of pollution, a by-product of the creation of ideas that is frequently toxic to other ideas and inventions. Progress can't be made until the pollution has become less harmless.
Ok, that idea is a little out there, but it's
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Since "the rest of the world" includes the individual, group, or organization that created and produced the work in the first place, you'd think people would respect their rights and interests...
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Or to put it another way, how many 70-year-old songs and/or movies have get downloaded?
Those 50 years old? 40? 30? 20?
Go past a year or two, and the number of downloads per day drops dramatically, aka the "long tail" curve.
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And yet the vast majority of "idea creators" (inventors, musicians, artists, etc) are in favour of intellectual property in some form.
And yet the United States, with some of the world's most restrictive intellectu
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Do you not see the irony in suggesting that as the tm/c/patent producers want them it's not like pollution (hint what do the oil/gas companies really think of pollution compared to the rest of us, they probably call it "untargetted by-products")?
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Culture is the United States' biggest export. It's not necessarily through breakthrough innovation, but rather, through the embrace and extend model.
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I notice that you do not dispute my claims about science and technology. Briefly, Americans invented jazz and rock routinely win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (incl. 2 of the past 4 years); and produced or hosted some of the world's greatest visual artists and architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sol Lewitt,
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I absolutely agree. Maybe one day technology will advance to the point where intellectual property restriction is unnecessary. But such technology does not exist today -- now, we have technology that allows for unprecedented ease of violating copyright, but which has failed to ensure that producers get compensated in any way; especially in unglamorous fiel
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Everybody is a producer of copyright material -- everything you write, everything you draw or build, everything you say is subject to copyright -- and hence a producer of "IP". It's just that most folks don't bother to try to sell any of it.
This posting © 2006. Unless your Slashdot ID is s20451 you are hereby granted unlimited distribution rights. Slashdot user s20451 must pay the a
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Also, I neglected to mention in my original post that intellectual property does not prevent the free flow of ideas. I can read your post and write this reply in spite of whatever copyright restrictions you impose, and I am not even invoking my "fair use" rights to quote. Thank you for making my point for me.
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No such thing.
Certainly, there are inventions, works of art, and so on. These aren't "intellectual" property, these are tangible goods. The "intellectual" property is the temporary government-granted monopoly on making copies (possibly modified or as part of something larger) of those tangible goods.
Now, while people can exchange money for temporary government-granted monopolies, those temporary monopolies themselves aren't particularly economically useful. From t
Reform just means reducing the pollution (Score:2)
Likewise IP is viewed by many (esp. the more prgoressive creators) as a necessary evil in order to sustain respectable funding levels for scientific research and artistic creation.
Thing is: technology changes things. Just as there are more efficient, cleaner technologies that can manufacture a wide range
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Your anecdotal observation would likely be wrong. There is certainly a natural tendency for those who derive great riches from any system that creates pollution to dismiss the polution as a trivial byproduct. So you will almost always see the people who benefit from the systems that produce t
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Without copyright, the GPL would hardly be necessary, because we could reverse engineer any closed-source software and freely share the resulting code. The GPL exists mainly as a means to turn copyright against itself.
Likewise, the people most cheesed off about pollut
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Ummm... (Score:2)
In the US: Earth Day began in 1970, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1963, what is now called the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. I know bloggers are routinely unaware that anything happened before the 2000 presidential election, but you'd think a professor might. "The average voter" was quite aware of the importance of clean air and water; today they're much less conscio
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Maybe it's your memory that's a little fuzzy (Score:2)
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I also went to the first Science Fiction Movie Marathon at Case Western Reserve University, and was recently surprised to see that it's still running every year.
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I hope not (Score:2)
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I doubt it becomes as much an issue (Score:4, Informative)
To make matters worse, to be concerned over copyright, you first of all have to have access to copyrightable material. If you don't then, well, the stuff doesn't really matter to you. So you have to be one of those that actually either produce or consume content. Now, producers of copyrightable material will hardly argue that there is too little restriction for the user, and people who're the proverbial "lazy consumer" will hardly stand up and become political movers.
Let's also not forget that the environment and peace movement was also driven by songwriters, poets and other "content creators", and only a handful of them were actually concerned with the issue, the rest saw a huge market to milk. Now, which artist out for money would sing against copyright?
Generally, I'm a little pessimistic that copyright becomes the "green" movement of the 2010s. I'd love to see it, and I'll support it with everything I can, but my hopes are not too high.
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Environmental dangers cause loss of life. This induces a survival-instinct reaction, and can be violent. This is taken very seriously by the powers that be, since violence can topple them if it becomes widespread and targetted at them.
Intellectual property dangers cause loss of entertainment. This induces a whiny, "I'm ent
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How about artists who think that the money would be better if the current media companies were dethroned. As things stand now, they aren't really all that great for artists in many respects. Very few people who are against current intellectual property laws are opposed to the idea off copyright altogether. For the most part, we just think that the balance needs to shift back towards society as a whole rather than the copyright owners. It's
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There are some. NOFX, for one; I also think System of a Down and The Offspring; I'm sure there are others.
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I'd have to agree, if simply because in all the casual conversations I've had with people over so-called copyright issues, the overwhelming response seems to be that a writer (or movie maker, or whatever) should get iron-clad protection for their work.
The general public simply likes the notion that somebody's "idea" (es
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US Economy (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that for this to work, the rest of the world has to adopt USA IP laws, and most countries know it goes against their best interest, so they are not very enthusiastic about it.
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How much do you think Harry Potter and the James Bond franchise are worth to the UK? How many countries (as politically diverse as Canada and China) worry about the cultural impact of cheap foreign imports?
The Geek makes a mistake
And in another tie-in (Score:4, Interesting)
I.e. getting rid of copyrights (or bringing them back to 14+14 years) would help the environment.
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Copyright Act of 1790 (Score:2)
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It's not an erroneous assertion. The Copyright Act of
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Where are the PDFs? (Score:2)
A little off-topic (Score:2)
("H" is Mr. Hanna, the reporter, and "I" is Ivor, the candidate)
H: Quite. Now; Ivor Biggun, no votes at all for the Standing-At-The-Back- Dressed-Stupidly-And-Looking-Stupid Party. Are you disappointed?
I: Ah, no, not really, no... I always say, "If you can't laugh, what *can* you do?" Ha-ha-ha-ha (squirts Hanna with flower).
H: ...take up politics, perhaps. Has your party got any p
Wrong party (Score:2)
I find some IP/Copyright Arguments Confusing (Score:3, Insightful)
Without copyright, maybe even Microsoft might come up with a protection scheme that works.
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While I don't have the balls to be in favor of eliminating copyright completely, I expect that if we did the market would come up with a better answer than protection. There is a fundamental problem with using cryptography to protect content, because you hav
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Without hardware support (Treacherous Computing and the likes), it is strictly impossible to make a working system.
The subtle consequence is, that trying to limit distribution in order to gain a profit, where that usually or always fails, will not be profitable.
If its not profitable, then large organizations like Microsoft and others will simply not exist.
If large organizations like those do not exist, then suddenly opensource has
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the gospel of the FSM says it is so (Score:2)
it has long been known that piracy is directly linked to global warming.
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/ [venganza.org]
Continuous Copyright == Continuous Environment (Score:2)
Solution: limited copyrights, like it was originally intended. Current law "reduces" the rate of new work since authors can ride the gravy train of one work forever. Infinite copyright also makes copyrights assets to be acquired, hoarded, and protected via lawsuits. Limited copyright
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Consider also that originally, copyright only applied to publishers, because copying was not practical for individuals.
So you could replace that sentence with one closer to what the pirate party is saying:
time-limited copyrights that only apply to for-profit organizations, like it was originally intended.
Huh? (Score:2)
Where?
Support our troops! These colors don't run! I'm lovin' it! Born in the USA!
What precisely is wrong with copyright? (Score:2)
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Why should it? I hope you realize that this is your personal opinion. A lot of us think that the individual freedom to share, copy, modify, or otherwise do anything I want with information in my posesion is more important than the distribution control of the author. This is obviously a tradeoff between certain factors:
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Why? What gives you the intrinsic right to control what other people do with the knowledge they have?
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Sorry, I was under the impression you were arguing that there was nothing wrong with modern copyright law. I do see the value in a realistic copyright law, such as it was originally written (though with more realistic time limits, like 5 years instead of 14 years). I also had some counterpoints to the rest of your