[bad law/bad tech?] Sony music group employed a dumb simple bot called "Web Sheriff" that crawled the web looking for filename matches...it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot...

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet “depends on how one parses government spending—it’s fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it’s pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it’s well into the hundreds of billions range.”4 For context, Meinrath’s estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project [...]

The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be “flamed,” meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual’s email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary [...]

In the realm of the Internet, a state-corporate alliance has developed that is matched perhaps only in finance and militarism. It makes a mockery of traditional economics, with its emphasis on an independent private sector responding to a competitive market. It also makes a mockery of the traditional liberal notion that capitalist democracy works because economic power and political power are in two distinct sets of hands, and that these interests have strong conflicts that protect the public from tyranny. Examples of how large communication corporations and the national security state work hand-in-hand are beginning to proliferate. The one that was exposed—and is singularly terrifying—concerned how, for much of the past decade, AT&T illegally and secretly monitored the communications of its customers on behalf of the National Security Agency.27 The more recent stories of how Amazon and PayPal/eBay cooperated with the government in the WikiLeaks affair may not be in the same league, but they point to the demise of the separation of public and private interests at the heart of liberal democratic theory [...]

The future increasingly looks like one where the wireless Internet world will come to equal or exceed the traditional wireline broadband sector, and this will be a proprietary system that does not practice “network neutrality” or have the openness long associated with the Internet. We should expect more great mergers among and between the largest media, telecommunication, computer, and Internet corporations, along the lines of Comcast-NBC.

As the authors of a 2011 report by the New America Foundation put it, we are entering a world of digital feudalism, where a handful of colossal corporate mega-giants rule private empires. Advertising will be given every opportunity to exploit the system, and any meaningful notion of privacy will have to be sacrificed. “For once the fate of a network—its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation—is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them,” one of the earliest champions of the democratic Internet recently observed, “that network loses its power to effect change.” It is a world that would have been considered impossible not too long ago, but it is the destination at which one inevitably arrives, if capitalism is behind the steering wheel.

"it's a COACH from the other team, sticking out his knee and tripping the nice man who plays for the Dolphins who is portrayed here by Jamil Smith..."

1. call everything an experiment
2. when you're given the go-ahead from authorities, go fast
3. build up a user base
4. when you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to be nice
5. keep asking, keep re-phrasing the question
6. when you get the microphone, make your point clearly
7. get standing
8. try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you
9. look for over-reaching
10. don't be afraid to fail

Hyde praises projects like General Public Licenses, which channel intellectual property into the public domain, and the Distributed Annotation System, which prevents the monopolization of genomic knowledge. But he does not propose a program for action, nor does he dispute the need for limited commercial applications of new knowledge. Instead, he tells stories with a moral. If we reassessed our history, he teaches, we would reassert our citizenship in a Republic of Letters that was crucial to the creation of the American Republic — and that is more important than ever in the age of the Internet.

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

[see dedication at end]

the web is connecting us in ways we've never been connected before and we're going to have to re-think everything; when media change, human relationships change; "networked individualism"

"Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones," wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the "four factors" of the fair use test. "Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone's ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address." [...]

Amazon may have clamped down on the feature in response, but the Library of Congress has now given users the right to crack e-book DRM in order to hear the words. Exemption number six only applies in cases where there is no alternative; if e-book vendors offer any sort of version that allows screen-reading or text-to-speech, even if the price is significantly higher, people must use that version rather than bypass DRM.

“commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” [...]

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality [...]

A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years [...]

Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

@1:15:00 music industry is totally corrupt, also @1:47:00

* MR doesn't think the climate crisis is anything to worry about ("work on Malaria and AIDS instead", "things that directly affect people" [hmmm...])

* millions upon millions in profit earned throughout his life, and he's working on a cloud music service

[links links links!]

People involved in the distribution of published material have tried their best to call such actions “stealing” since the beginnings of copyright. If you really want to understand what copyright is about, what its origins were, then please go and read this excellent piece. It tells you why copyright had everything to do with distributors, distribution and central control and very little to do with authors, musicians and artists. Why it had everything to do with censorship and exclusivity and very little to do with creativity and free expression. In fact, if you get the chance, spend time at questioncopyright.org; there’s some very useful material there, including this video, Copying is Not Theft

[...]

If internet copying was really stealing, then there would be an active disincentive to produce digital works. Yet, in the apparent heyday of internet copying, every form of digital publishing is on the rise. There are more books being written and published, more films made, more albums released [...]

The democratic process itself is being subverted, lobbyists are seeking to ensure that the Bill is not properly debated in Parliament before being passed. To me this is more criminal than anything the Bill seeks to prevent.

International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.

What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet

This issue is an embarrassment for all concerned, a naked bit of crony-capitalism that has so much more at stake than mere copyright. It needs to stop. Read on for how it came to this, and what you can do to stop it.

[Google book settlement]

Bunch is correct that the secondary purpose of copyright is to reward creators for their work, but only insofar as to encourage the primary purpose of copyright, the continued creation of new work.

[everyone sell your own stuff] today, we have a much more permanent, and graver risk: contracts and DRM have the power to lock readers and writers into legally unbreakable shackles. There's no such thing as a proprietary book. There's no such thing as a license agreement necessary to read a book. Books are governed by a social contract that is older than publishing, older even than printing. The recent innovation of copyright in books recognizes the ancient compact between readers and writers, and protects your rights to own your books, to loan them, to give them away, to resell them, to read them in any nation, in any circumstance. A publisher or bookseller can't force you to buy Ikea sofas to sit upon while you read your books.

But Amazon can force you to buy Kindles (and Amazon-approved devices) to read your Kindle books on and listen to your Audible audiobooks on.

Forever.

And if one of the five titans that control almost all of publishing gets into a scrap with one of the four or five titans that control almost all ebook publishing, or the one company that rules the audiobook market, the collateral damage is that you will have to choose to eschew a gigantic slice of all the literature ever made in order to hang on to your library, or abandon your library in order to get access to that publisher's work. Or fill your shoulderbag with a half-dozen tablets and readers, one for each permutation of which corporate elephant is trying to crush another. [john sargent's letter: http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/macmillan_30jan10.html]

By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work [...] We had a culture where an enormous chunk of cultural life was proliferated and shared without most of us ever calling a copyright lawyer.

We are about to change that past, radically. And the premise for that change is an accidental feature of the architecture of copyright law: that it regulates copies. In the physical world, this architecture means that the law regulates a small set of the possible uses of a copyrighted work. In the digital world, this architecture means that the law regulates everything.

But while China’s war is conscious, efforts by other countries to encircle the Net are not. To see what I mean by that, read Rebecca MacKinnon’s Are China’s demands for Internet ’self-discipline’ spreading to the West? Her short answer is yes [...] The Obama administration is negotiating a trade agreement with 34 other countries — the text of which it refuses to make public, citing national security concerns — that according to leaked reports would include increased liability for content hosting companies and service providers. The goal is to combat the global piracy of movies and music.

The Obama administration has offered up a strange mix of copyright policies in its first year (both ACTA and Creative Commons, for instance), but it has at least made clear that "better copyright law" does not always mean "more copyright protection."

[see also: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23518]

However, since working here, I've realised that doing evidence-based empirical psychology and psychiatry is a lot more difficult in countries with limited resources.

Access to the evidence is expensive (thanks to the use of restrictive copyright and excessive pricing by scientific journals) and research is difficult when there is little free time and few funding opportunities.

However, this is much less of an issue with psychoanalysis because the major source of information is your own experience, insights and work with the patient, plus discussions in a limited set of journals.

In other words, it's much easier to fulfil the requirements of what is expected of a well-informed competent psychoanalytic practitioner than what is expected of a scientifically-oriented evidence-based psychologist.

the objectors say little to nothing about the impact of the settlement on consumers, who already benefit from Google's efforts and would benefit even more, if the agreement is approved.
The interests of information users ought to be the top priority of U.S. copyright officials, but Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, condemned the original agreement. She spoke on behalf of the theoretical owners of orphan works--authors and publishers, in other words, who were given a powerful monopoly and then abandoned it. Peters accused Google and the organizations who sued the company of conspiring to execute an "end-run around copyright law as we know it."
There's the real problem. Copyright "as we know it" is a disaster and an embarrassment. Rather than complain about the ingenuity, leadership, and careful diplomacy of Google in trying to clean it up, why doesn't Peters focus on the job she was hired to do: urging Congress to bring copyright law in line with the realities of the 21st century?
Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about legal rights and responsibilities in the digital era.

not only will things continue to change, the rate of change itself is likely to increase. We are not just in transition from one state or model to another state or model, we’re in transition to a state of permanent accelerated transition where the model is continuous rapid reinvention.

[Though I disagree with Helprin, I don't think he's the asshole here. Not a fan of these empty web-culture 'take-downs' in the first place.]

What else to say about a man who boasts of looking at a computer screen "as little as possible," puts the word "blog" in quotes "to quarantine it because it is so ugly," compares wikis to Soviet rulers, says that he "has never been to a party" except once in tenth grade, and who finds socializing with other people a "torture so exquisite that I sometimes imagine my heart will burst"?

@17:50 on ELUA

http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00

...intellectual property being protected - not by the strong arm of the government, but by way of the very technologies that have incited stronger laws in the first place.

“You Don’t Love Me Yet” takes a lighthearted approach to the potentially heavy subjects of appropriation and authorship

...as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, [we] act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift.

he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself...that hid the fact that there was no truth there...he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the 'bricoleur' himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that 'they may always come in handy'.