10 ms·

Copyfight: EFF co-founder enters e-G8 "lion's den," rips into lions

192 points by grellas 15y ago

kahawe 15y ago
When I see all this talk about regulating the internet over the last years, I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there...
- nickolai 15y ago
  >I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there... That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    Yes, but that does not keep those same people from claiming the authority to "regulate" and "change" it. Though I am wondering how they are actually going to enforce all that on something as vast and international as "the internet". And, let's be honest, all this was and is about absolutely nothing but the music and movie industry crying over allegedly lost sales. Only the wordings used to describe it have changed. (now it was "a more civilized internet"... that sheer smug-ness is hard to miss.) How can two expendable industries have that much influence on politics??? Even with all their lobbying and "donations". It is not like we would suddenly lose our western culture without them.
    - bluedanieru 15y ago
      They have a ton of money and cultural/legal obligations which drive them to manipulate legislation and law enforcement in their favor as much as is practicable (and it turns out our governments are corruptible enough that it is infinitely practicable). This fight will probably continue for as long as these organizations exist on the surface of the Earth. Or until they win.
    - pyre 15y ago
      Governments have their own non-industry agendas too (i.e. WikiLeaks).
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    >That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway. Exactly. The only thing they have done by intervening is amplified the anarchy. In this, at least, they are fulfilling their role as entertainment providers. IMO the internet is even MORE of a wild-west type of place right now than it was ten years ago, despite or even because of attempts at regulation and corporate intervention. Whether this is all about to collapse in on itself, well, thats the million dollar question.
    - chopsueyar 15y ago
      Whether this is all about to collapse in on itself, well, thats the million dollar question. I believe it is. Look what is going on. The people who makes the decisions have no understanding of the technology or its possibilities within a societal context. It is the same reason Kevin Mitnick was put in solitary for so long. People in power make poor decisions with misinformation. I say let it collapse and we will move on to the next thing. I remember people in the late 90s, early 00s remarking the internet is a fad. I vehemently disagreed at the time. Now, I believe it to be more likely than less likely. Who knows, maybe Mark Zuckerberg is our Francisco D'Anconia?
- utoku 15y ago
  In the real good old days, many internetworking attempts failed because they tried to have a point of central control. Only the current internet protocol survived the evolution.
bluedanieru 15y ago
I'm glad he went I guess, but I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy and they'll just make the invite list more exclusive next time. Meanwhile none of these pig-fuckers are interested their arguments being challenged on their merits. They know what they are about, and it is decidedly not the best interests of society, or even creative expression. "Speech has to be free but movies cost money." I doubt he even meant this to be a double entendre. He is literally trying to be reasonable by suggesting that people should not have to pay blood money to 20th Century Fox in order to post something to their blog. He is seriously trying to illustrate benevolence here. So I doubt that trying to reason with these people serves a purpose.
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  > I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy[…] I think this is debatable. It depends on how the summit is eventually presented by mainstream media. If they say there's EFF co-founder, and the panel concluded that we should lock this IP leak machine that is the Internet, then Cory and you are right. But I've already heard news on the radio (France culture, in France) which talked a good deal about freedom, and let speak a spokesman from LQDN. So there's a good chance that the actual report from a good deal of the mainstream media is that the industries said one thing, and the EFF said another. They may even report that the EFF said the e-G8 is something the EFF doesn't approve of. In that case, Cory and you would be mistaken. In the end, however we probably need both. Someone who won't go to avoid legitimizing this farce, and another one who go take the heat to secure a minimum media coverage for dissent.
- Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
  Is it a form of censorship to not go to a powerful forum about censorship and give your ideas against censorship? If all those against, lets say "censorship", are silent when a major debate is being heard on it, then who do you think will get all the PR, and win in the end? I think for Cory it is a privilege that he was invited and it would have been a privilege to take part in the debate. It is an important debate, whatever their motives may be. We are at a turning point, and all voices ought to be heard, lest we, our society, makes an irrational decision because of the silence of some. Speak louder. That is, after all, what needs to be protected.
schrototo 15y ago
The thing that strikes me whenever I hear those crusty old old-media guys talking is that the reality of the generations growing up today is so entirely different. Nobody I know in my generation, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, gives a shit about copyright. Nobody. Everyone downloads music, movies and TV shows freely and without thinking about it. That's not to say they don't ever pay for stuff, just look at the success of iTunes or the record-breaking opening weekends of popular movies. But the young generations fundamentally do no have any respect for copyright, especially if it restricts their abilities to enjoy consumption of content. The times, they are a-changin', whether "the industry" likes it or not.
- acron0 15y ago
  I totally agree. I can't help but feel like they're holding on to "the way things were" because they've been through it. Children born today will - as they should - have a different perspective on IP and what it means and that's reflective of the movements that have been made in the last few years. These dinosaurs on stage can't comprehend change because they're so out of touch.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I find the comments people make on YouTube around this non-understanding somewhat interesting. The "stealing" metaphor seems to have led to the unintended consequence that people are confused by what "copyright infringement" even means, thinking that maybe it only applies to something like plagiarism--- "stealing" a work by claiming that it's yours when it was actually made by someone else. So the solution is to still post the video, but with a confusing disclaimer like, "this video isn't mine, all music belongs to [artist], no copyright infringement intended". Saying "no copyright infringement intended" while still uploading the video is strange thing to be doing, unless you have a nonstandard understanding of what copyright infringement means.
  - te_chris 15y ago
    I find it funny that you think that's a misinformed view of copyright. That's exactly what copyright exists for in the first place. Not to provide a sales monopoly, but to provide the artist the right to take a claim against someone else if they pass off that artist's work as their own. If it went back to that and shorter terms we might actually see some innovation....Oh wait, it basically has outside the corporate content industry.
nickolai 15y ago
The metionned 'HADOPI' group has been very productive as an entertainement provider lately. In particular, the specifications for 'netwotrk security softawre' (that should help one prove his innocence in a piracy trial) are a great read : * compliant software must implement reversible hashing (my favorite) * use of compliant software may not be used as an argument to prove one's innocence in court * cloud computing is actually a 'network protocol' etc.etc.etc. (a short analysis (in french) http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse-specifications-fonctionnelles-moyens-securisation.htm http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse-speci...)
T-R 15y ago
> "When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that's not an easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out to be Avatar, then you'd like to be compensated." This seems to imply that 20th Century Fox feels entitled to making the kind of profits that would support such exorbitant investments. I liked Avatar as much as the next guy, but the concept of making that much money off of something like music or film is a relatively recent phenomenon, dependent upon the combination of wide distribution with artificial scarcity. Even if Avatar couldn't be made without the kinds of conditions that allow for those kinds of profits, I'm pretty sure I'd trade it for all of the direct and indirect casualties of the recording and film industries; but really, I'm just thoroughly unconvinced that high quality work can't be motivated by more reasonable profits and other less tangible benefits.
- junklight 15y ago
  the decision to invest the $100M is a business decision. Wanting the laws changed to favour your business decision is understandable I guess but if you extend that line of thinking - why aren't they lobbying for, oh I don't know, people have to go to the cinema once a month? or that there should be a cinema tax. Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry. see how far you get with any investor if your plan involves changing the law to create more favourable conditions for your profit. these business models will all eventually die and be replaced by younger people who grew up in this copy and copy alike world and will find new ways of making money but there might be a hell of a lot of collateral damage to the law as they go down.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage
  - sesqu 15y ago
    Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry. We already have the IP tax. In my country, it's essentially a value added tax on all digital mass media, regardless of use. The money from that is lumped in with the money from concerts and from playing radio in public, and goes to an entertainment organization that then distributes it to its members and partners as it sees fit.
edanm 15y ago
From the article: "Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost." Is that accurate? I thought copyright was invented specifically to give a monopoly to creators, in order to encourage innovation/creation. I think that statement is conflating two separate issues in order to confuse people (the logic being, we needed copyright before mass distribution was possible; it's possible now; therefore, we don't need copyright).
- sp332 15y ago
  Does this letter from Thomas Jefferson - before telegraphs, let alone radio - answer your question? http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
  - edanm 15y ago
    It seems like he was wrong, from this letter. "Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody". Also worth reading the next few sentences: " Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Ryanmf 15y ago
  Try again. The argument is not that copyright is unnecessary. The argument is that "honoring copyright" and "taking legal action and attempting to secure government oversight to prop up an obsolete, commodity-based business model" are nowhere close to being the same thing. To assert that Barlow is attempting to confuse is totally disingenuous. The two issues are conflated. They're conflated because the rights-holders have conflated them. He's not sitting on that stage debating a panel of artists and philosophers; the majority of them aren't even proper economists. They're just the guys who have the most to lose if things change, and they're attempting (I would argue illegally/unconstitutionally, but until we can get a handle on lobbyism, 1st and 4th amendment rights violations, and continuing trends towards oligarchy in this country... que será, será) to leverage as much influence as they can muster to legislate their poor business model into continued existence in a world which no longer supports it. Let's take the honorable Mr. Gianopulos' example: when someone asks you for a couple hundred million dollars to make a movie about some blue aliens, you'd like to be compensated. First of all, "some blue people on another planet"? Now, I'll be the first to say that I felt Avatar was mostly Pocahontas with better visual effects. But come on. Gianopulos was a poor Greek kid from New York City, he attended college and law school, then immediately went to work in Hollywood. This is his entire life. He's on a stage insisting that the sanctity of these (his?) arts must be protected by any means (currently legal or not) necessary. And he still can't get six words out of his mouth without being completely dismissive of the art he professes a desire to protect. This is one of the two biggest successes of the man's professional career. I wonder if he refers to Titanic as "some fucking thing about a sinking boat." (The attitude illustrated in the preceding paragraph is the foremost reason many of us consider these people to be pig-fuckers, incidentally. I'm going to step outside the bounds of rational discourse for a moment and risk some downvotes to make an audacious assertion: If you (not you, edanm, who I'm replying to, but you, the reader) believe that these multi-billion dollar media conglomerates actually concern themselves with art or the livelihoods of artists, or that they intend to protect anything but their own bottom lines, or that they are somehow entitled to the role of sole, perpetual rights holders and distributors of any media created by anyone, anywhere, ever (as their comments indicate that they believe they are), you need to please see your way right the hell out of this discussion—maybe do some light reading, I'd recommend starting with Lessig's Free Culture— because you clearly don't understand what the fuck is going on here. Yeah, there was a lot of hyperbole in there. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to sort out whether or not I'm full of shit.) Now, down to brass tacks. What Mr. Gianopulos is really concerned with is Avatar as a vehicle for his well-deserved compensation. So let's take a look, shall we? Avatar budget: ~$237,000,000 Avatar worldwide gross as of Jan 2011: $2,039,472,387+ According to News Corp's 2000 Annual Report [1], 20th Century Fox grossed roughly $1 Bn worldwide for all films released in FY 2000, and nearly half of that (~$494 M) was a result of them duping viewers worldwide into watching Star Wars: Episode 1 (including me, on opening day, the bastards). I was a freshman in high school by the end of FY 2000, which means Napster was in it's last throes, but Opennap networks were as numerous as they'd ever been and more configurable clients like WinMX were widely distributed, Newsgroups and IRC Warez/Scene channels had been hot for years, and the Kazaa's of the world were coming soon, with Torrents and an infinity of blogs posting an infinity of Rapidshare links on the horizon. I "knew" (on the internet) a guy at the time who had over a terabyte of music available for download, when a terabyte was an unfathomable amount of data. He had a cushy job where he could more or less take home as many hard drives as he wished, whenever he wished, and he filled them up largely with multi-hour trance and techno DJ sets, at quality levels way above the average back then. All of this is to say, in FY 2000, if you knew how to work the internet and were so inclined, you could get anything you wanted, for free. Maybe you had to wait a few days for it to download on your dial-up connection, and it may have occupied 20% of the remaining free space on your 20 Gb hard drive, but you could get it. All those people who paid repeatedly to see "The Phantom Menace" multiple times in theatres? They definitely knew how to download a copy of it well before it was released on DVD. And yet they still paid. Weird, right? Flash forward a decade, when broadband is prevalent, storage is cheap, and the tools and understanding required to download any given copyrighted work are not merely the domain of geeks and organized crime, but are in fact readily available to your dentist, my mom, an increasing percentage of the elderly, and everyone on earth under 25 years old. Also, probably dogs. Yet 20th Century Fox managed to nearly double FY 2000s yearly gross with a single film. But Mr. Gianopulos is concerned about compensation. Better call the lawyers. Actually, better just get international heads of state to issue mandates that henceforth Sony/BMG, Time Warner, CBS, NewsCorp, Viaporn...I apologize, Viacom, NBC/Universal/GE?/Comcast??/Whatthefuck and the weeping ghost of Walt Disney are the sole arbiters and proprietors of any creation which may be construed as "media," and furthermore will act as government contractors wherein they will be responsible to define and enforce the meanings of the words "art," "artist," "music," "culture," "innovation," and most importantly, "deserve." None of this even begins to address the astronomical budget of a film like Avatar in an age when a $200 cell phone can record higher quality video for a longer period of time than a $15,000 professional camera and $40,000 worth of film could 15 years ago, nor the fact that marketing ANYTHING to a worldwide potential customer base has gone from "complicated and expensive" to "marginally free, and the easiest shit ever." My passion, music, also suffers great tribulation resulting from the decisions of the aforementioned pig-fuckers, and as you'd imagine I have quite a lot to say on the topic, but I've already written a ton here, best to let some of you tell me why I'm doing it wrong before I carry on. [1] http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html (edit: changed caps to ital, removed superfluous characters)
dotBen 15y ago
The whole idea of the "eG8" is offensive both on the one hand to the concept of the real G8, and on the other hand to the accordance by which matters pertaining to the politics of the Internet should be debated. The G8 is a group of elected officials who represent their respective countries based on democratic process. The eG8 is a bunch of industry folks who represent no one but their own self-interests. If the 'real G8' was the heads of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Toyota, ConocoPhillips, Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Ford, etc we'd all horrified and out raged. If the eG8 was a private meeting of industry folks to shoot the shit on whatever, go in right ahead. But if they're going to debate policy it's a total red flag. I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry frankly.

192 points by grellas 15y ago

When I see all this talk about regulating the internet over the last years, I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there...

nickolai 15y ago
>I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there... That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway.
- kahawe 15y ago
  Yes, but that does not keep those same people from claiming the authority to "regulate" and "change" it. Though I am wondering how they are actually going to enforce all that on something as vast and international as "the internet". And, let's be honest, all this was and is about absolutely nothing but the music and movie industry crying over allegedly lost sales. Only the wordings used to describe it have changed. (now it was "a more civilized internet"... that sheer smug-ness is hard to miss.) How can two expendable industries have that much influence on politics??? Even with all their lobbying and "donations". It is not like we would suddenly lose our western culture without them.
  - bluedanieru 15y ago
    They have a ton of money and cultural/legal obligations which drive them to manipulate legislation and law enforcement in their favor as much as is practicable (and it turns out our governments are corruptible enough that it is infinitely practicable). This fight will probably continue for as long as these organizations exist on the surface of the Earth. Or until they win.
  - pyre 15y ago
    Governments have their own non-industry agendas too (i.e. WikiLeaks).
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway. Exactly. The only thing they have done by intervening is amplified the anarchy. In this, at least, they are fulfilling their role as entertainment providers. IMO the internet is even MORE of a wild-west type of place right now than it was ten years ago, despite or even because of attempts at regulation and corporate intervention. Whether this is all about to collapse in on itself, well, thats the million dollar question.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Whether this is all about to collapse in on itself, well, thats the million dollar question. I believe it is. Look what is going on. The people who makes the decisions have no understanding of the technology or its possibilities within a societal context. It is the same reason Kevin Mitnick was put in solitary for so long. People in power make poor decisions with misinformation. I say let it collapse and we will move on to the next thing. I remember people in the late 90s, early 00s remarking the internet is a fad. I vehemently disagreed at the time. Now, I believe it to be more likely than less likely. Who knows, maybe Mark Zuckerberg is our Francisco D'Anconia?
utoku 15y ago
In the real good old days, many internetworking attempts failed because they tried to have a point of central control. Only the current internet protocol survived the evolution.

bluedanieru 15y ago

I'm glad he went I guess, but I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy and they'll just make the invite list more exclusive next time. Meanwhile none of these pig-fuckers are interested their arguments being challenged on their merits. They know what they are about, and it is decidedly not the best interests of society, or even creative expression. "Speech has to be free but movies cost money." I doubt he even meant this to be a double entendre. He is literally trying to be reasonable by suggesting that people should not have to pay blood money to 20th Century Fox in order to post something to their blog. He is seriously trying to illustrate benevolence here. So I doubt that trying to reason with these people serves a purpose.

loup-vaillant 15y ago
> I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy[…] I think this is debatable. It depends on how the summit is eventually presented by mainstream media. If they say there's EFF co-founder, and the panel concluded that we should lock this IP leak machine that is the Internet, then Cory and you are right. But I've already heard news on the radio (France culture, in France) which talked a good deal about freedom, and let speak a spokesman from LQDN. So there's a good chance that the actual report from a good deal of the mainstream media is that the industries said one thing, and the EFF said another. They may even report that the EFF said the e-G8 is something the EFF doesn't approve of. In that case, Cory and you would be mistaken. In the end, however we probably need both. Someone who won't go to avoid legitimizing this farce, and another one who go take the heat to secure a minimum media coverage for dissent.
Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
Is it a form of censorship to not go to a powerful forum about censorship and give your ideas against censorship? If all those against, lets say "censorship", are silent when a major debate is being heard on it, then who do you think will get all the PR, and win in the end? I think for Cory it is a privilege that he was invited and it would have been a privilege to take part in the debate. It is an important debate, whatever their motives may be. We are at a turning point, and all voices ought to be heard, lest we, our society, makes an irrational decision because of the silence of some. Speak louder. That is, after all, what needs to be protected.

schrototo 15y ago

The thing that strikes me whenever I hear those crusty old old-media guys talking is that the reality of the generations growing up today is so entirely different. Nobody I know in my generation, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, gives a shit about copyright. Nobody. Everyone downloads music, movies and TV shows freely and without thinking about it. That's not to say they don't ever pay for stuff, just look at the success of iTunes or the record-breaking opening weekends of popular movies. But the young generations fundamentally do no have any respect for copyright, especially if it restricts their abilities to enjoy consumption of content. The times, they are a-changin', whether "the industry" likes it or not.

acron0 15y ago
I totally agree. I can't help but feel like they're holding on to "the way things were" because they've been through it. Children born today will - as they should - have a different perspective on IP and what it means and that's reflective of the movements that have been made in the last few years. These dinosaurs on stage can't comprehend change because they're so out of touch.
_delirium 15y ago
I find the comments people make on YouTube around this non-understanding somewhat interesting. The "stealing" metaphor seems to have led to the unintended consequence that people are confused by what "copyright infringement" even means, thinking that maybe it only applies to something like plagiarism--- "stealing" a work by claiming that it's yours when it was actually made by someone else. So the solution is to still post the video, but with a confusing disclaimer like, "this video isn't mine, all music belongs to [artist], no copyright infringement intended". Saying "no copyright infringement intended" while still uploading the video is strange thing to be doing, unless you have a nonstandard understanding of what copyright infringement means.
- te_chris 15y ago
  I find it funny that you think that's a misinformed view of copyright. That's exactly what copyright exists for in the first place. Not to provide a sales monopoly, but to provide the artist the right to take a claim against someone else if they pass off that artist's work as their own. If it went back to that and shorter terms we might actually see some innovation....Oh wait, it basically has outside the corporate content industry.

nickolai 15y ago

The metionned 'HADOPI' group has been very productive as an entertainement provider lately. In particular, the specifications for 'netwotrk security softawre' (that should help one prove his innocence in a piracy trial) are a great read : * compliant software must implement reversible hashing (my favorite) * use of compliant software may not be used as an argument to prove one's innocence in court * cloud computing is actually a 'network protocol' etc.etc.etc. (a short analysis (in french) http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse-specifications-fonctionnelles-moyens-securisation.htm http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse-speci...)

T-R 15y ago

> "When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that's not an easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out to be Avatar, then you'd like to be compensated." This seems to imply that 20th Century Fox feels entitled to making the kind of profits that would support such exorbitant investments. I liked Avatar as much as the next guy, but the concept of making that much money off of something like music or film is a relatively recent phenomenon, dependent upon the combination of wide distribution with artificial scarcity. Even if Avatar couldn't be made without the kinds of conditions that allow for those kinds of profits, I'm pretty sure I'd trade it for all of the direct and indirect casualties of the recording and film industries; but really, I'm just thoroughly unconvinced that high quality work can't be motivated by more reasonable profits and other less tangible benefits.

junklight 15y ago
the decision to invest the $100M is a business decision. Wanting the laws changed to favour your business decision is understandable I guess but if you extend that line of thinking - why aren't they lobbying for, oh I don't know, people have to go to the cinema once a month? or that there should be a cinema tax. Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry. see how far you get with any investor if your plan involves changing the law to create more favourable conditions for your profit. these business models will all eventually die and be replaced by younger people who grew up in this copy and copy alike world and will find new ways of making money but there might be a hell of a lot of collateral damage to the law as they go down.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage
- sesqu 15y ago
  Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry. We already have the IP tax. In my country, it's essentially a value added tax on all digital mass media, regardless of use. The money from that is lumped in with the money from concerts and from playing radio in public, and goes to an entertainment organization that then distributes it to its members and partners as it sees fit.

edanm 15y ago

From the article: "Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost." Is that accurate? I thought copyright was invented specifically to give a monopoly to creators, in order to encourage innovation/creation. I think that statement is conflating two separate issues in order to confuse people (the logic being, we needed copyright before mass distribution was possible; it's possible now; therefore, we don't need copyright).

sp332 15y ago
Does this letter from Thomas Jefferson - before telegraphs, let alone radio - answer your question? http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
- edanm 15y ago
  It seems like he was wrong, from this letter. "Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody". Also worth reading the next few sentences: " Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
Ryanmf 15y ago
Try again. The argument is not that copyright is unnecessary. The argument is that "honoring copyright" and "taking legal action and attempting to secure government oversight to prop up an obsolete, commodity-based business model" are nowhere close to being the same thing. To assert that Barlow is attempting to confuse is totally disingenuous. The two issues are conflated. They're conflated because the rights-holders have conflated them. He's not sitting on that stage debating a panel of artists and philosophers; the majority of them aren't even proper economists. They're just the guys who have the most to lose if things change, and they're attempting (I would argue illegally/unconstitutionally, but until we can get a handle on lobbyism, 1st and 4th amendment rights violations, and continuing trends towards oligarchy in this country... que será, será) to leverage as much influence as they can muster to legislate their poor business model into continued existence in a world which no longer supports it. Let's take the honorable Mr. Gianopulos' example: when someone asks you for a couple hundred million dollars to make a movie about some blue aliens, you'd like to be compensated. First of all, "some blue people on another planet"? Now, I'll be the first to say that I felt Avatar was mostly Pocahontas with better visual effects. But come on. Gianopulos was a poor Greek kid from New York City, he attended college and law school, then immediately went to work in Hollywood. This is his entire life. He's on a stage insisting that the sanctity of these (his?) arts must be protected by any means (currently legal or not) necessary. And he still can't get six words out of his mouth without being completely dismissive of the art he professes a desire to protect. This is one of the two biggest successes of the man's professional career. I wonder if he refers to Titanic as "some fucking thing about a sinking boat." (The attitude illustrated in the preceding paragraph is the foremost reason many of us consider these people to be pig-fuckers, incidentally. I'm going to step outside the bounds of rational discourse for a moment and risk some downvotes to make an audacious assertion: If you (not you, edanm, who I'm replying to, but you, the reader) believe that these multi-billion dollar media conglomerates actually concern themselves with art or the livelihoods of artists, or that they intend to protect anything but their own bottom lines, or that they are somehow entitled to the role of sole, perpetual rights holders and distributors of any media created by anyone, anywhere, ever (as their comments indicate that they believe they are), you need to please see your way right the hell out of this discussion—maybe do some light reading, I'd recommend starting with Lessig's Free Culture— because you clearly don't understand what the fuck is going on here. Yeah, there was a lot of hyperbole in there. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to sort out whether or not I'm full of shit.) Now, down to brass tacks. What Mr. Gianopulos is really concerned with is Avatar as a vehicle for his well-deserved compensation. So let's take a look, shall we? Avatar budget: ~$237,000,000 Avatar worldwide gross as of Jan 2011: $2,039,472,387+ According to News Corp's 2000 Annual Report [1], 20th Century Fox grossed roughly $1 Bn worldwide for all films released in FY 2000, and nearly half of that (~$494 M) was a result of them duping viewers worldwide into watching Star Wars: Episode 1 (including me, on opening day, the bastards). I was a freshman in high school by the end of FY 2000, which means Napster was in it's last throes, but Opennap networks were as numerous as they'd ever been and more configurable clients like WinMX were widely distributed, Newsgroups and IRC Warez/Scene channels had been hot for years, and the Kazaa's of the world were coming soon, with Torrents and an infinity of blogs posting an infinity of Rapidshare links on the horizon. I "knew" (on the internet) a guy at the time who had over a terabyte of music available for download, when a terabyte was an unfathomable amount of data. He had a cushy job where he could more or less take home as many hard drives as he wished, whenever he wished, and he filled them up largely with multi-hour trance and techno DJ sets, at quality levels way above the average back then. All of this is to say, in FY 2000, if you knew how to work the internet and were so inclined, you could get anything you wanted, for free. Maybe you had to wait a few days for it to download on your dial-up connection, and it may have occupied 20% of the remaining free space on your 20 Gb hard drive, but you could get it. All those people who paid repeatedly to see "The Phantom Menace" multiple times in theatres? They definitely knew how to download a copy of it well before it was released on DVD. And yet they still paid. Weird, right? Flash forward a decade, when broadband is prevalent, storage is cheap, and the tools and understanding required to download any given copyrighted work are not merely the domain of geeks and organized crime, but are in fact readily available to your dentist, my mom, an increasing percentage of the elderly, and everyone on earth under 25 years old. Also, probably dogs. Yet 20th Century Fox managed to nearly double FY 2000s yearly gross with a single film. But Mr. Gianopulos is concerned about compensation. Better call the lawyers. Actually, better just get international heads of state to issue mandates that henceforth Sony/BMG, Time Warner, CBS, NewsCorp, Viaporn...I apologize, Viacom, NBC/Universal/GE?/Comcast??/Whatthefuck and the weeping ghost of Walt Disney are the sole arbiters and proprietors of any creation which may be construed as "media," and furthermore will act as government contractors wherein they will be responsible to define and enforce the meanings of the words "art," "artist," "music," "culture," "innovation," and most importantly, "deserve." None of this even begins to address the astronomical budget of a film like Avatar in an age when a $200 cell phone can record higher quality video for a longer period of time than a $15,000 professional camera and $40,000 worth of film could 15 years ago, nor the fact that marketing ANYTHING to a worldwide potential customer base has gone from "complicated and expensive" to "marginally free, and the easiest shit ever." My passion, music, also suffers great tribulation resulting from the decisions of the aforementioned pig-fuckers, and as you'd imagine I have quite a lot to say on the topic, but I've already written a ton here, best to let some of you tell me why I'm doing it wrong before I carry on. [1] http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html (edit: changed caps to ital, removed superfluous characters)

dotBen 15y ago

The whole idea of the "eG8" is offensive both on the one hand to the concept of the real G8, and on the other hand to the accordance by which matters pertaining to the politics of the Internet should be debated. The G8 is a group of elected officials who represent their respective countries based on democratic process. The eG8 is a bunch of industry folks who represent no one but their own self-interests. If the 'real G8' was the heads of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Toyota, ConocoPhillips, Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Ford, etc we'd all horrified and out raged. If the eG8 was a private meeting of industry folks to shoot the shit on whatever, go in right ahead. But if they're going to debate policy it's a total red flag. I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry frankly.