Monday, September 02, 2002

[Scripting News] QUOTE A mostly user-level discussion on Blogroots about syndication and aggregation. It's good to get grounded with users every once in a while to relearn that what to us seems neat and cool, often trips up people who have expertise in areas other than ours. UNQUOTE [Scripting News] [Ken Dow] also shares links from [Dave Winer's Scripting News] from [Wired] QUOTE "[Verizon] refused to comply with the order, arguing the entertainment industry is presuming the guilt of its users without any due process." UNQUOTE [Scripting News] While reading related stories on [Wired] I came across a law suit against Hollywood by people who want the right to Edit the Movies to remove material that they find to be objectionable.  The suit has been brought by someone who has a patent pending that will help home users, such as parents, to edit what Hollywood delivers to the home, to remove material unsuitable for their children. You have probably heard my opinion on this before.  But I restate it and revise it as reality shifts. Intellectual Property Rights need to be protected, so that there is good incentive for people to improve the quality of what we get, be it literature, music, movies, software. If we accept a society in which anyone can take whatever they want, without proper compensation to the artists and authors, then the market place quality will be driven towards crud. We are in a society in which the mass consumers seek the lowest price and are getting what we are paying for, and the intellectuals are having a hard time getting a decent income. The publishers of the intellectual property are getting the lion's share of the income, and there is rebellion against them by both the consumers, who want freedom to get the stuff at low price, and the artists who think they are not getting fair share of the income. There needs to be ways that we can get the entertainment that we want and pay a fair price for it. My sister composed and performed music which she sent me by e-mail.  Is that kind of artist to audience delivery to now be banned because so many people are abusing the communication links for delivery of entertainment for which the copyright has been violated? I am extremely unhappy about the degree to which advertisements are intruding on the content stream, and law suits by the advertisers to try to block the ability of consumers to switch channels, fast forward, etc. to get around having to view the ads.  The main product should be packaged at a price that we can get it without having any of the advertisements in the first place. Computer usage can get complex.  Business Accounting is complex and difficult to understand.  Some of it is that way deliberately, where special interests lobby Congress to make it complex. Consider our Income Taxes ... how many people figure it out themselves without help from some software or going to a Tax place to figure it for us? Those tax places lobby Congress to keep it so complicated that we have to go to them to figure our taxes. Decisions are made that rule our lives by people who not understand the implications of what they are mucking with. One thing that really alarmed me was when I bought and read a book by a former National Security Advisor about cyber threats, it shows that he seemed to be really ignorant about some computer stuff, reminiscent of the kinds of thinking that Bruce Sterling wrote about in his book The Hacker Crackdown. We've talked about some of these things in Computer Community and it is evident that some of this is hogwash (threat is not real) and some of it is naive (threat is much worse than these people realize) but the news media repeats the book author stuff without much review by people who theoretically can comment on how much the author got it right and how much should have got expert advice before finalizing these writings. I believe that the computer community needs to give seminars to the law enforcement community to bring them up to speed on where the risks really are, and which of the risks in the popular media are really Science Fiction. End consumers ought to be allowed to obtain entertainment in one form, and listen to it in another form, be it put those tapes into your car stereo, boom box, walkman, home appliance, or whatever.  Just so long as the original obtaining was legally purchased or legal copies. End consumers ought to be allowed to obtain information or software onto their computers and make reasonable backup copies.  The issue should be related to the number of users and the number of platforms, and the licensing agreement should make it clear what the ceiling is, with a way to upgrade the ceiling, or to move your stuff from your old computer to a replacement one.  Just so long as the original aquisition was a legal purchase or legal copy. End consumers ought to be allowed to remove software, like games, or entertainment, like music, from their computers and personal places, like home and auto, then sell or trade that with some other consumer.  Just so long as the original user no longer keeps the copy. It seems like Government Beaurocracy is growing out of control.  All those agencies competing with each other and not doing a great job of communicating with each other in a national crisis. Is there any hope for simplification, or will that have to wait on another generation?   New ordinary users of computer technology often do not understand e-etiquette let alone all the stuff their software is doing, so they learn by emulating the other users around them. We see this blind leading the blind process with all the people on the public highways who are oblivious to speed limits, and the accident rate from drunk drivers. We see this blind leading the blind in the cyber-plagues of our own making, popularly known as computer viruses, and how people get infected. Consumers are smart enough not to be wearing t-shirts with their credit card numbers emblazened for anyone to use, or take the doors off of homes for anyone to help self to contents, but there seems to be a widespread misconception that there is such a thing as Internet Privacy.  That is an Oxymoron.  If you not want anyone to copy your stuff, do not connect it to the Internet. A generation or so ago, before PCs invented, students were stealing computer time to play space war simulation games.  The students had no conception of intellectual property rights, a problem that continues to this day.  The owners of the stolen computer resources had no conception of security, a problem that continues to this day. Now that the price of computer power has dropped so that anyone can use it, we have new generations of people making the same mistakes.  Put your stuff on the Internet and have this fantasy that no one is going to use it. Professional places, that post stuff to the internet, do a really good job of confusing the customers. Visit just about any news organization web site. With one message they clearly state that to copy anything from that site without their permission is a violation of copyright.  In other words reading the data from screen through my eyes to my brain is in violation of their rules. With other messages you can push a button and get a printer friendly copy, e-mail it to some discussion group, or copy the pages. Who reads the contract that comes with software? Radio license clearly states that this is not to be exported outside the USA and a very narrow range of countries. Anyone who looks at the popular sites and discussion lists can see that Radio is being sold all over the world. Does this mean that their contract is meaningless, or is there some law that called for putting some phrases in their contract and at some point 100% of Userland executives are going to be in trouble with the government for export violations? Documentation exists but where is the motivation for software vendors to do a good job with it ... how many end consumers bother to read the documentation before they have some kind of a problem? A potential problem exists with the acronyms and new uses for new technology. Can we reasonably expect any new buyer of Radio to know what RSS means? New users see something on other people sites and want to do that on their own sites, but do not know the right terminology for the phenomena.  This is like looking up the correct spelling of a word in the dictionary, when you do not even know what the word is.  That makes it difficult to pose good questions to the discussion groups, or use search engine to find prior answers. With Radio Referers we can see who is reading our stuff and giving us proper credit for it.  We can not see who is quoting us without attribution. I am learning how to give good credit to my sources, but many sites (most recently Slashroot), in combination with the software that I am using, won't let me edit to just do part of their story. It is getting difficult for me to figure out how to do credit when information flows through a series of people before it gets to me. When something is written with a summary statement at the beginning like a journalist story, then it can make sense to copy just the headline with a link to the source for full details, but many beginning webloggers are not that good writers to provide something that can be extracted like that. Some web sites have strict copyright rules, but those rules don't get into the RSS feeds. Many newbies don't give any credit until someone points out to them the need to do so. Different people want different things.  You can't blame software for being a square peg that you try to put in a round hole.  If you want a round peg, buy one. This does not bode well for the long term health of the Republic. The bulletin boards taken down by the government that led ultimately to the Steve Jackson case ... those BBSes were not selected at random.  There was stuff going on that gave the government reason to suspect criminal behavior.  It may or may not have been sufficient probable cause had the case been appealed all the way up the court system, but they did not move in with zero evidence. There were criminals using the bulletin boards to trade information on how to break into private computers.  Now people can always argue whether hacking is not illegal immoral etc. and what the responsibility of the host of a network has to help authorities catch abusers of the services, but the fact remains that there were serious assaults on the nation's infrastructure, such as a cracker bringing down a 911 service, attacks on computers in hospitals whose work was essential to the health of patients there.  Locating the responsible people was no easy task for the early cyber cops. Steve Jackson was working on a simulation game about cyber criminal activity.  As research for this game, he had employees trying to infiltrate the cyber criminal underworld.  Now when a bunch of people sit down to discuss their criminal behavior, the odds are that at least one is a police spy, and at least one is a journalist, but the police spy does not know which one is there as a journalist and which is there as a criminal. Journalists need some sources protection so they can get the information they need to do stories, but they also have an obligation to the nation.  When we have knowledge of criminal behavior,  we ought to make an effort to inform law enforcement of this, or risk being treated as being part of the criminal conspiracy.  This applies equally to journalists, authors, game designers, computer professionals. 3:54:58 PM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.