15 ms·

I have a bad feeling about this

629 points by llambda 15y ago

jessa 15y ago
May the force be with you.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
asynchronous13 15y ago
Sadly, I'm more incline to think we're at the beginning of Act II.
anxrn 15y ago
This, very much so. "At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy has been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies." I would extrapolate this to progress in free societies at any given point in history. Oddly, this evokes a strange feeling of comfort in the inevitability of disruption.
tnicola 15y ago
Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrelevant. It is, however, infectious. Facebook is following suit and (I hope) it won't be long before we all realize that the doze of benevolence will get you far. And by that I don't mean philantropy. 1) Don't charge people more than you have to. Make money, by all means, even get rich, but don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition. 2) Pay your employees well and create positive work environments. Happy people remain working hard and make you more money at a nice and organic rate. 3) Loyalty is no longer a virtue of an employee. It is a privilege earned by an employer. Don't be a DB and expect people to stick around and work hard for your just cause you are putting bread on their families tables. That worked in the 50's. Get on with the program. 4) Share the profits with your employees, share the innovation with your customers and don't be afraid to try new things even if they appear to hurt your bottom line. You will never know until you try it. 5) Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires (I intentionally did not use a word needs here. (This is where I will exit on this one.) I could go on. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but something (my gut) tells me that if we are in Act III, the good will win in the end. Doesn't it always? It's either that, or this rebel will need all the force I can get.
- ebaysucks 15y ago
  Please don't tell me you think one US political party is all bad and the other one is all good.
  - tnicola 15y ago
    I am Canadian, so no. This was not about one country, but the whole world.
- bo1024 15y ago
  > Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires Good luck finding one of those. More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic system rewards "evil" practices, that's what you're going to get. If you allow these "evil" companies to continue to re-design the system to reward patent trolling, snuffing out competitors with lawsuits, spying on Internet users, etc etc etc etc etc, then -- you will get a system in which the more that a company does these things, the more they thrive. If your political system allows companies that thrive to pay to bend the rules of the game in their favor, then they will not only continue to thrive but actively accelerate their success, to the detriment of the rest of the world.
  - tnicola 15y ago
    > More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. 100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other. An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month. Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000. Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely. Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.
camwest 15y ago
I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity (http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book-ch14.pdf http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book...) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people. It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists. Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?
- olefoo 15y ago
  Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet. That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.
  - eternalban 15y ago
    The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.
    - zanny 15y ago
      Reminds me of the Confederacy from the prequels. Oh yeah, those are forbidden. Regardless, the Republic and Confederacy were both toys of the Emperor, so I guess Google and Firefox... Ok I'll just leave. Star Wars should be public domain though (the original 3 movies). Fuck infinite copyright.
      - sukuriant 15y ago
        I have to disagree here. George Lucas is still alive, and he wrote it.
        nitrogen 15y ago
FourSquareToo 15y ago
Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.
- jhancock 15y ago
  Not sure about China. They do avoid IP rules but for purposes of bringing things under Chinese companies. Once these companies have enough value to protect in their IP (regardless of how they came to have it), they tend to look to their government for protection.
- kayman 15y ago
  Exactly. GOod luck enforcing IP rules in China. Your only choice is to out-innovate, not out-sue
  - alain94040 15y ago
    Actually your more likely choice is to copy (http://blog.foundrs.com/2012/01/02/apple-vs-samsung-the-trolls-win/ http://blog.foundrs.com/2012/01/02/apple-vs-samsung-the-trol...). We won't be necessarily better off in a world with no IP protection.
    - FourSquareToo 15y ago
      It's fascinating to imagine what the tech world might look like with no (or radically different) IP laws. I doubt it would be anywhere near as simple as the blog author makes out.
- meow 15y ago
  Software patents are already not valid in India. So no patent on implementing one-click buying. On the other hand, no protection for mpeg family of protocols either.
- regularfry 15y ago
  That was precisely the US's stance a while back. Funny how things change.
SethMurphy 15y ago
This artical is dead on. With this as motivation, we should all be more like Stallman and un-marginalize his point of view. His point of view is also mostly dead on, and always has been ... We can not let the mighty few rule the majority, it is not the way the internet was envisioned to be, and we should fight for it to remain as envisioned. In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of an internet service, it should be free. Unlike Stallman, I do believe in a bit of capitalism, but a majority of freedom.
- tnicola 15y ago
  And if I lived in the US, where my daily internet activity would be considered a felony, I would consider it a grave injustice that I had to pay more than companies' cost +10% for the internet service. As it stands, I don't pay for the TV service, so I have no problem paying going rates. (I'll let you deduct the rest and plead the 5th).
knowtheory 15y ago
I have only one question. Who are the ewoks in this analogy?
- dgritsko 15y ago
  Thinking back to the collapse of SOPA/PIPA, perhaps the everyday user of the Internet? Largely ignored by the "evil empire", until the sheer magnitude of their numbers outweighed their simple techniques (phone calls, faxes, letters to legislators) and proved overwhelming. That might be a bit of a stretch -- but in this case, I think it's warranted :)
- meric 15y ago
  Anonymous? o.0 I've always seen them as being "script kiddies" but they are always able to do more than I thought. Who knew they could free one of them from a drug cartel?
redstripe 15y ago
The BBC commissioned a study [1] that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. This from a public domain "brand". Meanwhile companies like Disney lobby for perpetual copyright to protect their own interest at the cost of all the lost opportunities that will never exist. I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses. I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367
- lincolnq 15y ago
  I don't think that anyone who has seriously thought about / read up on the issue considers long copyrights to be of net benefit to society. This indicates a deeper issue. However, which deeper issue it indicates is a subject of much controversy.
- moonchrome 15y ago
  >The BBC commissioned a study that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. But who cares how much it "brings in" ? Why is money the sole metric of wealth. How much value does open source provide - take linux for eg. which is used in pretty much every aspect of computing these days - from cell phones to super computers - how much value has it provided to the consumers and allowed developers/researchers/manufacturers to produce ? Apply that to every major opensource software effort, things like IDE's, servers, programming languages/compilers. If you were granted a monopoly (like some software companies are, eg. Microsoft with Android patents) would it allow you to make money ? Sure. Would it create extra value ? Nope. This is why stressing revenue, GDP and all other metrics is loosing perspective, they are a useful tool/indicator of the economy but the goal is providing value to the consumers. Screw the producers it's their job to figure out how to capitalize on their business model. Government should never protect the producer. Will the demand go away if you eliminate the IP laws ? No. So the producers will have to figure out how to create new business models that work in a new environment. You probably want to have transition phase, but instead we are doubling down on IP protection, it's getting ridiculous.
noibl 15y ago
TL;DR: As I enter my twilight years, I know that Star Wars will continue to comfort me long into my dotage. raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game. America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it. --- To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand. Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.
- Helianthus 15y ago
  That's a nice horse you have.
  - noibl 15y ago
    Feel free to say something that could actually be responded to whenever you get bored with trolling.
    - Helianthus 15y ago
      Well, editing as response to a child comment makes this comment a useless space. Cheater :(.
twainer 15y ago
Sorry, but this post is based on a false notion that intellectual property is a beneficial crutch propping up only corporations and piggybacks on the idea that destruction of entrenched interests is always regenerative. That second point is likely so - but the battle isn't about finding new corporate captains to pay creative individuals - it's about how not to pay creative individuals. I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve. I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.
- twainer 15y ago
  Enough with the cowardly and anonymous down-votes. If you've something wrong with what I've written, presumably you have a point to make of your own. Otherwise you are just confirming my point that people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality.
  - Helianthus 15y ago
    I suspect that people view your sentiment as sufficiently--forgive me--old-fashioned and out of touch as to be not worth redressing seriously. (Though to be fair, I don't really like HN's downvote culture either. I didn't downvote you.) The main reason I'm posting is to direct you to some irony in your phrase "people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality." While it might apply to silent downvoters, it also applies to people who haven't realized the futility and cost of holding onto copyright as a legal concept.
    - 15y ago
feralchimp 15y ago
> More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk. Actually, IBM and its mainframes/midrange have continued to prosper along with all of the newer growth markets in business computing. That's not just a correction about IBM, it's fundamental to noticing that job growth in these sectors was not "created by the decline of" anything. It was created by a huge expansion in the total amount of computing value that businesses found needs to consume in the marketplace. When zero-sum your ideology is, 900 years-old you will not reach. And not stray too far OT, but this is what I dislike about the "kill hollywood" meme. There isn't anything inherently hollywood-killing about the project of expanding the meaning of media production and delivery to include new (and great!) films that aren't produced by traditional studios...and there probably shouldn't be.
draggnar 15y ago
...that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. - Ben Franklin
shingen 15y ago
It's always curious when someone rails about a big government and its encroachment on freedom. Then in the same statement, talks about the use of big government to target specific companies to damage them instead. As though you can really have your cake and eat it too when it comes to a big government. Big enough to break up AT&T, regulate IBM and Intel and Microsoft - big enough to take your freedom, silence your speech, regulate your Internet. Good luck getting something that big and power hungry to not keep getting bigger and more powerful and eventually wiping out your liberty. You give a government system $7 trillion dollars to spend regulating and growing itself, what do you think is going to happen? They're just going to be selectively hands off? You think you can negotiate with that?
- TruthElixirX 15y ago
  We just need to elect the right (See: my) people, silly.
- Kroem3r 15y ago
  There's nothing about the size of the government that limits or enhances it's power to act in the best interest of its citizenry. (You've thrown a red herring in there.) What we clearly see is that government's determination that it's simply more efficient to deal with significant (read corporate) power structures than feebly citizenly ones. This is where the limit comes from. So perhaps I'm wrong: Perhaps a larger government is more able to engage with diverse and fine-grained interests while a small government is more likely to be trapped leveraging corporate power.
- jobeirne 15y ago
  Bingo; IBM and Microsoft aren't the ones holding the gun.
peterarmstrong 15y ago
Update: This is now the newest post in the Uncensored ebook (http://leanpub.com/uncensored http://leanpub.com/uncensored) which we are producing to benefit the EFF. Thanks Reg!
abecedarius 15y ago
Good story, but the only sense in which the heroes are sure to win is that whoever wins will be deemed the heroes.
draegtun 15y ago
>> ... recall playing with punch cards in the 1960s ... And I recall still using/seeing them in the early 1980s here in UK! They were still heavily used at that time in the Market Research industry for recording data entry (of surveys). In fact the term punching is still used in the industry to this day in reference to data entry.
- Erwin 15y ago
  They still are used, but just in a digital form. We interface with some unnamed software that requires you to recode data into 80 columns, 12 possible values per word (encoded as 12 usable bits within 2 8-bit bytes -- and only one bit can be set per word). That turns some fixed-width layout into 80-column groups, with e.g. the requirement that the last 2 columns contain the card number, and the first 4 some record ID. There isn't even any meta-data for that file, so someone out there must be sitting connected to a mainframe and punching in what card 1, position 5-7 contains US State ID or somesuch, before running the cards.
  - draegtun 15y ago
    In the Market Research industry (here) this is still pretty much the de-facto standard for sending digital data between agencies! This continues to remain unchanged by time because the leading Market Research tool [1] still prefers to use data with 80 columns, 12 multiple values per col (0-9, & and -) with optional multi cards (card numbers can be in any columns and any length). [1] Software is called Quantum. Originally developed in the 1970s !
CaptainDecisive 15y ago
To continue the Star Wars analogy, the great thing about technological advancement is that as sooner or later some unknown farm boy shows up out of nowhere and bulls-eyes the fucking exhaust port and then, sha-boom, everything changes. And the powers that be never see it coming. Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.
dasil003 15y ago
On a tangential note, I'm wary of relying on the job creation argument to validate new technology. The reason being that new technology can kill jobs. Particularly as programmers, one of our main goals is to automate things that previously required warm bodies. I don't feel guilty about this because I would never want to do those jobs, but on the same token, not everyone wants to be a programmer. And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well, which is a bit scary on a personal level (though I'm not really worried about this happening in my lifetime). At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in. I do worry that our biology is not well-suited to an automated environment, but there's nothing to do but confront the problem when we come to it I guess.
- rmc 15y ago
  Although there are some jobs that are killed, there are some jobs that are created. The nett jobs is an interesting metric. Some jobs should be killed. Thanks to technological innovation, less people don't have to work in fields collecting food. More people can work indoors etc.
- acuozzo 15y ago
  > And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well ... At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in. I agree and I'd like to provoke further discussion on a related matter. (Please note that I haven't yet decided whether or not I agree with the following two statements.) 1. Jobs don't matter as much in a GMI[1] system. 2. Working doesn't have to be the focus of one's life. I'd appreciate it if someone were to play devil's advocate. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income
mathattack 15y ago
Every business likes to buy from perfect competition and sell as a monopoly. This keeps input prices low and output prices high. This model is so profitable that companies bribe politicians to maintain it. Donating to a SuperPAC is more cost effective than R and D and has anshoeter payback. I see 2 ways of fighting this: 1) Civil disobedience - Pirate everything and share while willingly accepting the consequences. 2) Shine lights on the evil doers. Support wiki leaks. Publicize. Organize voting drives. I have bills to pay so I support number two. Great social change requires number 1.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > Great social change requires number 1. Movie studios and the recording industry can, at best, delay the inevitable. Artificial scarcities are against the laws of thermodynamics. Of all the money these industries make, only the tiniest fraction of it goes to the people who actually produced the good. Most of it is inefficiently applied in side operations such as promoting sales, manufacturing the physical support for the art, moving and storing it and selling it. All these operations can be reduced to a download and, perhaps, a payment.
  - mathattack 15y ago
    Fair points though the Internet delivery model won't make advertising or sales promortion go away. More efficient, yes, but not gone.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Any quantitative change of a couple orders of magnitude brings along a qualitative change.
agentultra 15y ago
The new technology will always replace the old despite the attempts to safeguard the latter by those with vested interests. It happened to the scribes when the printing press arrived; To the telegraph when the phone came along; to radio, records, and even television. Big companies with a lot at stake tried their best to prevent new technology from invading their markets and putting them out of business. The only one that I think is different is the development of the mobile phone and tablet computers. These are devices that are sold with locks on them and legislation that discourages tampering. I don't think we've seen this kind of thing happen before and it sets a bad precedent. I've got a Kindle and I don't really believe that I own it -- Amazon can remotely remove content from it and brick it if they wanted to. I've got a phone that that has the capability to spy on me. If I modify any of these devices to serve my interests I risk "bricking" them and voiding any warranties that they came with. Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik that's a first for us.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
This is a beautiful, haunting essay brimming with sobering insights: "At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."
shoham 15y ago
But the focus is rarely on the inventors themselves. This is the hardest job of all! Consumers tend to get what they want, and eat what they're given. If we're not supporting "starving artists" what's the point in having a more open copyright regime?
jarnix 15y ago
I hate this kind of titles, unclear about what you're going to read, it looks like Reddit but without the fun.
chasingtheflow 15y ago
"If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1."
rmk 15y ago
Excellent article, but I found this paragraph unclear: " And that’s just how they run politics. If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1. And I noticed earlier, the electoral motivator has been damaged. It's impossible to go to political innovation speed. "
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
c3ouieu28763 15y ago
You are wrong and I am 'insulted.' My name is C3pio- the descendant of the famous - infamous Chinese poet. My model is chinese-american, duty lifetime 55+, similar environment. Of course, I have worked for wall street, nuke plants and dot com or dot boombs, but aint rich. 1.on the final rocketship ride the robot sacrifices himself in the position of 'rear gunner.' The death star is stopped. 2.diverse, strange discussion is helpful. 3.Confucious saying I meet three class of persons: one I learn from as role model one I learn as ANTI-model, to avoid his bad character one I learn from to be amused and just happy - that is C3Pio 4.of course, my character is resurrected in the MATRIX 5.unlike the droids that lack COURAGE, COURAGE is the universal PROTOCOL. Call it faith, hope, being a small bit player on the SHAKESPEAREAN stage of life. Shame on you! Without your early pathetic experiences with phone MODEMS and secretly reading '2600' and MEETING CAPTAIN CRUNCH at the germany rave you would not be the DROID...errror MAN or human that you are. My the BUDDHA be with you! and may you be re-incarnated as a small insect flying droid. One that takes down the preadator drones. The battle of empire continues. afterword: thats to my Czech cousins. RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. Many think C3pio is talking in modem. WRONG again. He talks in protocol-hybrid-neo-Czech.
lists 15y ago
There's also the problem that IP law is premised on what amounts to folk psychology.
rooshdi 15y ago
I have a bad feeling too...but for different reasons. I fear society just doesn't give a damn anymore. I fear all our warnings will steadily fall on deaf ears and we will eventually become ostracized into oblivion. I fear humanity will embrace a system which pushes profits before people, ego over empathy, and lust above love. I fear elitists will eliminate innovation and erase the integrity of the internet and information. I fear for our future, but I have some hope in knowing their future fears us. Game on.

629 points by llambda 15y ago

jessa 15y ago

May the force be with you.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

asynchronous13 15y ago

Sadly, I'm more incline to think we're at the beginning of Act II.

anxrn 15y ago

This, very much so. "At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy has been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies." I would extrapolate this to progress in free societies at any given point in history. Oddly, this evokes a strange feeling of comfort in the inevitability of disruption.

tnicola 15y ago

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrelevant. It is, however, infectious. Facebook is following suit and (I hope) it won't be long before we all realize that the doze of benevolence will get you far. And by that I don't mean philantropy. 1) Don't charge people more than you have to. Make money, by all means, even get rich, but don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition. 2) Pay your employees well and create positive work environments. Happy people remain working hard and make you more money at a nice and organic rate. 3) Loyalty is no longer a virtue of an employee. It is a privilege earned by an employer. Don't be a DB and expect people to stick around and work hard for your just cause you are putting bread on their families tables. That worked in the 50's. Get on with the program. 4) Share the profits with your employees, share the innovation with your customers and don't be afraid to try new things even if they appear to hurt your bottom line. You will never know until you try it. 5) Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires (I intentionally did not use a word needs here. (This is where I will exit on this one.) I could go on. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but something (my gut) tells me that if we are in Act III, the good will win in the end. Doesn't it always? It's either that, or this rebel will need all the force I can get.

ebaysucks 15y ago
Please don't tell me you think one US political party is all bad and the other one is all good.
- tnicola 15y ago
  I am Canadian, so no. This was not about one country, but the whole world.
bo1024 15y ago
> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires Good luck finding one of those. More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic system rewards "evil" practices, that's what you're going to get. If you allow these "evil" companies to continue to re-design the system to reward patent trolling, snuffing out competitors with lawsuits, spying on Internet users, etc etc etc etc etc, then -- you will get a system in which the more that a company does these things, the more they thrive. If your political system allows companies that thrive to pay to bend the rules of the game in their favor, then they will not only continue to thrive but actively accelerate their success, to the detriment of the rest of the world.
- tnicola 15y ago
  > More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. 100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other. An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month. Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000. Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely. Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.

camwest 15y ago

I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity (http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book-ch14.pdf http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book...) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people. It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists. Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

olefoo 15y ago
Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet. That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.
- eternalban 15y ago
  The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.
  - zanny 15y ago
    Reminds me of the Confederacy from the prequels. Oh yeah, those are forbidden. Regardless, the Republic and Confederacy were both toys of the Emperor, so I guess Google and Firefox... Ok I'll just leave. Star Wars should be public domain though (the original 3 movies). Fuck infinite copyright.
    - sukuriant 15y ago
      I have to disagree here. George Lucas is still alive, and he wrote it.
      - nitrogen 15y ago

FourSquareToo 15y ago

Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.

jhancock 15y ago
Not sure about China. They do avoid IP rules but for purposes of bringing things under Chinese companies. Once these companies have enough value to protect in their IP (regardless of how they came to have it), they tend to look to their government for protection.
kayman 15y ago
Exactly. GOod luck enforcing IP rules in China. Your only choice is to out-innovate, not out-sue
- alain94040 15y ago
  Actually your more likely choice is to copy (http://blog.foundrs.com/2012/01/02/apple-vs-samsung-the-trolls-win/ http://blog.foundrs.com/2012/01/02/apple-vs-samsung-the-trol...). We won't be necessarily better off in a world with no IP protection.
  - FourSquareToo 15y ago
    It's fascinating to imagine what the tech world might look like with no (or radically different) IP laws. I doubt it would be anywhere near as simple as the blog author makes out.
meow 15y ago
Software patents are already not valid in India. So no patent on implementing one-click buying. On the other hand, no protection for mpeg family of protocols either.
regularfry 15y ago
That was precisely the US's stance a while back. Funny how things change.

SethMurphy 15y ago

This artical is dead on. With this as motivation, we should all be more like Stallman and un-marginalize his point of view. His point of view is also mostly dead on, and always has been ... We can not let the mighty few rule the majority, it is not the way the internet was envisioned to be, and we should fight for it to remain as envisioned. In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of an internet service, it should be free. Unlike Stallman, I do believe in a bit of capitalism, but a majority of freedom.

tnicola 15y ago
And if I lived in the US, where my daily internet activity would be considered a felony, I would consider it a grave injustice that I had to pay more than companies' cost +10% for the internet service. As it stands, I don't pay for the TV service, so I have no problem paying going rates. (I'll let you deduct the rest and plead the 5th).

knowtheory 15y ago

I have only one question. Who are the ewoks in this analogy?

dgritsko 15y ago
Thinking back to the collapse of SOPA/PIPA, perhaps the everyday user of the Internet? Largely ignored by the "evil empire", until the sheer magnitude of their numbers outweighed their simple techniques (phone calls, faxes, letters to legislators) and proved overwhelming. That might be a bit of a stretch -- but in this case, I think it's warranted :)
meric 15y ago
Anonymous? o.0 I've always seen them as being "script kiddies" but they are always able to do more than I thought. Who knew they could free one of them from a drug cartel?

redstripe 15y ago

The BBC commissioned a study [1] that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. This from a public domain "brand". Meanwhile companies like Disney lobby for perpetual copyright to protect their own interest at the cost of all the lost opportunities that will never exist. I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses. I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367

lincolnq 15y ago
I don't think that anyone who has seriously thought about / read up on the issue considers long copyrights to be of net benefit to society. This indicates a deeper issue. However, which deeper issue it indicates is a subject of much controversy.
moonchrome 15y ago
>The BBC commissioned a study that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. But who cares how much it "brings in" ? Why is money the sole metric of wealth. How much value does open source provide - take linux for eg. which is used in pretty much every aspect of computing these days - from cell phones to super computers - how much value has it provided to the consumers and allowed developers/researchers/manufacturers to produce ? Apply that to every major opensource software effort, things like IDE's, servers, programming languages/compilers. If you were granted a monopoly (like some software companies are, eg. Microsoft with Android patents) would it allow you to make money ? Sure. Would it create extra value ? Nope. This is why stressing revenue, GDP and all other metrics is loosing perspective, they are a useful tool/indicator of the economy but the goal is providing value to the consumers. Screw the producers it's their job to figure out how to capitalize on their business model. Government should never protect the producer. Will the demand go away if you eliminate the IP laws ? No. So the producers will have to figure out how to create new business models that work in a new environment. You probably want to have transition phase, but instead we are doubling down on IP protection, it's getting ridiculous.

noibl 15y ago

TL;DR: As I enter my twilight years, I know that Star Wars will continue to comfort me long into my dotage. raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game. America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it. --- To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand. Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.

Helianthus 15y ago
That's a nice horse you have.
- noibl 15y ago
  Feel free to say something that could actually be responded to whenever you get bored with trolling.
  - Helianthus 15y ago
    Well, editing as response to a child comment makes this comment a useless space. Cheater :(.

twainer 15y ago

Sorry, but this post is based on a false notion that intellectual property is a beneficial crutch propping up only corporations and piggybacks on the idea that destruction of entrenched interests is always regenerative. That second point is likely so - but the battle isn't about finding new corporate captains to pay creative individuals - it's about how not to pay creative individuals. I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve. I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.

twainer 15y ago
Enough with the cowardly and anonymous down-votes. If you've something wrong with what I've written, presumably you have a point to make of your own. Otherwise you are just confirming my point that people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality.
- Helianthus 15y ago
  I suspect that people view your sentiment as sufficiently--forgive me--old-fashioned and out of touch as to be not worth redressing seriously. (Though to be fair, I don't really like HN's downvote culture either. I didn't downvote you.) The main reason I'm posting is to direct you to some irony in your phrase "people don't like any ripple in the construction of their own reality." While it might apply to silent downvoters, it also applies to people who haven't realized the futility and cost of holding onto copyright as a legal concept.
  - 15y ago

feralchimp 15y ago

> More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk. Actually, IBM and its mainframes/midrange have continued to prosper along with all of the newer growth markets in business computing. That's not just a correction about IBM, it's fundamental to noticing that job growth in these sectors was not "created by the decline of" anything. It was created by a huge expansion in the total amount of computing value that businesses found needs to consume in the marketplace. When zero-sum your ideology is, 900 years-old you will not reach. And not stray too far OT, but this is what I dislike about the "kill hollywood" meme. There isn't anything inherently hollywood-killing about the project of expanding the meaning of media production and delivery to include new (and great!) films that aren't produced by traditional studios...and there probably shouldn't be.

draggnar 15y ago

...that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. - Ben Franklin

shingen 15y ago

It's always curious when someone rails about a big government and its encroachment on freedom. Then in the same statement, talks about the use of big government to target specific companies to damage them instead. As though you can really have your cake and eat it too when it comes to a big government. Big enough to break up AT&T, regulate IBM and Intel and Microsoft - big enough to take your freedom, silence your speech, regulate your Internet. Good luck getting something that big and power hungry to not keep getting bigger and more powerful and eventually wiping out your liberty. You give a government system $7 trillion dollars to spend regulating and growing itself, what do you think is going to happen? They're just going to be selectively hands off? You think you can negotiate with that?

TruthElixirX 15y ago
We just need to elect the right (See: my) people, silly.
Kroem3r 15y ago
There's nothing about the size of the government that limits or enhances it's power to act in the best interest of its citizenry. (You've thrown a red herring in there.) What we clearly see is that government's determination that it's simply more efficient to deal with significant (read corporate) power structures than feebly citizenly ones. This is where the limit comes from. So perhaps I'm wrong: Perhaps a larger government is more able to engage with diverse and fine-grained interests while a small government is more likely to be trapped leveraging corporate power.
jobeirne 15y ago
Bingo; IBM and Microsoft aren't the ones holding the gun.

peterarmstrong 15y ago

Update: This is now the newest post in the Uncensored ebook (http://leanpub.com/uncensored http://leanpub.com/uncensored) which we are producing to benefit the EFF. Thanks Reg!

abecedarius 15y ago

Good story, but the only sense in which the heroes are sure to win is that whoever wins will be deemed the heroes.

draegtun 15y ago

>> ... recall playing with punch cards in the 1960s ... And I recall still using/seeing them in the early 1980s here in UK! They were still heavily used at that time in the Market Research industry for recording data entry (of surveys). In fact the term punching is still used in the industry to this day in reference to data entry.

Erwin 15y ago
They still are used, but just in a digital form. We interface with some unnamed software that requires you to recode data into 80 columns, 12 possible values per word (encoded as 12 usable bits within 2 8-bit bytes -- and only one bit can be set per word). That turns some fixed-width layout into 80-column groups, with e.g. the requirement that the last 2 columns contain the card number, and the first 4 some record ID. There isn't even any meta-data for that file, so someone out there must be sitting connected to a mainframe and punching in what card 1, position 5-7 contains US State ID or somesuch, before running the cards.
- draegtun 15y ago
  In the Market Research industry (here) this is still pretty much the de-facto standard for sending digital data between agencies! This continues to remain unchanged by time because the leading Market Research tool [1] still prefers to use data with 80 columns, 12 multiple values per col (0-9, & and -) with optional multi cards (card numbers can be in any columns and any length). [1] Software is called Quantum. Originally developed in the 1970s !

CaptainDecisive 15y ago

To continue the Star Wars analogy, the great thing about technological advancement is that as sooner or later some unknown farm boy shows up out of nowhere and bulls-eyes the fucking exhaust port and then, sha-boom, everything changes. And the powers that be never see it coming. Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.

dasil003 15y ago

On a tangential note, I'm wary of relying on the job creation argument to validate new technology. The reason being that new technology can kill jobs. Particularly as programmers, one of our main goals is to automate things that previously required warm bodies. I don't feel guilty about this because I would never want to do those jobs, but on the same token, not everyone wants to be a programmer. And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well, which is a bit scary on a personal level (though I'm not really worried about this happening in my lifetime). At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in. I do worry that our biology is not well-suited to an automated environment, but there's nothing to do but confront the problem when we come to it I guess.

rmc 15y ago
Although there are some jobs that are killed, there are some jobs that are created. The nett jobs is an interesting metric. Some jobs should be killed. Thanks to technological innovation, less people don't have to work in fields collecting food. More people can work indoors etc.
acuozzo 15y ago
> And in the long term if we ever achieve AI then we're on the path to making programmers obsolete as well ... At a societal level this is not necessarily good or bad, it's just the direction we are currently moving in. I agree and I'd like to provoke further discussion on a related matter. (Please note that I haven't yet decided whether or not I agree with the following two statements.) 1. Jobs don't matter as much in a GMI[1] system. 2. Working doesn't have to be the focus of one's life. I'd appreciate it if someone were to play devil's advocate. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

mathattack 15y ago

Every business likes to buy from perfect competition and sell as a monopoly. This keeps input prices low and output prices high. This model is so profitable that companies bribe politicians to maintain it. Donating to a SuperPAC is more cost effective than R and D and has anshoeter payback. I see 2 ways of fighting this: 1) Civil disobedience - Pirate everything and share while willingly accepting the consequences. 2) Shine lights on the evil doers. Support wiki leaks. Publicize. Organize voting drives. I have bills to pay so I support number two. Great social change requires number 1.

rbanffy 15y ago
> Great social change requires number 1. Movie studios and the recording industry can, at best, delay the inevitable. Artificial scarcities are against the laws of thermodynamics. Of all the money these industries make, only the tiniest fraction of it goes to the people who actually produced the good. Most of it is inefficiently applied in side operations such as promoting sales, manufacturing the physical support for the art, moving and storing it and selling it. All these operations can be reduced to a download and, perhaps, a payment.
- mathattack 15y ago
  Fair points though the Internet delivery model won't make advertising or sales promortion go away. More efficient, yes, but not gone.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Any quantitative change of a couple orders of magnitude brings along a qualitative change.

agentultra 15y ago

The new technology will always replace the old despite the attempts to safeguard the latter by those with vested interests. It happened to the scribes when the printing press arrived; To the telegraph when the phone came along; to radio, records, and even television. Big companies with a lot at stake tried their best to prevent new technology from invading their markets and putting them out of business. The only one that I think is different is the development of the mobile phone and tablet computers. These are devices that are sold with locks on them and legislation that discourages tampering. I don't think we've seen this kind of thing happen before and it sets a bad precedent. I've got a Kindle and I don't really believe that I own it -- Amazon can remotely remove content from it and brick it if they wanted to. I've got a phone that that has the capability to spy on me. If I modify any of these devices to serve my interests I risk "bricking" them and voiding any warranties that they came with. Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik that's a first for us.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

This is a beautiful, haunting essay brimming with sobering insights: "At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies."

shoham 15y ago

But the focus is rarely on the inventors themselves. This is the hardest job of all! Consumers tend to get what they want, and eat what they're given. If we're not supporting "starving artists" what's the point in having a more open copyright regime?

jarnix 15y ago

I hate this kind of titles, unclear about what you're going to read, it looks like Reddit but without the fun.

chasingtheflow 15y ago

"If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1."

rmk 15y ago

Excellent article, but I found this paragraph unclear: " And that’s just how they run politics. If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1. And I noticed earlier, the electoral motivator has been damaged. It's impossible to go to political innovation speed. "

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

c3ouieu28763 15y ago

You are wrong and I am 'insulted.' My name is C3pio- the descendant of the famous - infamous Chinese poet. My model is chinese-american, duty lifetime 55+, similar environment. Of course, I have worked for wall street, nuke plants and dot com or dot boombs, but aint rich. 1.on the final rocketship ride the robot sacrifices himself in the position of 'rear gunner.' The death star is stopped. 2.diverse, strange discussion is helpful. 3.Confucious saying I meet three class of persons: one I learn from as role model one I learn as ANTI-model, to avoid his bad character one I learn from to be amused and just happy - that is C3Pio 4.of course, my character is resurrected in the MATRIX 5.unlike the droids that lack COURAGE, COURAGE is the universal PROTOCOL. Call it faith, hope, being a small bit player on the SHAKESPEAREAN stage of life. Shame on you! Without your early pathetic experiences with phone MODEMS and secretly reading '2600' and MEETING CAPTAIN CRUNCH at the germany rave you would not be the DROID...errror MAN or human that you are. My the BUDDHA be with you! and may you be re-incarnated as a small insect flying droid. One that takes down the preadator drones. The battle of empire continues. afterword: thats to my Czech cousins. RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. Many think C3pio is talking in modem. WRONG again. He talks in protocol-hybrid-neo-Czech.

lists 15y ago

There's also the problem that IP law is premised on what amounts to folk psychology.

rooshdi 15y ago

I have a bad feeling too...but for different reasons. I fear society just doesn't give a damn anymore. I fear all our warnings will steadily fall on deaf ears and we will eventually become ostracized into oblivion. I fear humanity will embrace a system which pushes profits before people, ego over empathy, and lust above love. I fear elitists will eliminate innovation and erase the integrity of the internet and information. I fear for our future, but I have some hope in knowing their future fears us. Game on.