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The battle is quite a bit broader than that - this is the battle of people that are just now figuring out the full implications of "Turing Complete", and how no

• hellbanner 12y ago
  I hadn't seen the secondtalk, thank you! HN, please share this essay and links with your network! Educate!
• digi_owl 12y ago
  Is the second one seems to be the same that he held at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
  • pdkl95 12y ago
    He gave the same talk at several locations (not just DEFCON and Google) - I linked the DEFCON 20 version because I think it is slightly better in a couple places, due to the security-focused audience. I believe they are largely the same, with only a couple minor differences.
• api 12y ago
  I generally agree, but I hate to be one of the only people on HN who ever brings this up: If there is no way to restrict piracy, and if piracy is generally normalized and socially acceptable, then how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything? This has some pretty severe and dystopian secondary consequences. It doesn't mean that nobody will pay to have information created. It just means that the customer will not be the reader/viewer/consumer of that information. Instead, the customer will be advertisers, propagandists, governments, religious factions, special interest groups, etc. Content will never be created for primary reasons ("for the art," journalistic integrity, etc.) but for secondary reasons (marketing, state propaganda). This is really a variation of the whole "free is a lie" theme. I really encourage people to watch this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A If Facebook and Google being free means you are the product rather than the customer, then the same thing applies to books, movies, music, etc. What I really keep trying to get people to grasp here is that piracy is disempowering. If you're not paying, you don't matter. Nothing will be made for you, with your interests or enjoyment in mind. Instead it will be made for whomever is paying, and will play to their interests, not yours. Nothing is free. You either pay for things, or things pay for you. On the hardware front, I fail to see how we can possibly create an alternative hardware/OS ecosystem that empowers the user if users are not willing to pay for it. Innovation, production, and capital follows the money. If users aren't willing to pay for a platform that empowers them, someone else will instead drive the future of computing by paying for a platform that disempowers the consumer. I think this is exactly what we're seeing.
  • pdkl95 12y ago
    > Nothing is free. Did you not get the whole concept of "digital"? Information most certainly is free. It's getting someone to make the specific types of information you want that costs money. Of course there are ways of restricting copyright infringement: laws respect for the legal system. A monopoly on the distribution is a powerful thing - it gives you a fairly easy civil case against anybody who violates that monopoly. What it doesn't do is grant you free enforcement of that monopoly, nor does it guarantee that someone will actually buy your product. Just because you want to make some type of art doesn't mean others actually want it or that it is worth any amount of funding >0. Also, you seem to be under the impression that money (profit motive) is the only way stuff gets created, which is patently incorrect. "disempowering"? Did you watch those talks? (mainly #2) This is about human rights that the arts should not trump just because they want to assert some new type of "property right" simply because they have devised some sort of technical trick to that tries to enforce some aspect of their monopoly. To continue the example used by Doctorow, just because you have a copyright or patent on the software that runs a cochlear implant, you shouldn't be automatically able to extend those monopolies to override the wishes of the person who actually has the cochlear implant surgically inserted into their skull. Restrictions - limiting someone's uses - are trivial to talk about when the copyright is on some movie that isn't really important, so some people have accepted the DRM argument for movies. The point of Doctorow's talk is that the concept of restrictions becomes VERY different when you're talking about repossessing someone's legs or hearing. A lot of this issue comes down to the propaganda that has been used by the media industry over the last few decades. They created the incorrect term "Intellectual Property", when property rights are not what the government grants you when you get a copyright or patent. You get some legal rights, which is fine. You get an easy civil court case. The current effort is to try and extend that limited, specific purpose monopoly into other areas by claiming that your movie, book, song, or software is "property". Being "property" is important, because it is a lot easier to make a case that your property should be defended by force. We defend traditional property because it is finite (aka a "scarce resource"). Government granted fictions don't need such protection, as they already have it by definition! Now, you're worried about how interesting art and such will be created, and the answer to that is simple: the same ways it has always been created, and if you're clever, some new ways. It is easy to use Kickstarter as an example of new ways to fund things, but the cool, really interesting ways haven't even been invented yet. I realize that this is probably a hard and risky business, but a copyright doesn't mean you should be able to remove that risk by break the general purpose computer. A copyright doesn't mean you should be able to get rights beyond the first sale and the ability to sue people that distribute your monopoly protected works, just because you found some technical trick (DRM) to make that distribution initially difficult. Being able to sue someone doesn't mean you're entitled to have the government any enforcement costs. Most importantly, that same copyright doesn't grant you a market or audience or any kind of guaranteed income, nor should it trump any *human rights". It will be hard for a while, as new styles of funding are explored. Many musicians have already moved back to a live-performance model, with patronage being used in some areas. I suggest that anybody thinking that restrictions (DRM) are necessary instead focus their time and money on changing to a new funding model - or inventing one - instead of wasting that their time and money trying to prop up pre-general-purpose-computer business models.
• wolfgke 12y ago
  > but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. Is there a transcript available?