The black outs of Dark Wednesday are over and the United States Congress has listened, shelving the contentious anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA indefinitely. Now, you would think that the internet was finally safe from corporate control. Huzzah! Bring on the cat gifs!
You would be wrong. Sort of.
Sci-Fi author, journalist, and Happy Mutant at large Cory Doctorow believes the copyright wars are just the opening salvo in a much larger conflict. This time it’s not just the internet; what’s at stake is the fate of all computing.
From rendering game worlds to managing insulin pumps, computers do almost everything. Think about that. Computers are devices that can be set upon any task and we’ve readily embedded them in every aspect of our daily life. To most of us, that’s been the chief boon of the digital age. But that same universality is also a threat — corporations, governments, every vested monopoly is worried about the disruptive power of computing.
And according to Doctorow, this fear means general computing has a giant bullseye on it.
You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 29:03]
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Thank you for interviewing Cory about this very important topic!
I really feel like the text about this intervie should've included a link to the article you mention, though. I haven't seen that article myself, but he did hold a talk by the same title, and it can be seen (with subtitles in many languages) here: https://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/GmpB…
Unfortunately the site is down – Hmm, wonder why… Do you have an alternate address for it?
I guess it was just down for a short while. It works fine for me now.
Indeed…. Fortunately I found it a short while later on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc. AMAZING talk!!!
Cory Doctorow presented at the 28th Chaos Communications Conference (28C3) in Germany in December 2011. IT Conversations has the recorded audio & video.
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5…
Excellent, that answers my previous question
Thanks for covering this critically important issue.
North America's war against the general purpose computer could be seen as originating from the Clinton/Gore administration in the USA during their National Information Infrastructure task force. This is when I first heard of the idea that we should redesign general purpose computers and communications technology to somehow work and yet not allow its owners to do things which someone else didn't like. This idea was exported to the world through some policy laundering with the 1996 WIPO treaties, and showed up in Canada first as Bill C-60 under the then Liberal government.
When the Conservatives formed government in 2006 I mistakenly thought we had won that battle. These were people who supported those who were uncomfortable with the mere registration of long-guns, so there was no chance that they would support locking up our computers. I launched the Petition to protect IT Property Rights http://c11.ca/petition/ict , assuming I would get back a confirmation from the Conservatives that they would reject the Clinton/Gore/Liberal policy of abrogating responsibility for protecting the property rights of technology owners.
I was unfortunately wrong. I believe the problem is that non-technical people believe the marketing brochures from the TPM vendors. They believe it will reduce infringement, even though there is no evidence of this and considerable evidence that these TPMs increase infringement. Since they incorrectly believe that TPMs are something applied to content, rather than primarily something that is applied to devices, they don't realise the considerable harm to technology owners and competing technology vendors. Content alone cannot make decisions, and if any decision is made (including "copying") it is encoded as software running on a computer. Any TPM that alleges to restrict "copying" is in fact restricting the rights of technology owners to control the keys to any locks on their own property, and to make their own software choices.
I believe if studied it would be proven that legal protection for TPMs will cause far more harm to the economy (including to copyright holders) than the good that would be gained even if the marketing brochures were true.
It is frustrating that people who claim their motivations are to stop people infringing their copyright related rights believe that attacking the property rights of many more people is a valid option.
I hope Canadians will write their MPs and tell them to respect technology property rights. If hundreds of thousands of people signed the Petition to protect IT Property Rights http://c11.ca/petition/ict , we might get the attention of a government that claims to have respect for property rights as a founding principle.
Indeed, you are absolutely right about WIPO and how little press it had compared to SOPA. But the internet wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it it is today and information didn't flow so easily to as many people as it does today, heck, the iPhone is barely 6 years old!
Indeed, people are taking to the internet 'streets' very late, perhaps too late some may argue; WIPO has passed, the DMCA has passed, DRM has been with us for over a decade, so long in fact that few of today's computer users remember the days when computers could actually easily be made to run the way the user wants instead of enforcing restrictions that are more and more painfully difficult and time consuming to remove (we've also passed from a free-flowing of persons between countries to a paranoid society where every traveler is treated as a potential terrorist – how did 300 million people accept to have their personal rights stripped away? Because 30 people killed 3000?)
So we end up having to spend a growing portion of our lives to go to all kinds of trouble to do what used to be simple and straightforward to do. Big deal to bypass the restrictions, some may say? The point is, IT SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY and, as Cory so eloquently points out, instead of solving the problem, our elected officials actually make it worse for every one of us, while the so-called 'pirates' bypass these barriers without even flinching.
And talking about the so-called pirates… I challenge the media industry to prove that even 1% of pirated copies would actually have been purchased if it wasn't available online for free, to justify the very characterization of piracy and their astonishingly overinflated loss estimates.
What is worse is that the whole approach to the issue by governments is fundamentally, morally and ethically wrong. What ever happened to the common good and the the rights of THE PEOPLE? When did the rights of the privileged few and those of the corporations trump the rights of the people?
What will it take for the general public to wake up from their apathy? The surprise of your mother who finds out, just like what happened to mine recently, that she can't play the DVD her old relative just sent her of her church choir, a 'very respectable person', because of DRM?
More and more, this issue affects us all, not just us techno geeks who have been following the issue since its inception 15 years or so ago.
When I talk to people about the two locks of DRM (one on content to make it only interoperable with "authorised" devices, and one on devices to disallow the owner from making their own choices), the most common reaction I get is disbelief. They don't believe that this is how DRM works, and most truly believe that what these laws are talking about is "copy control" (some magic pixie dust you can put on content that allows it to come alive and make decisions on its own without the need of software running on computing hardware).
People presume that they can do with their computers any legal thing they want to. Many less technical people are convinced that these restrictions are defects in the device. This is one of the reasons why the "Defective by Design" campaign was named that way: to let people know that these defects are deliberate choices being imposed on them, not something accidentally broken on their computer.
I think once people realise how these restrictions work, they can then begin to ask the right question.
a) Should copyright holders have the right to impose brands of access technology? I suspect most believe that copyright holders should have as much say in their choice of digital technology as book authors had in what brand of eye glasses people wore.
b) Should someone other than the owner of something be allowed to place a lock on it where the owner is denied keys? I believe most people believe property law should protect us from this, and that denying keys from owners is far more analogous to "theft" than any type of copyright or related rights infringement.
Once we get to these simpler and more relevant questions, and away from the science-fiction "pixie dust" nonsense, we can enact laws which better reflect the expectations of the majority of citizens in our society.
At the moment, I don't believe that citizens or politicians are making informed choices about the content or devices they are purchasing, or the laws that are being tabled/passed.
BTW: I've been creating/repairing/programming/using computers since the mid 1980's. Various attempts at things marketed as "copy control" have been with us since that time. What is new since the mid 1990's is proposed radical changes to the law to grant legal protection for activities that if we were talking about non-digital property would be prohibited. It is sad, but politicians not understanding digital technology has enabled lobbiests to dupe them into passing laws which are backwards to how other technology and property are treated.
I wonder if the conservative interests in TPM is from the censorship (tho they would never call it that) angle. That the moralists can use it to ban "unwholesome" content from the net. The kind of thinking that has given the world DVD players that will skip past various scenes if it recognizes the inserted movie…
Here's a link to Cory's article http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
As I see it, intellectual property law caters to ego and greed, and in the end it's only accomplishment will have been to divide us.
Here's a thought provoking read on the subject http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387
I suppose that digital age has to change our world, so the world's rules sometimes should be re-written. It's normal natural processes.
History has proven that we don't need to change the rules, we just need to drop them as they become irrelevant and harmful.
The same way the printing press opened people's eyes and the Inquisition tried to impose blinders and keep their control on the population by religious indoctrination (who would think nowadays that you could get capital punishment for your beliefs!), the information age has opened the eyes of the people and those in power are, just like then, desperately trying to keep imposing restrictions while the population moves away from its old shackles.