Saturday, April 13, 2002

The New York Times 'Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics'
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"Before we get to the scientific arguments of the neo-creos, a word should be said about their motivation. Just what do they have against Darwinism? Unlike the old-fashioned creationists, they are not especially worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. Then why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been ''proved true'' and asserted its consistency with Roman Catholic doctrine. Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are ''nonoverlapping magisteria.'' But the neo-creos aren't buying this. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are fundamentally incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is, in the words of Phillip Johnson, ''a purposeless and undirected process that produced mankind accidentally'' and, as such, must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful Creator."

redux [09.23.01]
The New York Review of Books Saving Us from Darwin

"Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities - one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague...? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve."

redux [02.05.00]
Slate Is Natural Selection the Result of Design?

Steven Pinker: "Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do."

Robert Wright: " A system can be entirely mechanical, complying with the laws of physics and mathematics, yet be teleological, designed to realize a purpose. In fact, that seems to be true of all teleological systems I know of, including genes and people and thermostats."

redux [09.05.01]
The Third Culture Science and the Psychology of Beliefs

"The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else."

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn

"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

Friday, April 12, 2002

The New York Times Magazine Silicon Valley's Spy Game
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"I tried again. What about the centralized storage of health information, as Oracle was proposing to do with the Leaders system. Would Ellison want government officials to have access to personally identifiable genetic information? "

"''I feel like Alice has fallen through the looking glass,'' Ellison said. His voice rose; he was starting to get a little testy. ''Does this other database bother you here? We can't touch that database because I won't be able to use my credit card. Like, I won't be able to go to the mall!'' He took on the voice of Sean Penn's stoner from ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'' ''Like, that's really disturbing. Like, don't mess with my mall experience. O.K., so people have to die over here without this, but that's not going to affect my experience going to the mall.'' He exhaled, and in his regular billionaire voice asked, ''I mean, what the hell is going on?''"

redux [03.11.02]
Wired News Spying: The American Way of Life?

"In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners.

Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty.

But Bush's war on terror is not a traditional military conflict with a clear end that can be met after, say, U.S. soldiers capture a city, eliminate a Taliban command post -- or even snare Osama bin Laden himself. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly have warned that the attempt to exterminate al-Qaida dens may continue for years, even decades. It conceivably could succeed the Cold War as the most important political struggle of the 21st century."

redux [02.25.02]
NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
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"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

MSNBC Tibetan culture gets a tech boost

"At a gala recently at the opulent Russian Tea Room in New York City, serene looking Tibetan monks rubbed elbows with suited clients of a Silicon Valley company that boasts about having survived the tech bust. This is a story about an unlikely marriage between philanthropy and capitalism, and how it could very well help preserve the culture of the people of Tibet.

SCATTERED across Northern India, Nepal and Bhutan are 32 settlement camps, home to more than 122,000 Tibetan exiles displaced from their native land by Chinese troops, who invaded the country 50 years ago. Just last month, action was begun in earnest to install a computer in each of these settlements, and to wire each for Internet access."

redux [10.22.01]
BBC Village in the clouds embraces computers

"I have seen that even a small village like mine can benefit a lot from the internet.

We can use it to generate money for the village, to provide quality education for our children, to provide information about our culture to children all over the world, and to invite volunteers to come to our village.

If everything goes well, I plan to build a college in my village and provide computer courses to the students. This will open a door for us to produce computer programmers in the village, and produce software for the big firms around the world."

redux [09.13.01]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
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"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites."

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

redux [04.23.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture

"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet

"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

redux [04.10.01]
Feed The Three Stooges Play Zunil

"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.

Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."

Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

The Washington Post Analysts Accused Of Touting Tech 'Junk' To Boost Profits

"At the height of the technology bubble, Henry Blodget and other Internet analysts at Merrill Lynch & Co. issued glowing reports about companies that would later crash, while privately deriding the stocks to one another in salty, dismissive language.

One company given a top rating by analysts was described in-house as "a piece of junk." Another was called "such a piece of crap," even though analysts in Merrill's Internet group told investors to buy more of it for their portfolios. One analyst worried that regular investors "are losing their retirement" because of the misleading advice."

redux [08.21.01]
The Standard Days of Reckoning

"There is something a bit disingenuous about this legal assault, which is, after all, mainly about people who lost money speculating in the stock market. Some are suing because they couldn't get shares in initial public offerings at the offering price; others are suing because they got the shares and lost money on them. Federal regulators and politicians are suddenly shocked - shocked! - to discover that conflicts of interest are rampant on Wall Street.

Still, with $3.3 trillion up in smoke since the Nasdaq hit its peak in March 2000, it's hardly surprising that the people and institutions that helped engineer the epic Internet bubble are being called to account. And for the technology finance industry - which was transformed by the Nasdaq's boom from a relatively obscure West Coast offshoot of Wall Street into a major source of growth and profits for top-tier firms such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston and Merrill Lynch - it's going to be a painful reckoning indeed."

redux [07.19.01]
The New York Times Opinion Page Cleaning Up Stock Market Research
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"Investment banks, whose analysts were touting stocks with overwhelming zeal even as the stock market started crashing, are now trying to rehabilitate their images. Last week Merrill Lynch , by some measures the world's biggest investment bank, declared that except under strictly monitored circumstances, its analysts would be prohibited from holding shares in the companies they research. The goal is to remove any incentive for them to boost a stock to ensure their own enrichment. But this novel policy will not entirely prevent conflicts of interest from arising. It should be regarded as a springboard to a more complete revamping of the relationship between publicly available research and investment banking."

redux [06.27.01]
News.Com Will Wall Street analysts turn apologetic?

"Wall Street analysts are known for a lot of things--being too optimistic, failing to warn investors about the dot-com crash, and being the latest target for Congress--but they usually aren't known for their apologies."

"Morgan Stanley analyst Jeffrey Camp cut Exodus to a "neutral" from "strong buy" and gave his clients an apology.

"There are few moments in my career that rival this one in its difficulty and unpleasantness. Elbert Hubbard said, 'The line between failure and success is so fine, we scarcely know when we pass it.' But passed it I have, and it is time to own up," Camp said."

redux [06.11.01]
News.Com Did so many get it so wrong?

"As pundits rush to explain what happened on Wall Street, fingers point to the thought leaders. We read exposés on Mary Meeker and Frank Quattrone--once dubbed geniuses--and wonder how they could have sponsored initial public offerings for the nth online grocer or women's portal. Or we ask ourselves how stock analysts could ride a stock all the way down from $150 to $3, all the while touting it as a "strong buy.""

"These are people who were supposed to be making smart decisions. How did they get it so wrong? The answer is, they didn't. "

redux [03.13.01]
The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."

Tuesday, April 09, 2002

MediaChannel The Dangers Of TV's Tunnel Vision

""One key issue was the understanding readers and audiences may form of the reasons for the violence, and how this arises out of 'framing decisions' about what to include in reports of the conflict. Are there certain explanations that prevail by default? Or do they result from choices made by journalists? Is all the responsibility of ill-intentioned leaders; or an expression of 'ancient hatreds' welling up from within? Key contributor Lyse Doucet of BBC World recalled that peace actions were generally ignored by journalists in favor of 'running off to the front-line;' but that meant 'we never probed why the violence was there in the first place.'""

MSNBC Intractable foes, warring narratives

"STEPPING BACK FROM the horrific headlines of the day, it is clear that the conflict over Israel/Palestine is all about competing narratives."

"In most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel’s: a democracy under constant siege. "

George Lakoff Metaphors of Terror

"This works literally—when we see plane coming toward the building and imagine people in the building, we feel the plane coming toward us; when we see the building toppling toward others, we feel the building toppling toward us. It also works metaphorically: if we see the plane going through the building, and unconsciously we metaphorize the building as a head with the plane going through its temple, then we sense—unconsciously but powerfully—being shot through the temple. If we metaphorize the building as a person and see the building fall to the ground in pieces, then we sense—again unconsciously but powerfully— that we are falling to the ground in pieces. Our systems of metaphorical thought, interacting with our mirror neuron systems, turn external literal horrors into felt metaphorical horrors."

redux [05.22.01]
MediaChannel The Myth In Journalism

"The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing.

Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories."

redux [03.03.02]
Bad Subjects Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism

"Yet if economic fear is a persuasive mode of social coercion, it can also function as a mode of consumption. Preventative consumption is a fear response that seeks to avoid the consequences of unpreparedness or inaction. Consumption itself becomes a defense against fears, rational or irrational. Since September 11, the spectre of Islamic terrorism has generated a market for products that can locate themselves within this conceptual framework of preventative consumption. A product's precise relation to the political phenomenon is irrelevant. Rather, marketability in the fear market relies on associative links. Risk, ever-present in the economic calculus, suddenly has an attributable face. Preventative consumption takes those social risks caused by foreign, alien hatreds, and reduces them into the manageable features of known products."

redux [10.05.01]
The New York Review of Books Notes on Prejudice

"Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do - & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree."

"The only cure is understanding how other societies - in space or time - live: and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates, John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas & free minds."

Monday, April 08, 2002

SFGate Copyright's Next Chapter

"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.

The new technology? The player piano roll."

"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."

redux [03.23.02]
Wired News Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders

"America's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood.

When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capitol Hill."

Cory Doctorow The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act

"Senator Fritz Hollings has introduced a modified version of the SSSCA, called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which will do just what it says: convert our rich innovative technosphere into a one-way medium run by coked-up Hollyweird fatcats who thought that the VCR was a bad idea but that Police Academy n -1 was just dandy.

The CBDTPA (let's call it the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act and have done with it) requires technologists to arrive at a trumped-up "consensus" with Hollywood Political Officers before they can bring any new products to market. This "consensus," reached at lawyerpoint, establishes what features every product that can store, trasnmit, display or manipulate digital files must have and which files it must not have: everything not mandatory is verboten."

Michael Fraase When elephants dance

"When elephants dance, it’s best to get out of the way. That’s exactly what’s happening now as the entertainment industry—the recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainly—attempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isn’t it?"

"As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: “If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; they’re too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.”"

Cryptome Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

"While industries are at odds as to how to solve these critical content protection problems, the legislation we introduce today provides us with the tools to break the logjam. Specifically, the legislation requires the content, consumer electronics, and information technology industries to come together with representatives of consumer groups to develop standards, technologies, and encoding rules to safeguard digital content so that it will be made more readily available to consumers without being subject to piracy. The affected parties would have one year to reach agreement. The technologies would then be incorporated into all digital media devices to ensure universal protection for digital content and universal access to such content for consumers. The deadline on industry would work in the following fashion: if they come together to solve these problems in private sector talks, we will empower government enforcement so that all consumer devices comply. If they don't, the government, in consultation with the private sector, will have to step in."

The Electronic Fronteir Foundation Congress Calls For Public Participation on Digital Music Issues

"Today, Senator Hollings introduced the alarming Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which will give Hollywood plutocrats the power to stall new digital media technologies for a year, negotiating a phony "consensus" at lawyer-point with technologists. This "consensus" will receive the force of law, prescribing which user-hostile features are mandatory and which innovative features are forbidden. CBDTPA is derived from the draft SSSCA (Security Systems & Standards Certification Act), the subject of our last alert.

Both the House and the Senate have called for comments on the future of digital music, an issue that is deeply entwined with technology mandates.

This is YOUR chance to voice your opposition to laws that make all digital media technology mandatory or forbidden."

United States Committee on the Judiciary Protecting Creative Works in The Digital Age: User Comments

"If this bill becomes law, nearly every form of digital technology we use today will be completely at the mercy of a handful of large content providers. Our computers, operating systems, networking protocols, and all other aspects of digital communication will have to change drastically to accomodate the whims of these profit-driven industry groups. This will hurt competition and innovation among hardware and software manufacturers by artificially restricting the functionality they can provide. New technologies will suffer the scrutiny of those whose interest is best served by the status quo before being allowed to market."

redux [10.23.01]
EETimes PC industry girds for copy-protection fight

"A PC industry executive said a range of copy-protection technologies are available to prevent video piracy and that a single solution will not work and won't be embraced by consumers. "It's a myth to say that there is a magic bullet out there" to protect all content, said Jeffrey Lawrence, an Intel Corp. executive and member of the Copy Protection Technology Working Group, a cross-industry group working on copy-protection standards.

The Hollings bill is "an unwarranted intrusion by the government into the marketplace" that would mean a "snap-shot approach" to digital rights management, added Ken Kay, executive director of the Computer Systems Policy Project, a PC industry group based here. "It will freeze technologies in place.""

redux [10.09.01]
Dan Bricklin Copy Protection Robs The Future

"Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

redux [09.04.01]
First Monday Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility

"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."