02.03.26.tu | propaganda (part 3)
Honestly! I had not intended to return to
the frustrating topic of copyright for some time but Michael Eisner's
commentary in the Financial Times has provided an opportune example of the
misleading usage of the "property".
Abe Lincoln and the internet pirates: The great Emancipator's forthright defence of intellectual property rights holds true today.
What was that forthright defense? The statement that the restriction of speech and ideas, "secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things." I do not disagree with Abe Lincoln, but I do disagree with Eisner because while he may laud the principle he has distorted and abused its application. And those of us that get fed-up with Eisner and his ilk sometimes lash out at the whole artfully constructed facade. This is a dangerous position for us to be in; as I wrote two years ago, "... it's difficult to voice this opinion because the small encroachments of copyright and patent that led to the present system are largely unseen. It's a creeping heaviness, but to complain of the invisible weight is thought to be unreasonable." However, my own reason does begin to fray when presented with a continued discrepancy between noble principles and unprincipled action: the perpetual extension of the original 14 year copyright term, the censoring of research, the theft of authors works via an underhanded amendment making all recordings works-for-hire, the acquisition of mp3.com by Universal which then slashed artist pay by 80%, the decreasing costs of manufacturing CDs but the increasing price of purchase, the debt many artists are saddled with when producing an album, the likely destruction of small Internet radio feeds, and the royalties we all pay to the recording industry when we buy a blank CD-ROM (regardless of its use!). At times, in exasperation, I think that the likes of Eisner are not capable of honest argument: they mouth the words, "freedom, author, consumer, innovation", but their actions call out, "money and power." (In an ironic twist of naming duplicity, the law that I wrote my senator about a week ago was introduced this week as the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act!) But I digress, I've said all this before, it'll probably get worse before it gets better, and my goal is to look at how Eisner effects his spin.
In asserting the importance of physical and intellectual property rights in a democracy, Lincoln echoed the views of 17th-century thinkers such as John Locke, whose phrase "life, liberty and property" inspired the Founding Fathers.
Sorry Mr. Eisner, our Founding Fathers did not equate these limited monopolies on thought to "property." Consider, the purposeful change from Locke in our Declaration of Independence, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Despite your misconstruction of history, our founding fathers feared many of the abuses present in our system today! They approached this topic with care and concern: a limited monopoly (a detriment) balanced against a requirement to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" (a benefit).
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... (letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 as cited in Kock & Peden, 1972)." — Thomas Jefferson: Father Of Invention
So when Eisner claims, "It is as American as the apple pie that one may not take off a neighbour's kitchen ledge." I respond that ideas are not apple pies. They are the recipes of civil democracy, science, progress, and happiness that should be freely exchanged and improved upon.
02.03.20.we | the company we keep
It's good to know that America's
rationalization for action in the middle east is not troubled by
inconsistencies. Our principles of freedom, religious tolerance, and the
civil treatment of women is the standard by which our actions and those of
our allies are judged.
Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers...
According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.
One witness said he saw three policemen "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya"
The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police - known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned "it is a sinful to approach them".
The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out. — BBC News.
02.03.19.tu | reagle's deployment vertigo
Reagle's Deployment Vertigo:
the rapid advancement of the leading edge of technology (e.g., Moore's
Law) when combined with conservative adoption (e.g., Stuck With Old Browsers
Until 2003) induces a sense of vertigo akin to Hitchcock's
famous track-out/zoom-in shot. (Vertigo is induced when the background
recedes while the foreground seemingly enlarges, but the subject is largely
stable relative to the frame.)
This theorem is posed in opposition to my earlier Widening Gap theorem which argued that the distance between the performance or feature set of the leading edge of technology (i.e., an exponential curve) and its base deployment (i.e. a less steep if not linear curve) would increase with time. For example, the distance between the capabilities of the most advanced users' platform should be increasing with time over the capabilities of the average user. However, given theorems like Parkinson's Law of Data, ("Data expands to fill the space available for storage"), the Productivity Paradox, and the uselessness of most new features one must wonder. Consequently, vertigo results from the dizzying speed of advancement, the plodding rate of adoption, and the sense that one doesn't feel all that more useful regardless. (It' probably best to go watch a good movie instead of getting dizzy thinking about this.)
02.03.13.we | propaganda (part 2)
I've been thinking recently about the power of narrative as a tool of
propaganda. Another tool of powerful persuasion is the names we choose
to give things. The contentious reclamation of words like "fag" and
"nigger" is evidence of this. A few years ago, I waxed philosophical about
the power of naming in a paper about designing computer applications:
In Judeo-Christian theology the first power granted by its God to man was the power to name, "Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name." (Gen2:19-20). Designing a schema that others will use is — in some sense — an exercise of the power to name.
The effects of this power needs no better example than the acronym IPR: Intellectual Property Rights. This short abbreviation cuts a broad swath through many issues important to civil libertarians and geeks: be it oppressive controls built into our computers to watch and control what we can do, the mp3 bull$hit of media producers, or the threat of software patents to open standards and software.
The terms of the debate about our rights of expression, creativity, common culture and innovation have been shifted purposefully to the paradigm of property, and consequently the virtues of greed. A policy for encouraging expression and innovation so as to encourage a rich and diverse culture is now used to suppress it. In 1998, media producers pushed for a law known as CTEA, but commonly referred to as the "Mickey Mouse Law." This "update" regularly occurs.Originally, copyrights lasted 14 years. In '98 the previous iteration of life of author + 50 years was extended another 20: keeping many works from entering the public domain — and removing some that had already entered it. Aside from that fact that the majority of works published at the beginning of the century are no longer available because the "owner" and terms of their use cannot be found, the law is at odds with the intent of the Constitution to further speech:
Most likely to succeed is Eldred's argument that the CTEA exceeds Congress's power under the Constitution's Copyright Clause (Article I, Section 8), which provides that
"The Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The Copyright Clause does two things. First, it empowers Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Second, the text of the Copyright Clause limits the means that Congress may adopt in exercising the enumerated power. Congress is limited to granting rights to authors for "limited Times" - there can be no perpetual ownership of intellectual property. — The Mouse That Ate the Public Domain
Many commentators have wondered how eternally extending the terms of copyright incents the creation of works already created? They ask would books not be written without the century and a half of monopoly? (And what then of Shakespeare?) Nor have they failed to note the irony that Disney's greatest successes are — to use Disney's conceptualization — "stolen" from the public domain: Snow White, Sleepting Beauty, etc.
This month the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Eldred case, giving us some hope. However, even if the Court grants us this battle, resistance against the myth of expression as property must continue.
Consequently, I've been wondering about when the term "intellectual property" first began to be used? I was amused, but not surprised, to find that Wikipedia (a free and collaborative encyclopedia) addresses my concern from the start:
intellectual property: ... Many people reject the term 'intellectual property', which is of relatively recent origin, and substitute the term '[government-granted monopoly]?'. Copyrights and patents are a monopoly given government sanction for a limited period of time; thus people did not originally consider them property. While it is true that copyright and patents have something in common with more traditional forms of property, many people argue that this commonality is insufficient to justify the use of the term 'property'.
So clearly, I'm not alone in my concerns, but the OED is silent on its etymology. I will continue to look, and if I find the answer I will provide the excerpt, even though the more draconian "intellectual property management" proposals would refuse me the ability to do so.
[Update 02.04.26: I found the The History of Copyright, which answerse some of my questions on the history of the term "property."]
02.03.02.sa | sssca
Senator Kerry,
I am writing to you to express my alarm with the recent hearings of the Senate Commerce Committee on content protection for digital media. I will keep my comments brief.
The content industry has been systematically abusing the limited monopoly granted to authors. Their position is contrary to the United States Constitution that, as you know, permits this monopoly so to encourage innovation and creativity. Consider an example of Senator Holling's draft SSSCA proposal. Such "protection" requirements would likely be encumbered by software patents that would damage one the most innovative and creative forms of content creation today: open source software such as Linux. Such a law could make the creative efforts of many authors and companies impossible if not illegal! Surely we should not sacrifice a technical culture of international collaboration and innovation, and the productivity of the technology sector for the sake of Hollywood's uncompromising greed!? Particularly when any such controls would be technically ineffectual.
I read in a report that during the hearing you said, "We might need to legislate." If you do, you will not have deterred the infringement of copyrights by the determined infringer, but you will have wounded many authors producing some of the most innovative content and software today.
Sincerely,
Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT
Cambridge, MA 02139.
02.03.01.fr | blogger style
What would goatee look like when it looks
like a blog? Well, this
month's theme provides the answer. I've approached blogs with a little
trepidation, toying with conventions but never completely conforming.
First, I like my site to be very clean, standards conformant, accessible,
and readable on any device, ranging from a PDA to a 21" monitor. Second, I
don't use blogging software. Not that I dislike the software, I think it's
fabulous: good looking "push button publishing for the people" — in
contrast to the geocity horrors.
It's just that I've been "blogging" long before the term even existed and
I'm set in my ways and requirements. For instance, I like to edit html
files and introduce a new visual theme every once in a while. I'm not sure
how to make a blog preserve a given month's theme. Also, in order to get
exacting layout many blogs are not HTML/CSS conformant or must resort to
not using common HTML elements (e.g., <h1>,
<p> etc.) at all beyond CSS styled
<span> and <div> elements. I
appreciate they do this to avoid all the non-conformant browsers who will
enforce their own display semantics (e.g, <h1> must
necessarily be really big) into pre-existing elements regardless of what
the CSS style declaration says, but those pages also seem to loose some
structure. My HTML (all those elements I'm referring to) is actually
XHTML (structured in a certain way) so I can use
XML tools on it. (Yes, if all the entries where in a
database I could spit them out however I wanted, but again, I'm set in my
ways, I like files!) Finally, many sites are overly busy for my tastes; I
like to focus on the text and the photographic elements.
When I saw that Firda had designed some awesome standards conformant, no-table CSS layouts in her CSS Colouring Book, I thought I would give it a go. Nice! And since I fear I've already lost any non-Web weenie readers I might as well present a colophon for goatee for the geeks; these are the tools I presently use to create the site:
- Editors
- Amaya and Scite
- Web Server
- Apache
- Operating System
- Debian GNU/Linux
- Validators
- W3C's HTML Validator,CSS Validator, and Tidy
- News Feed (RSS)
- XSLTproc
continue reading [february]
