Since my last post, I have come across a page written by someone who was an eyewitness to the events: The Edge of the Creative Commons, by Brent Laabs. He validates my criticism and also offers some additional information about when and why the change from BY-SA to BY-NC-SA happened. Well worth reading.
I’ve submitted this as a story to Techdirt, and I’m contacting others. Let’s see if I can make a fuss over this.
In my previous post, I noted that TV Tropes used to be available under a BY-SA license, but then they changed to a BY-NC-SA license. I consider this a bad move, of course, but after I finished my post, another thought occurred to me: what if it’s illegal?
To understand why this would be illegal, you’ve got to know a few things about Creative Commons licenses and how they work. First off, they are supposed to be irrevocable. Consider the following excerpts from the BY-SA legal code:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work…
The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats….
Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.
The code is long and boring to read, but the parts I just quoted seem pretty clear that the license lasts as long as the copyright. This doesn’t mean that TV Tropes can’t re-release stuff under the BY-NC-SA license, but it does mean that everything is still covered by the more liberal BY-SA license. This is why All The Tropes has the right to take all of TV Tropes’s old stuff and repost it under the BY-SA license. So, at the very least, it is misleading for TV Tropes to imply that none of their current content is covered by BY-SA.
But there’s a deeper problem than that. It comes down to a question of “ownership”. The Creative Commons legal code notes that the “Licensor” reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms. So the question is: who is the proper “Licensor” for TV Tropes’s content?
If TV Tropes, LLC, is the proper “owner” of the content in question, then they do have the right to relicense their stuff, although I question the ethics of doing so. But I don’t think they can call themselves the “owner” of most of their content! Their current administrative policy is to take “irrevocable ownership…with all rights surrendered” of everything they receive, but some of their older administrative pages say nothing about that at all! In other words, TV Tropes simply cannot claim to own the copyrights on anything submitted to them before they changed their policy, which happened in November 2013. If TV Tropes does not own that stuff, then the contributors (and there are a lot of contributors) still have the rights to it, according to the Berne Convention. They gave TV Tropes permission to use it under the BY-SA license, but that doesn’t include the right to relicense their contributions under the BY-NC-SA license! Did the legions of contributors ever explicitly give TV Tropes permission to relicense their work? If not, then TV Tropes is violating the BY-SA license, and by so doing, they lose their rights under that license, meaning that they lose the rights to use the work at all! Their relicensing the content to BY-NC-SA is a massive act of infringement, and they had better pay up – or else!
Of course, it’s been nearly a year since TV Tropes started claiming irrevocable ownership, and over two years since they started marking everything as BY-NC-SA. Why hasn’t anything bad happened to them yet? I believe it is because of the inherent weakness of Creative Commons licenses: they rely on copyright for their power, and copyright is not a tool for the masses. Copyright is now, as it has ever been, a tool for the few to oppress the many. Expecting it to come through in our favor is a foolish proposition, and everyone who does so (including Creative Commons) has made the fatal mistake of believing hype over substance.
But perhaps I am being too pessimistic. Time will tell. In the meantime, I intend to probe this issue further, and see if we can’t actually use these licenses to put some pressure on TV Tropes. Maybe I’m a fool, but I know that large organizations live and die by the words on paper, and there are cases on the books of the lowly bringing down the haughty using the law. Wish me luck.
P.S. For a good bit of reading on the trouble with copyright, check out this essay: ‘Balanced’ Copyright: Not A Magic Solving Word, by Alan Story (and some good follow-up on Techdirt). I’ll have to give that essay a more thorough reading later, but for now, let me just say that I fully agree with Alan Story’s suggestion to “burn Berne”.
All of you who are reading this are probably already familiar with TV Tropes, the great wiki of the elements of fiction. It’s a fun resource, and a powerful time sink. But there’s a problem with it, and from my vantage point as a free culture fanatic, it’s a big problem: the license.
TV Tropes uses Creative Commons’s BY-NC-SA license. This license means that you can copy and modify the content however you want, but subject to these four conditions:
1. You must give proper attribution to the content creator (BY)
2. You must not use it commercially (NC)
3. You must make your content available under the same license (SA)
4. You must not add any DRM to what you make (this is standard in all Creative Commons licenses)
Now, conditions 1 and 4 are great by me, and condition 3 wouldn’t be so bad, except for condition 2. That’s actually a very profound restriction, dictating how someone can use the information. While conditions 1, 3, and 4 just tell you what you must do when you use it, condition 2 tells you how you must use it. This is a broad restriction, and not a very helpful one.
Smarter folks than myself have written a lot about the potential harm in non-commercial restrictions. The good folks at Freedom Defined have put together an excellent page: The case for Free use: reasons not to use a Creative Commons -NC license. I also recommend the following post: Why The NC Permission Culture Simply Doesn’t Work.
But there’s an even better argument against the NC provision, especially since TV Tropes is a wiki: the most popular wiki of all doesn’t use it! Wikipedia’s license is BY-SA, commercial reuse fully allowed. It doesn’t seem to have harmed Wikipedia at all, and it makes Wikipedia’s content more useful to the world. Curiously enough, TV Tropes used to be available under the BY-SA license, as this archived page shows. Why did they change? I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it was because they wanted more control over the submissions they were getting. Wikipedia notes here that TV Tropes even changed their terms of use to demand total ownership of user contributions.
Well, some folks weren’t happy about the change, and they decided to do something about it. Taking advantage of the freeing nature of the BY-SA license, these folks took TV Tropes’s stuff and forked it, creating a new tropes wiki: All The Tropes (also available on Wikia). All The Tropes offers folks a place to give and receive truly free content when discussing culture, creating a repository of knowledge and opinion that’s available for anyone to use for any reason, commercial or not. There is no top-down control, nor top-down censorship, and they even use better software to run their wiki. Seriously, check the place out.
So, the next time you want to discuss some incredibly overused cliche, or some element of fiction that seems to be everywhere you look, or some magnificent moment in fiction that was just so awesome, forget the control freaks over at TV Tropes. Go to All The Tropes instead. Choose freedom. You’ll be glad you did.
In the course of my research for my upcoming post, I came across an unusual story. It is part of the larger story of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, one of the first “characters” created by Walt Disney. If you’ve never heard of Oswald and you’re wondering why rabbit is so obscure while the mouse is so famous, the reason is that Walt lost the rights to draw the rabbit. Walt didn’t like the deal he was getting from Universal Studios, and they refused to pay him any more, so he left, but they kept Oswald. Walt went on to create Mickey, and Universal cried in their beer.
Time went on, and Mickey rose to a great price while Oswald languished in obscurity. The Walt Disney Company decided that they wanted the rabbit back, and Universal was willing to let go, for a price. So Disney and Universal made a trade: Disney got the rights to Oswald, and Universal got the contract for Al Michaels, plus some other stuff related to sports coverage.
Now, both Disney and Univeral seemed happy with this deal, but it strikes me as very strange. Consider what Univeral got: a valuable new employee, with decades of experience and a large fanbase. Consider what Disney got: the right to draw pictures of a certain kind of made-up rabbit.
How does this make any sense?
But to answer my own rhetorical question: Disney didn’t just get the right to draw a rabbit, they got the rights to prevent other people from drawing that rabbit. That’s something worth plenty of money, and that’s how the trade makes sense.
Perhaps, one day in the future, a generation wiser than ours will look back on our strange permission culture and wonder why we did such a thing to ourselves. Will we be able to provide a meaningful answer? Or will we have to confess to a kind of madness, that compelled us to prevent each other from doing harmless things, out of some strange idea of propriety?
I don’t know what the future will bring, but I sure hope it’s better than what we’ve currently got.
I’ve just updated my Copyright/IP policy. No major changes, just some clarification. Let me know if I’ve left in any mistakes.
Hello again, readers. I’m working on a long post, tentatively titled “The Costs of Copyright”, but before that’s ready, I’d like to share with you something that was going to be in the post, but which I removed because it didn’t fit the tone I was going for, but I just couldn’t throw it out, so here it is now: I am taking three people who I’m inclined to disagree with, and finding things that we agree upon.
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The three people who disagree with me are J. Neil Schulman (see my disagreements with him here), Alexander Baker (see here) and a mysterious fellow who I know only as Strangerous Thoughts. I haven’t publicly sparred with Strangerous before, but they’ve written posts like The ultimate justification for natural and intellectual property and The economic principles of intellectual property and the fallacies of intellectual communism, so you can see why I am inclined to list them alongside Alexander and Neil. But before I get to disagreeing with these fellows once more, I must first say nice things about them (one of these days, I’m going to say nice things about Jack Valenti).
First, about J. Neil Schulman. Neil wrote a little essay called Human Property, seeking to explain his views on what property is and what it should be. Sadly, early on the essay, he insists: “There is no more of a distinction to be made between “intellectual” property and “stupid” property than there are distinctions between any other kinds of property.” But! Just before Neil says that, he says this:
Nothing in a state of nature is property.
It’s only the application of human intellect to things found in a state of nature that makes anything property.
Why, that’s right! And it’s something that I’ve been overlooking.
As Neil puts it, nothing in nature has the stamp of ownership on it. There is no natural property. So how does property come into being? Quoting Neil:
Then come human beings who look around, put up fences, take stuff and turn it into other — sometimes brand new — stuff, and say to other human beings, “This which I messed around with is mine and not yours. Use it without my permission and there’s going to be big trouble.”
Now, when I read that, I remembered this phrase from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
It seems that Mr. Rousseau and Mr. Schulman do not agree on the utility of the idea of “property”. Who is right? I say that J. Neil Schulman is right. To support Neil’s position, I quote Crosbie Fitch:
Tell a bear his cave is not his property because he has no government to legislate it so. Tell a wolf the carcass he’s enjoying is not his property because he has no government to legislate it so.
Property derives from privacy, the individual’s innate power and natural right to exclude others from the spaces they inhabit and the objects they possess. Governments are supposed to secure such exclusive rights – on the basis of equality – as opposed to whoever is the more powerful.
Rousseau saw property as a wicked institution, but Fitch does not agree, and neither does Neil, and neither do I. Animals recognize property just as much as humans. Birds do it (nests), bees do it (hives), even educated fleas do it (citation needed). The idea of property is a functional, useful idea. But it is an idea, and I thank Mr. Schulman for pointing that out to me.
Second, about Alexander Baker. In the comments on this recent post of his, he makes an excellent point, which I shall quote here:
“Use is only interfered with if the thing is physically interfered with.”
You’re free to define “use” that way, but then all you’ve done is smuggled your conclusion into your premise. With that definition, Kinsella could have written a very short book:
Property rights only apply to rivalrous things. Rivalrous means that use by one interferes with use by another. Interference must be physical. Therefore property rights only apply to physical things. QED.
And that is the sum and substance of what Kinsella did, although he goes on for 60 pages.
(Context: he’s responding to a commenter trying to nail down the definition of use, and he references this book by Kinsella.)
Now, to me, that sounds very reasonable! Why not make that a premise? But Mr. Baker is right to point out that it is a premise, and it’s important to question our premises, and it’s especially important to not assume what you’re trying to prove (except in mathematical proofs, but that’s a story for another time).
Finally, about Strangerous Thoughts. They’re new here, but it so happens that I have the nicest things to say about them (sorry, Neil and Alexander). I refer you to this post of theirs: The supply of and demand for rights and the fallacy of natural rights. I agree with the entire thing, and I will be basing this post on the theory that Strangerous offers therein. Here’s Strangerous’s own summary:
The pursuit of natural rights theory is a search for first principles that determine the unarguable right any human possesses at any time in any place. This idea cannot be transposed from theory to reality. In reality, rights only exist if they are enforced, and the enforcement of rights is limited by material scarcity. In a free market society there may be no avoiding positivist rights if costs must be suffered to have rights – each individual must pick and choose what rights to insure himself.
In other words, we cannot guarantee all conceivable rights, so we must economize. For example, we cannot grant ourselves the right to immortality. It’s too expensive! Generations have tried and failed to achieve it, without success, so it’s just not a good idea to try to guarantee it. Of course, none of us are very eager to die, so we grant ourselves the right to not be murdered. This is a much cheaper right, but it still comes at a cost: we must give up the right to murder. Most of us consider this right to be of very little value, so we give it up almost thoughtlessly, but it’s good to recognize that we have given up a right in exchange for a different right. Everything comes at a cost.
Now, all that said, what rights shall we grant ourselves? Here, like most libertarians, I take my cue from the viewpoint of individualism. As an individual, I exist independent of anyone else, and have the power to make my own decisions, just like every other individual out there. The libertarian style of economics, so often called “capitalism”, is better understood as economic individualism:
Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge.
This approach applies to civil rights as well. As Neil put in the title of one of his posts: No, Not Gay Rights — Individual Rights! I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Now let me get back to the subject of economizing rights. Since we’re trying to maximize individual rights, we must ask: “What rights do individuals want most, and what rights can individuals afford?” From here, we can turn to physical reality as our guide, to help us determine which rights an individual needs most to survive and which rights an individual is most able to secure for themselves. Crosbie Fitch, pondering a similar question, came up with this response:
Rights are the vital powers of all human beings. We have rights to life, privacy, truth, and liberty.
– We have a right to life, to protect the health and integrity of our minds and bodies.
– We have a right to privacy, to exclude others from the objects we possess and spaces we inhabit.
– We have a right to truth, to guard against deceit.
– We have a right to liberty, to move and communicate freely.
Regrettably, Fitch calls these “natural rights”, but the term here might be appropriate, because these rights stem from powers that we all naturally possess, and needs that we all naturally have! As such, we can describe them in market terms as high-value, low-cost rights, just the sort of thing that a free market in rights can effectively deliver. Better yet, the enforcement of these kinds of rights is subject to economies of scale: the more people have them and defend them, the easier they are to defend. By cooperating in mutual defense, we can strengthen our claims to these rights, lowering their effective price, which leaves us room in our “rights budget” to secure further rights for ourselves (or, alternatively, to take the time and energy that we used to spend securing our rights, and use it to secure other goods, such as material wealth of leisure time). This is called progress.
—–
That was all going to be in the introduction, but I changed my mind. I hope you don’t mind me putting it here, to stand or fall on its own merits alone.
Today, September 19, is Talk Like a Pirate Day. But I have no need to do anything special for it. “Why not?”, you might ask, to which I reply, “I am already a pirate, and so are you.”
Perhaps you doubt that you are truly a pirate. But it is true! The monopolists who seek to control all life have branded as “pirate” anyone who will not conform to their exact specifications. Consider this news story from TorrentFreak: Copyright Holders Want Netflix to Ban VPN Users. It seems that the copyright holders are upset about people using virtual private networks to circumvent geo-blocking restrictions on services like Netflix. But here’s the thing: the people who use Netflix are all paying customers. They have to be. So the monopolists can’t complain about a lost sale here; these people, who they are calling “pirates”, are all paying to watch the shows. But it is not enough for the monopolists. They insist on having the right to geo-block, to only sell to certain places at certain times, and if you are in an unlucky place, too bad for you. They want your money, of course, but even more than that, they want control. And if you dare to escape from that control, then you are a pirate, even when you pay.
Not for nothing do I call copyright “a law for nobody”. It turns us all into pirates. So feel free to throw the occasional “Avast!” into your conversation, but don’t feel that you have to. If you want to talk like a pirate, all you have to do is talk like someone who values freedom, and you’re well on your way to piracy.
I’d like to return, for a moment, to one of my previous posts, Escape the Iron Prison. In that post, I touched briefly on the story of Columba (also known as Columcille, or Colm Cille, meaning “church dove”), 6th-century Christian missionary and book transcriber. But the breadth and length of that post made it hard to focus on any one aspect in particular, and I don’t think I gave Columba the attention he deserves. So today, we’re going to learn a little more about Columba, because he was a cool guy.
Unlike lucky folks like us who get to live in the future, Columba had to live in the past, and living in the past had a tendency to really suck. Instead of having far too many books, people in Columba’s day had far too few. The printing press wasn’t due to arrive in Europe for another 800 years or so, and that meant that if you wanted to copy a book, you had to write it all out by hand. This is not the sort of environment that produces an active file-sharing scene. But true fans will be true fans, and true fans copy and share, and Columba was a true fan of the Word of God.
According to Life of Columcille, Columba went to hang out with Finnian, his old teacher, and borrowed a book from him (specifically, a psalter). Columba thought that the psalter was just swell, and decided to make a new copy. Lacking the power to simply Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Columba wrote the new copy himself, and what a glorious writing it was:
On a time Columcille went to stay with Finnen of Druim Finn, and he asked of him the loan of a book, and it was given him. After the hours and the mass, he was wont to tarry behind the others in the church, there transcribing the book, unknown to Finnen. And when evening came there would be candles for him the while he copied, to wit, the five fingers of his right hand blazing like five passing bright lights, so that they lit up and enlumined the whole temple.
– From Life of Columcille, p.177
My hands do not get nearly that magical when I’m copying books. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.
Anyways, Finnian eventually decided that he wanted his book back, so he sent a young man to pick it up. The youth peeked in on Columba doing his copying, and was apparently quite amazed by it, but Columba didn’t like being peeked on, so he sent a crane to pluck out the youth’s eye. Remember, kids: respect people’s privacy… or else! Not surprisingly, this turn of events pissed Finnian off, so after healing the youth’s eye, he insisted that Columba give up the copy he had made. Columba refused and appealed to the local king to settle the matter. Diarmait heard them out and rendered the following famous judgment:
“To every cow her calf, and to every book its copy.”
Columba refused the king’s judgment, which prompted the king to send in an army, so Columba rallied his kinsmen and fought back. According to the legend, Columba even got God to intervene on his behalf, such that none of Columba’s kinsmen died in the battle, thus giving him and his folk a rather solid victory. Diarmait and Finnian went home empty-handed, and Columba kept his copy (the Catach of St. Columba is believed to be the book in question).
What a story! First, a man of God tries to make the word of God more abundant, but his teacher and mentor refuses to let him do so! He appeals to the king for justice, but the king sides with the mentor, so he appeals to God for help, and he triumphs! What a statement – that God is on the side of the copiers! And it’s worth reading Columba’s defense of his actions:
“I hold that Finnian’s book has not decreased in value because of the transcript I have made from it, and that it is not right to extinguish the divine things it contained, or to prevent me or anybody else from copying it, or reading it, or from circulating it throughout the provinces. I further maintain that if I benefited by its transcription, which I desired to be for the general good, provided no injury accrues to Finnian or his book thereby, it was quite permissible for me to copy it.”
The spirit of Kopimism is strong with this one. We need to tell this guy’s story more often.
And that’s why I’m proposing that we make Columba the patron saint of free culture and file-sharing. I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t know how the official system works for making someone a patron saint, but I think that we don’t need to wait for the Vatican to act on this one. Kopimism already has a gospel (provided here by Christian Engström); it’s time it had a patron saint as well. I nominate Columba.
As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s a split in the libertarian movement right now, over the subject of “intellectual property”. Some are against it, some are for it. One of the voices in favor of intellectual property rights (specifically in the area of copyright) is a fellow named Alexander Baker. He writes a blog called Intellectual Space, subtitled: “The Libertarian Theory of Intangible Property”. Here’s his brief explanation of his own blog:
Intellectual Space is a praxeological examination of property rights for intangible objects. I initially began thinking that a rigorous philosophical approach would support the anti-IP position prevalent in libertarian circles. The opposite has occurred.
This is an interesting challenge for me. Alexander Baker appears to share many of the premises I have, yet he arrives at a very different conclusion from mine, and he insists that it is the result of a rigorous philosophical approach. This indicates to me that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Perhaps we do not share certain as many premises as I thought. Perhaps our logic has gone wrong somewhere. Perhaps we’re just miscommunicating, and we do not truly differ in opinion. Whatever the case, there is a problem somewhere, and this long post is my attempt to tease out that problem and fix it.
Continue reading
So, back in my old post wherein I disagree with J. Neil Schulman, Schulman himself has dropped by to publicly disagree with me. This is good, because that’s exactly what a comments section is for. Anyways, in the course of insisting that he is right and I am wrong, he reminded me that his preferred term, instead of “intellectual property”, is “media-carried property”, or MCP for short.
MCP… where have I heard those initials before?
Now, I doubt that Neil intended to reference the tyrannical Master Control Program when he picked the term “media-carried property”, but, nerd that I am, I can’t resist making the connection. And there is a deeper connection, but it is one that Neil has consistently refused to acknowledge.
Neil does not talk much about how to enforce claims of MCP. In his first post insisting that copying is akin to identity theft, he has this to say on the matter:
The questions of how copyrights, trademarks, and patents are currently defined and enforced by States are an entirely separate issue from the arguments I have been making since the 1980’s about property rights in identity and information objects.
For now I would be entirely satisfied if libertarians and anarchists recognized my property rights in the things I create and respected my right to license copies, using no other enforcement mechanism than social preferencing.
And… that’s it. The end! But I am not satisfied. This tells us nothing at all about what happens when social preferencing fails. What then?
Neil’s theories on matter-based property do not suffer from this lack. In the event that someone does not recognize your property rights in the physical world, Neil says that you have the right to shoot them, and he suggests that you carry a gun. He wrote a whole book on the matter, called Stopping Power (I haven’t yet read it, though I expect that I’ll agree with most of what it says). This is good, because you can’t expect social preferencing to always work. You need a backup plan when people break the rules, and carrying a gun is a good backup plan.
But what about when someone takes your media-carried property? What if they break through your copy protection and make it available as a Torrent? What do you do then, Neil? But he has never answered this question. This situation has been presented to him many times, by both friends and enemies, and he hasn’t even acknowledged it. This leaves a big, gaping hole in his theory of property rights in information.
Of course, Neil is not the first person to claim property rights in information. Many people before him have set out to do the same thing, and they have come up with solutions to fill that hole. Solutions like digital rights management, trusted computing, broadcast flags, notice-and-takedowns, ISP policing, and copyright bots. These all work together to do two things: take away people’s privacy, and take away people’s control over their own machines. And this is where Neil’s MCP runs into Tron‘s MCP. The only way to complete Neil’s theory, and provide information owners a means to defend their claims, is to control all communication. The entire network must be monitored and controlled, and any break-ins must be shut down swiftly and decisively. The media companies have known this for a long time, and they have fought to establish that control over the World Wide Web. To a great extent, they have succeeded. Their copy-protection schemes have infected all of our devices, and their monitoring systems hover over their world, ready to cut off and punish anyone who shares information without their permission. Like the Master Control Program, they reach into systems and appropriate programs and insist that they can run things better than we can.
This is a massive problem for Neil’s theory, because all of these measures invade people’s property and reduce their control over their own lives. Worse, they all work through the mechanism of State power, and they increase the State’s control over us. We can’t accept any of this. But then how can owners of media-carried property protect their property from invasion? Neil’s theory makes no sense anymore, because there’s no way to implement it. It’s as if he were advocating for the right of self-defense but refusing to let people own weapons. How does it work?
And what of the fact that these controlling measures are all being implemented? Here in the real world, the MCP is winning. Copyright laws continue to get stricter, anti-piracy measures continue to get more invasive, and ordinary citizens continue to get squeezed, and J. Neil Schulman, proud libertarian, is silent. If Neil will not fight for our liberty, who will?
Luckily for us, some people are smarter than Schulman. Like Flynn and Tron, they work to create systems where all information is free and open. They create open-source software that will not betray its users to outside controllers. They support laws that protect our privacy and our right to communicate. They find ways to crack DRM and defeat broadcast flags. They give us the power to protect our liberties. They go by many names: copyfighters, free software advocates, cypherpunks, pirates, and so on. But they all have one thing in common: they fight for the Users.
If these people win, no one will be able to control the network. Information will flow freely. And instead of being a glaring contradiction, Neil’s theory of MCP will simply be left incomplete – permanently, fatally incomplete, like a human body without a heart.
And that is why I keep ragging on Neil. He never acknowledges this problem with his theory (that is, that claims to MCP cannot be enforced without the aid of a total surveillance state). He seems to consider the question of enforcement to be totally irrelevant. Well, Mr. Schulman, you’re wrong. No matter how many nerd jokes I make, I still have to live in reality, and in reality, your claims to media-carried property fail. People do not naturally respect such claims, and even when they try, those who do not respect such claims always have the power to ignore them. Even in our less-than-free society, piracy is easy and rampant, in spite of the State’s best efforts to crush it. Do you think that people will just stop pirating when the State is gone?
If the future is libertarian, then it will run on Free Software and distribute Free Culture, all the better to serve free people. So come on, Neil. Get with the program. Fight for the Users.
Lodo the Bear 