EULAAAAAAUGH! (9/30)

In committing to these daily posts, I was trying to edge out of my comfort zone a little bit, write about some different topics. Today not so much, and I hate to drag you readers back toward anything that remotely resembles a copyright debate. A recent US ruling on software has got me rattled, though. Ars Technica analyses it here, probably better than I will. The short form is: the courts have decided that the bullshit EULA that you never read anyhow is actually enforceable, at least when it comes to resale.

I think this is ridiculous, for a number of reasons. The first and foremost among my objections is that the software industry should never been allowed to sell you a license and not a product in the first place! This kind of example is getting old, but the copyright that protects a book does so even when I own the physical object itself. The copyright doesn't protect paper; it protects IDEAS. When I take my ONE copy of a book and sell the whole thing without retaining any part of it (except, presumably, for memories and any little bits of cover that fell off if I read it excessively)...the ideas contained within are not harmed, modified, plagiarized, or pirated. I had a material possession and I sold it, the end. With digital goods, we think it gets more complicated. But this is buying into a fiction that just because something is "digital", it is not physical. The information stored in your computer is REAL and PHYSICAL. It exists as carefully constructed patterns in actual matter in your hard disk. Yes, digital goods are easily copied blah blah blah. I don't know about the actual legality of this, but if I photocopy the entirety of that book I own and sell that to you - but destroy my original copy - I don't think it's morally any different from selling you the original. I guess the book analogy can get old or preachy or whatever, but I think it's unfair to grant vastly different controls and protections under the SAME laws to different art forms. What the hell is so special about software that the developers get to tell me everything I can and can't do with it. Authors spend a lot of time and effort on their craft, and seem to be happy with less. They're happy with libraries and interpersonal loans, and second-hand book shops (probably? Or if they aren't they're kinda curmudgeonly. And fuck, I even saw a book by AYN RAND that had been donated - DONATED! - by an eponymous foundation to some school or other, in a second hand bookshop yesterday).

I think I might be rambling in all directions a bit here, so I'm going to try and get this in order. I don't like the idea of software as a licensed service unless software companies start acting more like they're selling services, and less like they're selling you products with legalese copouts stapled to them. If software lisencing is going to be upheld by law it needs to be regulated BY LAW, and it should NOT simply be protected by law by virtue of it existing. Just because I own property does not mean that I can do anything I want there. I can't kill people in my house just because it's my house, and software companies should likewise not be able to write all the rules for their software. I think there should be limits on their power. I think that resale should be protected by law. I think that companies should not be able to stipulate what constitutes "acceptable conduct" (some EULAs say that you can't use the product to disparage the creators thereof, etc). I think that companies should not be allowed to terminate or alter these contracts without warning. I think that companies should have a responsibility to all licensees for the complete and total duration of the license. Right now it seems that the software companies have all the leverage over you, the consumer, and that's not really how things should work. Without some rules for consumer protection, the market is going to trend toward restrictive EULAS, which hurts users, hurts the economy, and hurts creativity. Again: copyright should NOT protect anything other than the CONTENT of the book, program, film itself. Filmmakers don't get to tell you what kind of reviews you can write. Authors don't get to tell you that you can't make your own custom cover for their books. Software should be no different!

I may end up rewriting this for clarity and continuity. For now I'm tired, and upset with the courts.

LOUD!

An Open Letter to Stephen Harper (In Progress)

To the Right Honourable Stephen Harper:

Two recent pieces of news have caused me considerable consternation with regards to the policies advanced by your government; these being - in no particular order - your intent to bring "stronger" copyright law to Canada, and the intimidation of those feminist/womens' advocacy groups in Canada which have come out in opposition to your frankly contemptable decision not to support safe access to abortion for women in impoverished countries. Although these two issues aren't of themselves related, your government's adoption of these policies speaks to a perilous disconnect between the values of the Conservative party and those of the general Canadian public.

On the matter of copyright, our country has been very fortunate that circumstances have conspired against your previous attempts to reform the law, which were met with much resistance by consumers, educators, and even creators themselves. The copyright consultations held by your government last year seemed a show of good faith, a willingness to seek a superior balance between the needs of consumers and creators. Please, do not disregard the will of the people on this matter; it is in their name and their interests that you are supposed to govern. What the media conglomerates are demanding of the Canadian government (and others) is not merely protection for artists, it is support for business models that are dying. It is an end to privacy and even the presumption of innocence, the so-called "three-strikes" policy that would institute widespread monitoring of internet use and automatically disconnect citizens merely accused of copyright infringement without so much as a chance to defend their innocence. It is a lockdown on culture that simply does not make sense in an age of sharing. I do not, Mr. Prime Minister, mean "illegal file sharing" when I say sharing; I refer to a more general set of cultural phenomena. Networks and software aren't only making "theft" easier; they are also giving the means for creative self-expression to more people than ever before in history. People are chosing to create, and in many cases they are choosing to share: whether it's the Free/Libre Open Source Software movement, or the Creative Commons.


I am not so naive as to think that in some ideal future, all creators will work for free. What I do think is that the way to ensure that creation continues in this country is not to use heavy-handed legislation to lock Canadians into the old ways, old businesses whose practices are no longer suited to the current market. Apple and Amazon have demonstrated that what your legislation would call "digital locks" are not necessarily the only way forward for digital commerce: both have been selling music without such encumberances for some time now. You have children, and so I imagine that you are not unaware of the artistic medium that is the videogame (I have a bone to pick with Roger Ebert on this matter, but that is for another time and place). Stardock Studios and the website "Good Old Games" sell such products without digital locks, and they do not seem to be in dire straits. Conversely, EA Games' "Spore", a hotly anticipated title, suffered a PR nightmare when it was released with particularly strict digital locks upon it. The fact of the matter is that the more entrenched these locks become, the better (comparatively) the experience of piracy will become. A pertinent example can be seen here: commercial DVDs when played in a standard DVD player assail the viewer with often unskippable previews and warnings. The content of commerical DVDs is scrambled, making it difficult for end-users to make archival copies, or even simply watch the DVD on operating systems such as Linux. A pirated film, by contrast, simply begins playing the film when placed in a DVD player. It is simple to make copies for use in case the original becomes damaged, it can be played almost anywhere, and it can be converted to many different formats to be played on many different kinds of player. Paradoxically, the kind of broad functionality that I and many other Canadians would be interested in paying for is NOT the kind offered by the industry. It is that same industry which has been framing the choice in this debate as between Canadians (and others) being offered their very limited, highly controlled packages...or nothing at all. I wish that your party would take a stand against this, not just from a consumer rights angle, but also because we should not encode into law this caste-like distinction between producer and consumer. We are not passive; I don't believe that culture exists without interpretation, criticism, parody and remixing. These are not valueless acts, but the content industry seeks in law to make crimes of some or all of these!

I have not been very forthcoming with positive suggestions, but as a start there is perhaps NDP MP Charlie Angus'proposal to extend Canada's existing private copying levy to a new range of devices. Here, at least, is found the spirit of true compromise: the industry wants money, and Canadians want relative freedom to format-shift their media once they have legally obtained it. Rather than criminalizing the latter, the private copying levy allows both sides to enjoy what they say they want to enjoy. But if the content industry insists instead on tighter controls, you must ask yourself; if they thumb their nose at money, what is it that they really want? Do they want fair compensation for creative works, or do they want a frankly unrealistic and unfair level of control over our culture?

On the issue of your government's lack of funding support for abortion abroad, and the subsequent cutting of funds to women's advocacy groups I urge even more strongly that you reconsider your position. DVDs are one thing, but your party is endangering human lives in the hopes that it can simultaneously adopt fundamentalist values re: abortion and still somehow stay in the good graces of Canadians by maintaining the status quo on the homefront. With all due respect, Sir, just how stupid do you think Canadian feminists (both women and men) are? At best, what your policy decision indicates is that your government either does not believe in a universal standard of human rights (reproductive and otherwise) or that you intend at some later time to mount a campaign against abortion at home. Either of these conclusions should send chills down the spine of respectable Canadians, Mr. Harper. Women who are denied access to safe abortions will often seek them from less reputable sources. This can kill them, Mr. Prime Minister. I believe in providing and promoting contraceptives in places where women wish for a greater control over their reproductive lives, but if you have been following the issue you will know that it is sometimes difficult to get men to wear condoms reliably. There is an effort to produce a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-distribute female contraceptive cream (or some similar unobtrusive substance), but this is not at present a reality. The reality is that a balanced approach to the reproductive health of women must include abortion, even if only as a last line of defence against unwanted pregnancy! That you have chosen not only to stand against abortion, but also against those groups who have lawfully and dutifully protested your choice in this matter speaks to an even greater evil than neglect, however. These groups do not exist to stroke your ego, and they will not always agree with you. Disagreement and debate are principal foundations of democratic society, and while I suppose there's no law that says you MUST fund these groups, it rather seems as though you are cheating. Quieting the debate with fear tactics and then claiming that you have won by virtue of being the loudest (or perhaps the only) voice is poor sportsmanship - and I am being generous. What is it that your government fears from these groups? That they might take a stand against what they perceive as injustice? Is that not an invaluable practice in a free society, or do you believe that all of our checks and balances and our Constitution itself are just so much window dressing for your new brand of tyranny? Well this Canadian will have none of that, and will have none of you if this is the most reasoned and mature manner in which you see fit to conduct public discourse in this once-proud nation!


Sincerely,


A Concerned Citizen.



I intend to send this letter in paper form at some point in the near future, but not quite in this present form. The final work will obviously need less of the spleen that makes blogging so delicious, but I'm curious to know what you think could be improved. Yes, I am outsourcing my proofreading. I'll be doing some of my own over the next day or two...but I won't catch everything!

Copyright and Copywrong at age 300

It startles and astounds me just how right someone (or several someones) can be in one moment:

"The wide availability of content delivery platforms is based on standards and hardware for which interoperable content management technologies are critical [...]This calls for a heightened degree of standardisation within the digital media chain; in a highly networked environment, cross-sectoral cooperation is required to an unprecedented extent to ensure the interoperability of metadata for exploitation of primary, secondary and even tertiary markets and user need"

-WIPO

And how blatantly wrong the next:

" In most countries, there are many more consumers than creators and performers, creating political challenges for policy-makers in managing discussions on copyright"

-WIPO (emphasis is mine)

 Same document. Successive paragraphs.

Now, before you take up your keyboard in anger and strike me down with all your anger, please allow me to explain. Remember what I said a few posts ago? I said:

"I think we're so used to thinking of ourselves as consumers that we almost don't consider what we are actually doing. I'm creating something right now. I took my camera to school with me, and on the way both there and back I did even more creating! As I have said, with the means of production becoming cheaper and cheaper (on the software side moreso, perhaps) there are fewer hurdles between you and creative expression than there have ever been in history"

And I'm right. We're the generation of ubiquitous connectivity and social media. All those pictures you take and the posts you write and possibly your twitter posts as long as you can prove that they constitute original expression beyond a simple statement of fact? That's all your creation, and that's all protected by copyright BY DEFAULT, thanks to the same kind of extensions to the law that Big Media wants to keep going. Look here:

"#2  Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you add an application and use Platform, your content and information is shared with the application. We require applications to respect your privacy settings, but your agreement with that application will control how the application can use the content and information you share. (To learn more about Platform, read our About Platform page.)
   4. When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them)."

-Facebook Terms of Service

These seem like some pretty reasonable rules. Facebook needs a relative amount of freedom in order to provide effective services, and most people seem unlikely to care about stray backup copies of party photos that they have already implicitly decreed are safe for public consumption. Facebook isn't directly profiteering from your work, but indeed if it did not have these liberties its service would be greatly inferior, and hence their survival as a cultural and financial entity does in some way derive from the way they use your content. But ask Big Media if you can take about this level of liberty with the music that you buy and I guarantee you'll hear them scream bloody murder. Why is it ok for some creators to be treated worse than others, though? If this is good enough for us it should be good enough for everyone who creates, right?

Well, not really.

First, you might be thinking "well, what about quality?"

That would be a mistake. Do you mean to tell me that the moral high ground in this argument should go to the best art, because let me tell you that is NOT in the slightest what the content industry is trying to secure in this fight. Second, creation is supposed to come from the heart, not the pocketbook. Why should funding or publishers matter in whether or not we believe a creator should have some reasonable expectations about the kind of terms he or she can get for their work. I think the difference is that if the public as a whole had the kind of hold on the legislature that Big Media does (a terribly ironic conundrum), Facebook would be PAYING US to use their content in exchange for its continued presence as an advertising platform and cultural icon. But alas we do not, and are consequently treated as second-class creators.

If one looks at the world of webcomics, you'll see a lot of quality. You'll also see a lot of self-publishing. The comics that have attracted large readerships have not necessarily needed large corporate funding; they have grown because of the quality of their content. WE DID NOT NEED publishers or editors or agents to tell us which webcomics were worthy and which were not. Hey, what would you know, the invisible hand that everyone likes to talk about so goddamn much DID ITS JOB! Grassroots creativity does not mean "hatchet job" anymore, and perhaps our culture will wise up to this fact.

So, where are we now?

We are leaving a culture of passive consumerism, and we are building one where many people create, or become indirectly involved in the creation process through feedback (see: Imogen Heap's fan outreach and crowdsourcing from the making of her last album, or ANY popular blog with a thriving comment community). WIPO's stance is still rooted in the frankly archaic notion that modern content delivery is, and will continue to be a one-way process. There are many people who have been saying this for years; Lawrence Lessig being the obvious example.

But they are saying something right when they talk about interoperability. What they should have said in the next paragraph is that industries need to work together to create products that continue to foster two-way communication between creators. Not between "creators and consumers" because while indeed some people have become better or more prolific than others, we have already seen that giving everybody the same tools does in no way cheapen the best work done in a category of creative works. Did good webcomics not arise and gain fan followings because everyone and their dog could post one to the internet? The answer is beyond obvious. So give everyone the same tools for sharing their work. Some will take to it naturally, and others will leave it alone...but it will no longer be up to the creaking dinosaur industries of the past who gets to be transformed into something famous and who does not! To some extent we can already see this phenomenon in action: just watch the rise of a viral video.

Of course, if we envision a world without promoters and labels, the infamous words of Warhol look more and more like the literal truth of the now*. Perhaps being a famous artist will cease to be a true career option, and we will just spend our years constantly hunting down the latest viral sensation.

I'm not sure I've touched on sharing in this future world yet, but of course I am no oracle. I can say that I believe if creators were treated equally I think we might see agitation for truly balanced copyright law. The profit motives would be properly aligned for once, as what you have is no longer two adversarial groups, each trying to swindle the other. What you have is one group that has to weigh the protection of its individual livelihoods against the protection of cultural heritage. What you have is one group that has to balance its need to eat with its desire to remix, review, and renew its culture from time to time.

-Loud!

Oh yes, and check this out.

*"15 minutes of fame", in case that wasn't clear

Free Beer and Swords

I imagine I am not unlike a significant fraction of you, dear readers, in that I like to leave a nice, generous space between waking up and getting up. I like to fill that space with the reassuring tones of CBC radio (if for no other reason than it’s pretty much the only thing you can listen to on the radio unless your interests are “the same awful – read: popular – music over and over again” or “trying to solve your midlife crisis with a liberal application of hair metal”*) Today, I awoke to a very compelling treatise on economics, in particular the “hidden” or “deferred” costs of our purchases: Raj Patel*’s The Value of Nothing. The author’s first example was an icon of western consumer culture – the hamburger. A hamburger will run you about $4 under our present economic system. Calculate the overall resource use, social and environmental damage, what you might call the “true” cost of a burger, and you end up with a figure (supposedly) approaching $200. Where’s your “value menu” now, Ronald? This is but the tip of the iceberg, of course. Approaching “Third World Debt”, Mr. Patel invited listeners to consider that what “they owe us”, in terms of loan repayments and the like, is nothing in comparison to what we owe them as recompense for what we take (in, among other things, natural resources)***.

*As solutions go, I suppose this isn’t bad.

** You can find the interview here (scroll down to part 2), which I reccomend you listen to because a) it's actually quite engaging and b) this dude has a fantastic voice.

***Political realism would suggest that you can’t really call this a ‘debt’. After all, ‘debt’ on the international level is what you can effectively demand from other governments. In other words, we’re living in a great spherical high school where the bullies are free to live off the lunch money of the weak.

Not all of the “true cost” of that hamburger is extracted from poor nations, however; look into your own pocketbook, and you may find a very unwelcome siphon.  With your tax dollars* you’re subsidizing the criminally low wages that the hamburger joint is allowed to pay its employees. With your tax dollars you are paying for a healthcare system that is someday going to have to deal with the great reckoning of cholesterol and sucrose. With your tax dollars, you’re ideally going to be paying to counteract the environmental and climactic effects of all the deforestation and diesel-burning that goes on in the name of cheap meat.  Whenever someone says they are “I am passing the savings along to you”, what they probably mean is “I am passing the costs along to you, minus the sticker shock”. If - having become aware of this burden - you are uncomfortable with it, you’ve got a few options. The simplest of these is to try and rein in the excesses of the free market with legislation; you know, what we’ve ostensibly been trying to do pretty much since the industrial revolution. This is at least a serviceable option, but just how many asterisks can we append to the statement “Free markets are the best way of providing services” before we entertain the notion that just maybe we’re dealing with more than just errata?

*Ok so probably not many of you pay taxes. But you will.

Raj Patel’s ideas about a more just economic system seemed to hinge on what we might call “The Commons”, a useful concept which is also invoked in the work of Lawrence Lessig (and, as we will see, the two are very much connected). Most people, Patel said, hear commons and think:

Commons - a physical space which people are free to access without bias (in this case, the big field).

But it’s really more useful to think of The Commons in terms of resources. Space is a valuable resource; indeed many a developer would likely love nothing more than to pave over land with the kind of property value that a municipal commons must have! However, people like to have space, but individually can’t all afford to own little chunks. Allowing private development might create more wealth than leaving the commons as they are, but that wealth would be restricted to a select few. As a society, we’re okay with a certain amount of inequality, but we have decided that access to recreational space is something that we’d like everyone to have. What Patel (and also Lessig, but I’ll get to that later) seemed to me to be arguing is that we as a society should perhaps raise the bar a little. We should declare a few more resources to be made ownerless such that they can be shared by all, regardless of individual wealth.  Before the consolidation of capital into wealthy hands, we had de facto rules for managing these resources to ensure that they were equitably divided and – more importantly – preserved for the future.

If you’ve read Lawrence Lessig, you’ll find a lot of this very familiar. Just as the consolidation of capital in the hands of the few deprived so many independent craftspeople of their livelihoods, Lessig might say that the consolidation of content in the claws of communications conglomerates is doing much the same to creators who choose to operate outside the world of studios and record labels. Enter the Census (sic) of Files Available on Bittorrent*, which I stumbled upon this morning with thoughts of alternate economic systems lodged firmly in mind.

*As it is a mere representative sample, the term Census is somewhat misapplied.

So the data suggest that piracy is pretty much the rule on the ol’ inter-tubes. The comments on the article seem to be about a 2:1 mix of “people who might be free-culture moderates”:“people who are peeved at the cultural prevalence of theft on the internet”.  To my mind, one of the more interesting comments is:

“Of course, given that copyright has been a part of our history since long before the existence of the internet, it shouldn't surprise us that the number of cultural artifacts under copyright vastly outnumber the number outside of it.”

The piracy we see now could be a transitional phase on the way to a new model of culture. That’s probably not much of a relief to the purveyors of content, but then there’s not really anything they can do anyway, right? Zearle's* Hackers and Crackers proposes that warez are a form of liberation from economic oppression. After all, the creative power afforded by programs like photoshop and maya is only available to those who can, well, afford them. Now, from the data in this study it would look like the majority of bittorrent users are pirating tv and movies (also porn), not content-creation programs with which to empower themselves. It would be too easy to write this kind of behaviour off as lazy, cut-and-dry theft. Consider the following:

“I'm not ok with the fact that 99% of the culture that people want to share is somehow "owned" by someone. That's not how culture works, and trying to force it to work that way simply ends up destroying that culture. Culture is fundamentally a shared experience. Take away our ability to share it freely and what you have is at best commerce, not culture.”

* I have written about Zearle in the past with...interesting results.

I could not tell you just how politically-motivated your average bittorrent user is, but I know that as a student I can't really afford to buy new DVDs, for example. Does that make downloading them on Bittorrent a form of protest? I don't really imagine so. What, however, is the net difference to the creator if I download something as opposed to buying it used, or from value village? I don't think the producers, creators, actors, set designers, etc. see an additional penny either way. Bittorrent happens to be the cheaper option for me, it has a superior user interface, and better selection to boot. Probably there will never be a paid option as compelling as bittorrent, nor perhaps could there be. If we're lucky, though, there won't have to be. Enter some alternative economic systems.

Frankly, we have opened the can of worms when it comes to free and ubiquitous copying; I don't believe there is really any hope – not in the near- to mid-term, at any rate – of returning to some gloriously ignorant past. The question, then, isn't how we go about ending piracy by force, but how we establish a relationship with creators in which no one starves. And we all get to enjoy our favourite TV show or whatever. There are at present a number of schools of thought on this issue, which can be generalized under the heading “post-scarcity economics”. That's probably an oxymoron to at least one of you reading this, isn't it? Economics is all about supply and demand; what do you DO when you've the capacity to all but eliminate both (even for just a subset of all possible commodities)? A surprisingly coherent answer is “sell what cannot be copied”. Sell a personalized experience that simply won't have the same kind of value to another person. So what if someone gives away a virtual concert, programmed to sound as though it were performed in their very own living room (as per an example in the linked article)? It won't be the same thing to anyone else, unless perhaps they recreate the space themselves! It's not a bad notion, and it does dovetail nicely with some of the other options I am about to explore, but I don't find it without weakness. Like the business model we're heading away from, this sort of philosophy will seem just as antiquated as the onward progress of technology slowly erodes the list of “things beyond copying”. Some sound devices already come with a calibration utility to help you arrange audio channels in an ideal way to suit the space, so what happens when we develop the technology to take an audio file and have it sound as though it is being played live in any given space?

As long as we keep the current paradigm of money, I think it's safe to say that people will try to save as much as possible. Would adopting an alternative currency help the situation? Consider the notion of “Whuffie”, which is sort of like a measure of prestige, or social credit. You can see this kind of system pop up in the fiction of several Science Fiction authors, among them Cory Doctorow (who coined the term) and Charles Stross (pretty much everything past the near-future in Accelerando). What I find interesting about this system is that it allows for a person who would in any other case be materially poor to live quite happily through their reputation. Where we tend to measure wealth in terms of purchasing power, liquid assets, etc, social credit systems are – as I understand them – a complex interplay of favours and loans with your integrity as collateral. Let's look at an individual – say Richard Stallman – under the lens of two different kinds of wealth measurement. We might expect, under traditional economics, to see a wealth breakdown that looks something like this:

But I would argue that even in our world of hard currency this doesn't REALLY measure all available wealth. I mean, think of all the free software geeks who would buy the dude a beer, or put him up for a night or several, or buy him a katana because of xkcd. We're not really accounting for the value of what this guy could have if he really wanted. Below is a chart more reflective of social credit:

Sweet Jesus the man is made of free beer and swords!

(I officially disclaim any relationship of these charts to the actual wealth of Richard Stallman, this is just an amusing example because who else can count both free beer and katanas in their pool of potential wealth?)

The idea of social credit based accounting is an interesting one, and its pretty internally-consistent. Where does all the beer come from? Well, if you make good beer, that's the kind of social credit that can probably alleviate most of your material concerns. Just sponge off people and provide delicious brew in return, right? Of course, if we follow this "who would you buy a beer" logic too far, you start to wonder at what point the beer itself shouldn't just become the currency?

The wonderful thing about beer-as-currency is that it allows for denominations which are currently impossible. To wit: behold the minus-ten-dollar bill bottle!

The obvious issue with a social-currency based economy is more or less evident when you consider the kind of person proposing it: they command a great deal of respect, they produce content, and they're active participants in at least some kind of community (online or otherwise). The pressure to make something that other people will like enough to credit you is kind of analogous to the struggle faced by the starving artist in present economics, isn't it?

I think we're so used to thinking of ourselves as consumers that we almost don't consider what we are actually doing. I'm creating something right now. I took my camera to school with me, and on the way both there and back I did even more creating! As I have said, with the means of production becoming cheaper and cheaper (on the software side moreso, perhaps) there are fewer hurdles between you and creative expression than there have ever been in history, more or less! And speaking of the commons and cameras, there is no better story to illustrate why the former is so important than that of the legal status of the latter. The whole story is - I believe - contained in Free Culture, but here's the deal: you can take photographs in public, and pretty much only famous people have any veto power over that. If the law had not sided with photographers, and made permission necessary, think of just how few people would actually take up photography as a hobby...or even as a career. After all, what would stop people from charging exorbitant amounts for the use of their image, if that was their perogative? Photographers enjoy a magnificently expansive commons, and pretty much everyone is the better for it. Without ubiquitous photography, we would be lacking not only a key technology which helps us archive our lives, we would be giving up an art form and a powerful ally in the service of democratic accountability (read: we couldn't really take pictures of police brutality)!

I'll upload more later, but for now my internet service is uncooperative. The Wonderful thing about creating is that it doesn't have to be a "good once only" kind of thing; by applying a Creative Commons license to my photographs, these become a potential springboard for future creativity....even a gift of sorts. Even better, the terms of the license stipulate that any derivative works YOU make have to be shared on the same terms - the gift keeps on giving!

-Loud!

Antipasti

I have a longer post in mind, hopefully it will go up tonight.

I wanted to share this ASAP, though. You will notice two things when you click this link. One is that the page number is 1701, the four registration numbers of the Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701 (and successors A through E. J if you thought Enterprise deserved to be canon*). The second thing you'll notice is that Emily The Strange is a ripoff of a character from the Greatest Childrens' Books Of All Time, Nate the Great.

A word about Nate the Great. NtG was the reason I grew up with a significant desire to become a detective. It was a phase between Fireman and Astronaut, but it lasted for a significant portion of my childhood. It also spurred in me the desire to be able to cook on my own, believe it or not. Nate would always make himself pancakes while pondering his latest case, and I aspired to that sort of self-sufficiency. I guess I managed to do one of these two things, but who knows. I still haven't a clue exactly what kind of career will be waiting for me on the other side of schooling, but goodness knows people won't start trusting each other universally within the forseeable future.

So, to see that a highly profitable character is straight-up pirated from an old favourite? Kind of sad. I mean, there's certainly a sort of irony to it, and I hope that this sort of wanton theft doesn't go unresolved, especially when the US culture industry has been working so very hard to punish those thieves, the pirates. As much as I would love to see the man responsible for this act of piracy forced to settle for all the money he has (it happened to an innocent victim of the RIAA, shouldn't it happen to a guilty party?), I don't think that should be the lesson learned here. I doubt this will do anything to deter the fanatical pursuit of those bent on taking control of all contemporary culture, but I hope more people realize this and refuse to buy in to the bullshit next time they here a corporate fat-cat telling us how "sacred" IP is!

*hint: the answer is no.

Far Cry 2: (if) Anything Goes (wrong with SecuROM, you're fucked)

Today's title is a not-so-clever play upon the title of one in a series of trailers for the inexplicably-named Far Cry 2. Inexplicably named?, you wonder, whatever could he mean? Put simply, Far Cry 2 has, besides being a shooter which takes place mostly out of doors with fairly remarkable human AI and semi-realistic weapon handling dynamics, nothing to do with Far Cry. Neither the game engine, nor the development team itself are constant between games. The closest analogue to the situation that exists with Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Crysis was that of the Age of Empires series compared to the first Empire Earth. The latter was the far more audacious brainchild of original AoE developer Bruce Shelley, who split with Ensemble studios, whose plan for Age of Empires 2 was simply more of the same. Crysis in relation to Far Cry is very much like AoE 2 versus 1. Certainly some aspects of the design have been improved, but along the way the developers seemed to lose sight of what we all found so charming in the original. Where Crysis is essentially a punishing benchmark for the PC hardware elite, it looked to me as though FC2 was shaping up to be a little more innovative, a little less stale. I was (the operative word) looking forward to the ability to roam 50-odd square kilometers of map at my leisure, to experimenting with different approaches to combat, and to interacting with the various in-game factions.

Well, what really separates Far Cry from its successor in my mind is that I cannot, in good conscience, buy FC2. Even on Steam it is saddled with a 3-computer 5-time semi-refundable secuROM-based DRM solution. Let's break this down, shall we? Even if I buy the game on a platform with tough, integrated DRM, a platform that requires me to be connected to the internet, a platform that knows my name, a platform that TRACKS MY GAME-PLAYING HABITS...UbiSoft still doesn't think their IP is safe enough. For the record, if I'm going to go into the kind of trouble it must take to crack a Steam game, do they really think I'll stop there? SecuROM, like every other kind of DRM, has attracted the usual posse of gamer-hackers and pirate-hackers who for reasons ranging from legitimate (secuROM is notorious for butchering system performance and flat-out not working, or so I hear) to the morally ambiguous (they do it for the lulz) to the nefarious (read: piratical). So, what they are asking me to do is to potentially devalue the money I spent on the kind of kick-ass hardware one uses to play current games by chaining me to a stupid activation system that doesn't seem to offer any more practical security than Steam already does (you know, locks and honest folk and that...). Oh, but it DOES limit how much I can use their game. To me, this represents the height of irony. Game developers are going out of their way to create the potential for what they call “emergent gameplay”, they are trying to give the player more control over the interactive experience. At the same time, game publishers are working round-the-clock to limit the number of times you can install the games that YOU pay to use with YOUR money, and piracy continues unabated. In fact, piracy was marketed as ACTIVISM when Spore was released with unreasonable activation limits. “Make Spore the most pirated game in history,” was the rallying cry “show EA that this DRM shit does not fly with gamers”. I didn't pirate Spore, though. I can't say that after seeing gameplay past the cell stage that I really felt I even wanted to play it. Everywhere you see people variously toasting and lamenting the so-called decline of the PC as a platform for games. Everywhere you see developers blaming piracy, but I don't think for a moment that we should be so naïve. Games are getting bigger, prettier, louder....but shorter and costlier, in general. This has been a recognized pattern long before people started whining about piracy as they have in recent months. If you read the newsposts on Penny Arcade (I only read it for the articles, I swear!), you'll see that Tycho always says the same thing about PC gaming: people – not counting the small but vocal minority of hardware aficionados, ie. Yours truly – just want to play. They don't want to worry about the kind of issues that will necessarily cause problems on a platform so variable and diverse as the PC. Consoles are cheap, their games tend to sell better than PC titles, and for the most part they are idiot-proof. While the move towards hard drives and firmware updates and downloadable content may complicate the gaming console experience, I doubt that the “insert disc and play” functionality is going to go anywhere. Well, at least until game cartriges make their inevitable return to prominence, but even so maintenance will still be as simple as “blow on the contacts”. Truly, what would make the most sense for people who want a thriving market for games with the kind of complexity and indie content that only PC gaming can provide as present, the 90% of gamers who don't have a hard-on for their hardware should just buy Macs, thereby creating enough of a market to make development worthwhile. Macs, with their (generally) standardized hardware, could then move into direct competition with gaming consoles, and proceed to beat the stuffing right out of them. The power of Steve Jobs to make relatively unremarkable products look like Yaweh's own gadget collection, combined with the kind of market share that would allow Apple to exert serious power over hardware manufacturers (hell, they somehow have Intel half in their pocket already!) would combine to form a super-gaming entity that could somehow convince consumers to pay three times as much for a piece of hardware with identical capabilities and upgrade options to a gaming console. Of course, Apple's record of having pretty strict control over media (the plan not to allow third-party iPhone apps, anyone) might antagonize indie developers for a while, I think that the larger problem would be in the long term. The few of us who love to tinker with hardware would just suck it up and hack MacOS onto a gaming PC...but the supply of hardware would eventually dry up. The mac platform would, due to its homogeneous nature, be a potential coup for DRM, which could be encoded into ALL HARDWARE.

Where I'm going with this is that PC gaming would have to sacrifice the strengths of our platform in order to achieve mainstream success. It would lead to a momentary renaissance of gaming, but we would be effectively signing away our last vestiges of control over digital content in the process. The other extreme is the abandonment of DRM, making the PC attractive as a platform through an unofficial “try-before-you-buy” culture (for the honest folk, at least). The lifting of DRM restrictions would create a lot of good will in gamers, and it might even lead to a momentary jump in sales...but big-budget games would inevitably disappear from PC, which would become a sort of starting point for would-be game developers, releasing freeware and shareware content in a bid to land spots at a major label.

The reason I'm not going to buy Far Cry 2 is because I am following the third path, which I believe has the potential to lead us toward victory in our fight to remain a viable, free environment for gaming. Of course, it is marked as a “top seller” on Steam, so the fight may already be lost, but I object to the DRM enough that this won't change my decision. If gamers don't buy games that come with unreasonable terms of use (ie. The retail version of Bioshock at launch), game companies WON'T MAKE MONEY. When they decide to treat their customers like vermin. Pirating games may feel good, but it's not the answer. I contemplated buying FC2 and then pirating a version with the DRM removed, but UbiSoft would only see my money if I did that. They would not see the gamer, fighting to preserve his favourite hobby by any means necessary. They would only learn that they can get away with bullying us, and everyone who went to school knows that if you don't let the bully use you for his or her personal entertainment, if you refuse to react to their provocations, they will (hopefully) stop trying. If you continue to react, they'll only come back more and more often.

So if you're listening UbiSoft, you just LOST A SALE of Far Cry 2. I sincerely hope it's not the only one you lose.

In the interests of striking an emotional balance in this post, I shall now shift gears entirely.

To be succinct, I've got love on my mind. Stop. Did you click the link before continuing? If not, open it in a new tab and keep going. It is thematically consistent with what I am going to say, and it will also make the experience of reading this blog 100% more FUNKY.

DDR players who own Supernova 2 are excused now, although they're likely to have reached for their dance mat upon hearing the first strains of music after clicking the link.

Now that we're all groovin', I can continue. This thanksgiving marked for me an entire year of being single, possibly barring an incredibly mishandled affair around the holidays. You know who you are and in retrospect I'm really really really sorry, even though I'm pretty sure you're not holding a grudge. One year of being single has taught me that, well, I don't really like being single. It has also taught me that I don't hate being single either. If I were surrounded by happy relationships, or incredible-yet-too-intimidating prospects, I think I might be a wreck, but neither is the case. Being single is totally stable, and relatively functional. The impending visit of my Ex-girlfriend does, however, have me in a bit of a rush. I'd love to have a date for next weekend, not only for purposes of escaping the house, but as a show of strength, a defensive maneuver of sorts. Unfortunately, dating someone for those reasons is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative – the long way of saying I am uncomfortable with using people. Relationships being organic as they are develop at uncertain rates, and with a week's notice I really don't have the highest of hopes. It's not as though I haven't been considering the issue since much earlier in the year, it's that I have yet to really find an individual of the female persuasion with whom I have the right kind of rapport, ie. The kind I can talk to naturally, without watching my words to make sure I'm not geeking out too hard. As you probably know, this would already be PRETTY RARE even if I wasn't beset with a terminal case of shy.

So boo-hoo, I don't really talk to girls. At least I don't pop my collars.

What I have at the moment are prospects, but nothing more. In each case there are too many unknowns to allow for a solid plan. Missing first year university here has been academically painless (although I think I'd be better off having taken FYP, that's another story), but it has the unfortunate side effect of alienating me from the social dynamics which have sprung up. All I know is that if people like my housemates they tend to be ok with me. This would be awesome if girls visited this place more than once or twice in EVER. The only other constant that I have become aware of is that if I meet someone at Dal, chances are it turns out they're a King's student anyhow. Some have voiced an opinion to the effect that this just goes to show that I attend the wrong school. I guess at least that when I meet girls at Dal my housemates will invariably know something about her.

Fifty bucks says that no matter who she is, it's always:

“Oh, her. She's dating a guy in my tutorial”

(or something to this effect)

• Loud!

PS. My heartache is over and indeed I can live without you.

PPS. Have you listened to Holy Fuck? That shit is bangin'!

PPPS. Maybe I should just take the hint* and get a haircut?

*assumption that there was a hint to be had? ASSUMED!

In which Loud muses about how to keep the free world rocking. And writing. And painting. And coding...

My housemate returns home tonight, and finds the remaining three of us in the midst of a heated debate. Naturally, he inquires as to what it is we are yelling about.

“We're having another copyright fight”

“Oh”

“Well, we do tend to have them every couple of days”

At this point, Etarran observes:

“We have them EVERY day!”

Which would be funnier if it weren't the honest truth. We had indeed argued about intellectual property rights the night before. It would certainly be funnier if it weren't my fault. As the token long-haired-hippie-anarcho-communist, I am something of a philosophical punching bag for the ...I guess liberal moderates? Who make up the house, and occasionally those visitors from outside the house as well. It's possible that this is for a good reason; the people who take issue with my positions tend to be more pragmatic, whereas I am an ideologue. Sadly, I think that in this sense I am an outmode, that policy and thought have to be guided by what rational observation can prove, and not by what an individual or group believes is somehow more “virtuous” than the next guy's “good life”.

When we debate intellectual property, as we do too much around here, it comes down to a fundamental difference in priorities. Etarran has observed of us that we “believe mostly the same things, only you believe them for completely the wrong reasons”. In common, I think everyone in the house is in agreement that no matter how you arrange IP rights, you need to both encourage and reward creativity. Past this, we tend to disagree entirely: I focus on the need to promote a vague “public good” - the benefit to people when they are allowed to enjoy art and participate in culture – by removing “unreasonable” restrictions on use of intellectual property. The others point out that making intellectual property less strictly controlled damages the ability of artists and publishers to make money, and therefore disincentivizes creativity. They assert that derivative use of IP under the current framework can be permitted by negotiating with the copyright holder, and purchasing it from them (or agreeing to pay royalties), and since this is at all possible the system does not need to change.

The way I see it, though, the economics of creativity are not the only thing that need be dealt with. While career artists do have to make a living from what they create, there is a whole world of non-commercial creativity that I believe is stifled when artists and corporations demand tighter restrictions on how we are allowed to use our media. For example, it makes economic sense for Apple to have iTunes dispense songs which are of a format exclusively supported by their brand of mp3 players. It makes sense for iTunes not to interface with mp3 players from other vendors. Apple has no obligation to increase the business of other companies, and it has a right to maximize its profits. Apple's policy in this matter may help Apple, but it is harmful to the public good and, I would argue, to the digital music industry. I believe that a free, open standard for music files (mp3, while ubiquitous, is not common property) and players would create a market in which users could buy music AND portable audio devices with greater confidence (I would suggest that they might buy more music, were this the case). Such a system would create market pressure for each vendor to produce the best, cheapest Open-Source Audio Codec (OSAC, not as catchy as mp3, but what can I do?) player, as well as the best digital delivery service. This intense competition would be a great boon for consumers, but perhaps costly for the technology providers. To this, I would respond “tough titty”. If each digital distribution platform used a unique key to encode songs bought through that service, consumers could be forced into being less fickle. HOWEVER, this would put quite the damper on another form of creativity, namely that exhibited by programmers of free or alternative media players. A decent compromise could be reached if users could pay a nominal fee (per song, perhaps?) for either the ability to transfer keys (encryption would be standardized, of course) to other programs, or perhaps – and this is already a reality – simply for unencrypted media files. I think that being able to pay to free your media from DRM strikes me as particularly fair. One, if it is money the companies want, then let them have money in exchange for free (as in speech, not as in beer) information, and Two, honest people who do not like DRM would be allowed to put their money where their mouths are. I think this sort of arrangement could work for all manner of digitally-distributed media. I would love for, say, Steam to be cross-compatible with other digital distribution platforms once I paid the fee. Valve might give up a certain amount of potential revenue, but as a fan of Valve's work, it's not like I'd give up lining their coffers. Sure, they might have to wage a couple of price and feature wars with other providers to get my every purchase, but they should have to do that anyway! Different companies make motherboards, BUT I do not have to buy an Asus graphics card when I use an Asus motherboard. I do not have to buy Toyota gas if I drive a Toyota. I do not have to buy a Warner Brothers' movie player to watch Warner Brothers movies. Standards are DEFINITELY beneficial to the public good, and it's high time that digital distributors cut out all the proprietary bullshit!

Picking up from thoughts of computer hardware and digital distribution of games, I would like to make the case that gamers, and gamer culture (at least on the PC) can be an example of an enlightened copyright regime. First, I want to be clear that I don't think that piracy as it exists in PC gaming is justified or enlightened. What I do think is that “piracy” of so-called “abandonware” games does have some certain merit. While in some cases the industry does produce means for gamers to play their old favourites again (ie. SNES emulators on a chip with all the old games preloaded), only recently have services like Steam and Gametap really, well, tapped into this market. Still, not every retro game will be profitable, and I foresee the utility of a small amount of file-sharing for the obscure, the overly complex, and the forgotten. Where gamer culture really shines in terms of IP is in the world of mods. When buying one game at retail allows you to access for free the creativity of many others who contributed content for the love of gaming (or in an attempt to get noticed in the industry), that can translate into additional value for the original creators and publisher. I think that if the model of mods could somehow be ported over to other forms of art (accessing derivative works is contingent upon owning the original content), we could make culture participatory AND fair to creators. “Institutionalized plagiarism”, you say? Hardly! Humans often learn through imitation/ My sister learned to talk by parroting my every sound (true story!), and while I'm pretty sure I found it annoying, you don't see me handing her a DMCA takedown notice! We retell jokes that we didn't make up ourselves, we relate stories that are not our own, we play games that we didn't make up but never paid for (remember wall-ball in grade 3 or so? Foursquare/king's court?), and sometimes we modify or embellish these things. Granted, these things are not new, but if you told me that no one's livelihood depended on them, I would laugh in your face. Imagine a world where you had to get permission to tell or modify any joke you told, or any schoolyard game you played, and tell me that YOUR livelihood would not be adversely affected (with a straight face and not dripping sarcasm). I think that if we enjoy a series of books, we shouldn't have to worry about whether or not the publisher wants to make an RPG out of it when we contemplate making a MUD on the internet based on said book. Maybe that's cutting into the potential revenues of the author, but if people are not allowed to celebrate what they love with just a little imitation (the sincerest form of flattery), something is VERY WRONG. What I cannot quite say is where the line should be drawn between what sort of derivations are fair and which are not. Maybe a MUD based on your favourite fantasy book is ok, but what about home-cooked rules for adapting, say, D&D or GURPS to be playable in that world? Such an action would be rather akin to making a mod of a computer game, based on an established franchise that you did not own. This happens all the time, and occasionally copyright owners will force the mod teams to cease and desist. While I respect the desire of, say, Lucasfilm, to make money on Star Wars: Battlefront, I think I would rather play a Battlefield mod coded by people who LOVE Battlefield and Star Wars instead of money. I think the ideal arrangement would be what happened to Garry's Mod, Team Fortress, and Desert Combat. Rather than a battle between quality and profit, the industry should embrace mod teams, and then commission them to help build, or even design on their own a bigger, better, for-profit version that the IP rights holder can sell. The amateur creation should be allowed to remain as a demo, free publicity for its better-supported official cousin. Of course, the practicality of hiring a mod team every time you want to exploit a franchise for profit is nil, but in other media the concept does exist in a sense (ie. Star Wars extended universe novels, although I'm sure they have a strict vetting/quality control policy on those). If multiple derivative works were being prepared at the same time, it only gets worse (although mod teams sometimes do coalesce on their own when this happens). The best answer I can give is that IP rights holders could always hire the pick of the modding crop when multiple projects were involved, and that franchise-based gaming could move away from being assigned to particular studios, and to contract work by modders? Still impractical, I suppose, so if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it.

I think that's all for now. Apparently posting about actual goings-on in Halifax was a lie. Maybe it will happen next time.

-LOUD!

T minus 10...9...8...7...6...

5...

“keyboard check!”

4...

“qwertyui...”

3...

“ok, that's good. Internet connection?”

2...

“check!”

1...

“ok, quiet everybody!”

Hi! I'm Loud, and this is post number One Hundred and Fifty.

This is a post that I've been mulling over in my head for what must be two weeks now, because I a) don't want to screw up a cool milestone, b) wanted to secure some guest posts (more on this later), and c) I procrastinate. It has been my intention from the beginning of the creative process for this post to address the issues raised by Bill C-61, which you may know by a different name: “CDMCA” or “Canadian Digital Millenium Copyright Act”. Those who already know what this is can probably skip to the next paragraph. If you don't know what it is, you'll probably want to start by asking “should I care about this bill?”. The fact that you are reading these words is a strong indicator that you are using a computer (hey, someone could have printed this out for you, or copied it longhand if they were really, really bored). That is all the information I need to say unreservedly that you should care about Bill C-61. In fact, that is all the information I need to say unreservedly that you should oppose Bill C-61!

“...And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of design upon his life...”

-John Locke, Two Treatises on Government

By lobbying for (or drafting, if you ask the more cynical pundits) legislation such as Bill C-61, the content cartels that have come to dominate media are placing themselves into a state of war with each and every citizen. In having DRM and contracts supercede Canadian law, Bill C-61 is effectively giving large, established industries total control over your legal rights to use media. And what of “fair use” or “fair dealing”? Since you are ONLY allowed to use copyright work for non-infringing purposes UNLESS you would have to circumvent a “digital lock” (DRM by any other name) in order to get your hands on the content. There are some narrow exceptions to this rule, for educational and research purposes, but these will not help the average consumer, or creator. You have NO fair-dealing rights unless the publisher wants you to have it. In other words, fair-dealing is no longer a right, it is a privilege. Any so-called “rights” you are given under C-61 (and there are a few) are not rights at all, but priviliges. The operative word here is “privilege”: in a world of legally-protected “digital locks”, true freedom of speech and creativity will belong only to the privileged. You're probably asking what this has to do with “absolute power”, and so I shall indulge your curiosity. Everything you know is derived from something you read, watched, saw, heard, and so on (epistemologists STAY OUT OF THIS ONE, WE'LL HAVE THE DEBATE LATER!). How you relate to what you know is determined in a similar fashion. You read about, talk about, and interpret data. Most of what you think comes from what we call culture, be it science, literary criticism, novels, music, film, or a blog. While there is always an element of personal experience and reflection, what you think is derived at least in part from what other people think, and have recorded for you to reflect on. Bill C-61 is part of a strategy by the “dinosaur” content providers to dominate culture completely. Their power used to be held in check by limited copyright terms (so that no one publisher could censor a work by buying up the copyright and never publishing it, for example), and what is called “fair dealing” or “fair use”. By extending copyright terms, by eliminating fair use rights through legally-entrenched DRM, by seeking out and suing scapegoat after scapegoat, they seek to control you by law, by code, and by fear*. They seek to control the horizontal and the vertical; they hope to control everything you see and hear. If they are allowed to succeed in this, they will gain control over what you think, or at the very least how you think. Thought creates action (again, philosophers, that argument is for another day), and therefore it is not unreasonable to say that corporate control of culture is a form of absolute authority. Therefore, the content providers and anyone else pushing Bill C-61 have entered into a state of war with you, and every other Canadian Citizen.

*If you want to read more about this, I suggest Free Copyright, by Lawrence Lessig, in which this issue is explored in detail.

Of course, the Lockean defense of my perceived right to exercize lethal force should recording industry execs ever knock on my door is hampered by the double-edged sword that is Lockean philosophy. While no fan of arbitrary authority, Locke was an avowed lover of personal property, which is exactly what the content cartel says it's protecting from “pirates”. This is a useful tactic for the industry and its lobbyists; who doesn't want to brand their opponent a “scurvy dog” after all? The most important thing that you or I can do when we talk about this issue is reveal to the uninitiated that this is not a black-and-white debate, that there is a middle ground in this so-called “war”. The goal of the moderates – our goal – is to satisfy the need to protect content from piracy without running roughshod over the rights of consumers, and fellow creators. The current Bill C-61 DOES NOT accomplish this goal. Here are some examples of how it unfairly limits the rights of consumers:

• If you have media files on your hard drive, it will be illegal to make backup copies of your hard drive for the purposes of data security (Bill C-61 only allows only one copy of a media file for each device you own and devices that will be used with them, a backup copy on your PC's external drive, or your Apple Time Machine would be two copies associated with the PC)

• While you will be legally allowed to make a backup copy of a commercial DVD, you will be able to do so ONLY if you do not bypass a “digital lock” to do so. Hey, guess what EVERY COMMERCIAL DVD has on it?

• You will only be able to TIVO/TV-Tune/Timeshift programming for the purposes of watching it once at a more convenient time. Want to watch that last Battlestar Galactica ep again to see if you missed anything the first time, or want to show it off to your friends tomorrow? Seems you're out of luck!

I am no commercial pirate. In fact, I do actually buy content or go without, I don't pirate stuff just because I don't want to spend money on it. But if Bill C-61 is law, I would be branded a criminal, even though I DO NOT engage in or profit from piracy. I like to have recordings of shows that can watch without having to wait for the DVD box set, which I'll probably buy anyway if I like a series enough to record it and watch it multiple times! I like to have multiple copies of files sometimes, because I dual-boot Windows and Linux, and while I can read the Windows drive when I'm in Linux, the reverse is not true. I haven't ever actually ripped a DVD, but I do enjoy having the option open to me. I am not a pirate, but I will lose the right to manage my content in a non-infringing manner if the Bill passes. So will you. In addition to the Wikipedia links for background, Free Culture, and the Bill itself, you may want to avail yourself of more information. Here are some starting points to get you on your way.

Free Your Culture, Free Your Mind

Having established that bill C-61 does not represent in any way the ideal relationship between creators and consumers, I suppose the onus is now on me to say what would constitute such an arrangement. My answer can now be seen perched above even the title of my blog: Creative Commons is – at least for me – the best solution to the problem. If you haven't checked out my license agreement out of curiousity already, go do it now. That being said, I understand that as a voluntary initiative, Creative Commons is only half a solution. You can – and should – be a part of that half, but don't lose sight of larger goals.

The key elements of a whole solution in my view are not terribly different. What I think is necessary is to retain the flexible nature of CC, and to make “some rights reserved” the legal default for any work not registered as being otherwise (those with strong commercial interests, or a desire for more complete control over their work would be allowed to reserve all rights for a nominal fee. A copyright registry as proposed by Lawrence Lessig is also a brilliant way to simplify the process of getting permissions for work still under copyright). I think that authors should be given the right to determine the terms under which their work will be sold, which is a right that content providers or any other sort of middleman should have. Yes, it is their investment in the artist that they are protecting, but if a particularly cautious label doesn't want to publish the work of an artist whose terms are particularly liberal, I'm sure that there would be many like-minded publishers ready and willing to take that artist onboard. I think that in any system, people should not buy media that comes with terms they find objectionable. Under Bill C-61's proposed legislation, this would be a very large amount of media, and should the bill be passed into law, then we should not grumble, we should not pirate, and above all we should not buy. Let the market show the industry that unfair terms will not be tolerated, or else it is not they, but we who are to blame for rolling over and allowing restrictions to be placed on our freedoms.

I hereby open the floor to guest posters and reader submissions. Over the next while, I will augment this post with different views (some of them my own) on what an “ideal copyright system” would be, and relevant explorations of the topic of copyright at large. I've already contacted some of you about guest posts, but anyone I know is immediately welcome to send me one. Submissions from anyone who doesn't know me go to Loud(dot)Blog(at)gmail(dot)com. Any editing I do will be for spelling, grammar, and clarity if absolutely need be.

Final Notes: read Little Brother, a Creative Commons-licensed book by Cory Doctorow. So far it is a pretty good read. Thanks go to Gold for the tip. Join the facebook group “Fair Copyright For Canada” as well as your local chapter. Attend a meeting or two, offer to meet with your MP. This legislation will affect you, so I suggest you try to affect it in return.

-LOUD!