It isn't our job as technologist to build tools to circumvent the law. It is our job as technologist to educate politicians and the greater population as a whole why these issues are important. Sure, civil disobedience can be a tool in that fight, but that alone isn't going to change anything.
It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.
They get seats by spending money on campaigns. Public is easily manipulated by political marketing. The only thing that could put them out of there seats would be more money spent for a smear campaign against them.
> It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.
As opposed to romanticized world where money (got from industry) put into political marketing has no effect on votes and you achieve political goals by educating voters (at no cost other than your sincere effort)?
We'll start with the easiest and work our way up (subjectively):
1) Who's the President?
2) Who's your Governor?
3) Who's your Mayor?
4) Who are your Senators?
5) Who's your Representative?
6) Who's your State Senator?
7) Who's your State Representative/Assembly member?*
I ask these questions every time someone brings up their "The system is rigged, maaaaan". I've only found a handful of people that could name their Representative. Most people can't even name their senators. I always find it fascinating how people are able to trash talk their representatives when they don't even know who they are.
* Excluding you communist unicameral Nebraskans
You can waste your time knowing about these people and trying to get them to do something which you think is good for everyone even though there are powerful people who pay him to not do it, or spend the time to be one day in a position to get them to do something good for you by paying them.
I think the latter will be much more effective and long term that you don't need to know anything or anyone. You just need to find the person who has that power. When that person is no longer in power, just find the next one who is. If you never need those people, even better that you didn't spend time on any of those shitheads.
But you have the power to vote and that is the power which puts them there eventually, directly or indirectly. Even if you did nothing, your power to vote DOES influence that entire chain of people. So, next time you decide to vote for your local politician, do a thorough research about him/her and make sure you are choosing the right candidate, for your decision affects others too. Imagine how many reviews, ratings, articles, research papers you read on the internet before buying a laptop or an iphone or android phone! Even if you spend a tenth of that effort in researching the politician, the whole country will benefit from that!
Take it a step further and publish that research.
I still vote, but I'm also pretty sure it's a waste of my time. It's one of those game theory things. If everyone got out to vote it would be good, but my individual contribution is unimportant.
Even the people who turn out for Presidential elections (when their votes arguably make the least difference) usually don't know enough and their legislative representatives to make an informed decision, and tend not to show up for the off-year elections when it's only those offices up.
In 2014, Senator Jeff Sessions R-Ala. was "elected" without an opponent. In that same year, 32 other Representatives were "elected" without any opposition, my own Representative included. 28 more didn't have a "major party" opponent. That means ~14% of all Representatives had little or no competition.
This is overly simplistic. If it were exclusively about cash resources, the most cash-rich candidates would win every time. We know that doesn't happen. Yes, money does play an important role (because it costs money to run ads, print signage, get people to hang said signage, staff phone banks, etc. -- not because there's some reptilian overlord that has to be paid before he lets you become POTUS), but it's not the only role.
More important than money is to control a media outlet that the general public trusts. Pundits have more power than politicians because it's so easy for them to generate outrage. ABC, CBS, NBC, and the cable channels really hold the bulk of political sway in this country. They can frame not only the political discourse, but all significant social discourse, in the terms that they prefer. The internet is dampening and decentralizing their power a bit, which is why non-establishment candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were able to gain any traction at all, but their influence is still massive.
Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't the past 3 presidential elections been won by the candidate with the biggest cash flow?
And yes, of course it is not the only factor as you noted, media coverage is crucial and information via the internet is rapidly becoming a more important factor. But the problem is: the same people who own and operate these massive media corporations also own the internet infrastructure and are also the ones who are pouring massive amounts of bribes/funding into the elections.
First, correlation is not causation. Second, this chart [0] shows Romney and Obama were neck-and-neck as far as dollars raised, and that Romney actually had spent slightly more than Obama. This chart says it covers through September 2012, so maybe Obama did end up spending a bit more (or maybe he didn't), but the difference in spending is very small.
When you ask why Romney lost in 2012, there are a couple answers that get cited. First, Romney's leaked "47% comment" was disastrous for him. Second, Obama's team used technology much more effectively to get out the vote. Apparently there was a group working on software on Romney's side, but it wasn't managed correctly and the software was not usable by election day.
Only in the same way law of conservation of energy is overly simplistic.
All the people that say "It's not only about money!" then give examples which boil down to "Tt's also how you spend it!" to which I can only reply "Duh!"
However, those who do win, unless they are named Sanders, will be bound by said money.
On a local level, money does matter more, and it's effects are meaningful.
Money isn't everything. Giving a damn matters too.
For more directly from Orwell in one of his letters considered to foreshadow 1984's thesis, see here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=WXGbfAHYecwC&pg=PA232&lpg=...
It's written as a warning of how futile it will be to resist totalitarianism in a future advanced technological state
> It's written as a warning of how futile it will be to resist totalitarianism in a future advanced technological state.
You fundamentally misunderstand 1984 and Orwell himself. The notion of the futility of resisting totalitarianism never would have been uttered or thought by Orwell. He absolutely and tirelessly championed resisting totalitarianism. He wrote a great many words on the subject. He never warned anyone of the futility of resistance in his prior works, and he certainly didn't push himself to death to deliver 1984 as such a warning. There is a vast difference between you, the reader, determining that Winston's resistance is futile—particularly in the hindsight of O'Brien's exposé at the end—and suggesting that Orwell was warning the reader that resistance is futile.
It's a warning that if you don't stop it by recognizing it's rise through dictatorship over language, over emotions, and finally over thought it will be impossible to resist. Well, that is what I (and apparently Hitchens) see in his writing. I also see plenty of parody, especially towards Emmanual Goldstein and his book (Trotsky), purges blaming foreign conspiracy, and the illogical party slogans.
Both in peace time and during the war.
1984 to Stalin is what burning is to explosion.
Money doesn't override voters, but it can make decisions that the voters don't care about. How many voters care enough to check up on their Congressional representatives' views on copyright? And how many lobbyists do?
And this cynicism about the system only makes the problem worse. Why check up on votes on banking regulations if you think the donors are going to decide it anyway?
The high road is the one where your conscience gets to weigh-in, and you do right in spite of your fear.
If one of the two assumptions above fails: assuming we can legally define what exactly constitutes a bribe (and I imagine this is not a solved problem), it probably would be possible to pass a law that says that if you can prove as a politican that you were offered or given a bribe (for a sum n), the bribe-offering party gets fined (say) 100n (aiming for their economic destruction), of which 5n is given to you (thus incentivising you to report bribes) and some token amount is given to everyone else serving in the same elected body as you (to incentivise everyone to vote for the law).
That would still reduce the influence by >95% because you have to pay 105x and the politician only gets 5x.
The actual problem is that if a politician is known for reporting bribes then they won't be offered any, so taking 1x every time is still more profitable than taking 5x once.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. You make it more expensive and fewer people can afford to do it.
How do we make it cheaper to buy politicians, so that we can do it too?
1) How can we build more resilient technologies so that copyright law becomes irrelevant? (And note that we already have some candidates - like IPFS)
2) What technologies do we need so that we do not need politicians? For example, is it possible to create nation-states that are small (think hundreds of thousands of people) and allow people to create their own easily?
Oh, wait...
1 - If you make them more expensive then only the truly wealthy will be able to buy them. Yes, they exist
2 - Corruption is a matter mainly of personal ethics and perception of things around you. Of course it's hard to turn down heavily compensated engagements or other types of 'incentives' given by big players. Especially when everybody does it. It's really an issue of Game Theory
But seriously. Starting idea: Build a website that does some well analytics and makes it clear when politicians chose profit and special interests over the good of the people. I know some sites do this, but I haven't seen any executed well enough to reach the right people.
Lenin was obstesibly starting a revolution for the 'good of the people.' Cuba did as well.. The good of the people there has resulted in an average monthly income of $20.
Don't knock the special interests.. EFF and Wiki are both examples of special interests just as much as the special interests of the publishing industry.
The book Economics in One Lesson is certainly worth reading..
Disney owns more television stations and has more money than the EFF.
Then you need to fix your political system before you can fix the law. As an outsider looking in it seems like sorting out how campaigns are financed would be a good first step and that seems like something Bernie Sanders wants to and probably can fix. So the opportunity is there for you to take if the issue is important enough to you.
There is no argument clever enough or convincing enough to overpower the flood of money and bullshit that keeps copyright law the way it is. You may as well argue against the law of gravity. The only solution is to deprive the bad actors of the funds they need to keep the system corrupt, and since most people (rightly, in my opinion) can't accept simply abandoning large parts of their culture to that fight, the only option left is to make piracy widespread, easy, and safe.
Which has done more to erode Microsoft's server profits, people pirating Windows or people creating GNU/Linux?
What we need is to build alternative platforms that compete with Hollywood and destroy them (and their margins) through legitimate competition.
-Buckminster Fuller
Fuller claimed that the reason why we cannot take care of the greater population as a whole is not because we don't have the technical feasibility to do so but because we are trying to solve our problems with politics. Trying to solve the problems of the electric age by using the paper-based political framework is futile and self-defeating.
Nonsense. Politicians already settled their mind a long time ago, it was when they were in college or before that, now its way too late. You don't believe me? Try to convince creationist politicians about evolution, and it doesn't matter how many proofs you show them, the complete fossil record, they are not going to get educated, you can prove them evolution is not against their beliefs but it will not matter at all.
They hate getting educated as much as they hate reductions in their salaries.
I fight off being a manager, I can't imagine being in any kind of leadership position over an entire county/state or country.
Just like a proper manager of people isn't over those people. A manager should - IMO - be just another part of a team, a person/people who coordinates and facilitates the work of others.
Would you say the same thing to those building tools to circumvent the great firewall of China?
That job is done CC-BY-SA. Your work (and derivatives) under this licence is guaranteed by copyright laws to be free to use, remix and resell (provided those rights are passed on) for your life plus 70 years.
Ideally, our law would be updated to match new technical innovations, but instead the scope is only getting extended so that it's easier to prosecute people who are using digital capabilities to do natural things.
We need to seriously analyze the role of intellectual property in our culture. Why are so many of the world's most massive companies people who are exploiting IP/copyright? The margins are pretty high when all you have to do is order new prints of a DVD, for example. Is this really a fair trade, or might we be giving too much away?
But calling that barbaric is absurd hyperbole. It casts people wanting copyright reform as fringe extremists. When when I explain how much copyrights actually cover, for how long, and the extreme penalties for violations most people can't believe it (many don't, it's too absurd and conflicts with their property and profits world view. similar to how you can't convince a climate denier with facts). But, if they do, they realize that MPAA, RIAA, et al are the fringe extremists.
We're a bunch of angry people.
I have no problem with people expressing the outrage of the situation in strong language.
(That being said, I too am an artist and sympathize with their plight. I wouldn't like some of you do away with copyright outright. But these laws as written are shackles and chains on our artists and culture as well.)
So Plan B?
See the thing about life+70 is that it has made a few people very rich, so cultural creatives are going to oppose not only attempts to roll back life+70, but also any attempt to roll back anticircumvention laws. They're hoping that they'll be the next to win the superstar lottery, and on the off chance that they do, they don't want their jackpot cut down from what previous superstars have netted. Never mind that vanishingly few people ever win this lottery, or that life+70 benefits publishers far more than it does performers.
In order for civil disobedience to actually work, there has to be popular support for the disobedience, so the cops and prosecutors don't feel like asshats for enforcing what looks to be an unjust and detested law. There just won't be that level of support for opposing copyright laws, not for at least your life + 70 years. So yeah, being sued or imprisoned is about the best you can hope for.
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Not every justice is won by playing by the rules.
Unfortunately the average voter around here would rather scream at each other about taxes, and simply commit copyright infringement...
It would be much more effective to help write software that assists in the violation of copyright law.
And in any case of all the reasons to vote for a party that is going to govern everything, intellectual property law is not at the top of the list. It's certainly not going to be the issue to bring voters out in enough numbers to make the major parties sweat.
FWIW: They were in the previous coalition government, so they got very good representation for their votes. Unfortunately their voters hated what they did, so their vote collapsed at the next election (and the party they were in government with grew in votes).
And no, they didn't get 'good representation' anyway. They got 9% of the seats on 23% of the vote when they went into coalition, and in the last election, got 1% of the seats on 8% of the vote. Even as a junior party holding the balance of power in a coalition, they didn't have the clout they should have, from a percentage-of-votes-cast perspective.
But regardless of how you slice it, it's still a clear example of how a FPTP voting system ends up in a two-party political system.
They formed the government. Your original comment said they had 'little to no representation' - for a party with cabinet seets and the deputy prime minister, that's a bizarre claim.
Feel free to nuance it and segue into a discussion of FPTP, sure. I'm a Green Party member, so I need no persuasion there. But if you're a LibDem, then telling yourself you imploded because of 'striking a bargain to try and fix the voting system' is pretty self-delusional. The LibDems imploded because of their government record. They voted against the policy interests of the people who voted for them. If that's because of a bargain and sense of duty, then more fool them for getting played like a tool. No proportional representation will help with that. If they can't be trusted to stand for what they offered the electorate.
Which is all a side show from your original comment that I was responding to.
> If they can't be trusted to stand for what they offered the electorate.
They were playing the long game. My guess is that they knew very well they'd be taking a body blow (since everyone was shocked by the coalition in the first place) but that in years to come, the system would be more representative.