Welcome to the Jungle/Oligarchy/Plutocracy/Corporatocracy!

26/7/12 15:55
[identity profile] kayjayuu.livejournal.com


I've enjoyed watching or following the Olympics since I was a little kid. At one point I fantasized about being in the Olympics, despite not having any sports talent whatsoever. Didn't we all? It looked like fun and games! Sportsmanship and brotherhood! Peanut butter and jelly! Bread and Circuses!

This year, though, I have cut my cable and, while I still have interest in the individual athletes and some events, I more than likely will not give it much time aside from the occasional YouTube upload and passing news story. Which means I'm also committing the gravest sin, probably punishable by imprisonment somewhere in our Brave New World (read: Britain, this year): Anti-Commercial-Engagementism*.

I won't be seeing the Official Sponsor of the Official Sponsors, hardly anywhere. I'm sure they'll be all over my webpages except... a) I use a lot of Adblock, b) I'm blind to most web advertising in the way that I ignore the bugs on my car windshield, c) 99% of ads I do see work inversely with me -- DNW specifically because I saw the ad, and d) I don't hang out on websites with advertising. I'm a bad, bad capitalist.

Unlike those such as myself, many others find themselves faced with the opposite dilemma: that of actually using the words "Games," "Two Thousand and Twelve," "2012," and "twenty twelve" in a sentence. Or pairing any and all of the above with "Gold," "Silver," "Bronze," "London," "medals," "sponsors," or "summer." Because obviously they're making a buck discussing the gold fields of grain in the summer of 2012 down at the farmer's co-op. Or something.

( But wait, there's more! )
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Cracking down on piracy, and what's the result?

14/4/12 19:24
[identity profile] airiefairie.livejournal.com
French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales
http://torrentfreak.com/french-three-strikes-law-slashes-piracy-but-fails-to-boost-sales-120330/

So... apparently France is now claiming the title of standard-bearer of anti-piracy legislation. A recent law has resulted in a 66% reduction of piracy in the country, BUT! Maybe surprisingly (to some), the sales haven't improved any.

Perhaps it is time to reassess the correlation between tougher anti-piracy legislation and the effects on the industry? To get real and "face the music", so to speak? As it turns out, people download pirated stuff that they would not otherwise buy. Or am I getting this wrong and there is some other factor that I am missing?

Of course the failure of this legislation to bring the desired effect still does not erase the other question: Just because piracy doesn't necessarily directly correlate to lost sales, still does that make it OK? From an ethical POV? In other words, does there have to be a victim for there to be a crime?

( A solution - maybe )
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Assessing IP

2/4/12 09:47
[identity profile] a-new-machine.livejournal.com
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a copyright attorney post-graduation. I am enamored of quite a few fields where copyright is a key issue, particularly gaming. Then I took a few IP classes. I still find the law interesting, but for totally different reasons.

Copyright and patent laws are interesting because they are an express command, in the US Constitution, to engage in social engineering. They allow the creation of monopolies to encourage invention and creativity. This has its upsides and downsides, of course. The upside is that owners of the IP get to exploit it for a limited time, and the downside is that only they get to. Since everything is a remix, this sort of restriction is moderately anti-creativity, if we understand that the vast majority of creative people are extremely good at mixing-and-matching things that others have done before. It's presumed that we get more out of it than we lose, though.( But do we? )
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Trayvon Martin's Mother Trying To Cash-In On Her Son's Death?

26/3/12 21:04
[identity profile] dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com
Trayvon Martin's mother Sabrina Fulton filed applications to copyright "Justice For Trayvon" and "I Am Trayvon" less than a month after her son was killed.



The video above has no sound and shows the actual documents, complete with Sabrina Fulton's address and information about the law firm representing her. Some say she's filing for copyright on these phrases to keep others from cashing in, others say she herself is trying to profit from the death of her son. If she filed the papers for herself and plans on using any cash rewards toward a scholarship in her son's name, I think that would be admirable. But it would be a sick situation indeed if she were pocketing the money for her own personal benefit.

(x-posted from [livejournal.com profile] mividaloca99)
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Clash of the Enterprise Titans

26/1/12 08:10
[identity profile] stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com

Boxing

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group. - Robin Morgan

Ladieeeees and Gentlemen. Let’s get ready to rummmbbble. Tonight’s bout is between two leviathans. In one corner, weighing in with Social Media, Web 2.0, Google, Facebook, Twitter and other web applications we have the Mighty Internet. In the other corner, weighing in with the entertainment media industry, the literary industry, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the proprietary pharmaceutical industry, the software application industry and other privately owned products is Propertus Intellectus. Your referee tonight is from the U.S. Government, SOPA PIPA. You know the rules. Let’s have a fair fight.


( Ding Ding Ding. Round 1 )

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(no subject)

13/1/12 18:21
[identity profile] gunslnger.livejournal.com
The coming war on general-purpose computing

It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning. And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, still manage to pass good rules that make sense. That's because government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

The first part of the article is mostly history, then it gets into the above part about regulations and then concludes with the warning that it will only get worse. I think this is a reasonable analysis of the situation and I agree that a big part of the problem is dealing with copyright when you have technology that effectively eliminates it, so that you have to create a new version of copyright by fiat, rather than have the system naturally enforce it. And people want to hold onto that old system and shoehorn the new one onto it.

But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship.

That's where we're headed and there isn't anything to do about it as long as the copyright holders insist on controlling things the way it's always been. We need to rethink the concept of copyright, not just how we enforce it.
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PIPA video

17/11/11 08:57
[identity profile] raichu100.livejournal.com
Looking at the entries for the past couple of days (I have been away from LJ for a little while), I didn't see any posts with this video, and only one post about the bill.

I'm inclined to think this is a bad idea. How will attacking Google and YouTube solve the (dubious) problem of internet pirating? I don't think it's worth the potential negative consequences.

Thoughts on the video or the issue as a whole?

Edit: welp, the imbed failed spectacularly. Here's a link to the video on americancensorship.org (scroll about 2/3 of the way down), and here's a link to the YouTube version.
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SOPA and Protect IP acts

16/11/11 10:54
[identity profile] jerseycajun.livejournal.com
Hey all,

Starting up Firefox the morning brought my attention to a couple of upcoming bills before congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP act of 2011.


I can't offer much yet in the way of my own personal analysis, except that it seems the usual suspects are lining up on either side, with the RIAA et al on the "For" side and Google et al on the "Against" side. So I'm inclined to lean with the latter, especially given that the title of a bill and its stated summary of purpose almost always contradicts its actual text and implications. In any case, has anyone else read much about these two bills, the pitfalls or benefits?
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Watch Out Mommar, Mickey Mouse may be gunning for you

25/5/11 12:58
[identity profile] rasilio.livejournal.com
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/25/navy-seals-fights-mickey-mouse-trademark/


"On May 3, just two days after Usama bin Laden was killed in a raid on the Al Qaeda leader’s Pakistan compound, Disney filed trademark applications to use the name "SEAL Team 6" on everything from entertainment, toys, video games, clothing, footwear -- even Christmas ornaments and snow globes."

This just shows how screwed up out IP laws are. The idea that there is enough of a chance of this succeeding that Disney even bothered to file for the trademark is ridiculous. It is absolutely and abundantly clear that Disney will be attempting to leverage the already existing reputation of the actual Seal Teams to sell these products without the actual members of the seal teams or the US Navy who sponsors them getting any credit or profit.

The proper response at the patent and trade mark office to this should be a hearty laugh followed immediately by a denial, however under current law that so favors large corporations they have a very real chance of winning their claim and getting the trademark which would mean that the Navy couldn't even use the name in their recruiting ads without paying tribute to Disney.
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(no subject)

7/4/11 13:35
[identity profile] malasadas.livejournal.com
Back in the mid-1990s, I was enjoying my weekly ritual of having biked to my neighborhood Safeway, picking up the West Coast edition of the Sunday New York Times and taking to my favorite coffee house in Manoa Valley for a thorough read. I came across an interview with Esther Dyson talking about the new world of digital content that was springing up on the World Wide Web. Dyson, daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson who is famous for his futurist notions and a noted commentator on emerging technologies in her own right, proposed that in the digital future, no artists would be paid for the creation of content -- such content would be freely available via electronic means. Writers would make their living by speaking and teaching. Artists by paid gallery shows. Musicians by concerts. And so on.

The idea ruined my Sunday by leaving me in a viscerally sour mood. Dyson's ideas were fairly repellent to me on some very personal levels. I was working as a high school English teacher, and many works I included in my curriculum were by writers who were notably brilliant but hardly the kind of people who could make a living by public speaking. My internal argument with Ms. Dyson demanded to know how there could ever be another J.D. Salinger in her world -- it being an imaginary argument, of course, that question stumped her.

( It is almost 20 years later...Was Esther Dyson right? )
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Copy Rights ® vs Homeland Security

29/11/10 10:22
[identity profile] verytwistedmind.livejournal.com

If you ever want to make the “®” it’s alt + 174.  Now don’t say I never taught you anything.

There have been two interesting articles regarding copy right I want to discuss.

 

Article 1:

The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.

ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.

The sites are replaced with a note from the government: "This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations."

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/130763-homeland-security-dept-seizes-domain-names-

 

Copyright infringement is a crime. There is no arguing that. However, is this the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Why are they doing this?

 

Article 2:

Americans for Limited Government is calling on the U.S. Justice Department to take action against a liberal think tank for using seal of the American President on a new policy publication.

In general, commercial use of the seal is prohibited by 18 USC 713[6] of the United States Code, and further defined by Executive Orders 11916 and 11649. The United States Secret Service is authorized to use the seal in conjunction to fund raising sales for its charitable benefit fund

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_the_President_of_the_United_States

Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government, reportedly sent a letter to White House counsel Bob Bauer asking if the Obama administration had granted a special exception for CAP’s “The Power of the President: Recommendations to Advance Progressive Change,”  a policy publication which offers suggestions for President Obama to pursue the progressive agenda through executive orders in lieu of legislative initiatives.

The Center for American Progress has since responded, claiming the organization purchased a photograph of the seal from the Associated Press, offering no further clarification on its use of the seal on its publication.

In response, Manning said, “They’re admitting they did not get permission.  So the operating question is: Is the White House going to take action to protect the seal because it violates the statute?” .

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/can-the-center-for-american-progress-really-use-the-presidential-seal-in-self-promotion/

 

This also appears to be a crime. However, ICE has not put the impressive: "This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations." on the link for the Think Progressive use of the Presidential Seal. Isn't the unpermitted use of the Presidential Seal more dangerous to Home Land Security than someone selling Proda g-strings?

 Why do we have metaphoric black helicopters closing down websites selling knockoff goods but laissez-faire use of the Presidential Seal? Is the lack of uproar about the use of the Presidential Seal on a Progressive think tank’s a double standard? What do you think the motivation is behind ICE’s new power to seize websites? Have you ever purhchased a cheap knockoff product or pirated music or movies?
 


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On the Role of Government

16/8/10 13:53
[identity profile] a-new-machine.livejournal.com
( Some almost unrelated background )This got me to thinking over the role of government. One popular argument is that government exists to act as a mediator between special interest groups. This looks like one instance of that gone off the rails. Government here isn't a mediator - it's a bargaining chip, its power over others used by two unrelated parties to come to an agreement between two antagonistic parties.

Me personally, I never bought the "mediator" argument. Government is there to balance competing interests, but not those presented to it by corporate supplicants who come with a fully-crafted legislative plan for Congress to sign off on. The same thing can be seen in the Google-Verizon proposal. There, two of the biggest players in the space come up with solutions based on their interests and needs, and present it for sanction as public policy. It's hardly a democratic process. The interests balanced should always be those of the public vs. those who are restricted or impeded by the legislation. How many people really want an FM tuner on their phone? How would the inclusion of that antenna affect smartphone development? None of that is considered - just getting more listeners for an old medium. The interest groups do a very good job of fulfilling the interests of their clients. Unfortunately, our interest group - the elected officials in Congress - do a pretty awful job of representing ours.
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