I have a bad feeling about this

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this

by llambda • 14 years ago

629 179 14 years ago

raganwald.posterous.com

asynchronous13• 14 years ago

Sadly, I'm more incline to think we're at the beginning of Act II.

anxrn• 14 years ago

This, very much so.

"At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy has been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."

I would extrapolate this to progress in free societies at any given point in history.

Oddly, this evokes a strange feeling of comfort in the inevitability of disruption.

tnicola6• 14 years ago

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender.

For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way.

Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrelevant. It is, however, infectious. Facebook is following suit and (I hope) it won't be long before we all realize that the doze of benevolence will get you far. And by that I don't mean philantropy.

1) Don't charge people more than you have to. Make money, by all means, even get rich, but don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition.

2) Pay your employees well and create positive work environments. Happy people remain working hard and make you more money at a nice and organic rate.

3) Loyalty is no longer a virtue of an employee. It is a privilege earned by an employer. Don't be a DB and expect people to stick around and work hard for your just cause you are putting bread on their families tables. That worked in the 50's. Get on with the program.

4) Share the profits with your employees, share the innovation with your customers and don't be afraid to try new things even if they appear to hurt your bottom line. You will never know until you try it.

5) Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires (I intentionally did not use a word needs here. (This is where I will exit on this one.)

I could go on. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but something (my gut) tells me that if we are in Act III, the good will win in the end. Doesn't it always?

It's either that, or this rebel will need all the force I can get.

ebaysucks• 14 years ago

Please don't tell me you think one US political party is all bad and the other one is all good.

tnicola6• 14 years ago

I am Canadian, so no. This was not about one country, but the whole world.

bo10242• 14 years ago

> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires

Good luck finding one of those.

More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives.

If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic system rewards "evil" practices, that's what you're going to get.

If you allow these "evil" companies to continue to re-design the system to reward patent trolling, snuffing out competitors with lawsuits, spying on Internet users, etc etc etc etc etc, then -- you will get a system in which the more that a company does these things, the more they thrive.

If your political system allows companies that thrive to pay to bend the rules of the game in their favor, then they will not only continue to thrive but actively accelerate their success, to the detriment of the rest of the world.

tnicola6• 14 years ago

> More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives.

100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other.

An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month.

Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000.

Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely.

Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.

petercooper• 14 years ago

don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition.

But that partly encourages new competitors. If a market is dominated by a good product at a good price, it's harder to compete than if it is grossly overpriced.

tnicola6• 14 years ago

So imagine how far ahead a company would be if they were first with a fairly priced product.

I believe that this is why price is not a competitive advantage and you need more substance to beat out your competition.

camwest• 14 years ago

I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity (http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book...) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people.

It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists.

Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

olefoo• 14 years ago

Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet.

That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.

eternalban• 14 years ago

The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.

EGreg• 14 years ago

What is that paper talking about? I'm sorry but aren't all these things already in place? You can generate your own certificate, you can have them issued by certificate authorities... you can sign up with facebook, you can have your own domain from a registrar, you can have your own email address, etc.

At the end of the day, who really cares about your unified identity? Only advertisers, and even they don't really care about ALL the aspects of what you do. Everyone just needs to see the relevant "user" that you have on their particular network. While YOU need to have a secure and private machine that gives control over your data verifies others' access to it, by relying on their identity relative to you. That's all.

The only really important part of identity is that the account should not be transferable to one or more unauthorized users. Authorization should ideally be granted by both sides. "What you know" is transferrable, which is why "who you are" or "what you have" is often better. If you lose "what you have", you can invalidate that account, and transfer your identity to another one, with the permission of the identity issuer.

FourSquareToo2• 14 years ago

Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.

jhancock• 14 years ago

Not sure about China. They do avoid IP rules but for purposes of bringing things under Chinese companies. Once these companies have enough value to protect in their IP (regardless of how they came to have it), they tend to look to their government for protection.

kayman• 14 years ago

Exactly. GOod luck enforcing IP rules in China. Your only choice is to out-innovate, not out-sue

alain94040• 14 years ago

Actually your more likely choice is to copy (http://blog.foundrs.com/2012/01/02/apple-vs-samsung-the-trol...). We won't be necessarily better off in a world with no IP protection.

meow• 14 years ago

Software patents are already not valid in India. So no patent on implementing one-click buying. On the other hand, no protection for mpeg family of protocols either.

regularfry3• 14 years ago

That was precisely the US's stance a while back. Funny how things change.

SethMurphy• 14 years ago

This artical is dead on. With this as motivation, we should all be more like Stallman and un-marginalize his point of view. His point of view is also mostly dead on, and always has been ... We can not let the mighty few rule the majority, it is not the way the internet was envisioned to be, and we should fight for it to remain as envisioned.

In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of an internet service, it should be free. Unlike Stallman, I do believe in a bit of capitalism, but a majority of freedom.

tnicola6• 14 years ago

And if I lived in the US, where my daily internet activity would be considered a felony, I would consider it a grave injustice that I had to pay more than companies' cost +10% for the internet service.

As it stands, I don't pay for the TV service, so I have no problem paying going rates. (I'll let you deduct the rest and plead the 5th).

knowtheory• 14 years ago

I have only one question.

Who are the ewoks in this analogy?

dgritsko• 14 years ago

Thinking back to the collapse of SOPA/PIPA, perhaps the everyday user of the Internet? Largely ignored by the "evil empire", until the sheer magnitude of their numbers outweighed their simple techniques (phone calls, faxes, letters to legislators) and proved overwhelming. That might be a bit of a stretch -- but in this case, I think it's warranted :)

meric• 14 years ago

Anonymous? o.0 I've always seen them as being "script kiddies" but they are always able to do more than I thought. Who knew they could free one of them from a drug cartel?

redstripe• 14 years ago

The BBC commissioned a study [1] that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. This from a public domain "brand". Meanwhile companies like Disney lobby for perpetual copyright to protect their own interest at the cost of all the lost opportunities that will never exist.

I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses.

I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367

lincolnq• 14 years ago

I don't think that anyone who has seriously thought about / read up on the issue considers long copyrights to be of net benefit to society.

This indicates a deeper issue. However, which deeper issue it indicates is a subject of much controversy.

moonchrome12• 14 years ago

>The BBC commissioned a study that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy.

But who cares how much it "brings in" ? Why is money the sole metric of wealth. How much value does open source provide - take linux for eg. which is used in pretty much every aspect of computing these days - from cell phones to super computers - how much value has it provided to the consumers and allowed developers/researchers/manufacturers to produce ? Apply that to every major opensource software effort, things like IDE's, servers, programming languages/compilers. If you were granted a monopoly (like some software companies are, eg. Microsoft with Android patents) would it allow you to make money ? Sure. Would it create extra value ? Nope. This is why stressing revenue, GDP and all other metrics is loosing perspective, they are a useful tool/indicator of the economy but the goal is providing value to the consumers. Screw the producers it's their job to figure out how to capitalize on their business model. Government should never protect the producer. Will the demand go away if you eliminate the IP laws ? No. So the producers will have to figure out how to create new business models that work in a new environment. You probably want to have transition phase, but instead we are doubling down on IP protection, it's getting ridiculous.

iamgilesbowkett• 14 years ago

I think you raise a very good point with "how much value does open source provide", but this question:

"Why is money the sole metric of wealth."

is a) ungrammatical and b) basically a tautology. money is the sole metric of wealth because wealth, quantified, is money.

not trying to detract from the point you raise, just getting a bit OCD about logic and grammar.

jlarocco3• 14 years ago

"Why is money the sole metric of wealth. How much value does open source provide - take linux for eg. which is used in pretty much every aspect of computing these days - from cell phones to super computers - how much value has it provided to the consumers and allowed developers/researchers/manufacturers to produce ?"

What unit would you use to measure the value it provides, if not money?

"Apply that to every major opensource software effort, things like IDE's, servers, programming languages/compilers. If you were granted a monopoly (like some software companies are, eg. Microsoft with Android patents) would it allow you to make money ? Sure. Would it create extra value ? Nope. "

I don't understand the point you're making. Obviously somebody thinks Microsoft's Android patents are valuable, or they wouldn't pay to use them. What do you mean by "would it create extra value?"

"Government should never protect the producer."

At least we agree on something...

"Will the demand go away if you eliminate the IP laws ? No. So the producers will have to figure out how to create new business models that work in a new environment. "

That makes no sense. Demand existing isn't enough for something to spring into existence. You make it sound like other people slaving away to create music, movies, and software is your birth right or something.

gaius2• 14 years ago

Why is money the sole metric of wealth. How much value does open source provide

Why are feet and miles the metric of distance, can't we just have near and far?

More seriously: value has to have a common unit of exchange. The grocery store clerk isn't going to give you your shopping for free because you happened to write some piece of software he isn't even aware of. Money allows value to be stored and transferred. Anything else is just warm fuzzies.

davidw8• 14 years ago

Because the people who (#)&#(#^^&% write Linux need money for things like houses, cars, food, health care, school, and so on. That's why money counts.

shoham9• 14 years ago

"Screw the producers" With all respect to you as a person, fuck that. I'm an independent artist and I don't want to be screwed. Consumers tend to get what they want and eat what they're told to. It's small, independent businesses and artists who shape, have shaped, and will always shape the world that you live. you're welcome.

nhebb• 14 years ago

You need look no further than primetime TV in the US. ABC and NBC both have shows based on Grimm's Fairy Tales - Once Upon a Time and Grimm. Both shows are doing well in the ratings and have the public domain works of Grimm to thank for it.

josephcooney• 14 years ago

Not to mention vast swathes of the Disney canon is ripped whole-cloth from folk stories.

tomflack• 14 years ago

The stated goal of copyright protection in the United States is to "...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

Given Disney's fierce protection of ancient copyrights and attempts to have their length endlessly extended AND the importance Disney places on their old properties... would a shorter copyright term in fact meet this goal better by forcing Disney to produce new characters and new series? There is little "progress" in endlessly hashing out Mickey Mouse, so if he were forced in to the public domain Disney would be forced to create new characters to keep making money.

Disney is just the example I am using to illustrate the point, this train of thought applies to most film studios. Long copyright terms are making it more desirable to keep squeezing your old work over creating something new.

Joeri• 14 years ago

Actually, disney makes very poor use of the characters that they keep rehashing. If mickey mouse was freed, we'd see tens of thousands of creative works every year based on him, instead of the handful we're getting now.

The value to society of leaving disney the ownership of mckey mouse is a net negative. More people would make more money on a freed mickey mouse.

edanm4• 14 years ago

Your mistake is thinking about brands like Charles Dickens and Disney. Of course they make money, and of course they would continue producing work if copyright was only 20 years.

What you have to think about is the author who is not famous, but who makes his living off of selling books. Not the millionaires, the ones with a regular salary. They often sell old stories to short-story collections, for example, for a few thousand dollars. If this happens often enough, they can continue the life of book-writing. If not, we'll have less authors.

At the end of the day, if less money goes into writing books, we're going to lose some authors who won't be able to afford writing. Some great authors will also never be discovered, because they couldn't afford to keep writing for long enough.

It's a balance, and I'm not saying that the balance is right at the moment. But it's very disingenuous to say "Disney will still make movies", because they're not the only ones around.

Note: I talk about books, but the same is true for indie bands, indie software developers, etc.

lwhi• 14 years ago

No. I don't buy it. This is exactly the sob story that's served up to us by corporations like Disney and conglomerates like the RIAA. People create art for reasons other than making money. We're never going to end up with a world that's devoid of musicians, artists or authors.

However we could plausibly find ourselves living in a world without these multinational corporations.

mbell2• 14 years ago

I don't think your considering enough variables here. At face value, assuming all other things are equal, you are correct. But all other things are not equal.

I'm far more likely to give my money to the individual artist or collective group of artists for a piece of work than I am a 'Disney'. The Louis CK situation is a great example of this dynamic en-mass.

People DO appreciate artists, people ARE willing to pay artists for their work. People are NOT willing to pay ridiculously top heavy, bureaucratic corporations that do nothing but get in the way of the purchaser experiencing the work of artists.

scott_w• 14 years ago

However, even with copyright we still undoubtedly lose talented authors due to them being unable to make enough money from book publishing. Same goes for software development, musicians etc.

You have merely stated your opinion as fact, and not provided anything that can back it up. The current proliferation of content producers (for want of a better word) can be just as easily put down to the larger audience granted by the web.

ajuc• 14 years ago

Do you really think it makes difference for a poor unknown author, whether he has exclusive rights for his book for 20 or 70 years? He can still sell his book after 20 years, after all. And regular people are not evil for the sake of it, if they want to buy a book, they would prefer to buy it from author, than from some opressive company.

BTW new economy makes it easy to extract value from the long tail. How much does author earn on each book? 10 % of final price? Probably less.

With if he self-publish an e-book, he can earn 100% of the price. Think about price difference for customer. Would you be more eager to buy book that is 1/10 the price? Would you be more eager to buy 21 years old book from author, or from some huge distributor?

Cutting out the middle man is the way to support more content producers with the same amount of customers. Copyright protects distributors, not producers.

Is it better for you to sell 10000 e-books, and know that for each book sold 10 more were pirated, or to sell 1000 e-books, and know nobody pirates them? I'd prefer the former.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

You are muddling the issue. You are confusing the current system of editors, publishers, printers, promoters, salesmen with literary content production.

Authors can distribute their works in electronic form, even sell them in such ways, with much lower overhead than ever possible. With that, authors who would never be published because they would never be commercially successful can publish now. If nothing else, with this advancement of technology, we should see an unprecedented boom in the diversity of published literature.

And it all happens independent of copyright restrictions. Is a copyright that lasts well beyond the lifetime of your descendants that much a powerful incentive to write and publish?

regularfry3• 14 years ago

Maybe the answer is that we should have fewer authors who can survive on their back-catalogue. Sure, some great authors would never be discovered, but by the same argument we'd get back those mediocre authors who would otherwise have been brilliant engineers or doctors if they hadn't been able to satisfice themselves into a career which neither truly benefits them nor society.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Or to move even further away from the idea of driven genius - who would bother to do things like create audiobooks, if they weren't afforded copyright protection?

seclorum2• 14 years ago

>I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country.

Copyright doesn't just protect entertainment content - it protects enlightening content, as well. Science and technology are the real industry markets that will 'benefit' from these copyright laws going through - Disney is just the soft glove over the iron fist that will make it 'acceptable' to the general populace to maintain control over information that can be used to disrupt existing technocratic class cultures.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

What does society gain from extending the copyright of a dead artist? Will the artist then rise from the dead and start creating again, with such a powerful incentive?

njharman• 14 years ago

> American republicans with their distaste of market regulation

Don't confuse constituents with politicians. Politicians esp at national level want whatever their corporate campaign donors desire. They are all for regulation that benefits their "friends".

noibl2• 14 years ago

TL;DR: As I enter my twilight years, I know that Star Wars will continue to comfort me long into my dotage.

raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game.

America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it.

---

To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand.

Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.

Helianthus8• 14 years ago

That's a nice horse you have.

noibl2• 14 years ago

Feel free to say something that could actually be responded to whenever you get bored with trolling.

twainer6• 14 years ago

Sorry, but this post is based on a false notion that intellectual property is a beneficial crutch propping up only corporations and piggybacks on the idea that destruction of entrenched interests is always regenerative. That second point is likely so - but the battle isn't about finding new corporate captains to pay creative individuals - it's about how not to pay creative individuals.

I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve.

I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.

twainer6• 14 years ago

Enough with the cowardly and anonymous down-votes. If you've something wrong with what I've written, presumably you have a point to make of your own. Otherwise you are just confirming my point that people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality.

Helianthus8• 14 years ago

I suspect that people view your sentiment as sufficiently--forgive me--old-fashioned and out of touch as to be not worth redressing seriously. (Though to be fair, I don't really like HN's downvote culture either. I didn't downvote you.)

The main reason I'm posting is to direct you to some irony in your phrase "people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality." While it might apply to silent downvoters, it also applies to people who haven't realized the futility and cost of holding onto copyright as a legal concept.

Helianthus8• 14 years ago

You're saying that we should play by the rules. Part of the game, though, is that we can change the rules.

Intellectual property is more or less dead. This is not a willy-nilly urge, nor a selfish catharsis. It's the outcome of a generation growing up with instant access to their culture, and once such freedom is granted it is not easily revoked.

twainer6• 14 years ago

Go ahead - look through all my comments I've written on IP. When you know what I am saying, you'll know I am not saying one should play by the rules - I never have in my life, that's for sure.

And yes - the current urge is selfish - as you point out it grows out of having taken a freedom - not having worked to be 'granted' anything - and then had that freedom 'revoked'.

There is always a greater good. I am 100% for us building one that benefits us as individuals rather than corporate entities. But the desire to wipe out IP does nothing to put economic power into the hands of creative individuals - what it empowers by a much greater factor is consumption. Last I checked we had enough of that as it was - and this is empty-calorie consumption that flows upward to the new corporate entities that can withstand the pennies to be made on it. It will never devolve power to the individual level.

A better system of IP exists - I have several detailed ideas of how it would function - and it basically revolves around treating the work of corporations differently from that of the individuals - separating ownership and monetization. A system built like this could work as an opt-in model to gradually replace current copyright - but it NEVER will without consumers playing by the much fairer rules. Yes - there are still rules - no system works without them.

If one can't meet the most basic burden of civil society by playing a game, however new, by mutually accepted rules, then there is no recourse - is there? And one can't, won't and shouldn't be taken seriously as a partner for change.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

> Intellectual property is more or less dead.

> culture

IP is a huge game, but culture is a tiny speck on the landscape of it. Try selling Äpple computers or Nyke shoes on the street of any Western-ish country, and don't even get me started on patents.

waqf• 14 years ago

When corporations conduct their business by lobbying for their business model to be legally protected, trying to compete with them in the market is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

twainer6• 14 years ago

Agreed.

But in my conception of copyright reform there is a separation of copyright ownership law vs. legal protection of instances of when that copyright is monetized. The weakness in current copyright law isn't that it exists at all, it's that rights that properly benefit the individual transfer wholesale to the entity able to bring the idea to market. This needn't be the case. And a fix has beautiful consequences that align well with the major needs of the players involved. Though it would take agreement between both public, corporations, and government alike, the prime mover for such a parallel opt-in copyright system would be the individual themselves - which means such a system is both incremental and possible.

feralchimp• 14 years ago

> More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk.

Actually, IBM and its mainframes/midrange have continued to prosper along with all of the newer growth markets in business computing. That's not just a correction about IBM, it's fundamental to noticing that job growth in these sectors was not "created by the decline of" anything. It was created by a huge expansion in the total amount of computing value that businesses found needs to consume in the marketplace.

When zero-sum your ideology is, 900 years-old you will not reach.

And not stray too far OT, but this is what I dislike about the "kill hollywood" meme. There isn't anything inherently hollywood-killing about the project of expanding the meaning of media production and delivery to include new (and great!) films that aren't produced by traditional studios...and there probably shouldn't be.

draggnar• 14 years ago

...that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. - Ben Franklin

shingen• 14 years ago

It's always curious when someone rails about a big government and its encroachment on freedom. Then in the same statement, talks about the use of big government to target specific companies to damage them instead.

As though you can really have your cake and eat it too when it comes to a big government. Big enough to break up AT&T, regulate IBM and Intel and Microsoft - big enough to take your freedom, silence your speech, regulate your Internet. Good luck getting something that big and power hungry to not keep getting bigger and more powerful and eventually wiping out your liberty. You give a government system $7 trillion dollars to spend regulating and growing itself, what do you think is going to happen? They're just going to be selectively hands off? You think you can negotiate with that?

TruthElixirX• 14 years ago

We just need to elect the right (See: my) people, silly.

Kroem3r• 14 years ago

There's nothing about the size of the government that limits or enhances it's power to act in the best interest of its citizenry. (You've thrown a red herring in there.) What we clearly see is that government's determination that it's simply more efficient to deal with significant (read corporate) power structures than feebly citizenly ones. This is where the limit comes from.

So perhaps I'm wrong: Perhaps a larger government is more able to engage with diverse and fine-grained interests while a small government is more likely to be trapped leveraging corporate power.

jobeirne• 14 years ago

Bingo; IBM and Microsoft aren't the ones holding the gun.

peterarmstrong• 14 years ago

Update: This is now the newest post in the Uncensored ebook (http://leanpub.com/uncensored) which we are producing to benefit the EFF. Thanks Reg!

abecedarius• 14 years ago

Good story, but the only sense in which the heroes are sure to win is that whoever wins will be deemed the heroes.

draegtun2• 14 years ago

>> ... recall playing with punch cards in the 1960s ...

And I recall still using/seeing them in the early 1980s here in UK!

They were still heavily used at that time in the Market Research industry for recording data entry (of surveys). In fact the term punching is still used in the industry to this day in reference to data entry.

Erwin• 14 years ago

They still are used, but just in a digital form. We interface with some unnamed software that requires you to recode data into 80 columns, 12 possible values per word (encoded as 12 usable bits within 2 8-bit bytes -- and only one bit can be set per word).

That turns some fixed-width layout into 80-column groups, with e.g. the requirement that the last 2 columns contain the card number, and the first 4 some record ID.

There isn't even any meta-data for that file, so someone out there must be sitting connected to a mainframe and punching in what card 1, position 5-7 contains US State ID or somesuch, before running the cards.

draegtun2• 14 years ago

In the Market Research industry (here) this is still pretty much the de-facto standard for sending digital data between agencies!

This continues to remain unchanged by time because the leading Market Research tool [1] still prefers to use data with 80 columns, 12 multiple values per col (0-9, & and -) with optional multi cards (card numbers can be in any columns and any length).

[1] Software is called Quantum. Originally developed in the 1970s !

CaptainDecisive• 14 years ago

To continue the Star Wars analogy, the great thing about technological advancement is that as sooner or later some unknown farm boy shows up out of nowhere and bulls-eyes the fucking exhaust port and then, sha-boom, everything changes. And the powers that be never see it coming.

Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.

dasil003• 14 years ago

On a tangential note, I'm wary of relying on the job creation argument to validate new technology. The reason being that new technology can kill jobs. Particularly as programmers, one of our main goals is to automate things that previously required warm bodies. I don't feel guilty about this because I would never want to do those jobs, but on the same token, not everyone wants to be a programmer. And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well, which is a bit scary on a personal level (though I'm not really worried about this happening in my lifetime). At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in. I do worry that our biology is not well-suited to an automated environment, but there's nothing to do but confront the problem when we come to it I guess.

rmc• 14 years ago

Although there are some jobs that are killed, there are some jobs that are created. The nett jobs is an interesting metric.

Some jobs should be killed. Thanks to technological innovation, less people don't have to work in fields collecting food. More people can work indoors etc.

acuozzo• 14 years ago

> And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well ... At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in.

I agree and I'd like to provoke further discussion on a related matter. (Please note that I haven't yet decided whether or not I agree with the following two statements.)

1. Jobs don't matter as much in a GMI[1] system.

2. Working doesn't have to be the focus of one's life.

I'd appreciate it if someone were to play devil's advocate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

mathattack2• 14 years ago

Every business likes to buy from perfect competition and sell as a monopoly. This keeps input prices low and output prices high. This model is so profitable that companies bribe politicians to maintain it. Donating to a SuperPAC is more cost effective than R and D and has anshoeter payback.

I see 2 ways of fighting this:

1) Civil disobedience - Pirate everything and share while willingly accepting the consequences. 2) Shine lights on the evil doers. Support wiki leaks. Publicize. Organize voting drives.

I have bills to pay so I support number two. Great social change requires number 1.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

> Great social change requires number 1.

Movie studios and the recording industry can, at best, delay the inevitable. Artificial scarcities are against the laws of thermodynamics.

Of all the money these industries make, only the tiniest fraction of it goes to the people who actually produced the good. Most of it is inefficiently applied in side operations such as promoting sales, manufacturing the physical support for the art, moving and storing it and selling it. All these operations can be reduced to a download and, perhaps, a payment.

mathattack2• 14 years ago

Fair points though the Internet delivery model won't make advertising or sales promortion go away. More efficient, yes, but not gone.

agentultra• 14 years ago

The new technology will always replace the old despite the attempts to safeguard the latter by those with vested interests. It happened to the scribes when the printing press arrived; To the telegraph when the phone came along; to radio, records, and even television. Big companies with a lot at stake tried their best to prevent new technology from invading their markets and putting them out of business.

The only one that I think is different is the development of the mobile phone and tablet computers. These are devices that are sold with locks on them and legislation that discourages tampering. I don't think we've seen this kind of thing happen before and it sets a bad precedent. I've got a Kindle and I don't really believe that I own it -- Amazon can remotely remove content from it and brick it if they wanted to. I've got a phone that that has the capability to spy on me. If I modify any of these devices to serve my interests I risk "bricking" them and voiding any warranties that they came with.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik that's a first for us.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

This is a beautiful, haunting essay brimming with sobering insights:

"At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."

shoham9• 14 years ago

But the focus is rarely on the inventors themselves. This is the hardest job of all! Consumers tend to get what they want, and eat what they're given. If we're not supporting "starving artists" what's the point in having a more open copyright regime?

jarnix• 14 years ago

I hate this kind of titles, unclear about what you're going to read, it looks like Reddit but without the fun.

chasingtheflow• 14 years ago

"If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1."

rmk• 14 years ago

Excellent article, but I found this paragraph unclear: " And that’s just how they run politics. If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1. And I noticed earlier, the electoral motivator has been damaged. It's impossible to go to political innovation speed. "

c3ouieu28763• 14 years ago

You are wrong and I am 'insulted.' My name is C3pio- the descendant of the famous - infamous Chinese poet. My model is chinese-american, duty lifetime 55+, similar environment.

Of course, I have worked for wall street, nuke plants and dot com or dot boombs, but aint rich.

1.on the final rocketship ride the robot sacrifices himself in the position of 'rear gunner.' The death star is stopped.

2.diverse, strange discussion is helpful. 3.Confucious saying I meet three class of persons: one I learn from as role model one I learn as ANTI-model, to avoid his bad character one I learn from to be amused and just happy - that is C3Pio

4.of course, my character is resurrected in the MATRIX

5.unlike the droids that lack COURAGE, COURAGE is the universal PROTOCOL. Call it faith, hope, being a small bit player on the SHAKESPEAREAN stage of life.

Shame on you! Without your early pathetic experiences with phone MODEMS and secretly reading '2600' and MEETING CAPTAIN CRUNCH at the germany rave you would not be the DROID...errror MAN or human that you are.

My the BUDDHA be with you! and may you be re-incarnated as a small insect flying droid. One that takes down the preadator drones. The battle of empire continues.

afterword: thats to my Czech cousins. RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. Many think C3pio is talking in modem. WRONG again. He talks in protocol-hybrid-neo-Czech.

lists• 14 years ago

There's also the problem that IP law is premised on what amounts to folk psychology.

rooshdi• 14 years ago

I have a bad feeling too...but for different reasons. I fear society just doesn't give a damn anymore. I fear all our warnings will steadily fall on deaf ears and we will eventually become ostracized into oblivion. I fear humanity will embrace a system which pushes profits before people, ego over empathy, and lust above love. I fear elitists will eliminate innovation and erase the integrity of the internet and information. I fear for our future, but I have some hope in knowing their future fears us. Game on.

I have a bad feeling about this

Related Stories