Exactly Right

User, frustrated by the DRM not working on his computer, and the fingerpointing between MS and the studios, describes from his viewpoint the result of the implemented DRM technologies:

The irony in all of this, is that the DRM that Hollywood is so much in love with, is really only harming their paying customers. When you do a DRM reset, it’s not your pirated files that get revoked, it’s the ones that you already paid for that are at risk. I’m not allowed to watch low res Netflix files, even though I have the capability to download high def torrents? How does this even make sense? It’s as if the studios want their digital strategies to fail.

It’s the Process, stupid…

A great post by Linux Torvalds [to linux.kernel newsgroup] that I’d read today, (Somebody had it on their blog, but I really don’t remember where, sorry!) and am reposting here. Three reasons: (1) It’s one of those great biological metaphors* and (2) it connects with the point I had made before about a passage in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse & most importantly, (3) So I can find it again when I am looking for it! Here’s Linus replying to a critique that Linux is making progress through “sheer luck”:

Shot-gun patents

As a follow-up to the post of March 2007, The System IS the Sickness here’s an interesting report by the Sunshine Project which sums up some of the issues concerning patents for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, otherwise known as “Bird Flu.” It seems that some companies are patenting whole sequences of any Bird Flu virus sample that WHO or the CDC sends them, hoping by a kind of shot-gun strategy, to come out with a winning ticket in the patent lottery. They haven’t analyzed any of these sequences at all, they are just patenting them as the sequence them.  Indonesia, as I had noted last March, is unsure why it should contribute information that WHO hands over to the CDC who in turn hands that sample over to an American Pharma Company, who will extract royalties from whoever ends up producing the vaccine. There is no offer on the table to share royalties based on the information Indonesia provided with Indonesia, or to release that information into the public domain, so any company could use it. Indonesia could end up being unable to afford the treatments that their samples were instrumental in creating.

The report is a good summary and is especially interesting when it discusses how the science interacts with the legal/patent framework.

Throwing the book at the copyright maximalists

Books, because they are so much more useful and browsable than their digital equivalents, have not been hurt at all by digital piracy. Of course, even that fact didn’t stop the IP maximalists over at IP Central, who tried to instigate an astroturf campaign to enlist authors in their copyright maximalist strategy, which is to make the very technologies to distribute files illegal. It didn’t work, BTW. Perhaps authors know a little better than to surrender their freedom of the press?

So there are several authors who are giving away their books as free digital downloads, and have seen their real-world sales increase. Of course there was Richard Stallman’s Free as in Freedom as well as Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, as well as Bill Mitchell’s ground-breaking (for 1995) City of Bits. But each of those books were topically related to their distribution via the internet.  And who could forget Eastern Standard Tribe?

These books are both different–typical efforts at publishing, recognizing the fact that “obscurity is a much greater threat than piracy.”

Hat tip: Against Monopoly

Tim Lee is on the right track

Over at TLF, Tim Lee is raising all the right issues in his (incidental) discussion of the reasons why Libertarians have trusted big corporations more than big government. That’s something of an understatement–Libertarians have generally suspected big government of the worst possible things, while bending over backwards to make excuses for corporations when they do something that trespasses individual freedoms.

Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom noted that Libertarians have a habit of making certain informational exclusions, seeing the importance of procedural freedoms (freedom of the press, for example), and ignoring the lack of substantive freedoms (freedom from involuntary starvation, for example). I see the same pattern in Tim’s post–the issues he raises are right, but there’s information missing. My goal in this post is to supply the missing information, so you can judge for yourself whether corporations pose the risk I think they do. To be clear, I am no fan of big government, but am concerned right now with the freedoms that are being destroyed by corporations. Sometimes government and corporations are acting in concert, against individual freedoms, but it’s almost always clear who’s in the driver’s seat when that’s happening. So at a certain point, the choice of big government or big corporations is just a tactical decision of those who would oppress.

So, Tim says in his post:

During the 20th Century, policy debates often centered on power struggles between governments and corporations. The capital-intensive nature of a lot of industries meant that in many cases, policies that reduced government power often meant that corporations had a large influence over peoples’ lives. As libertarians, we pointed out the advantages of this arrangement: first and foremost, you have a choice about which businesses to patronize, but no choice about whether to deal with the government….. And of course, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the largest corporations, so even if raw “bigness” is your only concern, concentrations of government power should concern you a lot more than concentrations of corporate power.