Branko’s Weblog

Must jot down this idea before I forget.

Create an online school in the mould of Ars Digita University. Let those who are further along in their studies review the ones that are not as far. In other words, create a system like the years in school, but discard the teachers. Even the curriculum could be based on Wikipedia-like text books.

How trustworthy would such a system be? I don’t know.

It could be used for other purposes. Once, when the internet was young, oldbies would introduce newbies to the things that could be said about the topic of a given newsgroup. Sometimes an oldby would become indignant and point the newby to a FAQ. Sometimes the newby would learn and become an oldby.

I am a regular contributor to the nl.internet.www.ontwerp news group (all things webdesign). Most of the birdchatter there is of newbies (drive-by newbies, often) who indignantally tell us to help them, now! What bliss it would be if there were three or four of those newsgroups, overlapping, and you could only progress from one to the other by proving your worth. You could have a Slashdot-like system of modding postings up and down.

Sounds very much the recipe for old-boys-network type disaster. How to solve that aspect of it?

Big Copyright seems to have discovered BitTorrent. BoingBoing reports that film maker Dreamworks has sent a DMCA takedown notice to BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, whilst a customer of cable ISP Cogeco reports to have received a takedown notice from the MPAA through the ISP.

The interesting bit is that The Pirate Bay is based in Sweden, while Cogeco and its customer are in Canada. Neither countries are of course under rule of US law.

The blogs that run this story laugh about the stupidity of the MPAA and Dreamworks, but I think it is sad that everybody seems to accept as fact that the parties in question are breaking some kind of law (filesharing just happens to be legal in Canada, something that Cogeco and its customers do not seem to ‘get’), and that Big Copyright can try scare tactics on people in other jurisdictions. I wish people would worry a bit less about the poor starving artist, and a bit more about the constant nibbling at the foundations of democracy by corporations.

(See also the take-down notice Pirate Bay received and their response.)

As they say: do not ascribe to malicious intent that which can be explained by stupidity. And although these actions of the MPAA and Dreamworks may be the result of stupidity or accident, the malicious intent may be a criminal offense in this case.

It’s always more interesting to hear creators talk about copyrights, than it is to hear lawyers. There is a reason why a lot of copyfighting lawyers are now just repeating what Richard Stallman said 20 years ago; for Stallman, the problem that he as an author could not sample or build upon was a very real and concrete one back then, not a theoretical problem to be discussed over cigars and cognac.

Of course, creators aren’t always as savvy about the law as Richard Stallman is, but why should they have to?

nl20 is the local magazine that will tell you what’s on in the cinemas or who’s playing in the theaters. They’re published by PCM, not an unknown party to Dutch copyright lawyers.

This week they published an interview with Kasper van Kooten, ‘theater maker’, and apparently songwriter. I had never heard of him, but then again I am notoriously out of the loop.

Apparently, Kasper has written a song against filesharers. The natural thing to do, he confesses, and he really does not understand why fellow artists seem to care so little: “It is the disease of the download/Everybody grabs what they can/Sweat and tears stolen rudely/But once created so lovingly”.

Ah, but!, points out interviewer Robert van de Griend (btw, who owns the copyrights to an interview?), you also sing that you’re doing this for your artist buddies. “And those buddies were busy with cassette recorders when they were young.”

“That was different,” Kasper feels, “Downloading is no different than cloning. We used to tape the Soulshow from the radio. Exactly at the point where you thought you had recorded a complete song, they started playing a jingle, and your tape was worthless.”

The interviewer points out that if Kasper had been a kid now instead of then, he probably would have downloaded too; the interviewee shrugs off the point as moot, because hypothetical.

Folk lore has it that politicians are completely in the pockets of Big Copyright. That is of course nonsense. Just because a couple of politicos happily and loudly parrot Big Copyright’s party line, does not mean they’re being paid to do so–let alone that all representatives are.

What is true, though, is that Big Copyright wants to own the law makers. This is not, perhaps, the desire of anyone in particular within the cartel. But of its hivemind? Definitely!

What Big Copyright does have, though, and most copyfighters don’t, is the ear of politicians. They nibble, but do not binge. They nudge a bit here, nudge a bit there.

There are a few arguments that almost all politicians are sensitive to: “For the children”, “For the poor starving artist”, “For the public good”, “For the almost extinguished animal/plant”.

And suddenly what you end up with is the following: you have a law that forbids copying of any kind, and it basically lasts forever. However, you need to enforce that law, but law enforcement is a governmental monopoly.

So instead of calling in the cops after the fact, you try to make the copying impossible beforehand. Here’s what you do:

You make a storage format, one that is significantly better than what went beforehand. You trademark the logo, you patent the technology, you copyright the keys; you vest all these rights in a rights controlling organisation.

So far, politicians love this stuff. Self regulation, yeah! Power to the people, yeah!

Then, you nudge and you nibble, and you get a tiny law passed that says people may not break locks. “For the poor starving artist,” you explain to your representatives. You make sure you appear serious about this to them, you put on your best puppy eyes, and honestly, who is it going to hurt if you outlaw something that clearly can only be used for illegal purposes?

So now you have a lock that may not be broken, and a key that is copyrighted, and anyone who wants to use your significantly better medium will have to play by your rules. Contract law makes sure of that. Even if copyright law is not as ’strong’ in some countries, you bind the producers by contract to your rules.

Here’s the beauty of that tiny law: you can make the lock as weak as you want. The law does not care about the strenght of the lock, you’re still not allowed to break it.

You can repeat the process ad infitum with any old significantly better medium that comes by.

The content production is now in your iron grip, but it had already been mostly under your control; now you need to catch the bad guys, the criminals, the terrorists: your buyers, the public.

It takes a pretty smart guy to figure out all these sneaky movements towards complete annihilation of your freedom of speech (because that is what this is about, in the end, even if it’s not the purpose of this scheme); I must admit it wasn’t me. In 2001 I heard Tomas Vogt give a speech at the HAL 2001 computer security conference that outlined the above.

As he notes, Richard Stallman was an optimist when he wrote The Right to Read, an essay that paints a very bleak picture of what the publishing industry will allow us to do with our computers in the future. (Richard Stallman is the inventor of copyleft, a method of trying to restore the imbalance of modern copyright law.)

The ‘funny’ thing is, when I discussed this method on Usenet two or three years ago, people laughed at me: “These laws are just to deter the big pirates; the publishers will never go after regular people. You can still say and write what you want, and if you share mp3s, you can do so without worries.”

That was then, and now is now.

How successful you feel depends on how you manage to balance the following three utterances appropriately:

* That’s my fault

* That’s somebody else’s fault

* That’s nobody’s fault

At least, so I thought a few days ago, when I was balancing two long planks while biking home through a rain storm.

Distributed Proofreaders has posted it’s 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occassion by over 500 volunteers.

Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR’ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg.

According to BoingBoing, so-called ’security firm’ Akonix “are telling lies about BitTorrent“. Presumably to help sell their BitTorrent blocker, which, as BoingBoing snidely notes, is just a name that can help you drive up the price for an ordinary firewall.

If you need a firewall, why not get Zone Alarm, which is cheap and good?

It’s ironic though. BitTorrent is not your classical P2P file sharing utility. It is P2P, but it is more of a Download Load Easing Utility. It has very legitimate purposes, and it is hard to be anonymous when offering downloads through BitTorrent, so you can only offer illegal content out in the open.

Since BitTorrent is suited for legal uses, it has been embraced by the pro-filesharers for their propaganda. This in turn creates a rich soil for con artists to operate in. “Ooh, file sharing bad. BitTorrent file sharing. BitTorrent bad.”

BoingBoing reports that Bugmenot is back up. Apparently, their hosting company decided to flip the switch, although Bugmenot’s anonymous owner can only guess as to why. Most of the rest reads like a soap opera too, including the obligatory nazis who play a part in the story. I am not going to keep relaying the soap, so start tracking BoingBoing if you did not already do that.

I was writing an entry about how, if Brein wants to play hardball, we should perhaps engage them in the legal arena. The weapon I had chosen, or thought I had chosen, was an article from the Dutch authors’ rights law that I thought said that it is crime to misrepresent the copyright status of a work. This is something that record companies and book publishers routinely do: they put a legal text on or in the work that in an overly broad way claims copy- and usage rights on that work, even on parts of the work to which they do not own the rights.

Unfortunately for me, it seems that I dreamed that such a clause exists in the law. The closest I came is article 34: “Hij die opzettelijk in enig werk van letterkunde, wetenschap of kunst, waarop auteursrecht bestaat, in de benaming daarvan of in de aanduiding van de maker wederrechtelijk enige wijziging aanbrengt of wel met betrekking tot een zodanig werk op enige andere wijze, welke nadeel zou kunnen toebrengen aan de eer of de naam van de maker of aan zijn waarde in deze hoedanigheid, het werk aantast, wordt gestraft met gevangenisstraf van ten hoogste zes maanden of geldboete van de vierde categorie.”

In English: “He will be punished with a prison sentence of up to six months or a fine of the fourth category, who wilfully and without right changes the title of a work of literature, science or art, or the designation of its maker; or who harms the work in any other way that could negatively affect the honour or the good name of the maker or [its/his] [value/dignity].”

So, did I imagine this mythical misrepresentation article, or did I just misinterpret article 34?

(Edit: made the translation of the article better English–or so I hope.)

The wonderful Bugmenot service is rumoured to be dead. Bugmenot helped you to circumvent the obligatory registration process that so many websites let you go through nowadays, especially the sites of newspapers.

BoingBoing reports that “someone understood to be the admin for Bugmenot.com says: ‘Our host pulled the plug. I reckon they were pressured. If anyone has got some secure, preferably offshore hosting in mind then please let us know so we can get the service back up as soon as possible.’”