I constantly hear them chattering about how they would like to do <action> but stupid <apple/android> doesn't allow them do said action. A recent example of the other day was something about how apple blue-tooth is somehow not compatible with a windows devices or something along those lines.
Perhaps right now walled-garden devices are still profitable, but if they continue to become more limited it won't take long for a suitable (more open) alternative to appear.
As for your second point, I find it somewhat paradoxical, I assume you would agree with me that computers are becoming more and more common (including smart phones). And yet you think that the knowledge _about_ computers will decrease?
Perhaps the obliviousness of the people around you have become more apparent because of the ubiquitousness of computing these days. But to say it has _increased_ would imply that that group was knowledgeable in the first place, which is not the case. Also since more and more people are born that have been around computers their entire lives, I find it very doubtful that less of those people will end-up learning about computers than before when it was strictly the domain of "nerds".
Cars have also become more and more ubiquitous throughout the years, but I would not say that the % of population willing to open the hood and get down and dirty has grown at the same rate.
If pirating requires "opening the hood" and users' experiences with technology trend towards simplicity, it's not unreasonable to conclude that piracy will decrease.
My life isn't simpler as a result of things like DRM on my motherboard and video card. It doesn't make a user's life simpler if their computer is fused shut to prevent service, or if they have to buy ink and coffee of a specific brand in order to use their existing printer and coffee machine.
When people are given options like (say) replaceable batteries, and this isn't associated with some other giant disadvantage (as it will be if you don't even try to design FOR the user, but just to sell)... most will prefer that.
Isn't it? I don't like it, but I can admit that if you tell the user "These are the video services that work, you don't get to grab them elsewhere", or "You must buy this brand of ink", instead of giving them an array of viable options. Or saying "You must bring this computer in if you want service".
Fewer options, and having the decisions on what to do mandated for you is simpler. It means you don't have to think. It's paternalistic and encourages helplessness, but it's simpler.
Its anything but simple. I'm a geek and the only thing I really know for sure about the whole debacle is that "plays for sure"... didn't.
It was diabolical. I didn't just toss it, I actually went "Office Space" on the thing in the driveway first.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c0176416...
I love how the "small percentage of older HP ink supplies" is a list of printers as long as my arm.
Instead there will just be a lot of confusion of what is compatible with what and a lot of tears when people waste money on something that's incompatible. Say... a user without a PC who has a large iTunes in the Cloud library buying an Android phone. "Wait what do you mean I can't listen to my music any more?"
With music (or any other data) locked in the cloud, you don't own it any more. You are granted a right to use, and this right is revokable.
Pick an article, any article.
I hope Google's rediscovered interest in Web apps (Service Workers, Polymer, etc.) will herald a major shift back toward ever more powerful Web apps that are as easily installed locally to home screen (and offline capable) as native apps. If that happens, there will be less use of app stores and more low-cost devices whose only app store is the open Internet, which is a lot harder to restrict.
Err, for starters you can't install any app that's not web based with such a model.
A better analogy would be literacy. Many people struggle with functional illiteracy in the United States (and throughout the world). These people are frustrated and have limited economic opportunities. If they were given better resources to help them achieve functional literacy, they'd be happier and more successful overall.
He's speaking of desktop computers, so not including "smartphones".
A smartphone users doesn't need to have 1/10 the knowledge about OSes and desktop computing a Windows/OSX/Linux users needs.
Bluetooth is a good example... You can use regular (even Apple's) wireless keyboard on an Android phone out of the box. Even wireless mice, it's a fun thing to try, and see a mouse cursor appearing on the phone screen. I also like that I can plug a USB SDR device on my phone and explore the RF spectrum with an open source app. Something I would not dream to do on iOS, which can't event handle a USB thumb drive.
So I think the situation is very different between the two ecosystems, and it's great that people can choose according to what they value the most. Of course we want the best of both worlds and the two platforms are converging a bit along these lines but a device that allows any app to be installed will probably never be as secure as one that only takes from a curated list.
Aren't they becoming less limited? Every year Apple allows developers to do things they couldn't the year before (e.g. keyboards, widgets).
*if you want your phone to be compatible with the vast majority of external devices, services, stuff your friends have, etc, or if you want your political critter to stand a chance of winning, or if you want to not have dial-up, pay a few hundred dollars a month +, have a really slow connection, or go without Internet.
You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly, I suspect the war has already been lost.
In case anybody hasn't seen Doctorow's amazing talks on this subject, well... you should. He gets right to the heart of what will be the biggest "disruption" in social structures since the industrial revolution.
His first talk that he gave at 28C3, "The Coming War on General Computation"[1], received a lot of press, but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. This is really unfortunate, because the 2nd talk is far more important: it extends the problem into a lot of other areas of "normal life". DRM in movies is generally only "annoying". DRM in some medical device you rely on is a very different situation.
This suggests that we need to start winning against stuff like DRM and the MPAA trying to censor websites. While movies are really not that important, setting precedent is important, or it will be a lot harder to fight the real problems later on.
If there is no way to restrict piracy, and if piracy is generally normalized and socially acceptable, then how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything?
This has some pretty severe and dystopian secondary consequences. It doesn't mean that nobody will pay to have information created. It just means that the customer will not be the reader/viewer/consumer of that information. Instead, the customer will be advertisers, propagandists, governments, religious factions, special interest groups, etc. Content will never be created for primary reasons ("for the art," journalistic integrity, etc.) but for secondary reasons (marketing, state propaganda).
This is really a variation of the whole "free is a lie" theme. I really encourage people to watch this talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A
If Facebook and Google being free means you are the product rather than the customer, then the same thing applies to books, movies, music, etc.
What I really keep trying to get people to grasp here is that piracy is disempowering. If you're not paying, you don't matter. Nothing will be made for you, with your interests or enjoyment in mind. Instead it will be made for whomever is paying, and will play to their interests, not yours.
Nothing is free. You either pay for things, or things pay for you.
On the hardware front, I fail to see how we can possibly create an alternative hardware/OS ecosystem that empowers the user if users are not willing to pay for it. Innovation, production, and capital follows the money. If users aren't willing to pay for a platform that empowers them, someone else will instead drive the future of computing by paying for a platform that disempowers the consumer. I think this is exactly what we're seeing.
There is exactly 0 danger of running out of creative people, regardless of whether or not they get paid. The creativity is built into the human psyche at a low level; it existed long before money, and it will exist long after our civilization has crumbled. In fact, we could totally ban music/painting/whatever, and creativity would still be extremely common.
Whether or not there exists an entertainment _business_ has nothing to do with promoting the creation of art. In fact, the industrial-entertainment complex is probably a net drag on creative expression via crowding-out effects.
I consider this abusive, exploitative, and mean spirited in the extreme.
"Yeah, we enjoy their work and it enriches our lives, but no way we're going to even slightly inconvenience ourselves to support them. Let the artists starve... there'll always be more where those came from!"
You could say the same thing about underpaid Chinese sweatshop workers I guess... "there's always more where those came from!"
I am not being paid to do it. I have no particular expectation that anyone will give me money for it after it is done. I also know that it is probably not as good as a novel written by any of my favorite professional authors.
To indulge this new hobby, I have something called "a day job". Other people who create artworks frequently have one. Only a select few have the independent means to create art full time, and some have acquired a large enough base of supporters to make a living at it.
We have a wealthy society. As such, we are capable of supporting a certain number of people as artists.
But the world does not owe you a living. Less popular and less prolific authors cannot expect to earn enough to write full time just because Stephen King can. A musical performer can't expect to buy a new car even once in his lifetime just because Taylor Swift can now afford one every year for the rest of her life. A painter can't expect to get out of community service because a Banksy can sell for thousands of dollars.
The plain fact of the matter is that there are more people who want to be professional artists than society is currently willing to support. Society likes some artists enough to make them rich, but you're not going to be one of them (unless you get really lucky or are terrifyingly talented). There are plenty more that society will support in a middle-class lifestyle. But for the most part, the aspiring artist's default assumption should be that society wouldn't give two steaming piles for a new work, and it should stay that way until well after the first check clears.
As for myself, I have no plans to quit my day job. Even if I think that my book is better than Twilight, the author of that... piece... actually has dollar-denominated approval from productive society to write books as her full-time profession.
Currently, my plans are to eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents myself, while also providing a painless way for readers to pay me what they want, even if it is just a compliment with no money attached. If I get even one penny, it will be more than what I expected in return for a work of art that no one but me ever asked for.
That is why there is no danger to artistic culture. Even if no one else cares for it, there is still a reward for the creators in their pride of craftsmanship, their knowledge that they created something unique, that did not exist until their will brought it into existence.
That said, I would never ever for a moment think that line cooks don't deserved to get paid, just because I am not.
Writing a novel is incredibly difficult. It often takes years of absolutely thankless work. Your friends and family think you've gone mad, or you're just wasting your time tooling away on "that book." (Eye roll.)
Music is the same: hard work, endless practice, stop energy. "When are you going to quit that band and get a real job?"
Culture is not free. It's created by the blood, sweat, and tears of people who are willing to stand up against their own doubts and the subtile discouragement of others to channel some intensely personal muse, refine the signal in thousands of hours of dull practice and repetitive revision, and finally deliver something that we can enjoy.
But hey, we're all entitled to their works for free because we're the all-important consumer!
The "information should be free" ideology elevates the passive consumer above the active producer both morally and economically. The consumer has all the freedom and all the benefit for none of the work. Once I saw the injustice in this, I could not un-see it.
Fundamentally I think it's a half-baked ideology that comes from people who are looking only at the Internet in isolation from the rest of the socioeconomic system. Most of these people are well-intentioned, but the ideology fails.
It might work if we lived in a post-scarcity society where income wasn't strictly necessary since the marginal cost of everything is approaching zero. But we're nowhere even close to that.
The difficulty of producing the first copy is of almost no significance economically, in comparison to the marginal cost to produce one more copy than already exists.
The recipe may be difficult to create, but it is dead simple to copy. The song is difficult to compose, but easier to perform, easier still to play a recorded performance, and easiest of all to copy a recording. The book is hard to write, but easier to read, and easiest to copy.
We are not entitled to any work for free. But we have a reasonable economic expectation that what we pay to enjoy it will be close to what it costs to create an additional copy. If we elect to pay more, it will be because we wish to encourage the artist to create more works at a reasonable cost. Whether you believe that the artist is entitled to more, or not, depends in large part on whether you believe that culture should be an oligopoly good, or a commoditized good.
I happen to prefer the latter.
Did you not get the whole concept of "digital"? Information most certainly is free. It's getting someone to make the specific types of information you want that costs money.
Of course there are ways of restricting copyright infringement: laws respect for the legal system. A monopoly on the distribution is a powerful thing - it gives you a fairly easy civil case against anybody who violates that monopoly.
What it doesn't do is grant you free enforcement of that monopoly, nor does it guarantee that someone will actually buy your product. Just because you want to make some type of art doesn't mean others actually want it or that it is worth any amount of funding >0.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that money (profit motive) is the only way stuff gets created, which is patently incorrect.
"disempowering"?
Did you watch those talks? (mainly #2) This is about human rights that the arts should not trump just because they want to assert some new type of "property right" simply because they have devised some sort of technical trick to that tries to enforce some aspect of their monopoly.
To continue the example used by Doctorow, just because you have a copyright or patent on the software that runs a cochlear implant, you shouldn't be automatically able to extend those monopolies to override the wishes of the person who actually has the cochlear implant surgically inserted into their skull.
Restrictions - limiting someone's uses - are trivial to talk about when the copyright is on some movie that isn't really important, so some people have accepted the DRM argument for movies. The point of Doctorow's talk is that the concept of restrictions becomes VERY different when you're talking about repossessing someone's legs or hearing.
A lot of this issue comes down to the propaganda that has been used by the media industry over the last few decades. They created the incorrect term "Intellectual Property", when property rights are not what the government grants you when you get a copyright or patent. You get some legal rights, which is fine. You get an easy civil court case. The current effort is to try and extend that limited, specific purpose monopoly into other areas by claiming that your movie, book, song, or software is "property". Being "property" is important, because it is a lot easier to make a case that your property should be defended by force. We defend traditional property because it is finite (aka a "scarce resource"). Government granted fictions don't need such protection, as they already have it by definition!
Now, you're worried about how interesting art and such will be created, and the answer to that is simple: the same ways it has always been created, and if you're clever, some new ways. It is easy to use Kickstarter as an example of new ways to fund things, but the cool, really interesting ways haven't even been invented yet. I realize that this is probably a hard and risky business, but a copyright doesn't mean you should be able to remove that risk by break the general purpose computer. A copyright doesn't mean you should be able to get rights beyond the first sale and the ability to sue people that distribute your monopoly protected works, just because you found some technical trick (DRM) to make that distribution initially difficult. Being able to sue someone doesn't mean you're entitled to have the government any enforcement costs. Most importantly, that same copyright doesn't grant you a market or audience or any kind of guaranteed income, nor should it trump any *human rights".
It will be hard for a while, as new styles of funding are explored. Many musicians have already moved back to a live-performance model, with patronage being used in some areas. I suggest that anybody thinking that restrictions (DRM) are necessary instead focus their time and money on changing to a new funding model - or inventing one - instead of wasting that their time and money trying to prop up pre-general-purpose-computer business models.
(1) Destroy old business model.
(2) ... hand wavey magic happens here ...
(3) Utopia!
I question #2 categorically. The magic never comes.
Historically people have to struggle to be compensated fairly for their work. It was true for labor in the late 19th century, it's true for Chinese sweatshop workers, and it's true for content creators. A rising tide does not automatically lift all boats, and models of fair labor compensation do not appear without a struggle.
Let's be totally clear here. I see the piracy issue as an issue of labor fairness vs. labor exploitation.
If programmers were the ones on the chopping block, none of you people would be talking like this. You'd all be up in arms and talking about what can be done. This is entitled elitism of the first order; only some professions are entitled to compensation or for their wishes about how their works are used to be respected.
Why is it that there are a million hackers working on new alternatives to The Pirate Bay, yet I see almost nobody working on new ways for authors, musicians, and artists to connect directly with their audiences?
TPB doesn't connect musician to audience -- it distances musician from audience even more than the record companies ever did! Piracy is the ultimate in passive consumerism. It's consumerism so passive there isn't even a twice-removed economic connection. There's no connection at all. You -- the viewer or listener -- might as well not even exist.
If the goal is to get the scummy record companies out of the loop, why aren't hackers working on that? Why doesn't somebody create a distributed, censorship-resistant medium for people to publish creative work that incorporates a transparent and direct-to-the-creator Bitcoin-based mechanism for payment? I'm not even talking about DRM, which I agree doesn't work. I'm talking about a simple mechanism. On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to. There's not even a "tip" functionality. I think the intent is clear from the absence of anything like that in the design.
This is about free, not freedom. You're appropriating a bunch of high-minded rhetoric, but the reality is you're just cheapskates who want free labor.
I'll reserve my respect for people who actually make things of their own and put them out there to advance the cause of freedom-- people like Linus, or DJB, or pretty much every original OSS software author out there.
The connection is the same as always have been, you view their film/listened to their music/etc, and hopefully liked it. By that metric, borrowing a book from a friend also doesn't count. This coupling of money and art is a disservice to both those things.
> On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to.
This is so wrong. Things don't work like that. Say I watch the latest blockbuster, or the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who do I pay?
Because we categorically reject the notion that corrupt, law-breaking middlemen who abuse the artist's right to be paid and abuse or refuse service to the customer -- I mean the MPAA, RIAA, etc. -- are a better alternative or economic model for a digital age than the free sharing of bits which is what the internet (and before that, usenet, and before that, sneakernet) has always been.
We categorically reject the notion that we need state-sponsored controlled locked-down DRM ecosystems where hackers are thrown in jail for sending an HTTP request to an open server and cell phone unlocking is illegal, just so that the MPAA can continue to exist.
The free as in zero dollars alternative _is_ what is happening to software: the price of an operating system is being driven to zero dollars.
We celebrate this as the liberation of technology from the monopolistic, predatory, illegal activities that happened 20 years ago.
We applaud the brilliant, profitable companies that are not hostile to free software (as in freedom).
We hope more companies will learn how to do something like Github, The Linux Foundation, or Amazon EC2.
Meanwhile, you can question the magic. It might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to John Perry Barlow:
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
Why aren't you championing Actors Guilds, Authors fighting against Amazon's policies and fees, or even the fight against DRM?
"Free" is really a punk idea. It's a counterculture idea. "Steal this book" and all that. But ideas like that undergo a strange transformation when the power dynamics invert.
Graffiti is also a counterculture thing, a rebellious thing. But what would happen if the police started doing it? Imagine you go outside and see a couple cops spray painting "just say no to drugs!" on the side of your house? You confront them and they start spewing stuff about how "there is no property man! I should be free to express myself!" (Great comedy skit right there...)
The trouble is that hackers aren't rebels anymore. They aren't a counterculture. They've won.
So stop talking like a rebel, because you aren't one. You are a member of a super-privileged super-empowered super-educated upper class with tremendous opportunity and unbelievable power. With your ideas and gravitas you can raise more capital than most people can save over a working lifetime, and if your "startup" is successful you could find yourself with four houses and a private jet. With somewhat less effort you can command incomes that are twice the national average for a whole family and still have enough energy left over to hack on things "in your spare time" and debate politics on sites like this. You can, with a few "hacks," crash whole corporate systems and cost people millions upon millions of dollars all by yourself. If you know a bit about networks you can probably pull it off without being caught, maybe deflect the blame toward a third world dictator and create an international incident that captures global headlines... FROM YOUR BEDROOM.
You are upper class. You are rich and powerful -- far more powerful than the clueless geezers at the MPAA. I mean look... TPB gets taken down and six copies pop up in 24 hours. You can run circles around those morons because you're smarter, faster, ...
YOU ARE THE F'ING MAN.
You're not desperately struggling against the MPAA and the RIAA. Don't you get it? They're the ones desperately struggling against you, and it's a total rout. You are beating the living hell out of them.
"Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny. In the hands of "the man," piracy becomes a tool for crushing and beggaring labor, disempowering the consumer, and creating a surveillance dystopia by baiting users into passive surveillance-based content aggregators. It's as ridiculous as graffiti in the hands of the police.
You say "we" a lot. Let me tell you this. History will judge us on what we do with the awesome power we have been given.
I'm not defending the old record companies. We could do better. We could create systems that allow artists to sell their works directly to their customers with almost zero percent overhead -- 100% to the artist! Not only that, but we could create in that transaction a direct personal social link between artist and fan, a real relationship. That's so much better than the old model for everyone.
But no, we're building The Pirate Bay again, and again, and again, because we're cheap and we want free stuff. It's not just tyrannical and infantile. It's lame. It's not even technically interesting.
Everyone taking all the music they listen to for free hasn't, in reality, stopped new music creation. Therefore your argument must have some major flaws.
Perhaps artists don't unionise and go on strike, because they're afraid it would make clear the same thing the pirate bay makes clear - that the real market value of entertainment content is approximately $0.
Yeah "we want free stuff" ... but how have you managed to turn that into "people who want free stuff ... want to pay for stuff"?
I would look up a series of talks on YouTube called "free is a lie" by Aral Balkan. They deal more with the free service bait and switch than piracy, but I found them influential in getting me to question "free."
DRM and the old record companies are the lie you're selling. If they were fighting for their lives, they wouldn't have Washington DC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, ... in their pockets.
The 100%-to-the-artists stores exist. I love 'em.
I'm not the man, I'm just another guy looking for a job. The interview process for computer jobs should make it obvious that I'm not the super-elite like Chris Dodd.
I just don't think people will ever stop freely sharing culture... long after the MPAA, DMCA, RIAA, and all DRM schemes are forgotten.
The zero marginal cost of copying bits is only true if you look at the copying of bits in isolation. If you take a whole system view, it isn't free.
I think there's two sides to this, the people who want and think that everything has a price, and the people who recognize that the digital age brings with it advances that mean this idea no longer applies to everything the way it once did.
I'll end on a point I think we can agree on: duplicating a CD or CDs is not an indication that one has the financial means to buy it/them.
I guess if you want nothing but ad supported culture and skill-less rage comics and stupid blob cartoons maybe, but the kind of culture that really inspires, challenges, and uplifts takes real effort to create.
Culture is a byproduct of civilization, we produce culture merely by existing and interacting with each other. Music, media and cartoons are but one [current] aspect of our culture, they do not comprise all of it.
I would be quite interested in what a world would look like where artists created things for the sake of creation and innovation, instead of merely for a paycheck. That doesn't mean you couldn't get paid from producing hit music, it just means if you're not a popular artist you better have supplementary income.
Speaking only for myself, what I find inspiring is generally the work of other impassioned people working on topics I'm interested in. I like watching the videos that come out of DefCon for that reason, I find them inspiring. Those videos are feely available and IMO they're part of our culture too.
We create for many different reasons. Don't reduce us to just wage-slaves.
That's never popular, but I really think I'm right about this and I think with time other people are going to see it too.
I'm not intending to insult artists, but I am insulting the Internet's popular trash culture of memes and throwaway junk. I see "free" as being partly responsible for that. There's no money in creating online culture, therefore nobody can spend any real time or effort on it. As a result you get a lot of totally disposable superficial noise and ad-driven marketing gimmickry.
I am supporting your right to have control over your work -- not only a right to earn something from it or to give it away if you so choose, but also to have some say over how it's used.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26055297
If "information is free," what right would these guys have to protest their music being used in torture chambers? None, of course.
That's an extreme example but it illustrates my point. Copyrights aren't just about money. They're also about creators having some kind of say about what can be done with their work.
I believe that the creators of things should have more rights over their creations -- yes more -- than those that just "consume" them. Anything else strikes me as a grotesque value inversion. Disempowering the creator in favor of the consumer de-funds culture creation, impoverishes creators, and encourages a society of utterly passive consumption and triviality.
It's the ultimate in passive consumerism. Value flows one way -- downhill -- until the snow's all melted and the streams run dry.
That's not what free culture was supposed to do, either. Free culture was supposed to lead to a gift culture, not a culture of take-take-take. Part of why I've lost the faith is that the promised land hasn't come. Taking is all I see... take, take, take, gimme, gimme, gimme...
But I disagree that RIAA and MPAA are totally losing - they still have direct lines to power through the government and its regulative and, ultimately, judicial and military power.
There are more than 2 sides. There is not "the man" vs. "the underdog". It's less chess and more hungry hippos. Yes, we should build something better (for the market, for the world, for the commons) than TPB. But the regulative status quo disallows those things. TPB is a mushroom colony. What you want is a tilled field.
The government does not serve RIAA well, but it also salts the earth where we might grow internet-aware markets. TPB is a compromise solution, and better than nothing.
What we build is not in a vacuum.
Let's get started cultivating the field, plowing under the existing regulation which is defunct and self-serving, erecting new fences where boundaries represent newly-reasonable compromises, advantages, and common sense.
> "Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny
Just wow. I'd like to add some thoughts so that my comment isn't just a well deserved kudos that adds nothing to the conversation:
Hackers and hacker culture aren't actually as all powerful as you make them out to be. Most of the people on hn don't have four houses and a private jet or the power to crash corporate systems single handedly. We do have disproportionately more power than we did 30 years ago and the imbalance is growing. But we still don't have the most important thing that any would be revolutionary can have: Public support.
I was watching a documentary on Che Guevara the other day and I noticed how well things went for him in Cuba contrasted with how poorly they went in Bolivia. The difference was that the people were behind him in the former and hunting him in the latter. If hackers make the MPAA out to be the enemy, geezers that we need to hack circles around, then they will never win. Most people aren't upset with the MPAA or the RIAA, they don't see them as villains to be defeated. Everyone likes to get free stuff, but not enough to stand up and fight. Most of the people I know happily pay whatever price itunes asks for music or movies or any digital content. Granted most of the people I know are professionals with enough disposable income to pay for an album or kindle book without a second thought. And until they get pissed off with something that the various entertainment industries do, there will be no support for the freedom of information cause. The revolution will not be televised, or downloaded, because it won't exist.
This is the general problem with the freedom of information movement, you can't rally people to fight against someone who isn't actually oppressing them. No one I know has a problem with even DRM, it generally never occurs to them to copy media and send it to someone else. Heck, most of them aren't even aware of TPB at all. It's always good to see people fighting for what they believe in, but unless the majority of people can be convinced to join the fight the battles will be long, hard and potentially pointless.
They're also arguably more powerful than the RIAA, MPAA, and even governments-- in this particular domain. Sure they can be arrested one by one and sites can be taken down one by one, but overall the hackers are winning and the old stalwarts are losing.
Look up the difference in average income between a musician and a programmer. Who's "punk" now?
I'd also like to point out that Apple is far more valuable than any record company, and Google is practically the gloved hand of the U.S. State Department. The technology industry -- which opposes strong copyrights for a number of reasons -- has far more political "juice" these days than ailing record companies.
In the early 90s, both Bill Gates and Oracle Corporation expressed strong doubts or outright opposition to the idea of software patents. Later they 'won' and came to use software patents as competitive weapons.
Had 'hackers', at that point of the ascension of Microsoft and Oracle, 'won' – meaning the only gracious move would be to agree that the software-patent regime was good for them? No, the 'hacker' category had broadened, and many of the people doing the most interesting work still justifiably despised software patents.
Hackers and artists are creating systems for direct creative compensation, to replace the outdated idea of criminalizing digital reproduction.
Others, who are not necessarily the same people who could (technically or socially) sell out for the "four houses and a private jet" you dangle, still prefer to build other radically uncensorable systems. Don't adopt them into your royal "we".
Some of us build Bandcamps and Spotifys. Others have different beliefs and reasoning. I don’t think there’s some ultimately objective point of view that proves one group as right and another wrong.
How many great artist[1] make a lot of money from their work while they are alive? How many make a lot of money for their label (alone, or in aggregate)?
I'm not afraid of artists stopping to create, and I'm not too terrified of a future without projects like the Lord of the Rings-films (note that the books were a work of passion, and not a main source of income -- which might be considered a bad thing, but also illustrates that people will do what can -- as long as they have some free time at their disposal). Or without TV shows like "(American) Idol".
There's an aspect of being dependent on commercial success that tends to shape what art is made -- a sinister form of self censorship. So it is not just the business model that is under attack -- but also the constraints under which artists work. People will disagree if this is a good or bad thing -- but it should probably be a part of the debate (who should have the resources to create art, and what art should they be making? Do we really think the invisible hand is the best judge of what makes good visual art?).
[1] Great art and great artists is of course highly subjective. I'm thinking of people like Townes Van Zandt, Phil Ochs, or various blues/jazz legends -- people generally highly regarded in their field, but that in spite of having published through established channels have not had commercial "success".
But I fail to see how either of those things are really relevant to my argument.
Be clear: what I'm arguing against is the idea that industrial-scale mass piracy is actually a social good. I'm arguing against people like the "Pirate Party," etc. Conversely I am arguing that building a click mill "portal" on the backs of other peoples' work (like TPB) is at the very least a dick move even if it's not actually illegal.
Pulling more money out of the creative economy is only going to make things worse for artists.
I also disagree about the value of things like the LoTR films, etc. While these are to some extent purely profit-driven, they serve as vehicles of employment for vast numbers of creative professionals who use them to hone their craft. It's blockbusters like this that pay for the cool indie art flicks, and that create careers for the people who make such things "on the side." They also drive massive advancements in the technology and technique of film-making, and these make it easier and cheaper for indie art flicks to get made. I'd say the same thing about pop music-- it supports a vast technical infrastructure of music making, recording, editing, and distribution that indie acts can tap into and use. Without all that money going in at the top, you wouldn't have such a massive market for instruments, fuzz boxes, production software, synths, etc.
Freemium and "pay what you want" can work in some cases, and some artists have made it work, but my point is that it's the artist's choice what model they want to use. Making that choice for them and then preaching about how you've got the right to do so because your "free" views are morally superior is just assholery. If an artist doesn't want their work distributed in that way, doing so is saying you don't give a damn about them.
I grew up having access to the entire canon of film, books, comics, culture. That was a huge part of my formative experience. I want my kids to have that. I don't want my kids to be limited to what's on Netflix because of licensing agreements.
I am a big believer in Kopimi. I also love the idea of torrent nodes and bitcoin nodes and other P2P modes as a metaphor for holography and as a metaphor for knowledge as a whole -- each node contains within it an image of the whole swarm.The companies who make a profit from the works of artists and use legal means to restrict this model are shortsighted, stupid, and outright dangerous to soceity.
That said, I try to only consume works that are public domain and creative commons. It's not easy, and I frequently break this "soft boycott" not just out of lack of will, but also because fair use is my right and I intend on excercising it.
We've lost a majority of the early silent films produced in Hollywood. The myth of the internet as a permanent archive persists, and I can't figure out why. I believe that copyright activists and the Pirate Party are doing a net force for good in archiving our culture.
Without all that money going in at the top, people would be using free recording tools like Ardour.
My philosophy: Don't be a child. If an artist wants to restrict your consumption, it's not art, it's commerce. If you're old enough to have disposable income, you are old enough to support CC and PD works. Anything less, and you need to go listen to some more preaching.
Nice point on commercial success driving a form of self censorship. I'm big on independant media, but I have a huge respect for those who run established brands and are able to turn a profit in media.
Some mainstream artists do a very good job rewarding those who are willing to delve deeply into music.
With any form of art, but especially music, I believe it's the artists job to take us from the familiar, to the unfamiliar, and back to the familiar. My ideal artform is a massively popular avant-garde movement, but that's more of a platonic ideal than anything else.
Is there a transcript available?
You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly,
I suspect the war has already been lost.
For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.
I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.
You mean "like Olimex A20 Olinuxino which has the same form factor of the Raspberry Pi but unlike the latter is open hardware and runs on open source software only", right?
You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.
That seems pretty far from "open hardware". True that likely any similar project requires closed source drivers for things like the EC/embedded controller, 3D acceleration, and maybe the 802.11 chip, but at least you can choose to boot and use the system without support for the closed devices.
Please stop. This mindset is actively harmful. There's no "giant leap", it's all small steps.
I thought that this was no longer necessary[1], but after searching around I'm not sure if this means it is possible to boot without the blob. Does anyone know if this is the case?
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/
http://www.raspberrypi.org/quake-iii-bounty-we-have-a-winner...
A few more hacks like the recent Sony one, and they might be running away soon!
Today with the docker type tech being developed, it is only a matter of time before small free containers can be run on mobile devices and we will be free of the chains again :)
The more they wall us up the more we will work for freedom.
I guess I don't see how this idea addresses the concern, though. Sure, maybe it's natural that there's a split between the compliant sheep and the independently-minded. But the concern is about what the status quo is that the sheep live with and perpetuate, and the independently-minded have to rebel against. Things are worse for all of us if the kind of free expression and sharing of ideas that the Internet enables becomes something that only non-sheep do, or can do.
Would that situation be worse than in pre-Internet society? Maybe not, but maybe so: a society in which most of our information exchange takes place online, but only over controlled, monitored, or proprietary channels strikes me as worse than one in which most information exchange is offline, but not so locked down.
I don't think we have to worry about this as the commercial potential to profit off the masses is too great. I think there already is a schism between the sheep and non-sheep. The masses stay in their walled-garden apps and sites while much of the creative and interesting information and discourse goes to things like hidden services, torrents, or smaller niche sites (like HN for example).
And it has been very successful. 30% of software, music, video, and games sales is huge. They profit more from those sales than the content creators do.
Apple doesn't even let Firefox port their browser. Windows had third-party C compilers.
And Microsoft also has Windows RT with restrictions that makes it a walled garden just like iOS.
So in the end, it all evens out between the two.
Is it more difficult to do things that way, than simply buying a song or movie from an app store? Yes. But shouldn't that be a good thing? For years one of the arguments against anti-piracy enforcement was that the only reason people pirated was because it was easier to get content that way. Companies were told that the right way to fight piracy was not through Congres and the courts, but by making the experience of legally paying for content easier than pirating content.
Now, that is actually coming true. But apparently it is now also a wrong way to fight piracy.
One application, supporting two operating systems and three formats. Whooptidoo.
For something that is technically as easy as copying any format file to any device. Congrats. Great f-ing progress.
Not to mention the fact that most of what I would like to consume in media isn't legally available in my country in those or any other format. And anything but music is still DRM-crippled.
It's not just easier to get pirated content, it's still largely the only way.
And unless secured boot walled gardens are legally mandatory - people derive too much value from piracy to choose only the walled garden model.
It's also easy to see how financial privacy could become virtually nonexistent if digital currencies like Bitcoin take over. Most Bitcoin evangelists are turning a blind eye to this highly troubling downside when they extoll the virtues of a global cashless society.
Fortunately most computer users today still know about files and torrents, and hopefully that knowledge continues to thrive, but I do see large-scale attempts at fundamentally changing how we interact with computing devices that could eliminate that knowledge and those freedoms associated with it in the future. Taking down TPB and chasing the other torrent sites isn't quite as effective as systematically eliminating the knowledge that makes those sites possible; in other words, remove the concept of filesharing and "the Internet it created" will essentially kill itself.