Sinabro

Jimmy Wales writes in an opinion:

Keep a Civil Cybertongue
Rude and abusive online behavior should not be met with silence.
…
Fourth, adult targets of online hostility deserve a national support network. This should be a safe place where they can congregate online to receive emotional support, practical advice on how to deal with transgressors, and information on whom to contact for legal advice when appropriate.

Finally, it’s time to re-examine the current legal system. Online hostility is cross-jurisdictional. We might need laws that directly address this challenge. There is currently no uniformity of definition among states in the definition of cyberbullying and cyberharassment. Perhaps federal input is needed.

On his first three points (you can read it on WSJ.com if you want; I mostly agree with it, as long as no coercion is involved), I don’t find anything specific to find faults with, although I might argue that silence is exactly what rude and abusive persons should be met with: Don’t feed the trolls.

It’s his last two points I find alarmingly … deletionist, shall we say. Just as, with his support, Wikipedia has deleted articles and sections some cabal decided shouldn’t exist (I don’t have particular problem with it; although this is the reason I will never donate to Wikipedia again), he now wishes to delete unwanted dialogs from Internet discourse.

Take his “national support network” for example. Is would this be a support network like Alcoholics Anonymous, a voluntary organization with no legal power of enforcement, or would it be like the disastrous 18th Amendment? Both aim at the same worthwhile goal—one does it without infringing on anyone else’s liberty or property, the other produced huge backlash. Mr. Wales does not make it clear which path this “national support network” take, but the fact that he brings up “national” at all makes me think he means the latter. Nothing prevents local state advocacy and support groups from forming and advertising their services; they can pool their resources later, if their work appears effective and valuable.

And his advocacy of legal action specific for the Internet puts him off the deep end. This is as stupid as specific legislations for hate crimes, or many other unnecessary legislations Congress manages on passing. There are enough laws already regarding criminal harassments. For individual situations, you can always get restraining orders tailored to your situation, no one-size-fits-all laws needed.

Besides, can we trust our tech-illiterate legislators (who care little about the Internet beyond the fact that it’s great for fundraising) to consider the differences between online interaction and personal interaction as they write down their wisdom into a law?

For that matter, it’s misleading to draw direct comparison between online messages and personal interactions (under which I would even include phones). Personal interactions are difficult to ignore, and when there is actual bullying or harassment, it is physically onerous on the victim. On the other hand, online interaction seldom impose itself on the “victim”. Is someone sending you harassing email? Block him. Is someone posting vicious attacks? Don’t read it. It takes an active action—i.e. click on a link and read—for you to take offense and get hurt. Grow up and take up responsibility for your own action. If someone is actually being really malicious, we already have libel laws for situations like that.

No new laws are needed to specifically cover online interactions. Since, by rules of courtesy, I am not permitted to question Mr. Wales’ motives in advocating for this government intrusion into the Internet, let me simply question his judgment—and in particular, has he exercised good judgment over which he does have authority, i.e. Wikipedia’s deletionist decisions?

Well, maybe not quite:

binarybits writes “I’ve written an article for the free-market Cato Institute about how patents impede innovation in the software industry. It points out that people tend not to realize how vast the software industry is. It’s not just Google and Microsoft; virtually every organization has an IT department producing potentially-infringing software. Organizations as diverse as J. Crew and the Green Bay Packers have been sued for patent infringement. It’s crazy to expect all these organizations to worry about potential patent infringement. Hopefully the Supreme Court’s Bilski decision will lead to new limits on software patents.”

I’m sure that there is a diversity of opinion even among the objectivists. But I think it’s a good thing that an adjunct scholar for Cato Institute has come out against software patent. Given that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged views patents in general as being favorable (and the government making a “gift” of them to themselves as monstrous), I was worried for a while where objectivists would stand on the whole “intellectual property” issue.

But if they can oppose software patents (which is clearly harmful to entrepreneurs, and by extension, to the society), I think I can hope that their general approach towards other issues, such as patents in other areas (such as business methods) and role of copyright, would be a reasoned, rational approach.

Granted, it’s an old model, but that takes nothing away from the fact that this laptop is, within 10% of margin, a $100 laptop, i.e. at the price level originally promised by Negroponte.

A lot of people said that this wouldn’t be possible. Well, it turns out they were wrong. If I had to guess, even at this steep discount, this price for the old netbook must include the “usual profits”, or the reseller wouldn’t bother selling. So, it’s very possible that someone producing this at cost (i.e. substantial amount of labor by volunteers so the “usual profits” is smaller than usual) could have sold it even cheaper.

Of course, this was possible only because of the wild popularity and wide spread of the Eee PC. They didn’t sell this 7-inch model at $100 originally, and given the risks involved, I don’t think they could have. In this way, Negroponte was seriously wrong: by refusing to sell to the general market, his OLPC project lost momentum (as shown by the dismal failure of last year’s G1G1 program) and couldn’t put a $100 laptop out there before the “greedy capitalists” beat him to it.

Negroponte should have started out by marketing the XO laptop in the U.S. and Europe (I believe a lot of people would’ve bought it even at $200 or $300, if they weren’t forced to make a substantial donation in the form of G1G1) and use the proceeds to aggressively pursue R&D of future generations of XO, as well as lowering costs. At the moment, XO is at least 2 years behind in development compared to other netbooks, and with the “greedy capitalists” in the way, I don’t think the “philanthropist” has any chance: capitalism and market economy is the most efficient means of producing goods, after all.

Mr. Tenenbaum appears to concede a lot of grounds even when he could make RIAA work for it:

“This is me. I’m here to answer,” said Tenenbaum. “I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it,” he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings” on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs’ attorney Tim Reynolds.

“Yes,” said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he “lied” in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

“Why did you lie at that point?” asked Tenenbaum’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. “It was kind of something I rushed through,” responded Tenenbaum. “It’s what seemed the best response to give.” At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It probably can’t be said that Mr. Tenenbaum’s attorney is ignorant of the law, or even that he is negligent (given that he’s volunteered to take the case and has given unusual attention to it). And given that this is his attorney’s question, it is quite clear that the questions and the responses were planned.

So, what’s their plan here?

If I had to take a guess, I am guessing their strategy is the exact opposite of Jammie Thomas, who was seen by two different juries as lying in the face of plain evidences (which could only imply that she thought the jury was stupid) and got hit with huge, punitive damages. That is, they are trying to say Mr. Tenenbaum is an honest guy. He might have given false representation earlier (not under oath), but that was a moment of weakness, and on the whole, he is an honest, average American who is being asked to pay $4,000 (if he settled) or upwards to $1 million (if the jury goes for maximum damage, like in the Jammie Thomas case). Now, does he really deserve to get punished like that for doing what an average American does?

Of course, if the jury sticks to the law and finds willful infringement (which may as well be the case, because Mr. Tenenbaum probably knew the songs were copyrighted and couldn’t have been unaware that what he was downloading were not authorized copies), then the minimum damage they can award is around $24,000, which is still quite a bit.

But here’s the real reason constitution guarantees a right to trial by jury of our peers: the jury does not have to “follow the law”, if they find the law unjust. This is a check on our legislative bodies by ordinary informed citizens. They cannot pass arbitrary, clearly unfair laws and expect the citizenry to uphold them. The jury is the final arbiter of facts in any trial, and if a clearly unbiased jury finds someone innocent, the legal professionals are very unwilling to question that fact as found by the jury (appeals are usually on the basis of technicalities and how the jury might have been led toward a particular bias).

Of course, the legal counsels on either side cannot mention jury nullification during the trial (if they do, they will probably be held in contempt of the court and the judge will instruct the jury to ignore the call to ignore the law), but so many unusual things happened with this trial, so who knows how it will end up?

Perhaps we should considerably reduce the power of copyright in academic journals (via Slashdot), but we should do it through reasoned discourse, not mindless fear-mongering:

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?

Well, this is it. I no longer support RMS’s crusade.

According to Stallman, the Pirate Party’s proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power.”

Somehow, I had always believed that RMS and, by extension, FSF’s goal was to limit the destructive power of copyright in software business by using its own rules against itself. I had believed that, given the choice between strong, draconian copyright, with GPL taking all its power from the same law, and having no copyright at all for software (or something very short like 5 years), RMS and FSF would choose the latter.

I was wrong. I have said before (not here, ‘probably on Slashdot) that if I ever find out that RMS’s (and, by extension, FSF’s) position was pro-copyright (even if it’s for strengthening copyleft), then I would stop supporting him. This is it.

I do, in general, like free software and will continue to use it, but as a political force I am opposed to the free software movement, now that I know for sure that the movement is led by a statist liberal whose central agenda is forcing others to his will (i.e. forcing proprietary software authors to release the source code, even if they didn’t use any copyleft codes).

As one of the immediate consequences, my FSF associate membership will not be renewed at the end of this month.

P.S. I had been getting fairly annoyed with RMS’s bashing of libertarians (I count Gov. Palin as one, although she may not know that yet) and capitalists (insurance companies and banks) recently anyway. He had, before this, the merit of … being seen as having the right opinions and position on one issue I deeply care about (copyright), but apparently I was wrong about that.

Edit: After all, there is no reason to force arbitrary obligation upon proprietary software authors. Just as the way original patents worked, copyright can be a two-way street. If the authors want copyright protection, they can submit the source code along with copyright registration (as apparently they already have to do, at least for small programs), and this will be public record once the work passes into public domain. If they want to keep the source code secret, then they can do it the same way it’s done in every other industry: keep it a trade secret and don’t tell it to anyone, including the copyright office (and since it was never “published”, it won’t be under copyright protection).

The very first thing we should do with this copyright mess is probably requiring copyright registration (say, within 1 year of original publication, as is done with patents) for copyright protection. If it wasn’t worth registering, then it’s not worth protecting.

On Wired.com:

The judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial was biased has now been removed — for bias, of course.

The convoluted web of potential scandal further complicates the April 17 copyright infrigment convictions of the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt was assigned to investigate whether the four should be granted a retrial based on revelations that the original trial judge is a member of industry copyright-protection groups. But Ihrfelt was removed from the case Wednesday amid allegations that she was a member of the same organizations, a Swedish newspaper reports.

Why would a judge be a member of these trade organizations in the first place? That’s what I can’t understand.

That and, I guess, why the Pirate Bay people didn’t “discover” the original judge’s bias until after the trials were done—they had the plenty of time to question the judge’s conflicts of interest before the end of the trials, as to get a fair and impartial trial the first time. Was it one of the tactics where the criminal defendant tries for mistrial because then the prosecution, having shown most of its hand, has less chance of winning the retrial?

On Slashdot:

The Narrative Fallacy writes “The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. ‘Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,’ wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. ‘Her contributions were monumental,’ said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress’s current register of copyrights. ‘She blazed trails. She was a heroine.’”

Someone who worked on a copyright law that extended the duration to lifetime + 50 years a heroine? Clearly this submitter is on crack! (Or, as the case might be, heroin.)

Fair use existed before this law (in the “common law”, of course, but given the way U.S. court system works, the established body of case laws is as good as codified law), and if she had anything to do with this unconstitutional extension of copyright, she’s no hero in my eyes.

And as far as her “work” for which some idiots might consider her a “heroine”, it is at best unfinished. We need basis for fair use that doesn’t require you the legal expense of defending yourself first, as most of the times, you can’t get lawsuit dismissed on the basis of fair use, a poorly defined term; you first have to defend yourself in a full lawsuit that may go all the way up to the Supreme Courts.

Without that, fair use may as well not exist, since only those with a legal department (or enough money to hire lawyer for duration of the lawsuit) can use “fair use”, and those people can probably work out some kind of license for every incidental use they need anyway.

On Newswise.com:

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

A good proposal, with one fatal mistake:

“They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that …”

The government should not be able to grant exemptions, at all. A system in which “intellectual property” has been abolished save by specific exceptions as deemed fit by the government has the worsts of looters’ government (as depicted in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, for one), with none of the benefits of the current system.

We need to abolish, or drastically reduce the scope of, copyright and patents uniformly and fairly. And the only way to do this fairly is by not involving the dirty, greedy hand of the government in the process of creating and maintaining a marketplace of ideas.

If those fancy pants don’t have enough courage to abolish copyright and patent monopoly altogether (again, with no exceptions, save by acts of God), then let us simply reduce their scope and power, say, to pre-1900 level.

Aww … crap.

/etc/cron.monthly/vrms:
Non-free packages installed on plato

sun-java5-bin Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu
sun-java5-jre Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu

Contrib packages installed on plato

java-package utility for building Java(TM) 2 related Debian package

That’s not true! Java is free now! It’s even GPL’d.

Oh, well. I guess it’ll take some time for license change to trickle in, even into Debian testing (although, since it was a big news when that happened … I would be very surprised if Debian doesn’t eventually put sun-java into the main depository, rather than letting it sit in nonfree).