erroneous thoughts

As I surveyed some blogs, I found the following image in a friend’s blog:

There’s really not much I want to say about this, except I’ve been there, it sucked big time, and thank the heavens for that not being the case any more.

Not that I am big fan of copyright, but I’ve come to accept it (thought not some of the things usually more associated with it such as Digital Restrictions Management) mainly because it is an incentive to authorship. On the other hand, for some time now I’ve come to understand history as providing an useful insight at putting the present in the current perspective. Carl Sagan wrote that “we [human beings] are like butterflies that fly for a day and think it’s forever” (free translation, I read the book in Portuguese). This is true of current day events: whether we notice it or not, we tend to think of them only in their current state, usually overlooking what contributed or originated the current state of affairs. We tend to skip putting the right context on the events of today.

And copyright is no exception. Today, copyright is generally perceived as treating information as if it were a physical object, i.e. as if it were not replicable. That is, not replicable by anyone except the copyright owners (or more accurately the publishing companies that “represent” the authors or artists). So the way this deal goes down is, someone creates something, a publishing company publishes it (books, CDs, movies, …), and you, the final consumer, “consume” it: you buy the book, or the CD, or go the theatre watch the movie or buy the DVD, etc… This is a business model that technology made possible: to store the information on a media, first analogically then digitally, and to massively (re)produce it. The selling part was just plain old business. The pace of technological development was such that until the late 90’s, massive reproduction required a significant investment, which made it only feasible for large distribution companies. That is to say, it was a business model that grew around a technological limitation. But technology is not a still picture; far from it: it evolves, and in the particular case of replication technology, it evolved (mainly through cheap recording devices and P2P technology) to the point of making it a cheap, affordable process. The problem is that this particular technological development, renders the aforementioned business model useless: nobody will pay for a service (distribution) that one can easily do for himself. And so ends one monopoly. Mind you: what I am referring to here is the distribution process; creativity should still be rewarded. But that does not imply paying (and subjecting to the monopoly of) distribution companies, all propaganda to the contrary.

This how I used to (and still do) think about copyright. But there was one piece missing on this puzzle: that’s right, historical context. This gap was filled when I found a video of lecture by Richard Stallman. Unlike most of his lectures, this one was not about free software, but about copyright. It is lengthy (well over an hour), which reflects the complexity of the subject. It talks about a lot more then just history, but it does go into a foray on the historical roots of copyright. And, somewhat surprisingly given today’s state of affairs, it turns out that the initial intent of copyright was to benefit the public good! Rather then a special privilege of authors, it was, according to Stallman, a bargain made with the public, in which the public forfeited its right to copy (which in practice could not be easily applied since the general public were not publishers – remember, this was in a time before the computer age) for the privilege of getting more books – contributing to the common good. Perhaps even more surprising is that, again according to Stallman, this view was and still is endorsed by the US Constitution.

But then computers came. And after that, widespread broadband network connections. Suddenly, the public was again able to copy and distribute information. Now I imagine most of the readers live in democratic countries. Remember, democracy derives from the Greek words for people and power. So we have a scenario in which technology made existing laws obsolete. I think the obvious thing to do would be to revise said laws, keeping in mind the objective was the public good. Instead what has been done is to revise the laws, but to try to force us into the old situation, by making the new possibilities provided by technology illegal in most situations; thus favouring the big publishing and distribution corporations instead of the public.

Democracy is aimed to provide power to the masses, and technology is now in an unique position to help. Information sharing, if nothing else, can be an act of civil disobedience, an attempt to give back to the public rights that should have been theirs in the first place.

PS: Short-sighted readers will complain about the first pragmatical issue: revenue streams. This is addressed in Stallman’s video, and I do not speak of it here to avoid this post growing even more.

Ever tried to convert SWF to PDF? If you didn’t, consider yourself lucky. I needed to convert an SWF that basically contains a still image (rendering it as SWF is legacy behaviour) to either a PDF or an image, automatically, i.e. done by a program. After almost the entire week searching for a way to do this, I’ve found that, albeit it is not technically impossible, no one has ever done so. And as I lack the resources (mainly time, but also Macromedia stuff expertise…) to do so, my only choice is to change the legacy behaviour… some week to look forward to, huh?

For those who, like the author, spent hours playing that bloody game on long aged PCs and videogames consoles, enjoy!

So I need to use a rather fancy lib at work, the main download link points to a three year-old version of said library, the most recent must be grabbed through CVS, which is so slow that makes snails look like speedy-gonzales…

Actually, it just finished as I am writing this (after an eternity waiting…), and at almost the same time one of my colleagues says it won’t solve our problem. Oh well, I just came here to write about a curious discussion earlier this afternoon about starting to use these things in the office. It may turn out to be pretty cool, but coding with this background sound may not in all favour productivity…

OK, just out of slashdot, a former spammer quit the business and wrote a book about the good old days… curious that this is posted shortly after the start of a new pdf spam wave! but on to the next subject…

…which this post that caught my eye right I logged into WordPress: it’s becoming a habit.It appears that a teenage girl just killed herself because of… Harry Potter! She got some fake book she thought was legit, started reading it, and found the “gruesome end” inflicted upon the main characters, and was so disturbed that ended up hanging herself. Crazy world, this one…

As I am currently somewhat out of time, I’m writing this just to share two interesting links I found today:

• this one is a mental wondering of sorts on why are there films that suck, but one can still enjoy them (my own personal example on this is for instance series like Knight Rider…), but in what games are concerned, they either rock or totally suck.
• as for this other, it argues that there are too many Linux distros, and talks about how that fact may be hindering Linux adoption in general.

And home I go…

Eclectic is a fancy new word I first saw used in the alternative designation of Perl: Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. What it means in the case of Perl is irrelevant, but eclectic per se means derived from multiple sources. As this post contains a lot of unrelated things, well you should be seeing the association by now…

The first thing is a small video by a Canadian Law professor, that puts “Canadian Piracy in Perspective“. Although in my much modest opinion, it does a better job at putting the right perspective on the US legal effort against “piracy” (term used in a very broad sense). But better see for yourself:

Moving on to a different but related subject, here’s a rather long but good talk about DRM, namely on how it got smuggled into the legal system. To wet your appetite, here’s the opening quote:

Otto von Bismarck quipped, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” I’ve seen sausages made. I’ve seen laws made. Both processes are pleasant in comparison to the way anti-copying technology agreements are made.

This probably deserved a link in my anti-DRM page (see blogroll), but as I am in practice cut off from that machine, I’ll dump it here.

Last, but surely not least, another link on why privacy matters, and just to what extent it was been thwarted today. Some things are specific to the US, but it is troubling nonetheless…

Technology has made it possible to spy on the masses on an unprecedented scale. After WTC bombings, several programs (within the US) were created that did exactly that: massive surveillance, even without requiring judicial warrants. Reporting this were several reputable sources, such as the The New York Times, among others. A short list is provided in page 3 (printed page 1) of the pdf document you can download here. And this is far from being limited only to the US.

In this state of things, what is the reaction of the ‘average joe’?

Well, among the people I know (and apparently also among americans) the so called ‘nothing to hide’ argument appears to be very popular. There are several versions of this argument, but it usually reduces to something like this: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” Another fairly popular ‘reaction’ is to label all those who favour privacy and things like the widespread use of strong cryptography as ‘naive’ at best, or ‘terrorists’ at worst.

I have very well known and strong opinions against this, and today I stumbled in a Bruce Schneier’s article that shows that so does he. I strongly recommend the reading of both the article and the pdf, both rather small, but above all the article. It will not sunk you in tech jargon, and it exposes very clearly the point. And the point is the complete falsehood the “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong” (and hence if you did nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide). It is not. “Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect”. The remainder of the article explains why. Next I quote the most illustrative phrase (IMHO) of the whole article:

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

Happy reading

This proves it! I am not crazy! I am a very conservative, moderate and thoughtful person! Crazy are THESE GUYS!