This is how you run a language

Norway is digitizing all their books:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/11/5199472/norway-is-digitizing-all-its-books-and-making-them-free-to-read-online?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

This is what it looks like when you're serious.  That's it.  Just serious.

The big downside of the "cloud"

The "cloud" is essentially "someone else's computer".  Basically, the positive is that you don't have to install or maintain software or data.  The negative is that all your stuff is on someone else's computer.

When you embed a YouTube link into a facebook post or a web page, you are relying on the cloud (someone else's computer).  It is very convenient for you, and also for censors.

Readers of this blog will recall my special love for Sony, for repeatedly getting my videos on YouTube taken down for supposedly infringing on their copyright--for the use of music I had licensed the same way I had.  Well, recently this effect has been seen with the "Breaking Bad Alternate Ending" video going the rounds.  Here are some examples of this great video embedded in web pages using the cloud:

Boy what fun that is!  The internet is such a useful tool!  And frankly Sony is just stepping on their own damn stupid foot, as the takedown is almost certainly automated.

All to deny people a look at a cool little spoof video that would probably enhance their sales.  Stupid fucking motherfuckers.

Copy shit, don't link.

Amazon irritation

So I wanted to read the new book by one of my favorite authors, who shall remain nameless.

The book was "published" in September in the UK, but not until January in the US.

Amazon.com gave me the option to get on the waiting list to get the Kindle version.

Amazon.co.uk told me it couldn't sell it to me because it wasn't "published" in my country until January.

So I downloaded the ebook off a random website for free.

Ask me if I feel bad.

Data is not real stuff.  It is incredibly stupid to try to treat it as if it was.

Obviously not okay

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Viral-video-we-ve-all-seen-gets-taken-down-over-4887861.php?cmpid=hpts

Above is a story that is obviously not okay.  Some lady uploaded pics of her kid playing with the family pet.  Another lady copied it and monetized it through Youtube.  Now there's a lawsuit.

I think any normal person would feel that this is not okay.

However, if they'd just copied it for fun?  Really, would you consider that wrong?

What is new?

I came across this video on facebook today:

Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it appear the characters of Sesame Street were jamming out a heavy metal song by Slayer.

Is this copyright infringement?  Should it be?

From the stupid point of view, the video creator is plagiarizing both Slayer and Sesame Street, and obviously should go to jail and be fined a million dollars.

And this is why the old way of copyright needs to go away.  I think any ordinary person can see the value--no matter how trivial or flippant--added by this masterpiece of video editing.

It's all about free speech

So it's been a while since I rapped at ya...

This blog has always been about free speech.  My thesis is that toleration of piracy is required in order to preserve free speech on the internet.  However, free speech is under attack from many sources.

Recently it's become know that  two people are facing prison time for making chalk protest graffiti.  There is no situation in which this is acceptable.

Similarly, kids are facing terrorism charges for video game and facebook smack talk--even when it is quite obvious they are joking.

Point being, people are fucking stupid, and will censor each other quite naturally if given their head.  Defending free speech is a full time job, that never ends.

What is it you own again?

This isn't a new theme in this space--indeed, I think I've covered all the available themes a few times over.  But when you purchase "digital goods", you don't really "own" anything. 

A recent Slashdot thread got me to thinking about it again.  In it various geeks outline their methods of ensuring that their families and children will be able to access "digital content" they've purchased after they die.  So A) it's depressing and B) it's depressing on a different level.  If you have to set up a password protected SAN share on your home network, and develop and encryption system--what is it you "own" again?

I'm far more enamored with services like Pandora which do not make any pretense of you're "buying" anything.  But everywhere else it's all "buy this, own it today!" which is quite simply a damn lie.

Any money spent to "purchase" digital "goods" is wasted.

Again, I'll pay a few pennies for the service of providing me with an mp3 or movie file.  But that's it.

reselling mp3's (part 2)

So a court has ruled that "reselling mp3's" is copyright infringement.  We talked about this not too long ago here on this blog.  In fact, I just looked over that post and it's pretty much the same rant I was about to make today.  After 250+ posts I've found that indeed, I have run out of arguments.

Suffice to say for now that, once again, data is not stuff.  Trying to treat it like actual stuff will not, cannot, ever work.  At some point, ordinary folks are going to realize they've been taken for a ride, and the thousands of dollars many of spent on electronic stuff was completely, utterly, wasted. 

"Buy it today!" the commercials shriek about the latest movie or pop album.  But when you try to "resell" it, well, you don't "own" it any more.  You were just licensing it.  You didn't know that.  You are going to be pissed.

I still think ReDigi, the company trying to set up an mp3 resale shop, has got to be a bit of a tongue in cheek operation.  They know what they are doing is preposterous, but they are playing along with the content industry's ideas of treating data like stuff. 

The whole idea is ludicrous.  For example, presumably, when you "resell" and mp3 you "bought" you must make sure you delete it from your hard drive,  or you're a dirty thief.  But if "reselling" an mp3 is preposterous, how can the original "sale" be any different?

A friend linked me to this image which discusses how pricing works in the human mind:

http://imgur.com/gallery/To97rNL

I think the whole "buying and selling" of digital data is a thing very much along those lines.  People aren't trained to think about it correctly, and so they are ridiculously easy to fool.

Which is why I'm here :-)  You're welcome! lol.

HBO preternaturally calm

I read an interesting article today about HBO's Game of Thrones--everyone's favorite piracy topic.

In it, a rep from HBO says they don't send out the "Game of Thrones" police against casual torrenters.  He even seems resigned to piracy and not too disturbed about it.  The article mentions that they focus on people who are actually selling pirated copies, which of course is one of the main theses of this blog.

I don't know how honest they are being, but it's encouraging that they think this is the proper attitude to have publicly.

They also have a quote from one of the creators of the show waxing poetic on what he could do if people could even purchase a copy of a show for a buck, which I personally consider reasonable (if still a bit steep), presuming I can just download the damn thing and play it where I want.  They point out there is no way to do this, and so HBO is just giving up that money.

I'd be more confident about sanity starting to prevail if it wasn't for ACTA and other trade agreements which may undermine any chance for sane laws on copyright.

hacking is good

It's official, America is technically fucked.

Check out this post on Slashdot:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/03/20/1520218/botnet-uses-default-passwords-to-conduct-internet-census-2012

A researcher did a massive internet scan for default password devices, and actually had the nerve to use them.

Used to be, he would be a hax0r hero.  But look at the slavish posts on Slashdot.  "That's illegal!"  "That's unethical!"  "You're SO going to jail!".

Nobody is talking about the technical implications.  To quote user houghi:

"Postings all go about how this is illegal and not about the technical situation.

It is sad times when people are more worried about the legal thread and ruining their lives and not about the technical implications.

How many people do not dare to bring solutions because they might be punished?"

Indeed.  It's funny.  I'm old enough to remember when it was otherwise.  And I remember seeing the media slowly becoming internet-aware and getting it so wrong....but they persist in being wrong.  And the government persists in being wrong.  And over the years, a younger generation has come up thinking this nonsense is sane and normal.

And we've emasculated them.  They're a bunch of technical pussies and we are fucked.

With that kind of attitude, you can't learn anything. Hey you know what?  When you stick a default-password device on the open net, you're not getting hacked if someone logs in. You fucking invited them to.

Oh my God I assure you..it really is possible to be too nice.

Encouragement

So it's been along time since I rapped at ya...

I think what it is is that Facebook has been sucking away my "chatter on the internet" daily quota on a regular basis.  That, and after 200+ some-odd essays on the expansion of fair use in copyright, well, I've pretty much run over all the arguments!

Still, I'm keeping my eyes open and I've got a bit of a backlog of stuff I want to talk about.

Today I just want to share an interesting comment section on a blog on my local paper by Dwight Silverman, the excellent technology writer for the Houston Chronicle:

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/03/apple-amazon-get-patents-to-offer-used-digital-goods/

In this case, I'd like to draw your attention to the comments section, actually (sorry Dwight).  The blog post itself is just about Apple and Amazon trying to patent "reselling" of digital goods.  That, in itself, is so recursively contempt-worthy that I can scarcely comprehend it.  But the interesting thing I noticed was the comments--almost no one is defending this preposterous idea.

True, the comments are moderated, but I've seen in the past that Mr. Silverman seems to be pretty even-handed in his moderation.  But this is the first time I've seen such a comment section that wasn't filled with non-techies baffled by any sort of pro-piracy or anti-copyright point of view.

If this is the start of a new trend, it has come much faster than I could have expected.  I jumped in there, of course.  But the only really contemptuously anti-piracy rant came near the very bottom--the usual thing where the poster refuses to look at the big picture, and deigns to explain the current state of the law to all of us.  And it was immediately retaliated against, inadequately it is true, but still that's nice to see.

So maybe normal folks are starting to "get it".  I hope so.

More to come.

Boy, Canada is just begging to be liberated

News today that the IIPA, kinda the global MPAA/RIAA body, is harassing Canada about their new copyright laws.  You can read more detail about it here, but the gist of it is these guys are never going to stop until every country in the world passes laws which guarantee a totally authoritarian internet, where you can be hauled away or sued into oblivion if you download or upload the wrong bits.

Go torrent something "illegal" today, and help save the world.

Be sure to charge for admission, too.

Canada needs to practice critical thinking, too

One characteristic of people that I've noticed over the years is that most folks simply don't even try to see beneath the surface of things.  This is a big mistake, of course, if you really want to understand the world.

For example, when a congresscritter introduces a bill entitled "National Save the Cats Act", you can be quite sure that its main purpose is to eradicate all feline creatures from within the demesnes of the United States.

But you don't call it that.  People like cats.  So you call it something else.

This is what came to mind today when I read about Canada, for the moment, shelving plans to have warrantless internet surveillance of all Canadians.

Interesting that they would want to do this at all.  More interesting was the rationale--child pornography.

So in the United States we have warrantless internet surveillance to protect us from terrorists.  But in Canada it's for kiddie porn.

In China it's for the "good of society".

But what is it really, then?

Injecting into your internet

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging on a daily basis.  I'm not going to kid you--I'm finding it to be a challenge to write about 365 reasons why it's a great idea to expand fair use.  It looks like I started to run out of non-repetitive ammo at only about 200 reasons.  


I'm not going away though, so I hope you'll stick around.  It might just be that I'll post when I think I have something worthwhile to say.  Surely that's not so bad?  But this does count as a fanaticism-fail, so I apologize.  

Today I'm going to talk about injection.  Specifically, your ISP injecting--or removing--things from your internet feed.

First, Cox Cable decided it would be a good idea to inject HTML into your HTML stream to let you know when there is a service outage.  What this means is you are surfing the web, and suddenly you get a popup on whatever web page you're looking at that announces a service outage or whatever.

I spend a lot of time in this space talking about the integrity of information, and the need for integrity in our internet communications (in the sense of not being censored, not candor..although that's good, too).  At first this sounds quite innocuous.  But we know better, don't we?  When I type in the URL to a web page, I expect to have an unaltered communication session with the owner of the server that runs that website.  If my ISP starts injecting stuff in there, I am no longer getting an unfettered and unfiltered internet connection.

Using such technology, an ISP could, for example, make all the text in your browser a different color.   Or alter images and replace them with advertisements.

Slippery slope, that's all I'm saying.

And that dovetails nicely with the report of a French ISP blocking advertisements by default.  Again, sounds fabulous.  Indeed, most malware is served via advertisements, these days.

But it's not what you paid for.  What are they going to block next?

Not to mention, I've already run into a couple sites where all the actual content is served from an ad server--so no ads, no content.  It's another arms race on the internet....

Now, an option to block ads, I think that would be great.

The integrity of our communications must not be threatened, whether it's injection, blocking, or shaping torrent traffic.  Or we're just like China.

Patenting sucking

Amazon has apparently patented the artificial scarcity of digital goods.  Very nice.

So instead of allowing computers and the internet to make information as freely available as possible, we need to go out of our way to limit that potential.

I've gone on and on about this in this space before.  Maybe it's a defensive patent?  I don't know.

Mega money mega problems

If you haven't yet seen the footage of the Kim Dotcom copyright raid treat yourself to the beginning of this video.  And keep saying to yourself "this is about copyright infringement, this is about copyright infringement" over and over.

Bizarre.  I'm surprised they didn't just send a Tomohawk missile to blow up his house.

Kim is a huge douche, but you have to admit it takes some balls to continue on with your piracy-supporting ways after having your house raided by SWAT style teams.

Owning vs. renting

A consumer organization in Germany is suing Valve software over the right of resell of digital products.  The issue is that customers who "buy" games via Valve's Steam online service do not have the capability to resell the games they own.

On the one hand, my own argument is that digits are not real and it generally makes little sense to consider them property, per se.  On the other hand, people paid good money to "own" the games according to Valve's own fiction, but then the are denied commonly agreed-on rights of resell.

What to do, what to do.  I did like one Slashdot commenter's (sjones) barb:

"In the west, Communism is decried in part because it doesn't respect the concept of personal property. None of 'your' stuff is owned by you. So why, given that, should we accept for even one second a culture where we only rent and license things from corporate owners? We can't even be said to own the license since there are so many ways a 'permanent' license can just evaporate."

Hahaha.  Love it.  We're going to have to work with that concept some more.

Corporate Communism forever!

Facebook can be depressing

So I've finally been dragged kicking and screaming on to Facebook (thereby rendering it instantly uncool, by the way), and one thing that strikes me is that it is not only a fairly powerful positive force, but also a negative one.

In particular, it enables people with shared views to communicate.  This is useful but also poisonous.

Much as been said of the "echo chamber" of modern political discourse, where people of similar views echo each other's sentiments, reinforcing them, and without letting in dissenting points of view.  What this does in the human brain is generate an idea of "certainty".  And certainty is generally a Bad Thing when it comes to discussing the major problems of the world.

The fact is, shit is complex.  World views that refuse to acknowledge that are doomed to fail...painfully, as history has shown time and again.

So modern technology in the form of Facebook allows this process to happen 24/7.  And the irony is, those people who most need to listen to other points of view, in order to partially correct their distorted view of reality, are the ones who go out of their way to shut out dissenting voices.  All you have to do is click off "Show in my Feed" and you never have to look at it again.

Facebook should remove this feature.

If at first you don't succeed, try adding fines

So in France now they've had a "three strikes" type rule for a few years now.  Apparently it isn't working, so the music industry wants to change the law so that internet users will actually pay fines.

So let me get this straight.

You manage to subvert the government to the point that they introduce regulations for how all people in the country are allowed to use the internet--and it doesn't work.

So you want to change the law again so that you can actually fine internet users you don't like.

My question is--at what point will governments finally realize that these guys really have no fucking idea what they are doing?

Apparently we're going to invade Antigua, next

Torrentfreak reports that Antigua is moving ahead with its plans to officially dis-respect U.S. copyright laws and allow the setup of straightup pirate sites on its territory.

Kinda interesting, eh?

Turns out it is basically in retaliation for the U.S. using its leverage to destroy the Antiguan online gambling industry.  But still, I don't care.

The reason we're seeing a nasty multi national treaty being bulldozed through national governments everywhere is that because of the internet, if you want to create "intellectual property" you need to get every country everywhere to go along with it.  Which is hard and stupid, but they're going to try to do it anyway.

Nice to see Antigua shine a bright light on that little fact.