That's barbaric. That's why civil disobedience is the only adequate answer to the current overreach of copyright in the united states. It's up to us, technologists, to create and disseminate tools to help out in the dismantlement of an absurd system that is obsolete in the digital age.
This logic is the reason why we have so many archaic laws surrounding the technology. Too often our community simply decides it is easier to ignore the law in question than trying to fight it and so we withdraw ourselves from the debate.
It isn't our job as technologist to build tools to circumvent the law. It is our job as technologist to educate politicians and the greater population as a whole why these issues are important. Sure, civil disobedience can be a tool in that fight, but that alone isn't going to change anything.
Politicians don't get educated. They get bought. Do you have as much money as copyright industry? No? Then, no, you can't have your sensible laws. You'll have theirs. The only action you can take is to ignore those unenforcible.
Or, they get threatened with loss of their seats. Which is accomplished by educating the population.
It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.
> Or, they get threatened with loss of their seats.
They get seats by spending money on campaigns. Public is easily manipulated by political marketing. The only thing that could put them out of there seats would be more money spent for a smear campaign against them.
> It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.
As opposed to romanticized world where money (got from industry) put into political marketing has no effect on votes and you achieve political goals by educating voters (at no cost other than your sincere effort)?
Let's play a game. It's called "NAME! YOUR! REPRESENTATIVES!!!!".
We'll start with the easiest and work our way up (subjectively):
1) Who's the President?
2) Who's your Governor?
3) Who's your Mayor?
4) Who are your Senators?
5) Who's your Representative?
6) Who's your State Senator?
7) Who's your State Representative/Assembly member?*
I ask these questions every time someone brings up their "The system is rigged, maaaaan". I've only found a handful of people that could name their Representative. Most people can't even name their senators. I always find it fascinating how people are able to trash talk their representatives when they don't even know who they are.
The way system is setup, there is no way someone who cares for me is in any of those positions, because I did nothing to put them there, and nor did anyone who voted for them. They did it themselves and got help from people who they can help back.
You can waste your time knowing about these people and trying to get them to do something which you think is good for everyone even though there are powerful people who pay him to not do it, or spend the time to be one day in a position to get them to do something good for you by paying them.
I think the latter will be much more effective and long term that you don't need to know anything or anyone. You just need to find the person who has that power. When that person is no longer in power, just find the next one who is. If you never need those people, even better that you didn't spend time on any of those shitheads.
But you have the power to vote and that is the power which puts them there eventually, directly or indirectly. Even if you did nothing, your power to vote DOES influence that entire chain of people. So, next time you decide to vote for your local politician, do a thorough research about him/her and make sure you are choosing the right candidate, for your decision affects others too. Imagine how many reviews, ratings, articles, research papers you read on the internet before buying a laptop or an iphone or android phone! Even if you spend a tenth of that effort in researching the politician, the whole country will benefit from that!
There are already people to do this - League of Women Voters and their voter guide, for example. But another voter guide specifically aimed at illuminating issues not covered by other guides is always a worthy endeavor.
Yep. It doesn't even need to be in depth. "Here's who I voted for and why" in a blog post is enough to give even the most basic of information about a candidate, as well as just remind people it's voting season.
Only three of those people have influence over copyright law. And what does it matter if I know their names? Despite the propaganda, one vote doesn't make a difference.
I still vote, but I'm also pretty sure it's a waste of my time. It's one of those game theory things. If everyone got out to vote it would be good, but my individual contribution is unimportant.
The point was that if you can't answer, many others can't either. And all of their votes can make a difference.
Even the people who turn out for Presidential elections (when their votes arguably make the least difference) usually don't know enough and their legislative representatives to make an informed decision, and tend not to show up for the off-year elections when it's only those offices up.
> and tend not to show up for the off-year elections when it's only those offices up
In 2014, Senator Jeff Sessions R-Ala. was "elected" without an opponent. In that same year, 32 other Representatives were "elected" without any opposition, my own Representative included. 28 more didn't have a "major party" opponent. That means ~14% of all Representatives had little or no competition.
>They get seats by spending money on campaigns. Public is easily manipulated by political marketing. The only thing that could put them out of there seats would be more money spent for a smear campaign against them.
This is overly simplistic. If it were exclusively about cash resources, the most cash-rich candidates would win every time. We know that doesn't happen. Yes, money does play an important role (because it costs money to run ads, print signage, get people to hang said signage, staff phone banks, etc. -- not because there's some reptilian overlord that has to be paid before he lets you become POTUS), but it's not the only role.
More important than money is to control a media outlet that the general public trusts. Pundits have more power than politicians because it's so easy for them to generate outrage. ABC, CBS, NBC, and the cable channels really hold the bulk of political sway in this country. They can frame not only the political discourse, but all significant social discourse, in the terms that they prefer. The internet is dampening and decentralizing their power a bit, which is why non-establishment candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were able to gain any traction at all, but their influence is still massive.
>If it were exclusively about cash resources, the most cash-rich candidates would win every time.
Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't the past 3 presidential elections been won by the candidate with the biggest cash flow?
And yes, of course it is not the only factor as you noted, media coverage is crucial and information via the internet is rapidly becoming a more important factor. But the problem is: the same people who own and operate these massive media corporations also own the internet infrastructure and are also the ones who are pouring massive amounts of bribes/funding into the elections.
>Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't the past 3 presidential elections been won by the candidate with the biggest cash flow?
First, correlation is not causation. Second, this chart [0] shows Romney and Obama were neck-and-neck as far as dollars raised, and that Romney actually had spent slightly more than Obama. This chart says it covers through September 2012, so maybe Obama did end up spending a bit more (or maybe he didn't), but the difference in spending is very small.
When you ask why Romney lost in 2012, there are a couple answers that get cited. First, Romney's leaked "47% comment" was disastrous for him. Second, Obama's team used technology much more effectively to get out the vote. Apparently there was a group working on software on Romney's side, but it wasn't managed correctly and the software was not usable by election day.
Only in the same way law of conservation of energy is overly simplistic.
All the people that say "It's not only about money!" then give examples which boil down to "Tt's also how you spend it!" to which I can only reply "Duh!"
The fact of the matter is we've always lived in a 50/50 conspiracy world. Sure, its never as bad as the worst extreme we can think of, but its always half as bad. Not even Stalin's dictatorship, which is what 1984 is based on, was as bad as 1984.
1984 was not based on Stalin's dictatorship. There seems to be a common misconception among too many people who've heard this parroted, erroneously assuming that because Orwell was strongly wary of, and frequently wrote about, totalitarianism, this must mean he was writing about Stalin specifically. He was not. In fact, 1984 was written just as much about the UK and USA as it was totalitarian fascism and Stalinism. This is borne out in his letters. 1984 was focused on what Orwell believed might happen to the world if the atomic showdown was inconclusive (a rough paraphrase of one of his remarks in a letter). It was written as a tale of what would happen when the West—specifically the UK and USA—would find themselves challenged and take the attractive slide away from democratically operated [socialist] society toward strengthening and worshipping millionaires and "petty fuhrers", leading to outright totalitarianism that offered stability, predictability, and controlled externalities, all of which would provide simpler, thoughtless, controlled selves.
For more directly from Orwell in one of his letters considered to foreshadow 1984's thesis, see here:
1984 is definitely influenced from the state propaganda Orwell saw coming out the Soviet Union such as the book character Emmanuel Goldstein who is quite obviously Trotsky, and the state rewriting history by editing Goldstein out of party photographs is Trotsky again, the idea of loving a leader and hating the party, many more parallels.
It's written as a warning of how futile it will be to resist totalitarianism in a future advanced technological state
To your first paragraph, we are not in disagreement. Parallels and influences found in particular plot points is not the same thing as the GP's statement that 1984 was based on Stalin. It was not. Read Orwell's letters.
> It's written as a warning of how futile it will be to resist totalitarianism in a future advanced technological state.
You fundamentally misunderstand 1984 and Orwell himself. The notion of the futility of resisting totalitarianism never would have been uttered or thought by Orwell. He absolutely and tirelessly championed resisting totalitarianism. He wrote a great many words on the subject. He never warned anyone of the futility of resistance in his prior works, and he certainly didn't push himself to death to deliver 1984 as such a warning. There is a vast difference between you, the reader, determining that Winston's resistance is futile—particularly in the hindsight of O'Brien's exposé at the end—and suggesting that Orwell was warning the reader that resistance is futile.
I've read the letters, Hitchens books on Orwell, listened to his lectures on Orwell, read Orwell's essays, and his books. The message is to me, that resistance is hopelessly futile once totalitarianism is firmly entrenched and the state has absolute power over humanity itself. That's why Winston is broken and loves Big Brother at the end of the book, because there was no other possible outcome.
It's a warning that if you don't stop it by recognizing it's rise through dictatorship over language, over emotions, and finally over thought it will be impossible to resist. Well, that is what I (and apparently Hitchens) see in his writing. I also see plenty of parody, especially towards Emmanual Goldstein and his book (Trotsky), purges blaming foreign conspiracy, and the illogical party slogans.
Well, now you've actually elaborated with enough description to qualify your statement that, again, we are not in disagreement. It's quite odd to me that your first statement carried the tone of disagreement, while this reply offers enough substantive explanation to indicate we agree. Substance is key. The appeals to Hitchens, however, do read as an unnecessary argument to authority. There's a clear distinction between stating resistance is futile generally, and arguing it is futile against a thorough totalitarianism that has gained control over humanity itself.
Money doesn't override voters, but it can make decisions that the voters don't care about. How many voters care enough to check up on their Congressional representatives' views on copyright? And how many lobbyists do?
And this cynicism about the system only makes the problem worse. Why check up on votes on banking regulations if you think the donors are going to decide it anyway?
If you take the low road every time, then the best you can hope for is a world in which everyone takes the low road all the time. I don't want to live in that world. In this case, the low road probably won't even get you where you want to go, so you're not even reaping a tangible benefit from it.
It is fairly self-evident that we can't get purely self-interested and sufficiently coordinated with anyone who could displace them from their positions (in the sense that they value keeping their own bribes over denying their opponents bribes) politicians to support any measure that would actually make them no longer receive bribes.
If one of the two assumptions above fails: assuming we can legally define what exactly constitutes a bribe (and I imagine this is not a solved problem), it probably would be possible to pass a law that says that if you can prove as a politican that you were offered or given a bribe (for a sum n), the bribe-offering party gets fined (say) 100n (aiming for their economic destruction), of which 5n is given to you (thus incentivising you to report bribes) and some token amount is given to everyone else serving in the same elected body as you (to incentivise everyone to vote for the law).
The potential problem is that now you've created one of those loophole things. Now publically bribe the official n/105 of what you actually want, and it's totally legal!
> The potential problem is that now you've created one of those loophole things. Now publically bribe the official n/105 of what you actually want, and it's totally legal!
That would still reduce the influence by >95% because you have to pay 105x and the politician only gets 5x.
The actual problem is that if a politician is known for reporting bribes then they won't be offered any, so taking 1x every time is still more profitable than taking 5x once.
Well, if the law is set up in such a fashion that you can "keep receipts" and report retroactively to enjoy the full benefits, you would still have an incentive to dredge everything up the moment you retire (and put the extra 4x lifetime bribe earnings into your retirement fund or bequeath them to your kids), and while the crackdown would be delayed, the bribing parties would still eventually come under the hammer (so unless there is some way for them to take and run with their short-term earnings leaving a shell company to be punished, there would not be an incentive for them to bribe in the first place).
1) How can we build more resilient technologies so that copyright law becomes irrelevant? (And note that we already have some candidates - like IPFS)
2) What technologies do we need so that we do not need politicians? For example, is it possible to create nation-states that are small (think hundreds of thousands of people) and allow people to create their own easily?
If we could reliably track politicians' money flows, their opinions, their comments and their actual actions in a system that's easily queriable, it might just be easy enough for the common people to be more aware of their rulers.
1 - If you make them more expensive then only the truly wealthy will be able to buy them. Yes, they exist
2 - Corruption is a matter mainly of personal ethics and perception of things around you. Of course it's hard to turn down heavily compensated engagements or other types of 'incentives' given by big players. Especially when everybody does it. It's really an issue of Game Theory
But seriously. Starting idea: Build a website that does some well analytics and makes it clear when politicians chose profit and special interests over the good of the people. I know some sites do this, but I haven't seen any executed well enough to reach the right people.
Really 'good of the people' is a very dangerous concept. And what exactly is a special interest? People interested in copyright reform is a special interest just as people interested in copyright preservation is a special interest.
Lenin was obstesibly starting a revolution for the 'good of the people.' Cuba did as well.. The good of the people there has resulted in an average monthly income of $20.
Don't knock the special interests.. EFF and Wiki are both examples of special interests just as much as the special interests of the publishing industry.
The book Economics in One Lesson is certainly worth reading..
>> "Politicians don't get educated. They get bought. Do you have as much money as copyright industry? No? Then, no, you can't have your sensible laws. You'll have theirs. The only action you can take is to ignore those unenforcible."
Then you need to fix your political system before you can fix the law. As an outsider looking in it seems like sorting out how campaigns are financed would be a good first step and that seems like something Bernie Sanders wants to and probably can fix. So the opportunity is there for you to take if the issue is important enough to you.
If you think that education, or the lack thereof, of politicians anywhere is the reason for absurd copyright law across the entire globe, you really aren't paying attention.
There is no argument clever enough or convincing enough to overpower the flood of money and bullshit that keeps copyright law the way it is. You may as well argue against the law of gravity. The only solution is to deprive the bad actors of the funds they need to keep the system corrupt, and since most people (rightly, in my opinion) can't accept simply abandoning large parts of their culture to that fight, the only option left is to make piracy widespread, easy, and safe.
The only hope is China: they disregard copyright laws, and this will help them to surpass the GDP per capita of the United States eventually, since they have realized that the copyright laws actually hamper industrial innovation. At some point, the remaining large public companies here will realize that seriously weaking copyright laws is a matter of survival in the Chinese dominated international markets. Then the copyright regime in the US may change.
The average person cannot comprehend the effects of what they do unless it is directly fed back and even then. Thinking macro is hard for the smartest 0.01%: the average Pam and Jim will not understand what happens when the game plays out. Some politicians are above that, most are not. Sounds elitist and maybe it is however I am not saying I am better than that I am saying politicians should be. If they are not and they are not, this battle is indeed lost and not only because of money but simply because someone didn't think long enough and their candy crush was not getting enough attention to keep them focused.
In fact, if piracy really had the deleterious effects on culture and artistic expression that copyright advocates always claim it does, I suspect you'd see much more of a social taboo against piracy than exists now. I'm not one to usually rush to the defense of people reasoning with "their gut" but, in this case, I think most people know that the copyright regime is bullshit, and they act accordingly, even if they haven't given it as much thought as the average HN reader.
Creating new things that people like to spend their time on will help stop a bit of those funds getting to the bad actors. Until the bad actors figure out how to 'own' the new activity in some way.
> The only solution is to deprive the bad actors of the funds they need to keep the system corrupt, and since most people (rightly, in my opinion) can't accept simply abandoning large parts of their culture to that fight, the only option left is to make piracy widespread, easy, and safe.
Which has done more to erode Microsoft's server profits, people pirating Windows or people creating GNU/Linux?
What we need is to build alternative platforms that compete with Hollywood and destroy them (and their margins) through legitimate competition.
>I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people say "I don't like machinery and technology, it's making a lot of trouble." So we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and we're going to dump it all in the ocean. And you will discover that within 6 months, 2 billion people will die of starvation having gone through great pain. So we say "That's not a very good idea lets put all the machinery back where it was." Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now... scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100% of the people at a higher standard of living that anyone has ever known despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the barriers, any more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization.
-Buckminster Fuller
Fuller claimed that the reason why we cannot take care of the greater population as a whole is not because we don't have the technical feasibility to do so but because we are trying to solve our problems with politics. Trying to solve the problems of the electric age by using the paper-based political framework is futile and self-defeating.
Nonsense. Politicians already settled their mind a long time ago, it was when they were in college or before that, now its way too late. You don't believe me? Try to convince creationist politicians about evolution, and it doesn't matter how many proofs you show them, the complete fossil record, they are not going to get educated, you can prove them evolution is not against their beliefs but it will not matter at all.
They hate getting educated as much as they hate reductions in their salaries.
The evidence behind evolution is orders of magnitude more convincing than anything anyone could ever come up with for copyright law. Clearly we need something other than evidence, because if science doesn't work on politics, technology doesn't stand a chance.
It's not leadership and responsibilities per se that are the problem, it's the structure that grew around it. People who get to the top are not random, they're preselected to be malleable, to be puppets of various established interests. You don't get anywhere near real power if your peers think you can't be controlled by them.
Politicians in a representative democracy are supposed primarily to be servants of their electoral region aren't they ...
Just like a proper manager of people isn't over those people. A manager should - IMO - be just another part of a team, a person/people who coordinates and facilitates the work of others.
"It isn't our job as technologist to build tools to circumvent the law."
That job is done CC-BY-SA. Your work (and derivatives) under this licence is guaranteed by copyright laws to be free to use, remix and resell (provided those rights are passed on) for your life plus 70 years.
I agree. Copyright is irreversibly wedged. The only workable course is to ignore it. As most people do, in practice, when they can get away with it. So the job for technologists is to make that easier.
There's a lot of danger in leaving a generally-ignored law on the books. If you make enemies in law enforcement, it makes it easy for them to imprison you. The fact that copyright law is so widely ignored today is proof that it's not socially tenable in the face of new technologies.
Ideally, our law would be updated to match new technical innovations, but instead the scope is only getting extended so that it's easier to prosecute people who are using digital capabilities to do natural things.
We need to seriously analyze the role of intellectual property in our culture. Why are so many of the world's most massive companies people who are exploiting IP/copyright? The margins are pretty high when all you have to do is order new prints of a DVD, for example. Is this really a fair trade, or might we be giving too much away?
But calling that barbaric is absurd hyperbole. It casts people wanting copyright reform as fringe extremists. When when I explain how much copyrights actually cover, for how long, and the extreme penalties for violations most people can't believe it (many don't, it's too absurd and conflicts with their property and profits world view. similar to how you can't convince a climate denier with facts). But, if they do, they realize that MPAA, RIAA, et al are the fringe extremists.
They're fringe extremists who are nevertheless the appointed representatives of vast numbers of artists, producers, and heavily-monied interests.
We're a bunch of angry people.
I have no problem with people expressing the outrage of the situation in strong language.
(That being said, I too am an artist and sympathize with their plight. I wouldn't like some of you do away with copyright outright. But these laws as written are shackles and chains on our artists and culture as well.)
I agree. Civil disobedience is the only solution to such anti-intellectual crusades of greed. The only problem is that people that work on such tools will be persecuted (and prosecuted) even if those tools are completely legal (see the pirate bay, popcorn time, and anything related to bittorent). Still, better to risk trying than to bow down to greed.
No, I'm building legal software, not practicing civil disobedience. What others do with it shouldn't affect my freedom or life negatively. But it will.
Civil disobedience was a lot harder to do in 1776 then 2016. Marching in the street will probably have you bio-scanned, in a database, linked to your Metro Card.
Hope you like federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. And the loathing and contempt of virtually all creative people everywhere.
See the thing about life+70 is that it has made a few people very rich, so cultural creatives are going to oppose not only attempts to roll back life+70, but also any attempt to roll back anticircumvention laws. They're hoping that they'll be the next to win the superstar lottery, and on the off chance that they do, they don't want their jackpot cut down from what previous superstars have netted. Never mind that vanishingly few people ever win this lottery, or that life+70 benefits publishers far more than it does performers.
In order for civil disobedience to actually work, there has to be popular support for the disobedience, so the cops and prosecutors don't feel like asshats for enforcing what looks to be an unjust and detested law. There just won't be that level of support for opposing copyright laws, not for at least your life + 70 years. So yeah, being sued or imprisoned is about the best you can hope for.
Are you really upset about access to a book that you can find in any library? There are reasons to be upset about copyright, but this is just nonsense to me. If you really want to read this book so much, and for free, patronize your local library.
I respectfully disagree. Civil disobedience has been paramount in almost every civil rights matter since the US became a country. It's prohibition. It's Suffrage. It's Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. It's Snowden and Binney. It's every time the establishment overreach has extended to the breaking point, it's every time even the Supreme Court has needed checking.
Just to make sure, do you always vote for parties that are opposed to long copyright terms? If you were eligible to vote and didn't do this, then you have yourself to blame. Politicians are ultimately accountable to their voters and whatever laws you don't like are probably in place because most people either do like them or don't bother to check what they're voting for.
Voting for parties that are nominally opposed to long copyright terms is insufficient to counteract copyright extension lobbying. There's only a couple parties out there that are meaningfully opposed to long copyright terms. Do you suggest we all vote for the Pirate Party?
Unfortunately the average voter around here would rather scream at each other about taxes, and simply commit copyright infringement...
If you can't find one with a specific policy on that issue, then aren't there any parties aiming to reform the 2-party bias of the electoral system so that minority voices can be heard at all?
Well, in real terms, voting for a party that isn't democrat or republican in the US is a waste of time. The idea that eventually there'd be enough of a groundswell of support that another party would even become competitive? It just isn't going to happen with the way the US electoral system works. The Lib Dems in the UK have been fighting a similar fight for decades and still have little-to-no representation despite consistently getting 20%ish of the vote.
And in any case of all the reasons to vote for a party that is going to govern everything, intellectual property law is not at the top of the list. It's certainly not going to be the issue to bring voters out in enough numbers to make the major parties sweat.
> The Lib Dems in the UK have been fighting a similar fight for decades and still have little-to-no representation despite consistently getting 20%ish of the vote.
FWIW: They were in the previous coalition government, so they got very good representation for their votes. Unfortunately their voters hated what they did, so their vote collapsed at the next election (and the party they were in government with grew in votes).
"What they did" was strike a bargain to try and fix the voting system to make it more representative in future. The two major parties combined forces to campaign against more representative voting, because they were happy when it was just the two of them. The flip side of the bargain was that they'd vote alongside whichever party took them up. Because of that bargain, they didn't really get to vote in a representative manner. Who knows when would be the next time they'd hold the balance of power to try and effect voting reform?
And no, they didn't get 'good representation' anyway. They got 9% of the seats on 23% of the vote when they went into coalition, and in the last election, got 1% of the seats on 8% of the vote. Even as a junior party holding the balance of power in a coalition, they didn't have the clout they should have, from a percentage-of-votes-cast perspective.
But regardless of how you slice it, it's still a clear example of how a FPTP voting system ends up in a two-party political system.
They formed the government. Your original comment said they had 'little to no representation' - for a party with cabinet seets and the deputy prime minister, that's a bizarre claim.
Feel free to nuance it and segue into a discussion of FPTP, sure. I'm a Green Party member, so I need no persuasion there. But if you're a LibDem, then telling yourself you imploded because of 'striking a bargain to try and fix the voting system' is pretty self-delusional. The LibDems imploded because of their government record. They voted against the policy interests of the people who voted for them. If that's because of a bargain and sense of duty, then more fool them for getting played like a tool. No proportional representation will help with that. If they can't be trusted to stand for what they offered the electorate.
Which is all a side show from your original comment that I was responding to.
I'm Australian, so not a Lib Dem. But our last government was a minority government that was a major party in coalition with both a minor party and a couple of independents. Those independents got to have a slightly louder voice than their one seat would usually allow, but it's not like they were dictating general government policy simply because they held the balance of power.
> If they can't be trusted to stand for what they offered the electorate.
They were playing the long game. My guess is that they knew very well they'd be taking a body blow (since everyone was shocked by the coalition in the first place) but that in years to come, the system would be more representative.
