Searching for background info for a forthcoming post on a boring topic that should be forgotten, I found the research of Michael Curtotti, and was tickled to find he also has papers on human rights and freedom of movement, and runs a website called abolishforeignness.org.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent the closest approximation to an open world in modern times. … With immigration restrictions at a minimum, real freedom of international movement was a fact. The right of personal self-determination was reasonably secure for residents of Europe and the Americas, if not for other peoples ruled by them. Passports, which had fallen into disuse in much of the West, were required only in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Bosnia/Herzegovina.
Why were borders then closed? In part Curtotti writes:
The growing influence on public policy of racist ideologies seeking to promote racially segregated national communities – including by excluding all regarded as incompatible with the prevailing racially defined national character.
All the more ironic:
We may note also further explicit and implicit reservation of state freedom in regard of freedom of movement and citizenship. The International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination provides that the Convention does not prohibit discrimination between citizens and non-citizens. Further matters of citizenship, nationalisation or naturalisation remain at the free discretion of the state (subject to the requirement of non-discrimination between non-citizens) (art 1.2, 1.3). This is of course an extraordinary provision in such a Convention. It suggests that a state has virtually no obligations of “non-discrimination†to persons outside the legal and geographical boundaries of the state – notwithstanding the correlation between race and nationality, the fact that historically many states have racially discriminated to influence their ethnic composition and that the very idea of the nation-state is strongly linked to the idea of race and ethnicity. The explicit inclusion of such exemptions of course merely serves to underline that the drafters were well aware of the correlation between race and citizenship. Discrimination against foreigners is given international legal sanction by this Convention.
Curtotti concludes noting the tension between state prerogative and the universality of human rights, and that discussion, then recognition of freedom of movement as a fundamental human right, rather than an glaring exception, can be the beginning of a very long process of rights implementation.
I hope to soon read and review the rest of Curtotti’s papers, and everything on abolishforeignness.org. As noted a few months ago, I also want to read and review all of openborders.info. It appears these two group sites come from different perspectives: Open Borders, libertarian/negative rights/economics; Abolish Foreignness, progressive/positive rights/humanitarian. That’s good: all sorts of arguments are needed to abolish the monster of international apartheid.
Take this as an indication that running a large mailing list hosting service, and keeping it relatively free of spam, is very hard. Google Groups is unlikely to be shut down anytime soon, but maybe all messages and groups will be migrated to Google+ posts and communities, respectively. Lots of people would hate that, but Google controls the identifiers (this is probably most immediately pertinent), transitioning ownership or stewardship of services is hard, and the software isn’t free (but, at least non-software copyright may not be much of a practical obstacle; has anyone ever been threatened or actually prevented from mirroring mailing list archives?). The world would move on.
Two other amusing but less indicative of anything about the service screenshots of Gmail, from 2009.
If you want FLOSS alternatives to GMail and Google Groups, commercial ones include MyKolab and OnlineGroups respectively. Both are expensive; a post explaining why MyKolab is. If you’re politically aligned, Riseup provides mail and lists (their NSA statement; I’m surprised I haven’t seen the string alternastructure until now). Mailman 3⸮ And if you want everything to move to social-networky-but-free platforms, not much has changed since 3 months ago.
I vaguely recall in 1997 when David Bowie issued celebrity bonds, recently chronicled at a fan blog. I didn’t see them as a big deal: celebrity artists already had front-loaded payment via contract with record or other media companies, and their catalogs trade-able via ownership by the same, mostly public, companies. I suspect that despite the gimmick of individual celebrity bonds not taking off, an even larger proportion of such artists’ careers are effectively securitized these days, as their contracts with public companies are broader in scope (360 deals, covering live performance and everything else, in addition to recording sales and licensing). Am I wrong?
I recall more clearly a 2002 Bowie quote mentioned by the fan blog:
The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing…Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.
A lot of ambiguity and contradiction can be read into that quote, but “I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years” taken alone is unambiguous, and turned out to be totally wrong. I didn’t think Bowie’s prediction was sound in 2002. Had I written down a prediction in 2002, it probably would’ve involved muddling along, with only minor differences from my prediction of last year. But I may not have expected essentially no change at all, in any direction.
In hindsight, this is unsurprising: the free/open/[semi]commons has offered zero product (noting that the product is marketing and distribution, not cultural works) competition to proprietary popular culture, and near zero policy competition, excepting last minute rearguard actions. Both “sides” have stayed well within their comfort zones, far from changing copyright (utilitarian works, digital delivery of locked-down entertainment). What trend I can make out does not look good: innovation is happening faster on the locked-down delivery side, in part because that side has less of a problem with a vision of info regulation constrained to the domain of copyright, and it doesn’t have an informal side which largely serves as a marketing and price discrimination mechanism for its opposite.
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It was and is sad that the first thing to come to mind regarding the “absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music” is with regard to copyrestriction rents rather than changes in what one hears due to culture and technology (eg new genres and instruments), admitting there is an interplay, especially among industry and culture.
One idle speculation about this interplay I’ve made for many years, but don’t recall writing about: to what extent has copyrestriction, through encouraging the creation of new works with exclusive rents, made culture less shared — not only in the sense that all cannot access and use the culture around them — but also in the sense of being more fragmented across subcultures, and especially across generations? At the same time, copyrestriction probably encourages mass spectacle, which is anti-fragmentary, though distasteful to me.
But I’m fairly confident that however we muddle through the future of info regulation — even in the unlikely event of copyrestriction dystopia or abolition (perhaps dystopia from the perspective of copyright advocates; I would love to see a dystopian future story from that perspective) — the sounds enjoyed by many will both be very different from those enjoyed today, but also not at all a transformation of everything we ever thought about music.
Rob Kaye of MusicBrainz writes about their RDFa dilemma. My summary of the short post and comments:
Someone paid to have RDFa added to MusicBrainz pages a few years ago.
The code adding RDFa is brittle, hasn’t been maintained through MusicBrainz schema changes, thus is now broken.
There are no known consumers the RDFa in MusicBrainz pages.
Unless someone volunteers to fix and maintain the RDFa, “we’re ready to remove the broken code from our pages in an effort to remove technical debt that has accumulated over the past few years.”
A few people want RDFa in MusicBrainz pages maintained because “Very long term I think this is a sensible way forward – the web site as its own API” and compatibility with other semantic web initiatives.
Some people tentatively volunteer to help.
Kaye’s post is a model for how to remove features — inform the relevant community, ask if anyone cares and is willing to maintain the feature in question. This could be applied in a commercial context, eg asking customers if they’re willing to pay to maintain a feature or to keep a service alive. It is somewhat odd that transaction costs are high enough/coordination poor enough that such is not as commonplace as feature removal and service shutdown.
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I’ve long liked the notion of the web site as its own API, to the extent of feeling a strong dislike for many RPC APIs for web applications, and like RDFa, but mostly I think most metadata implementation is premature, and as with choosing a metadata format, it is best to just ignore it till there’s an unambiguous and immediate gain to be had from implementation.
People pitching metadata as a solution, public or private good, are frighteningly like SEO pushers, except usually not evil. The likeness is that the benefits are vague, confusing, apparently require experts to discern and implement, and almost everyone would be better off wholly ignoring the pitchers/pushers.
I apologize for doing a bit of pitching over the years, wasting people’s time, making whatever I was actually trying to sell more difficult, lowering my intelligence (had I woken up on the other side of the bed some day, I’d have been pitching another layer of snakeoil) and adding technical debt to the world.
Mitigating all this: there’s often no clear separation of “data” and “metadata”. It’s all data of course..
Perhaps people who prefix with “meta” are another class deserving a punch in the face. Note that Kaye’s post does not include the string “meta”; I’m just exploiting the appearance of “technical debt” and “RDFa” in the same text here!
A couple months ago La Quadrature du Net opened a fundraising campaign. I appreciated that they placed a very easy to understand and very revealing version of their annual budget right on their main fundraising page.
This should be feasible for arbitrarily large organizations, but to maintain the revealing feature, a drill-down page may be necessary. Sure, one can criticize the choice of chart, or that this is presented as a bitmap, but those are minor details. The information is useful and revealing, and I suspect being capable (operationally and politically) to provide useful and revealing info directly is a positive indicator of organizational health. Donors to organizations that claim to stand for anything like transparency should accept nothing less.
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The Ada Initiative has one day remaining in its fundraising drive (donate page). I’ve never seen a better executed blog-why-you-support-us effort. Examples below; even if they don’t convince you that blogging is relevant again, they might convince you to donate to Ada Initiative:
“Executed” is perhaps the wrong word: such strong and personal calls speak to the organization and its constituency being very clear about what the organization is trying to do and how it is doing it. Without this clarity, it is basically impossible to achieve anything but muddled and weak messages, from the organization itself, nevermind its constituency.
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I don’t know how effectively LQDN’s constituency is helping it fundraise (I would not expect to, as it’d be mostly in French) nor do I know if Ada Initiative publishes any budget info (I didn’t look hard), but my point is to highlight how well each does on a particular aspect of fundraising, not to evaluate other aspects — though to repeat, I think getting either of these particular aspects right probably indicates a lot of other things are right. Copy rightness.
A Penny for Your Thoughts by Talllama is the winner, unanimously selected by the jury. It’s a fun transposition of exactly today’s copyright and debates (including wild mischaracterization) into a future with mind uploading. Quotes:
“My mom and dad would get upset at me.” He sent her a copy of his anxiety.
“Well my dad says copyright is stupid,” Helen said, sending back an emotion that was pitying yet vaguely contemptuous. “He says anyone who won’t pirate is a dummy.”
Timothy scowled at her. “My dad says that piracy is stealing.”
“My dad and I have trillions of books and thoughts, so we know better than you,” Helen said.
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“You see, Timothy,” his father continued, “If people didn’t have an incentive to think or dream, they wouldn’t. And then no one would have any new thoughts. Everyone would stop thinking because there wouldn’t be any money in it.”
“But you said people had thoughts in 1920 even though there was no copyright.”
“Yes, you’re right. What I mean is that there were no professional thinkers in those days.”
“It would be bad if people stopped thinking,” Timothy said.
Lucy’s Irrevocable, Colossal, Terrible Mistake by Chris Sakkas tells a story in which releasing stuff under a free license has amazing results. Unfortunately free licenses aren’t magic, and it isn’t clear to me what the story says about the future of copyright. Quote:
An alternative bookshop in Sussex, on the other side of the world to Lucy, created a video ad with her favourite song as its backing track. The ad ended with a thanks to Lucy for releasing her music under a free, libre and open licence and a hyperlink. Hundreds more people visited her site, the passive consumers of big business! They used the donate button on her site to spray her with filthy lucre.
Perfect Memory by Jacinto Dávila describes a world of 2089 mediated by perfect memory of all non-intimate events and voting for assignment of credit; copyright plays what role in such future? Quote:
[Socio-mathematics] was also the source of an unprecedented and fundamental agreement. All the stakeholders of the world came, after many unfortunate and even bloody events, to negotiate a new framework for producing and sharing common knowledge. And the basis they found was that to preserve freedom, but also the health of the whole planet and its species, that knowledge had to be shared, easily and readily, among all the stakeholders.
That led to a rebuttal of so-called intellectual property and copyright laws and their replacement with a body of global law acknowledging our common heritage, codependent future and the fundamental right of knowledge everyone has.
Copyrights in Chopin’s future by Krzysztof Blachnicki (English translation by Wojciech PÄ™dzich) has Chopin resurrected in 2015 through unspecified but expensive means, then exploited by and escaping from the current recording industry. A fun idea, but ultimately a stereotypical anti-recording-industry rant. Quote:
I hope that more people will have their own opinions instead of listening to the hissing of those snakes, sucking money out of artists to pay off their new automobiles. Wake up, folks, a good musician will earn his daily bread even if he decides to let his music go for free, for all to share. A poor man will be able to listen to real music, while a wealthy man will make the artist’s effort worthwhile. Isn’t it all about just that? Each may benefit, except the music companies which become redundant, so they turn to lies in order to keep themselves afloat.
What is an author? by refined quotes is a story in which all legal ideas are closely regulated and bland, “old art” outlawed so people consume new, legal stuff, the good stuff and real artists are underground, and with an additional twist that ideas take animal form. Quote:
You see? An artist is a little like an art producer. But he deals with the genuine ideas, as you see. He doesn’t buy them, like the law says he should. He just comes to places like this and spends his time with them. It’s a slow process. No one knows why precisely, but this crazy little ideas are in love with him, well, with all the artists.
The Ambiguous Future of Copyright by HOT TOCO is a snarky take on where copyright and computing are headed, presumably meaning to project ambiguous reception of Ubuntu/Canonical ten years into the future. Quote:
Friend2: “If I can extract info from this rant, I think Commonible, Ltd, is saying they’ve perfected trusted computing, fully protecting you from hacking and making ALL media available, fully compensating all value chains.”
Friend3 (quiet one): “I read about sth like this, Project Xanaxu. Real old stuff. The inventor thought the Web failed to transclude micropayments.”
500 Years of Copyright Law by Holovision embeds current copyright factoids in description of future eras. I can’t tell what its “Copynorm Exchange Decentralization Entente (CEDE)” regime consists of, but maybe that is also a current copyright factoid: someone reading a pamphlet describing copyright and mentioning a few acronyms (eg TRIPs) would not have much sense of the regime. Quote:
Attempts to put digital rights management into 3D printers were sooner or later unsuccessful against hardware hackers. There were open sourced 3D printers but many perceived them to be inferior to the commercially patented ones. When the commercial 3D printers were used to make other printers most companies left the marketplace. This left many still infringing the 3D printers with the excuse that the printers became “abandonware”.
Copyright Protest Song by Tom Konecki doesn’t seem to say anything about the future, but does capture various bits of complaint about the current regime. Quote:
Everybody wants only money and success
And none remembers the idea of open-access
To acquire knowledge and gather information
That is now the object of companies’ manipulation.
Copyright – Real Vision or fantastic vision? by Arkadiusz Janusz (English translation by Kuba Kwiatkowski) contains a proposal of the type “metadata and tracking will get everyone paid” explained in a parent-child lecture. Quote:
The file doesn’t contain a price, only points. In other words, the price is quoted in points. A point has a different monetary value for every country. Here, the minimum wage is about 1000 dollars. We divide the minimum wage by one thousand and receive the amount value of 1 point. If you download a movie, the server checks in which country you are, and converts the points into the appropriate price.
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That’s why in our times, pirates are at on the verge of extinction. Most frequently, they’re maniacs or followers of some strange ideologies.
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You can also read my review of last year’s future of copyright contest anthology, which links to each selection. This year’s selections are notably less dystopian and take less of a position on what the future of copyright ought be.
I enjoyed judging this year’s contest, and hope it and any future iterations achieve much greater visibility. Current copyright debates seem to me to have an incredibly short-term focus, which can’t be for the good when changes which have supposedly produced the current debate are only speeding up. Additionally, and my one complaint about the contest other than lack of fame, is that “copyright” is a deeply suboptimal frame for thinking about its, and our, future. I will try to address this point directly soon, but some of it can be read from my contest entry of last year (other forms of info regulation with different policy goals being much more pertinent than quibbling over the appropriateness of the word “copyright”).
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You may see an embedded player for the audiobook version read by me below. Some of the durations shown may be incorrect; the winner, A Penny for Your Thoughts, is actually slightly less than 15 minutes long. Sadly the player obscures the browser context menu and doesn’t provide a way to increase playback rate, so first, a default HTML5 player loaded with only the winner:
Comment by Max Read on one of many articles about the hyperloop idea promoted by Elon Musk (apparently [edit: somewhat] similar ideas have been around for awhile, including the descriptively named vactrain):
Why would we build a “hyperloop” instead of just moving everyone in America to one huge city?
We could fit basically the entire U.S. population into an area around 9,000 square miles (think New Hampshire) at the population density of Brooklyn (35,000 people per square mile), which is more than enough space for public parks and small (and even, for some, single-family) houses.
A good, comprehensive public rapid-transit system could get you from one end of the city to the other in a couple hours at most.
The rest of the country could be turned into national public wilderness and some large-scale industrialized agriculture. We could also eat bugs for protein and grow vegetable gardens.
I don’t know how serious Read is, but why not, and why only “America”? All ought have access to the opportunity and wonder of The City — the opportunity and wonder of all humans.
Though a serious part of me is serious about this, I know that only small progress is possible for now, perhaps until the em era.
Thanks to Max Read for the fun comment, however intended.
When we designed Lima, privacy was one of our main concerns.
Lima stores your files at Home. So you can be sure you own your storage. Nobody in the world can access your data, but you. And you don’t need to pay monthly fees for that. The storage technology inside Lima was designed so you can get your data back anytime, even if your Lima device is broken.
The security of your Lima device is our first priority. Like a private datacenter, your Lima is far more difficult to hack than your computer. Our team works continuously with security experts to make sure it remains so. Like high security servers, your Lima will be frequently updated with security patches to keep it unaccessible from badly intentioned governments and individuals.
This looks like very great idea. I am definately a backer. I would like to know if there is any plan to open source the code (may be some kind of stretch goal) ? Whatever described as Tech FAQ’s looks great. But without open sourcing how one could be assured that there are no backdoors in the software. This is not matter of trust but it would be great if community can review the code and find out any security risks.
That’s a friendly way to ask, but it is a matter of trust: verify instead. Commenter Markus:
Suraj, you are absolutely right. If I would be the NSA I would also create a kickstarter project and try to convince everybody that this project is the perfect anti-PRISM-tool and implement lots of backdoors and route traffic directly to the NSA. So, open source software is basically a must. But I don’t think that they can afford to make the SW open source because then you could use basically any similar device and don’t have to buy plug.
@Suraj: Markus nailed it. We are too fragile as a startup to open source our code, at least now. All the innovation in Plug is software based. However, you’ll still be able to analyze Plug in/out traffic: that’s also a good way to make sure we don’t do bad things with your data.
That’s a stunning answer. Given that this device is managing your local files with remote-updated, non-auditable software, the attack surface is huge. Now remote update of non-auditable software is commonplace, but most purveyors of such don’t market themselves as anti-PRISM solutions, like this image on the fundee’s page:
Contrast with a recent announcement from Least Authority:
We don’t even handle the source code of the client! We tell you to go download that from Debian, Ubuntu, or https://Tahoe-LAFS.org.
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We can never see your data, and you can always see our code.
Least Authority’s storage product is very different from Lima’s; but the above is excerpt ought be applicable to both as privacy-protecting products.
Apologies for the long prelude about something I’m unqualified to speculate about (security), comments about which were the first thing when I went looking for discussion of the fundee’s other answer about open source, which is also not very credible:
The only thing we manage on our side of the equations are updates of our app and the web interface of Lima. In case of company crash, we’ll do our best to open source at least the most critical parts of our code, so the community continues improving the solution every night.
Cheap talk if there ever was.
But I don’t blame the fundee, the company behind Lima; they are responding to what they see as business conditions, including lack of demand for software freedom (or open source, however you wish to characterize it) as a product feature that will change funding/purchase decisions.
Similarly, it is a bit odd, and a bit of trivia, that today’s crowdfunding services are in part descendants of ideas focused on provisioning works without copyrestrictions, but it seems that with minor exceptions, if a project produces works that are both transparent (eg revealed source or design files) and not legally restricted, it is merely a happy coincidence. Again, I don’t blame the platforms or the fundees. I (perhaps with some hubris) assign blame to people who want there to be demand for freedom for failing to stoke it, and failing to organize what exists.
Concentrated funders are very slowly making and coordinating their demands of fundees, eg Open Access mandates. How can crowdfunders/democratic patrons make analogous progress?
I’ve never been to Detroit, nor Michigan, unless you count transferring at the airport in the suburbs a couple times.
That surely qualifies me to come up with bandages for Detroit’s woes.
Establish a hereditary monarchy. It’ll boost tourism and non-crime media coverage. Whow? A lottery. Ticket sales will salve financial problems. There are some castle-like buildings available.
But a royal family is just the band. For the ages, turn the whole city into a museum. The top floor of the City Museum in Saint Louis has an intriguing collection of building adornments saved from demolitions in that city (which by the way lost 63% of its population from 1950-2010; Detroit lost only 61%). Detroit could improve on that by making the whole city a museum, with the royal castle and other estates and jewels as the main attractions. I expected to eventually immodestly propose that at least Jerusalem, probably all of Israel-Palestine, possibly a greater Holy Land encompassing the sites of major monotheistic religions (Utah would have to be an exclave/branch) be designated a museum to the worship of vengeful conceptions of god and the achievement of relative world peace, but hey, Detroit won.
I’ve already provided a complete set of bandages for Detroit, but in the spirit of folks proposing various regulatory holidays for Detroit, here’s a complimentary bonus that complements the above: prospectively eliminate all professional sports team liability for player injuries, suicides, and any other outcome, for 99 years. This will establish a sustainable revenue stream for the royal city/family/museum for a few generations as visitors pay handsomely to witness the NFL®-style American football they remember before it was driven to bankruptcy and banned.
At the EFF blog Seth Schoen speculates that Microsoft could be under continuous secret court orders which could possibly be interpreted to not allow it to add privacy protecting features to Skype. Maybe, but this can’t explain why Skype did not protect users prior to acquisition by Microsoft.
Schoen’s post closes with (emphasis in original):
That’s certainly not the case today, legally or technically—today, different kinds of calls offer drastically different levels of privacy and security. On some mobile networks, calls aren’t encrypted at all and hence are even broadcast over the air. Some Internet calls are encrypted in a way that protects users against some kinds of interception and not others. Some calls are encrypted with tools that include privacy and security features that Skype is lacking. Users deserve to understand exactly how the communications technologies they use do or don’t protect them. If Microsoft has reasons to think this situation is going to change, we need to know what those reasons are.
I’ll throw out some definite reasons users aren’t getting the protection and information deserved (secret court orders may be additional reasons):
Features have costs (engineering, UX, support); why should a developer bother with any feature when:
Few users have expressed demand for such features through either exit or voice;
Advocates who believe users deserve protection and information have failed to adequately increase actual user and policy demand for such;
Advocates and would-be providers of tools giving users what they deserve have failed to adequately deliver (especially to market! few users know about these tools) such.
In short Skype has not protected users or informed them about lack of protection because they face near zero threat (regulatory or competitive product) which would interest them in doing so.
EFF is doing as well and as much as any entity at generally informing users who probably already care a little bit (they’re reached by the EFF’s messages) and a whole lot more deserving of support. Keep that voice up but please always include exit instructions. Name “tools that include privacy and security features”; I see a screenshot of Pidgin in the EFF post, give them some love! Or better, Jitsi, the most feasible complete Skype replacement for all platforms. Otherwise your good efforts will be swamped by Skype user loyaltynetwork effect lockin.
