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I do not use "democrap" or "republicant", as they do not promote the discussion or understanding in any way. However, I did adopt Stallman's "Copy Restriction"
by beagle3 10y ago
I do not use "democrap" or "republicant", as they do not promote the discussion or understanding in any way.
However, I did adopt Stallman's "Copy Restriction" (instead of "Copy Protection") and "Digital Restriction Management" (instead of "Digital Right Management") - because they are a much better description of what the concept actually is for 99% of the people.
I started doing this after I told someone that I will not buy a Depeche Mode CD I wanted and was holding in my hand in the store, because it has copy protection; they looked at me completely puzzled, asking "Why wouldn't you want your copy to be protected?", and a little more inquiry revealed that they believed it was a somehow more robust (by virtue of being "protected") than non-copy protected CDs.
Language is a very potent medium of control. You are, indeed, used by facebook when you interact with it, and introducing it into the language is a way to bring it to the surface. He's not using "useds" to be clever. He's bringing it to the surface. It might look stupid to you, but I assure you that you are not immune to this kind of bias (and neither am I). I know that's why he does that, because I've heard him personally explain that when attending one of his talks.
In fact, if you look at the works of Kahenman & Tversky, you see that equivalent questions worded differently get opposite responses from people who we expect to know better (e.g. doctors, pilots, ...).
Stallman is basically trying to counter the (essentially unlimited) bias that the media has against what he believes, and I don't know of any tool that does that better than the rhetorical device(s) he is using.
- andrei_says_ 10y agoI think you'll enjoy this lecture by linguistics professor George Lakoff: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM Among other things he speaks of the think-tank-driven concerted effort to influence political support by using language invoking specific metaphors to frame important issues. Like "Tax Relief" for dramatically reducing taxes for the rich etc. Changed how I process political speech and pretty much any media-supported narrative.
- kerkeslager 10y agoIn the same vein, Orwell's Politics and the English Language[1] is an earlier observation of similar phenomena. [1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
- mathattack 10y agoI was just going to reference this. He was a master on the power of words, in both explaining it (as in your reference) and showing it in 1984 and Animal Farm.
- beefield 10y agoI recommend also Lakoff's book "Don't think of an elephant" I thought it is a good story how rethoric and framing is used nowadays in politics.
- ovt 10y agoLakoff and framing seemed to be in the air around 2003 or 2004, and it was a very good development. And then everyone forgot it, or maybe were encouraged to forget it.
- igravious 10y agoThank you for this link. More and more I am appreciating this guy's research. Have never seen him speak, what a natural speaker, very enjoyable as well as edifying.
- cbHXBY1D 10y agoNever meet your heroes. I was a big fan of his work before taking a class with him. He's the rockstar of the cogsci department at Berkeley but he's known as a massive ego and a poor professor.
- Dotnaught 10y agoI took one of Lakoff's classes in 1987 and found his work to be compelling. Metaphors We Live By should be required reading. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992...
- ktRolster 10y agoHe's the rockstar of the cogsci department at Berkeley but he's known as a massive ego and a poor professor. I don't want to be harsh here, but it might be worth for you to consider that you were also a poor student.
- cbHXBY1D 10y agoSure, it's a fair consideration. But before asking that question you should have just quickly googled some other student opinions. http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=246554 http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=246554
- yuhong 10y agoThis reminds me of the "copy protect music" setting from WMP.
- EGreg 10y agoMaybe one day Stallman will agree to use "Liberating Software" instead of the more confusing name "Free Software".
- js2 10y agoThank you both for your well-written arguments. This is the sort of commentary I come to HN to read.
- april1stislame 10y agoAnd your comment is the kind nobody comes here to read...
- waterhouse 10y agoArguably, the terms "copy protection", "digital rights management", "intellectual property", and probably a lot more that aren't on the top of my head are the result of, to quote the GP, "warping the very language they use to support their point"; but the groups in favor of these things were there first, and so they got to define the terminology that we've all ended up with.
- jolux 10y agoThis is probably just me but I think when they re-word things they choose the clumsiest and least-sexy possible words to put into the acronyms. Digital Restrictions Management is not only a mouthful, it's also obtuse and why bother when you could have something cool like Digital Rebel Management? That being said, if your claim is that the acronyms as they existed do not accurately describe what's going on, I fundamentally disagree. What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. What's DRM? It's technology that helps rights holders manage the rights they have to their intellectual property. What's intellectual property? It's like physical property, but it's ideas instead of objects. Intellectual property is never safe from the fair use exception, which is what protects what one might call the "free flow of ideas" and such. It's simply there to protect exploitation for financial gain.
- waterhouse 10y agoWhat's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. The naive reading (as beagle3's store clerk said) would be that it's technology that protects a copy, or perhaps the process of copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. Unfortunately, you are right: the term "protection" has been routinely used to mean the forcible restriction of competitors from entering a market, as in "protectionism" and "monopoly protection". The common theme here is that someone invented an abstract concept and applied a word to it that got its good connotations from the more concrete things it was usually applied to. Usually you can point to ways in which it betrays the original concept. In "copy-protection" and other kinds of business "protection", the thing being protected is not a business, or people, or property, but rather the ability of a particular group of businesses to make a profit doing what they're doing; the implementation of this "protection" may well involve sending police to forcibly shut down other businesses, arrest people, and confiscate property. For "intellectual property", the "right to the property" that the law enforces is not the right to the material integrity or full usage of anything physical; in fact, it's the privilege to prevent other people who have full ownership of physical objects from using them in certain particular ways. The digital "rights" are roughly the same: the right is not to own and have the full use of some digital object (which presumably means a group of bytes in memory or persistent storage somewhere), but in fact to prevent other people from possessing isomorphic digital objects. The government can invent any kind of "exclusive right to do X", and make the privilege transferable. Then people can buy and sell it. Like taxi medallions. And then people can call it "property", which they "own", and the government "protects" their "right" to it. I think it's a debasement of the terms, which functions (deliberately or otherwise) to mislead the unwary into granting the practice legitimacy.
- nsgi 10y agoStill don't understand the problem with the terms in your second paragraph. Copy protection protects CDs from being copied. Digital rights management manages the rights of the IP owner. These are just as valid. Then you have claiming Win32 is a subliminal message about winning rather than an abbreviation for Windows...
- kartickv 10y agoCopy protection doesn't protect the customer, nor does digital rights management help manage their rights. They are not benefits for the customer, only negatives. When my bank charges me a fee, they call it a fee, not a bonus, though it's the latter from their point of view.
- jolux 10y agoIt does protect the customer though, at the very least it means their money was well spent and other people can't violate that social contract by taking what they want for free.
- beagle3 10y agoPersonally, I don't feel any social contract is violated if someone else gets for free music that I paid money for. Furthermore, it seems neither do many of the artists - most of them make their music available for free through e.g. YouTube. And even if such a social contract existed, I suspect I would feel more harmed by the inability to format-shift the music I bought, than by someone else listening to the music without paying. It is rare for two passengers on an airplane to pay the same rate even for the same seat and service class. Does this violate any social contract in your opinion? Obviously, the money was not wall spent by one of them.
- jolux 10y agoWell no it doesn't, but that's generally because they had rewards with the airline or bought it in a deal somewhere. Both are legal ways to reduce the money you pay for things. As is streaming music these days. And I should emphasize I'm not against being able to crack DRM and I think it would be really bad to make uncrackable DRM. In my opinion DRM is not supposed to stop the people who would crack it anyways, it's the people who would try it just for the hell of it if it were easy. It's like why you put a lock on your house: it's not because it makes it impenetrable to burglars, it's because it keeps out 99% of the assholes who would just walk in if there was no door.
- baby 10y ago> You are, indeed, used by facebook when you interact with it But we're using it too. So maybe, "exchange" would be a better word? Although, with most of nowadays' apps (youtube, google, gmail, facebook, whatsapp, ...), the way they use "us" is really limited compared to the practicality they provide.
- beagle3 10y agoI am not using Facebook, but if it weren't for uBlock origin and friends, Facebook would be using me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- endgame 10y agoAs much as I agree with rms' philosophy, the word substitutions often feel like playground insults rather than useful rhetorical devices. Digital Restrictions Management is about the only one that's really stuck: it's not contrived, it's more accurate and it fits the initialism.
- creatonez 10y agoI agree with you. Language is an incredibly important part of a social movement. When you strip away the orwellian-ness of terms, you expose the true meaning. Manipulating language like that just isn't the same thing as using slurs like "democrap". Terms like "useds" highlight an important part of the true nature of advertising companies like facebook, but terms like "democrap" are simply insults.
- hanspeter 10y ago> You are, indeed, used by facebook when you interact with it All HN useds already realize this. If this by it self is a reason not to use a service, very few sites can be used.
- majewsky 10y ago> If this by it self is a reason not to use a service, very few sites can be used. Exactly.
- heroprotagonist 10y agoWhile there is some truth in that, it feels a little hyperbolic. Not all websites are equally abusive of their users. They don't all run their own tracking beacons or store, extrapolate and sell the same depth and quantity of personal information.
- hanspeter 10y agoNot all but most of the major sites. I'd expect all of the top 25 sites on Alexa to be equally abusive with the exception of Wikipedia. The difference between most sites (excl. Google) and Facebook is that Facebook have more users and more usage. They're not more abusive, their tracking just reaches more users. And please don't propagate the false notion that Facebook sell personal information.
- nathan_long 10y agoTrying to set the terms used in a political debate is incredibly common. In the abortion debate, the two sides call themselves "Pro Life" and "Pro Choice", which both sound good on the surface. Who wants to be anti-choice or anti-life? The PATRIOT Act was not called the Increase Spying on Citizens Act, but perhaps it should have been. The unfortunate fact is that if your political adversaries have already chosen a favorable-sounding, possibly-dishonest name for something, it's very hard to persuade people of your position while using the other side's terms.
- wedesoft 10y agoYes, if you control the language, you control the debate.