From bvsahana at hotmail.com Tue Oct 1 22:48:59 2002 From: bvsahana at hotmail.com (Sahana B V) Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 22:48:59 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Apologies for the Dwijen I am way mail Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20021001/198d51cd/attachment.html From mariam_abacha22 at hotmail.com Wed Oct 2 16:00:56 2002 From: mariam_abacha22 at hotmail.com (MARIAM ABACHA) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 03:30:56 -0700 Subject: [Commons-law] URGENT ASSISTANCE NEEDED Message-ID: <200210020828.g928SXDO006192@mail.sarai.net> ATTENTION Sir/Madam, I am Dr (Mrs)Mariam Abacha, wife to the late Nigeria Head of state, General Sani Abacha who died on the 8th of june 1998 while still on active duty . I am contacting you in view of the fact we will be of great assistance to each other, likewise developing acordial business relationship. I currently have within my reach the sum of Thirty Million United States Dollars ($30,000,000.00) cash, which I intend to use for investment purposes specifically in your country. This money came as a result of a pay-back contract deal between my late husband and a Russian firm in our country's Multi-billion dollar Ajaokuta Steel plant. The Russian firm in our country's Multi-billion dollar Ajaokuta Steel Plant. The Russian partners returned my Husband's share of US$30,000,000.00 U.S.D after his death, and lodged it in my late husb! and's Security Company of which I am a Director Right now, the new Civilian Government has intensified their probe on my late husband's financial resources and have frozen our accounts. In view of these facts, I acted fast to withdraw the US$30,000,000.00 U.S.D from the company's vault and deposited it in a privately owned security safe in my village. I have since declared the security company bankrupt. No record whatsoever exists concerning the money traceable by the Government because, there is no documentation showing that we received the money from the Russians. Due to the current situation in the country concerning the Government's attitude towards my family, it has become quite impossible for me to make use of this money within; thus upon your consent, I shall expect you to contact me urgently to enable us discuss indetail about this transaction. Bearing in mind that your assistance is needed to transfer this fun! d, I propose a commission of 25% (twentyfive percent) of the total sum to you for the expected services and assistance. Your urgent response is highly needed so as to stop further contact. All correspondence must be by e-mail. I must use this opportunity to implore you to exercise the utmost indulgence to keep this matter extraordinary confidential, whatever your decision, while I await your prompt response. Best Regards, MRS MARIAM ABACHA From monica at sarai.net Wed Oct 2 18:17:15 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:17:15 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] another case... Message-ID: Just wanted to share another case of the exaction of copyright. It can seem like a "repeat" of things seen and heard, but there it is... best Monica The French Society of Authors' Rights (SACD) following a request from Robert Bresson's widow, has forbidden Mouchette of the site http://mouchette.org to show one of her works related to the film called "Mouchette" created by Robert Bresson in 1967. The forbidden work is a quiz comparing both characters, the girl from the film and the girl from the website. Here is the letter that forbids the film quiz: letter This interdiction unfortunately censors a work which is an homage celebrating the source of its inspiration. The narrow-mindedness of the heir of the copyright is the only cause for this interdiction. As a protest, several websites are presenting copies of this quiz which is no longer allowed to be shown on mouchette.org The activities in support of mouchette.org will be announced at the following websites, where the URLs of the several copies will also be constantly updated: http://artlibre.org/events.php/miroirs/mouchette.html http://www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/mouchette/ The information in english will be available here: http://drivedrive.com/mouchette/censored.html You can download the forbidden work here and install it on your own site: http://www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/mirror/ A public debate and a press conference will take place in Marseille at La Compagnie on the 2nd of November to discuss the situation regarding copyright laws and the internet with a panel consisting of Pierre Bongiovanni, Antoine Moreau, Anne Laforet, Catherine Arnaud, Nicolas Maleve, a spokesperson for mouchette.org and specialists on the questions of copyright. For more information on the debate: isa at aux2mondes.org -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From tieraq8 at bitworks.com Fri Oct 4 14:50:37 2002 From: tieraq8 at bitworks.com (tieraq8 at bitworks.com) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 11:20:37 +0200 Subject: [Commons-law] RE: The FREE Mortgage Information You Requested. Message-ID: <200210040920.g949KbO25586@www.ge-lease.de> Unten finden Sie die Daten Ihres Feedback-Formulars. Es wurde abgeschickt von tieraq8 at bitworks.com (tieraq8 at bitworks.com) am Freitag, 4. Oktober , 2002 um 11:20:37 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- tt: This is the detailed information that you asked us about. Please read carefully. Thanks FREE INFORMATION mxxv --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From tripta at sarai.net Tue Oct 8 16:20:08 2002 From: tripta at sarai.net (Tripta) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 10:50:08 +0000 Subject: [Commons-law] Fwd: Small timer ISPs forced to use real IPs Message-ID: <200210081050.08690.tripta@sarai.net> This is just another instance of the increasing survelliance mechanisms around us. It is very important to document and circulate these so as to generate awareness and intiate conversations. cheers tripta ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- I was just having a talk with my local cable Internet wallah. Turns out that due to a push at the "top", they are being forced to give real IPs to all their customers. The real reason seems to be that due to some legalities, these ISPs have been asked to either accept responsibility for all and any undesirable activity from their NAT'ed customers, or help identifying them when the need arises. Since they are not willing to do the formers and the other option is technically tough, one solutions being touted is to give real IPs and log the IP activities. Last time I checked, Delhi itself should have well over a few hundred such small time ISPs where each ISP is catering to 100-200 subscribers on an average. When will the guys at the "top" stop such madness? Giving away hundreds and thousands of IPV4 addresses at this age in a country like India which has a habit of breaking records whenever demographics is concerned? - Sandip ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sandip Bhattacharya Puroga Technologies Work: sandip <@> puroga.com, http://www.puroga.com Play: sandipb <@> bigfoot.com, http://www.sandipb.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Linux-india-general mailing list Linux-india-general at lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-general ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- From jeebesh at sarai.net Sat Oct 19 15:47:29 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 15:47:29 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Free Software and the Death of Copyright Message-ID: <0210191547290G.00843@pammi.sarai.kit> http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/ Free Software and the Death of Copyright Eben Moglen The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention at the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property system. Contents I. Software as Property: The Theoretical Paradox II. Software as Property: The Practical Problem III. Anarchism as a Mode of Production IV. Their Lordships Die in the Dark? Conclusion I. Software as Property: The Theoretical Paradox SOFTWARE: no other word so thoroughly connotes the practical and social effects of the digital revolution. Originally, the term was purely technical, and denoted the parts of a computer system that, unlike "hardware," which was unchangeably manufactured in system electronics, could be altered freely. The first software amounted to the plug configuration of cables or switches on the outside panels of an electronic device, but as soon as linguistic means of altering computer behavior had been developed, "software" mostly denoted the expressions in more or less human-readable language that both described and controlled machine behavior [1]. That was then and this is now. Technology based on the manipulation of digitally-encoded information is now socially dominant in most aspects of human culture in the "developed" societies [2]. The movement from analog to digital representation - in video, music, printing, telecommunications, and even choreography, religious worship, and sexual gratification - potentially turns all forms of human symbolic activity into software, that is, modifiable instructions for describing and controlling the behavior of machines. By a conceptual back-formation characteristic of Western scientistic thinking, the division between hardware and software is now being observed in the natural or social world, and has become a new way to express the conflict between ideas of determinism and free will, nature and nurture, or genes and culture. Our "hardware," genetically wired, is our nature, and determines us. Our nurture is "software," establishes our cultural programming, which is our comparative freedom. And so on, for those reckless of blather [3]. Thus "software" becomes a viable metaphor for all symbolic activity, apparently divorced from the technical context of the word's origin, despite the unease raised in the technically competent when the term is thus bandied about, eliding the conceptual significance of its derivation [4]. But the widespread adoption of digital technology for use by those who do not understand the principles of its operation, while it apparently licenses the broad metaphoric employment of "software," does not in fact permit us to ignore the computers that are now everywhere underneath our social skin. The movement from analog to digital is more important for the structure of social and legal relations than the more famous if less certain movement from status to contract [5]. This is bad news for those legal thinkers who do not understand it, which is why so much pretending to understand now goes so floridly on. Potentially, however, our great transition is very good news for those who can turn this new-found land into property for themselves. Which is why the current "owners" of software so strongly support and encourage the ignorance of everyone else. Unfortunately for them - for reasons familiar to legal theorists who haven't yet understood how to apply their traditional logic in this area - the trick won't work. This paper explains why [6]. We need to begin by considering the technical essence of the familiar devices that surround us in the era of "cultural software." A CD player is a good example. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an optical storage disk. The bitstream describes music in terms of measurements, taken 44,000 times per second, of frequency and amplitude in each of two audio channels ------------------------ From jeebesh at sarai.net Sat Oct 19 15:48:08 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 15:48:08 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Copyleft versus Copyright: A Marxist Critique Message-ID: <0210191548080H.00843@pammi.sarai.kit> http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/ Copyleft versus Copyright A Marxist Critique Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information. ------------------------------------------------------- From mukund at nls.ac.in Sat Oct 19 16:46:30 2002 From: mukund at nls.ac.in (mukund at nls.ac.in) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 16:46:30 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] Apologies for the Dwijen I am way mail In-Reply-To: <20020927032008.7F65A1149C5@webmail.vsnl.com> References: <20020927032008.7F65A1149C5@webmail.vsnl.com> Message-ID: <2215.202.54.87.179.1035026190.squirrel@mail.nls.ac.in> > hi lawrence got your message ...tried to call you ..no one seemeed to pick up the phone . i'm leaving for cal tonight ..how may i help you ? love mukund > > Hi all > > all of us have been bombed by a host of these mail from dwijen Rangnekar > saying I am away etc etc. I hav no idea why it has happened and sorry > for the inconvenience > > > Lawrence > _______________________________________________ > Commons-law mailing list > Commons-law at sarai.net > http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law From tripta at sarai.net Tue Oct 22 19:22:37 2002 From: tripta at sarai.net (Tripta) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:52:37 +0000 Subject: [Commons-law] free_culture Message-ID: <200210221352.37246.tripta@sarai.net> Keynote by Lawrence lessig from oscon 2002 to hear the audio, redirect to _____________http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free_culture.mp3 __________________________________________ http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/2641 Free Culture Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 by Lawrence Lessig 08/15/2002 Lawrence Lessig: I have been doing this for about two years--more than 100 of these gigs. This is about the last one. One more and it's over for me. So I figured I wanted to write a song to end it. But then I realized I don't sing and I can't write music. But I came up with the refrain, at least, right? This captures the point. If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society. In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyright was stopped. In 1710, the statute had said that copyright should be for a limited term of just 14 years. But in the 1740s, when Scottish publishers started reprinting classics (you gotta' love the Scots), the London publishers said "Stop!" They said, "Copyright is forever!" Sonny Bono said "Copyright should be forever minus a day," but the London publishers said "Copyright is forever." These publishers, people whom Milton referred to as old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book selling, men who do not labor in an honest profession (except Tim here), to [them] learning is indebted. These publishers demanded a common-law copyright that would be forever. In 1769, in a case called Miller v. Taylor, they won their claim, but just five years later, in Donaldson, Miller was reversed, and for the first time in history, the works of Shakespeare were freed, freed from the control of a monopoly of publishers. Freed culture was the result of that case. Remember the refrain. I would sing it, but you wouldn't want me to. OK. Well, by the end we'll see. That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth--1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years. That was our birth, and more fundamentally, in 1790, because of the technology of the time, all things protected were free code. You could take the works of Shakespeare and read the source--the source was the book. You could take the work of any creativity protected by the law and understand what made it tick [by] studying it. This was the design and the regime, and even in the context of patents, there were transparent technologies. You didn't take, you didn't need to take the cotton gin [for example] and read the patent to understand how it worked, right? You could just take it apart. These were legal protections in a context where understanding and learning were still free. Control in this culture was tiny. That was cute, right? Control, tiny . . . OK. And not just then, right? Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone. (Audience Applauds.) It was culture, which you didn't need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. It was built upon a constitutional requirement that protection be for limited times, and it was originally limited. Fourteen years, if the author lived, then 28, then in 1831 it went to 42, then in 1909 it went to 56, and then magically, starting in 1962, look--no hands, the term expands. Eleven times in the last 40 years it has been extended for existing works--not just for new works that are going to be created, but existing works. The most recent is the Sonny Bono copyright term extension act. Those of us who love it know it as the Mickey Mouse protection act, which of course [means] every time Mickey is about to pass through the public domain, copyright terms are extended. The meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear to those who pay to produce it. The meaning is: No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned. Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal. Things are different now, [different] from even when Walt produced the Walt Disney Corporation. In this year now, we have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author--there are fewer and fewer of those people out there--to life plus 70 years. That's the expansion of law, but also there's been an expansion of control through technology. OK, so first of all, this reality of opaque creativity, you know that as proprietary code. Creativity where you don't get to see how the thing works, and the law protects the thing you can't see. It's not Shakespeare that you can study and understand because the code is, by nature, open. Nature has been reformed in our modern, technological era, so nature can be hidden and the law still protects it--and not just through the protection, but through increasing control of uses of creative work. Here's my Adobe eBook Reader, right. Some of you have seen this before, I'm sure. Here's Middle March; this is a work in the public domain. Here are the "permissions" (a lawyer had something to do with this) that you can do with this work in the public domain: You are allowed to copy ten selections into the clipboard every ten days--like, who got these numbers, I don't know--but you can print ten pages of this 4 million page book every ten days, and you are allowed to feel free to use the read-aloud button to listen to this book, right? Now, Aristotle's Politics, another book in the public domain [that was] never really protected by copyright, but with this book, you can't copy any text into the selection, you can't print any pages, but feel free to listen to this book aloud. And to my great embarrassment, here's my latest book, right? No copying, no printing, and don't you dare use the technology to read my book aloud. [Laughter] I'll have a sing button in the next version of Adobe. Read a book; read a book. The point is that control is built into the technology. Book sellers in 1760 had no conception of the power that you coders would give them some day in the future, and that control adds to this expansion of law. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before. Right? Because here, here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book--that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text--that's a copy, but it's a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories. Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?" I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control? Now, unregulated uses disappear, we argue about fair use, and they find a way to remove fair use, right? Here's a familiar creature to many of you, right? The wonderful Sony Aibo Pet, which you can teach to do all sorts of things. Somebody set up a wonderful aibopet.com site to teach people how to hack their dogs. Now remember, their dogs, right? And this site actually wanted to help you hack your dog to teach your dog to dance jazz. Remember (Europeans are sometimes confused about this), it's not a crime to dance jazz in the United States. This is a completely permissible activity--even for a dog to dance jazz. In Georgia, there are a couple jurisdictions I'm not sure about [laughter], but mainly, dancing jazz is an OK activity. So Aibopet.com said, "Here, here's how to hack your dog to make it dance jazz." If anything, it would be a fair use of this piece of plastic that costs over $1,500. You would think, "This is a fair use," right? Letter to the site: Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent Aibo, where copy protection protocol constitutes a violation of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA. Even though the use is fair use, the use is not permitted under the law. Fair use, erased by this combination of technological control and laws that say "don't touch it," leaving one thing left in this field that had three, controls copyright, [thereby] controlling creativity. Now, here's the thing you've got to remember. You've got to see this. This is the point. (And Jack Valenti misses this.) Here's the point: Never has it been more controlled ever. Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. Never. Not even before the birth of free culture, not in 1773 when copyrights were perpetual, because again, they only controlled printing. How many people had printers? You could do what you wanted with these works. Ordinary uses were completely unregulated. But today, your life is perpetually regulated in the world that you live in. It is controlled by the law. Here is the refrain: Creativity depends on stopping that control. They will always try to impose it; we are free to the extent that we resist it, but we are increasingly not free. You or the GNU, you can pick, build a world of transparent creativity--that's your job, this weird exception in the 21st century of an industry devoted to transparent creativity, the free sharing of knowledge. It was not a choice in 1790; it was nature in 1790. You are rebuilding nature. This is what you do. You build a common base that other people can build upon. You make money, not, well, not enough, but some of you make money off of this. This is your enterprise. Create like it's 1790. That's your way of being. And you remind the rest of the world of what it was like when creativity and innovation were a process where people added to common knowledge. In this battle between a proprietary structure and a free structure, you show the value of the free, and as announcements such as the RealNetworks announcement demonstrate, the free still captures the imagination of the most creative in this industry. But just for now. Just for now. Just for now, because free code threatens and the threats turn against free code. Let's talk about software patents. There's a guy, Mr. Gates, who's brilliant, right? He's brilliant. A brilliant business man; he has some insights, he is even a brilliant policy maker. Here's what he wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Here's the first thing I'm sure you've read of Bill Gates that you all 100 percent agree with. Gates is right. He is absolutely right. Then we shift into the genius business man: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Excluding future competitors. Now, it's been four years since this battle came onto your radar screens in a way that people were upset about. Four years. And there have been tiny changes in the space. There have been a bunch of "Tim" changes, right? Tim went out there and he set up something to attack bad patents. That was fine. There were a bunch of Q. Todd Dickinson changes. He was a former head of the patent commission--never saw a patent he didn't like. But he made some minor changes in how this process should work. But the field has been dominated by apologists for the status quo. Apologists who say, We've always patented everything, therefore we should continue to patent this. People like Greg Aharonian, who goes around and says every single patent out there is idiotic. But it turns out that the patent system's wonderful and we should never reform it at all. Right? This is the world we live in now, which produces this continued growth of software patents. And here's the question: What have we done about it? What have you done about it? Excluding future competitors--that's the slogan, right? And that company that gave birth to the slogan that I just cited has only ever used patents in a defensive way. But as Dan Gillmor has quoted, "They've also said, look, the Open Source Movement out there has got to realize that there are a lot of patents at stake, and don't imagine we won't use them when we must." Now, the thing about patents is, they're not nuclear weapons. It's not physics that makes them powerful, it's lawyers and lawmakers and Congress. And the thing is, you can fight all you want against the physics that make a nuclear weapon destroy all of mankind, but you can not succeed at all. Yet you could do something about this. You could fuel a revolution that fights these legal threats to you. But what have you done about it? What have you done about it? (Audience Applauds.) Second, the copyright wars: In a certain sense, these are the Homeric tragedies. I mean this in a very modern sense. Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groenig, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so. Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It's a documentary film. It's about education. It's a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It's a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don't give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It's insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that's fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights. So, the broadcast flag, which says, "Before a technology is allowed to touch DTV, it must be architected to control DTV through watching for the broadcast flag." Rebuild the network to make sure this bit of content is perfectly protected, or amend it for . . . chips that will be imposed on machines through the law, which Intel referred to as the police state in every computer, quite accurately. And they would build these computers, but are opposed to this police state system. And then, most recently, this outrageous proposal that Congress ratify the rights of the copyright owners to launch attacks on P2P machines--malicious code that goes out there and tries to bring down P2P machines. Digital vigilantism. And not only are you allowed to sue if they do it and they shouldn't have done it, but you have to go to the attorney general and get permission from the attorney general before you are allowed to sue about code that goes out there and destroys your machine . . . when it shouldn't be allowed to destroy your machine. This is what they talk about in Washington. This is what they are doing. This is, as Jack Valenti says, a terrorist war they are fighting against you and your children, the terrorists. Now you step back and you say, For what? Why? What's the problem? And they say, It's to stop the harm which you are doing. So, what is that harm? What is the harm that is being done by these terrible P2P networks out there? Take their own numbers. They said last year [that] five times the number of CDs sold were traded on the Net for free. Five times. Then take their numbers about the harm caused by five times the number sold being traded for free: A drop in sales of five percent. Five percent. Now, there was a recession last year, and they raised their prices and they changed the way they counted. All of those might actually account for the five percent, but even if they didn't, the total harm caused by five times being traded for free was five percent. Now, I'm all for war in the right context, but is this the ground one stands on to call for a "terrorist war" against technology? This harm? Even if five percent gives them the right to destroy this industry, I mean, does anybody think about the decline in this industry, which is many times as large as theirs, caused by this terrorist war being launched against anybody who touches new content? Ask a venture capitalist how much money he is willing to invest in new technology that would touch content in a way that Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti don't sign off on. The answer is a simple one: Zero. Zero. They've shut down an industry and innovation in the name of this terrorist war, and this is the cause. This is the harm. Five percent. And what have you done about it? It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests. It has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. We've got rights on our side. And we've done nothing about it. We let them control this debate. Here's the refrain that leads to this: They win because we've done nothing to stop it. There's a congressmen: J.C. Watts. J.C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it. Boy, not spend 700 years in Washington? He says, you know, I like you guys, but seven years is enough, eight years is too much. I'm out of here. Just about the time J.C. Watts came to Washington, this war on free code and free culture began. Just about that time. In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: "If you are explaining, you are losing." If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property. They don't get why rearchitecting the network destroys innovation and creativity. They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away. Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington? But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom . . . You Don't Deserve It. But you've done nothing. (Audience Applauds.) There's a handful, we can name them, of people you could be supporting, you could be taking. Let's put this in perspective: How many people have given to EFF? OK. How many people have given to EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? See? Four. How many people have given more money to EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side? How many people have given anything to these people, Boucher, Canon. . . . This is not a left and right issue. This is the important thing to recognize: This is not about conservatives versus liberals. In our case, in Eldred [Eldred v. Ashcroft], we have this brief filed by 17 economists, including Milton Freedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Kost, Ken Arrow, you know, lunatics, right? Left-wing liberals, right? Freedman said he'd only join if the word "no-brainer" existed in the brief somewhere, like this was a complete no-brainer for him. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong. That's what this battle is. These people are from the left and right. Hank Perritt, I think the grandfather of cyberspace--the law of cyberspace running in Illinois--is struggling to get support, to take this message to Washington. These are the sources, the places to go. Then there is this organization. Now some of you say, I'm on the board of this organization. I fight many battles on that board. Some of you say we are too extreme; you say that in the wrong way, right? You send emails that say, "You are too extreme. You ought to be more mainstream." You know and I am with you. I think EFF is great. It's been the symbol. It's fought the battles. But you know, it's fought the battles in ways that sometimes need to be reformed. Help us. Don't help us by whining. Help us by writing on the check you send in, "Please be more mainstream." The check, right? This is the mentality you need to begin to adopt to change this battle. Because if you don't do something now, then in another two years, somebody else will say, OK, two years is enough; I got to go back to my life. They'll say again to you, Nothing's changed. Except, your freedom, which has increasingly been taken away by those who recognize that the future is against them and they have the power in D.C. to protect themselves against that future. Free society be damned. __________________________________________________________________________________ From RAD_INTECH at YAHOO.COM Mon Oct 14 01:58:15 2002 From: RAD_INTECH at YAHOO.COM (RAJ) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 01:58:15 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] ASKING 4 NOTES Message-ID: <000501c279ed$a9cba1e0$3d01a8c0@serverlink> PLZ PROVIDE ME WITH CYBER LAW NOTES SO THAT EVEN I WILL HVE THE PERFECT KNOWLEDGE ABT CYBER LAW , HOPE U WILL PROVIDE THE PERFECT ONE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20021014/987707a8/attachment.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Oct 28 14:51:43 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 14:51:43 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Can You Trust Your Computer? Message-ID: <02102814514303.00909@pammi.sarai.kit> http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/26/2315242&mode=nested -------------- Can You Trust Your Computer? By Richard Stallman Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal. Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what it does; you can't study the source code, or change it. It's not surprising that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put you at a disadvantage. Microsoft has done this several times: one version of Windows was designed to report to Microsoft all the software on your hard disk; a recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player required users to agree to new restrictions. But Microsoft is not alone: the KaZaa music-sharing software is designed so that KaZaa's business partner can rent out the use of your computer to their clients. These malicious features are often secret, but even once you know about them it is hard to remove them, since you don't have the source code. In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would make it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission. The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. (Microsoft's version of this is called "palladium.") Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function. Of course, Hollywood and the record companies plan to use treacherous computing for "DRM" (Digital Restrictions Management), so that downloaded videos and music can be played only on one specified computer. Sharing will be entirely impossible, at least using the authorized files that you would get from those companies. You, the public, ought to have both the freedom and the ability to share these things. (I expect that someone will find a way to produce unencrypted versions, and to upload and share them, so DRM will not entirely succeed, but that is no excuse for the system.) Making sharing impossible is bad enough, but it gets worse. There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents -- resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company. Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink. Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous computing becomes a paradise for corruption. Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read them -- and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the U.S. government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself. You might think you can find out what nasty things a treacherous computing application does, study how painful they are, and decide whether to accept them. It would be short-sighted and foolish to accept, but the point is that the deal you think you are making won't stand still. Once you come depend on using the program, you are hooked and they know it; then they can change the deal. Some applications will automatically download upgrades that will do something different -- and they won't give you a choice about whether to upgrade. Today you can avoid being restricted by proprietary software by not using it. If you run GNU/Linux or another free operating system, and if you avoid installing proprietary applications on it, then you are in charge of what your computer does. If a free program has a malicious feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs and tools on non-free operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many users do it. Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime. There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see gnu). If only a treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of individual action (take it or leave it). To oppose treacherous computing, we must join together and confront the situation as a collective choice. For further information about treacherous computing, see tcpa faq. To block treacherous computing will require large numbers of citizens to organize. We need your help! The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge (Public Knowledge) are campaigning against treacherous computing, and so is the FSF-sponsored Digital Speech Project (Digital Speech). Please visit these Web sites so you can sign up to support their work. You can also help by writing to the public affairs offices of Intel, IBM, HP/Compaq, or anyone you have bought a computer from, explaining that you don't want to be pressured to buy "trusted" computing systems so you don't want them to produce any. This can bring consumer power to bear. If you do this on your own, please send copies of your letters to the organizations above. Postscripts: 1. The GNU Project distributes the GNU Privacy Guard, a program that implements public-key encryption and digital signatures, which you can use to send secure and private email. It is useful to explore how GPG differs from treacherous computing, and see what makes one helpful and the other so dangerous. When someone uses GPG to send you an encrypted document, and you use GPG to decode it, the result is an unencrypted document that you can read, forward, copy, and even re-encrypt to send it securely to someone else. A treacherous computing application would let you read the words on the screen, but would not let you produce an unencrypted document that you could use in other ways. GPG, a free software package, makes security features available to the users; they use it. Treacherous computing is designed to impose restrictions on the users; it uses them. 2. Microsoft presents Palladium as a security measure, and claims that it will protect against viruses, but this claim is evidently false. A presentation by Microsoft Research in October 2002 stated that one of the specifications of Palladium is that existing operating systems and applications will continue to run; therefore, viruses will continue to be able to do all the things that they can do today. When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with Palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets Palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets" -- but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this is not what Palladium is really designed for. The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack," "malicious code," "spoofing," as well as "trusted." None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling Palladium. And so on. 3. A previous statement by the Palladium developers stated the basic premise that whoever developed or collected information should have total control of how you use it. This would represent a revolutionary overturn of past ideas of ethics and of the legal system, and create an unprecedented system of control. The specific problems of these systems are no accident; they result from the basic goal. It is the goal we must reject. Copyright ©2002 Richard Stallman (Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.) -------------------------------------------------------