Republican staffer who was fired for copyright memo talks to Ars Technica
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That said, I do think the younger, more tech-savvy generation of Derek Khanna is much more informed and critical of copyright issues than politicians. A shift will eventually occur.
The Republican party in particular is moved forward largely through insurgent campaigns of right-leaning outsiders discontent with the mainstream GOP (see: the Tea Party). A few Silicon Valley hackers could form a copyright liberalization insurgency fairly easily, especially in a state like California where the GOP is a skeleton.
Moreover, people in SV vastly overestimate the political influence they are likely to have in the rest of the state. The silly issues that "matter" in SV (like "liberalizing copyright") quite honestly don't matter in the rest of California, where jobs and local governance are much bigger, more important issues.
We have no excuse for being as inept as we are at politics. It is a game we can win, but first we have to decide to play.
Continuing to prop up economic models that likely won't last doesn't seem very market driven. I understand the politicians don't want to address this fact, whether republican or democrat or other, but it will eventually come to a head and need to be addressed. Eventually even our own subculture here will be at the point that the movie industry is where most programmers/it people/etc... are unnecessary.
The only reason this particular economic model needs "propping up" is that people have decided that they have an intrinsic right to content produced at great expense by other people on their own terms, and, despite the fact that the law prohibiting them from ignoring the terms of the content producers is clear as glass, have chosen to establish huge anonymous conspiracies to collectively ignore the law.
Forgive me if I don't see this as a case of progress being held back by entrenched interests.
The guys who set up the lighting and sound on motion
picture sets have not been "obsoleted" by Reddit.
But I'm not here to promote the status quo ante. I'm just saying that the idea that progress for the tech industry as an inevitable and intrinsic good is a little suspect.
http://blog.longnow.org/02008/02/01/decision-blogs-vs-new-yo...
Long Bets has arrived at a decision for Long Bet #2
between blogger Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY
Times. At stake is US$2000.00 plus half the interest that
has accrued over the last 5 years in the Farsight Fund,
all of which will go to the charity of the winner’s
choice.
In the bet Winer asserts, “In a Google search of five
keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories
of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the ‘New York
Times‘ Web site”. ...
The Long Bets decision on this bet is in favor of Winer’s
side, weblog page ranks came out ahead of the NY Times. We
will be calculating interest and sending a check on to
Dave Winer’s charity of choice the World Wide Web
Consortium in the next month.
Similarly, I encourage people who believe otherwise to go ahead and bet like Martin Nisenholtz of the NYT bet. Bet that Hollywood will survive unscathed in the wake of SOPA/PIPA and YC RFS9, in an era of 1 billion plus portable high quality video cams (soon depthcams), in an era where a Macbook Pro can do professional quality video editing. Bet by buying the stock of movie companies if you believe they haven't yet hit their peak, by investing in the current physical distribution model, by wagering that actors and actresses will make tens of millions in perpetuity. Bet with the confidence that only internet nerds believe Hollywood is due for a reckoning with technology.
Others will bet the other way. That's the only way to really test the confidence of an industry prediction of this kind.
Very few of those people are writing from and about Syria, or are getting 1:1 interviews with the House Majority Whip. You see this most clearly in state and city government; the demise of newspapers has eliminated practically every source of information that would give you an idea of who to vote for for State Senate.
News coverage has a tremendous effect on public opinion (it can be argued that the media in 1992 was responsible for the LA riots), so decentralization of opinion means that journalists have much less power to decide which candidates are "acceptable".
[Regarding Syria, they did cut off their internet connection, but I don't believe the centralized news media has done a very good job of reporting what's actually going on in the Middle East in general. I trust Google Translate Arabic + first-party sources more than Judith Miller; YMMV.]
Do you really believe that but for an internet connection, Syrian bloggers would be outdoing Marie Colvin, who died to bring the story back for the Sunday Times? Based on what evidence?
To better analogize, hollywood right now has a bunch of screen related guilds that have contracts that stipulate for example that a production can only use workers from that guild/etc... What I'm arguing or positing is that as technology improves, the need for as many as there are will decrease just like manufacturing. That or more independent filmmakers will start brokering deals with unaffiliated professionals. The overall market will get bigger most likely, but the monolithic employment in the current market is unlikely to survive.
Sorry for conveying that hollywood would be obsolete, that isn't quite what I was intending though I worded it poorly.
My only worry is the current copyright regime is seeming to be ignoring the rather stark changes in overall cost of "copying" digital files. A lot of our current law rests upon copying itself being a prohibitive process and only possible by a limited few. Until we address that fundamental difference I don't see much point in debating the conflict between technology versus current producers. There is blame enough to go around on both sides, but that isn't productive. I really don't want producers to go out of business but adapting current copyright to the digital era seems misguided unless you establish that it makes sense to do so.
I'm just rambling now with wild abandon and i'll shut-up, hopefully I conveyed things a bit better, back to work for moi.
Take the recent machinima for Halo Forward Unto Dawn. Microsoft produced this web miniseries, which looks as good as any other tv or movie series, much cheaper than if they had to deal with the current Hollywood apparatus.
They worked with the director directly and hired other film experts for say erection/lighting/etc... on direct contract.
If it costs less than 50% or more by avoiding the current hollywood way of doing things, how could that not be disruptive to the overall cost of a copy of a film for example?
Take Primer, which only cost about $60,000 to "produce", it is much easier to charge less than $20 for a copy of the film when it is simple to produce and recoup your cost than if you invested over $100 million into a film total.
I know this last example is really stretching it but the costs for production are going down and in doing so creating a market that will be offering up competition to drive down costs. Note I'm not talking at all about piracy here. I rent videos from itunes/amazon all the time mainly due to only watching them once. But not having to pay $20 is the primary motivating factor, I don't personally think "owning/leasing" a copy to watch makes financial sense.
This is backwards. If copying were a prohibitive process, we wouldn't need laws to stop people from doing it.
Copyright rests on the opposite premise: That making copies of creative works is relatively easy and cheap. It was originally a response to the printing press making it really easy for anyone to publish bootleg books, which meant that actually paying an author for the rights to his or her work was a sucker's game. Copyright legislation was introduced to prevent people from taking advantage of how easy it was for anyone with a press to copy an author's work.
That is what has changed, the cost to copying digital files is almost zero. The cost to copy even with a printing press is not nearly the same. In addition the equipment required can be regulated much easier. That too is almost impossible to do with computers.
They do -- people do indeed have pretty much exactly that: an intrinsic right -- to copy and share intellectual/informational goods.
Why? How? Because these are non-finite non-rival goods, hence are a commons by necessity. Since there is no scarcity in instances/copies, and one person's use does not interfere with anyone else's there is no reason for restriction. Instituting a restriction creates a conflict where there was none, it reduces an abundance that is simply there in physical fact.
> "the terms of the content producers"
What producers want is irrelevant. The validity of the law has nothing to with producers' wants. What is wrong with the actual law is exactly the consequence of that erroneous view: that the law is there to benefit and enrich content producers, and therefore should be expanded and enforced ever further and more strenuously.
The law restricts the intrinsic right to copy and use public intellectual/informational goods only for a collective pragmatic purpose. The intent is to serve the public overall by ensuring plenty of content is made.
Piracy seems most likely good. Every extra copy that is used adds value into the economy; the only possible downside is that production might be reduced below what is desired. But is that what we see? Music, books, TV, movies -- is there a terrible shortage of these? Nope: there seems to be not only plenty but even more produced now than ever before. Piracy is de facto acting to correct the dysfunctionality of the current law.
Copyright holders have a lot more to lose than tech giants like Google have to gain from looser copyright laws. This means media companies will lobby more aggressively to save their copyrights.
The apple orchard might bring in more revenue than selling newspapers...but the newspaper has more influence over the population.
Perhaps, but why would anyone (but google and their shareholders) care about that? What's important is the taxes, job creation, etc., etc.
The tech sector is big but lots of things in CA are big. California is the top agricultural producer in the US [1], for example.
Well, obviously. Nothing really happens without people causing it. But a lot of political shifts are gradual, large processes that can't be attributed to one individual or even a single group.
Take gay marriage, for example. There has been no lightning-rod event, nor one particularly vocal advocate group for it. But over time, we see that opinions about gay marriage are shifting. While people did "make it happen", it's more of a broader consensus occurring.
Yes, Khanna's memo does indicate disorganization at the RSC. To wit: someone was hired at the RSC not understanding what the job of the RSC is, or, alternatively, the RSC failed to predict that someone working for the RSC might go rogue and announce a policy objective that doesn't promote hard-right conservatism. Khanna says "my memo was reviewed the same way all policy memos at RSC are reviewed". My guess is he's right, and that no policy memo at the RSC receives scrutiny, because everyone already knows what to expect from any RSC policy ever. Cut taxes. Slash spending. Delegate power to the states. Eliminate regulations. Bash the Administration. Drill ANWR. Repeal EPA climate change regulations.
Just repeating the RSC's policy positions makes me sound like a DailyKos commenter. I'm not caricaturing them. The RSC really is everything every HN'er believes they hate about the whole GOP.
The idea that the RSC was seriously going to be the host for sweeping copyright reform is fanciful. What really probably happened is, Khanna is a smart guy, his role at RSC writing little memos saying "this bill does not increase the scope of the federal government" "this bill does increase the scope of the federal government" "this bill does not increase the scope of the federal government" "this bill does not increase the scope of the federal government" "this bill does not increase the scope of the federal government" was a dead end, and he staged a huge PR coup to find his next gig. More power to him. But let's stop pretending this is some signal of a sea change in US government.
Every time my fellow nerds see fit to inform me of how outmoded copyrights and rights-supported business models are in the era of the Internet and BitTorrent, I think of how outmoded their business models are, built as they all are on the idea that anyone in the world couldn't pop a shell on them at any moment and wipe their databases clean.
But then I remember that they've also stuck up for DDOS attacks as "the digital equivalent of a sit-in", and I give up.
That's not really analogous to a hypothetical web-based business with a security hole. If anything, natural selection would then favor those businesses without such flaws, rather than seeing the industry itself wiped out. One might think that it already has, in that I remember the bad old days of CGI programs written in C. (I'm sure there's someone out there who could do that securely, but...)
I really ought to be able to consume content that I have purchased in a manner of my choosing. It's preposterous to me that I can't play a single-player game because the game company's servers are down, or that I can't keep a backup copy of a movie that's stored on a fragile medium, or that the maker of my electronic device can rescind access to books that I've purchased.
I don't take issue with business models based upon copyright because they're "outmoded"; I take issue with the provision of a privilege that exceeds its mandate. Also, I take issue with the idea of calling something "property" without attaching to it any of the trappings of property. Disney pays no tax for "owning" Mickey Mouse. They are not required to estimate in a consistent or coherent manner the value of their "property". They can sue for damages without regard to any actual costs. They can attach limitations to physical property (storage media) that abrogate normal property rights (use and resale).
Yes, there are people who want to tear down copyright simply because they want free stuff. I am not one of those people; I gladly pay for the media I consume, and I use my power as a consumer to favor reasonably priced and less restricted media. But that does not make the system we have acceptable, and it does not make any and all criticism of it illegitimate.
Then don't buy the damn game. How hard is that?
That's me, in the post to which you replied, making the same point.
IF I know beforehand, I won't buy the game. But how do you find out that a single-player game doesn't work when its vendor's servers go down? By owning the game and finding out first-hand (it's not printed on the box). Have you ever tried to return a piece of opened software? If the defect isn't on the disc, exchanging it won't do any good.
You cannot appeal to a free market argument like caveat emptor once you've already acceded to a decidedly non-anarchistic world where the government grants and enforces copy and license rights. Consumers have positive rights too, like the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.
You can be cavalier and abrasive as long as you're right; when you're not right, then you're just being an ass.
Put another way, if 85% of people no longer respect a given copyright law, then it's time for that law to change. A comparison can be drawn with speed limits.
What obsoletes copyright entirely is that it's a horrible way (like patents) of meeting its modern goals. Its authoritarian roots in censorship make it more focused on controlling distribution than rewarding the creator of valuable things. You (generically) might have noble goals with copyrights but they're a legal minefield stifling activity. And all because we won't reward a creator but merely give them a letter of marque to go try to reward themselves with. If we really cared about the public good (the supposed reason for copyright) or the creators, we'd make copying unrestricted and we'd reward the creators from a public tax pool that we'd fund by stopping all restrictions on copying and the savings from not legislating/litigating/enforcing this nonsense.
As for DDOS attacks, in what ways aren't they like sit-ins? In both resources are intentionally wasted, customers blocked, and often the harm spills over to surrounding businesses? Not defending them or decrying them, but why isn't it a fairly good analogy?
Nope.
(Shrug) Speak for yourself. I only disagree with about 60% of that stuff. Central-government maximalism doesn't make any more sense to me than copyright maximalism does.
The idea that copyright reform was ever going to come out of the RSC is a bit of a fantasy.
If the GOP pushed an "innovation" platform, they would be much better suited for the next 50 years of politics (copyright reform, low regulation, low taxes, greater skilled immigration).
Of course, like 0 GOP people read Hacker News, so I should be leaving this comment elsewhere.
This is what I hate about political messaging. All of those vague terms are nice and all, but the different ways to implement/achieve them are all over the political spectrum.
That is not a refutation of the idea 0 repubs are on HN. I know they're here, but you're merely saying some people on HN happen to agree with some of the vaguest of vague messaging ideals also used by the R's.
Ramesh Ponnuru is surprised when I tweet at him with articles that I found here. I doubt anyone that works at National Review reads Ars Technica.
(...and making it up with increased capital gains, wealth transfer, and real estate taxes. Tax the money that people didn't work for.)
So both "good government" and "innovation" will require "small[er] government".
Yes. I'm not one of those people, but I promise you that a lot of them exist. Your GOP "innovation" platform sounds like a big winner because you like the idea and you surround yourself with people you agree with- as everyone does, don't get me wrong.
While there are certain demographic trends that come with generational shifts (decades ago it was racial segregation, now it's gay marriage) concepts like "small government" don't. But when you're living in liberal metropolises you tend not to hear much about them.
Picking up the Silicon Valley crowd is very important for the GOP. They are wealthy, passionate, and activist. When Obama ran in 2008, hundreds of tech savvy engineers put their lives on hold to build the most technically advanced campaign of all time.
The right wing complained for decades about getting shut out of the old media. They shouldn't forfeit control of the new media without a fight.
To me those words (small government) mean "shady politician". How about a definition?
It was primarily young people's enthusiasm for Ron Paul in 2007 - 2008 that drove his campaign, platformed as it was on small government values. His campaign principles (and some of its messages) were then co-opted into the current-day Tea Party.
"Young people" -- as much as any over-generalized demographic can agree on anything -- seem to understand the value of small government, they just want a specific kind of small government: smaller military, less international presence, more infrastructure and social welfare (both at home and abroad).
> Dear Mr. Romney, you are pitching to the anti-Roosevelt faction of the country and it is rapidly shrinking.
Conservatism didn't suddenly appear in politics thirty years ago; it has been around, in this country, since before it was a country. In the colonial U.S., the conservatives of the time would have been called "Tories".
So while the demographics of modern conservatism might be mostly old white people, they'll either be replaced in a few years with idealistic young conservatives, or modern-day young liberals will slowly age into conservatism.
> If the GOP pushed an "innovation" platform...
...then it would no longer be the GOP. The GOP is not simply a group of people who like each-other and regularly meet to decide what they should have as a platform; it is the political realization of an idea, the idea of conservatism. You might as well say, "if the Democrats pushed a 'tax the poor, cut welfare, and abolish the estate tax platform'..."!
Conservatism exists for a good reason in society. It's there to act as society's "rudder", to (theoretically) keep it from evolving too rapidly and adopting too many stupid ideas. It can certainly be harmful when it gains a disproportionate amount of influence in a society, as in modern Afghanistan, but it is not inherently harmful -- and it shouldn't necessarily adopt aspects of a liberal platform.
I don't think you can convince Republicans that IP != property. Truthfully, if more property law actually applied to IP some things would get a bit easier (e.g. transfer of property).
First, the article is setup as if Khanna was being held hostage over this disagreement.(By contrasting his time while he was on the payroll with how he was now a "free-agent" because he was no longer on the GOP payroll. Then there is implication that the internal response of the GOP to his memo was driven by the content industry.
None of the above is disingenuous until we get to the blogger quote talking about how the GOP is just beholden to money interests. What's the value of that quote? You immediately throw in this disclaimer like sentence about how they could change their stance for their own benefit, but why put the quote in there in the first place?