Recently I posted about Stallman and Copyright, and how his beautiful ideas about how artists could make a living. Not every one think the same way, though…
Terry McBride, a somewhat famous music manager is also spreading the world about the end of copyright, as reported by El Reg, but with a bit of a twisted view on how actually bands could get some money out when labels won’t exist anymore.
The idea is quite old and obvious, football teams and websites do it for years, and is simply ad-driven free content. It’s not exactly free as in freedom as Stallman would love, I’m sure, but it’s a closer reality and I’m afraid we’ll have to go through that to reach real freedom.
Google is probably already developing AdSense for young female singers to display “Ads by Google” on their forehead while playing in a concert, and Microsoft is already filling the patent on how to force Vista buyers click on their “Ads by Yahoo! (I mean, Microsoft)” links on bands’ websites with “free” download that can only be played on leap years.
All in all, GNU is doing well and Stallman should be proud of it. The French revolution was an intermediate stage to “free the people” which was kinda necessary, pity they never reached true freedom. We might need this intermediate state again now, I just hope we don’t do the same mistakes this time (whatever they were)…
Yesterday I went to Stallman’s talk at Cambridge University where he proposed a new copyright scheme. Here is the transcript of the same talk elsewhere, not the same text but the same ideas.
Below is a mix of what he said and my thoughts on the subject based on his thoughts (complex, I know) so don’t take this as his strict opinion, go to gnu.org to know his real opinions.
Copyright
Copyright was invented to protect evolution of ideas and development of new technologies, to protect those that invested so much to create a good product not being scavenged by the lazy competition, but the way it’s been implemented today it not only taking aways our most basic freedom of use and friendship (by means of lending to friends) via DRM, but it’s also mining development of new technologies (see the BluRay case) and the evolution of ideas (see software patents).
To address how to create a copyright law that would get us back on protecting evolution and development, he divided creation in three groups and proposed a scheme based on them:
functional: Things you use at work or to perform work. Good examples are software, cooking recipes, tools, etc.
testimony: For the lack of a better term, testimony is the category which works of report, history, opinions, achievements (like scientific papers) are part.
art: Entertainment or artistic purposes only. Movies, music, paintings etc.
Reach everywhere
His copyright proposal says that every piece of work, no matter in which category it lies, should be allowed to be freely distributed (as in backing up your CDs as well as lending the backup to your friends indefinitely). This allows anyone to copy whatever they like, whenever they want, as many times as they think it’s good.
Some questions raised, and easily addressed:
How to control who is only copying and who is actually buying your work? Easy, you don’t. You don’t have this control today, and it’s a dream to think you will ever be able to do such thing.
So, how to authors make money? Lots of authors already make money out of donations, like a Canadian singer (I’m guessing this one) already makes a living out of donations and she’s not even locally famous. According to him, her wages were above what average bands get from “normal” recording companies.
But I’m a new band, no one is going to see my website. For that, he said, governments could have a tax (like one pound per month or so) and the money would be distributed directly to the authors and not their recording companies or publishers, based on popularity. The whole polling/popularity/tax thing was in the early stages of evolution in his mind but nevertheless, it was already practical for other famous bands like Radiohead.
Why should I have a website to make money? You don’t, and that’s a stupid question. This was one of the ways of getting money, you can ask for money on your shows too, be creative!
Some modifications allowed
The difference comes to modification. According to him, every commercial use of anything should be strictly bound to the copyright laws, which should block any unauthorized use of the material for around 10 years (some say 5 is better). After that, everything is on public domain.
Before that, though, for some types of work you cannot modify it without the author’s (or the bunch of lawyers from the recording company) consent. This is the price we pay for being in a capitalist society.
Indeed, this is a fair price to pay for art and testimony works, as we don’t need to modify Mona Lisa to be creative, we can create something new and, when the copyright expired, than we can modify it and be creative on top of it.
But not everything can wait. If a hammer is too long for your work you can saw it in half and be much more productive. You are allowed to say your friends to buy the hammer and saw it in half, to blog about it, write books and talk it on TV.
The same idea should be always true to software. If the program doesn’t work the way you want you should be able to modify it, post the patch, publish a book about it if you want. But the source code is hidden.
Hidden source code not only takes you the freedom of change to be more productive, but also takes aways the freedom of knowing what you’ve got in the first place. It’s very common to see big companies installing root kits, DRM kits, monitoring kits on your computer and you can’t detect it because the source is not available. Those kits takes away other freedoms as well. You can’t use the media as you like, share with friends and so on.
So this freedom is critical and for that, Stallman’s proposal is to make it compulsory to any functional work to be open to public scrutiny, allowing modifications and redistributions as many times as needed.
Some of the questions were:
How do you discern between art and functional work? It’s not up to you to define that. When you go to a court, the judge and jury defines if you’re guilty, if it was homicide or just manslaughter, and what your penalty should be. For some things it’s so obvious that you don’t even go to the court, the policeman can arrest you straight away (of course you still have the right to a lawyer and a call) but for others you always have the public opinion a sa last resource.
Hot to make money out of software, then? This is a very old question and Stallman himself answered it many many times, check the gnu.org link provided above.
Big deal
It seems impossible, though, to achieve such a radical change in every country’s laws all over the world. It’s a task that many would consider crazy, not to say useless. Others will say that there are many other quests that are much more important than that, so why bother?
Stallman’s answers (not literal, compiled and re-written by me with my own words) was quite clear, sober and simple (and this is why I admire him so much):
I’m only a man, I can’t fix all problems in the world. No one can in a life time, so we need to focus on one problem and go as far as we can. This is my focus.
It’s not only about software, it’s about freedom. Today’s society is heavily based on software so freedom of software is freedom of society. When you listen to a song in your iPod you’re listening to a stream of bits played by a software. Your freedom to listen to music, watch movies and work productively is at stake, we can’t afford to let it go.
Finally, I’m not saying you should do it, you do whatever you want, but who wants to join me in that quest is more than welcome.
So, freedom of software is, in fact, freedom of society. Each step towards digital restrictions is a step against freedom of society as a whole and every one can help with this quest by changing their ways just a bit here and there. It’s so easy, it costs so few and the result is so important that there is no excuse to avoid it.
Use open formats (for documents, videos, music), open source software (Ubuntu is easier to use than Windows IMHO), avoid buying DRM-ready media or giving money to companies that promote any kind of unlawful restrictions.
On the other hand, if you’re eager to help, join the DefectiveByDesign campaign of the Free-Software Foundation, or even FSF itself and make the world know that you DO care about your freedom.
PS: Stallman, let me know if you think you were misrepresented by this post in any way. Unfortunately this is not a wiki where you could change it yourself but I’d be glad to make any change.
I wonder why the human race is so tied up with serial thinking… We are so limited that even when we think in parallel, each parallel line is serial!
What?
Take the universe. Every single particle in the universe know all the rules (not many) that they need to follow. On themselves, the rules are dumb: you have weight, charge and can move freely round the empty space. But join several particles together and they form a complex atom with much more rules (combined from the first ones) that, if combined again form molecules that form macro-molecules that form cells that form organs that form organisms that form societies etc. Each level makes an exponential leap on the number of rules from the previous one.
Than, the stupid humanoid looks at reality and says: “That’s too complex, I’ll do one thing at a time”. That’s complete rubbish! His zillions of cells are doing zillions of different things each, his brain is interconnecting everything at the same time and that’s the only reason he can breathe wee and whistle at the same time.
Now take machines. The industrialization revolutionized the world by putting one thing after the other, Alan Turing revolutionized the world again by putting one cell after the other in the Turing tape. Today’s processors can only think of one thing after the other because of that.
Today you have multi-core processors doing different things but still each one is doing things in serial (Intel’s HyperThreading is inefficiently working in serial). Vector processors like graphic cards and big machines like the old Crays were doing exactly the same thing over a list of different values and Quantum computers will do the same operation over an entangled bunch of qbits (which is quite impressive) but still, all of it is serial thinking!
Optimization of code is to reduce the number of serial steps, parallelization of code is to put smaller sets of serial instructions to work at the same time, even message passing is serial on each node, the same with functional programming, asynchronous communications, everything is serial at some point.
Trying to map today’s programming languages or machines to work at the holographic level (such as the universe) is not only difficult, it’s impossible. The Turing machine is serial by concept, so everything built on top of it will be serial at one point. There must be a new concept of holographic (or fractal) machine, where each part knows all rules but only with volume you can create meaningful results, where code is not done by organizing the high-level rules but by creating a dynamic for the simple rules that will lead to the expected result.
How then?
Such holographic machine would have a few very simple “machine instruction” like “weight of photon is 0×000″ or “charge of electron is 1.60217646 × 10^-19″ and time will define the dynamics. Functions would be a pre-defined arrangement of basic rules that must be stable, otherwise it’d blow up (like too many protons in the nucleus), but it wouldn’t blow up the universe (as in throw exceptions), it would blow up the group itself and it would become lots of smaller groups, up to the indivisible particle.
The operating system of such machine should take care of the smaller groups and try to keep the groups as big as possible by rearranging them in a stable manner, pretty much as a God would do to it’s universe when it goes crazy. Programs running on this operating system would be able to use God’s power (GodOS libraries) to manipulate the groups at their own discretion, creating higher beings, able to interact, think and create new things… maybe another machine… maybe another machine able to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
I know letting the machine live would be the proper way of doing it but that could take a few billion years or I’ll be quite tired of engineering the machine and it’s OS and I’ll just want to the the job done quickly after that…
Why?
There is a big fuzz about Non-Polynomial time problems (NP-complete), those that can’t be solved in a reasonable (polynomial) time. The classic example is the travelling salesman problem where a salesman has to go to each one of a number of cities. Which is the best path to follow to visit all of them in the smallest distance possible? With 3 or 4 it’s quite simple but when you have lots like 300 it becomes impossible for normal (serial) computers to solve.
Another problem quite fancy is the Steiner tree problem, where you have some points and you want to connect them using the least amount of strings. This is as complex as the problem above, can take forever (longer than the age of the universe) for relatively small sets of points, but if you use water and soap the problem is solved almost instantly.
Of course, soap films cannot calculate the last digit of PI but because every part of it know a small list of basic rules (surface tension increased by the soap molecules derived from opposite charges between atoms) every particle of the machine works together at the same time and the result is only achieved because the dynamic of the system has it’s least energy (least amount of strings) in that state.
It’s true that today’s computers are very efficient on working on a wide range of problems (thanks to Turing proving the classes of problems his tape could solve) but there are some that it can’t, given that we only have a few billion years yet of universe to spare. Such problems could be solved if there was a holographic machine.
UPDATE:
More or less what I said was practically applied here. Thanks André for the link, this video is great!
Pangea Day aims to ‘tap into the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future’.
Twenty films will be selected to be shown on 10th May 2008 all around the world. Each film selected will receive $3,000 and the opportunity to pitch to Participant Productions (Jeff Skoll’s company). The winner will receive $20,000 to develop their treatment. This would be great for Camfed! (Yes, where I work ! )
If you haven’t already joined up to www.youtube.com, then please do so and view and vote for our film - ‘Two Friends: The Promise of Africa’s Future’ - which can be found here: ‘Two Friends‘
The more votes and the more hits, the greater possibility our film will be noticed! And please get your friends to vote too!
You can live a whole life and remain stupid but a stupid program using a pseudo-random number generator and a clever algorithm (Markov’s chain) can excel us quite easily:
“Bioinformatics is a physicist (definitions of enforcing standards but it puts wrong things can build complex information systems and nothing is totally unacceptable for every new piece of giving generic answers.”
Avaaz.org is a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The aim of Avaaz.org is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people shape global decisions. Avaaz.org members act for a more just and peaceful world and a globalisation with a human face.
In other words, they stand for a true democracy for the people and the planet and I’m honoured to be part of this community.
This time was about Bali’s new treaty on climate change and how they made Canada back up on it’s partnership with the US to screw the environment even more.
Every time I receive an email from them with news like that and the difference they can make I know that there is good in this world and the human race is not doomed to extinction, at least not at the pace most would imagine.
I was wondering about the patent system in US after reading this article. I am and always was against the non-sense of filling patents for thoughts and algorithms but this weird system can be in fact helpful, the weird results of the pressure against small companies in the US.
It is known that animals (men included?) can develop cannibalism when in restricted environments (such as a cage with more individuals than its capacity holds) or that cyclones develop when you have an extreme conditions in the atmosphere and the Coriolis effect force the air to spin at speeds much greater than we’d like. In a nutshell, the bigger the pressure, the bigger the results.
The capitalism system is all around property. When slaves were not humans, the property of humans were more valuable than their lives. The freedom we have today is the freedom of owning things IF you have money to buy them. If you can’t find a job to feed your children because you didn’t have money to pay for a good school (and therefore didn’t attend a good college) and you eventually steal food for your children, you get arrested and no one will look further to see why you have stolen in the first place.
The patent system was devised to protect the intellectual property (if that exists) and, conceptually is wrong from birth. Ideas don’t have owners and even the Greeks knew that. The core of augmenting ideas is to share and enhance and not to protect it. The only reason to protect ideas is to get money in the end, again, the capitalism is more about money and property than freedom and happiness (I’m being redundant here, I know).
Anyway, the US is the uttermost expression of the capitalism and supposedly of freedom and equality. A system that protects anyones ideas is, in principle wrong but, egalitarian. If that system can yield you money, so you can pay for your son’s studies and he can have a “better” life it means that it’s giving you “freedom” to choose your steps from now on.
But we all know how bureaucratic this systems is and individuals just can’t start filling patents, they won’t even know how to start even if they had good ideas. Worse, if their parents weren’t rich they couldn’t have gone to good school and college and have good ideas on their own and the US is not famous for treating well poor people not even trying to find ways to fight against poverty (they’re too busy getting oil from Middle-East).
So, for a long time, the patent system was used to protect the big companies’ interests for decades. They’d hire great minds and incorporate their ideas to the company (not personal anymore) and if someone can answer me how can a company have ideas I’d be very glad to know.
But as always, the bigger the pressure the worse the answer. Small companies are filling patents like crazy for the last decade or so and they’re making a huge profit out of them. It’s still not right, companies can’t have ideas to protect but that’s the very ugly answer to a very high pressure. It is, in the end, equalising the US society, spreading the money from the big companies to the small companies and probably making the capitalism a bit fairer.
Still, as capitalism, the only group benefited is the rich. Poverty levers are still maintained (increasing?) and they won’t be affected by this change. Pretty much like in the French revolution where the people were used as a mass to disband nobles and kill the king and when everything was settled the (then unusual) group of non-noble rich people took the government and the poor were only poor again (still are).
I don’t want to go into that now but terrorism (in fact all small things that were wrongly put in the same basket called “terrorism”) is also a reflection of that pressure. For me, terrorism is much more the pressure it’s made on people than actually their response to that pressure! I’m not trying to justify any attitude, it’s still horrible and must be stopped, but it’s not by increasing the pressure that they will be stopped!
Humans, like animals, behave like that for millions of years, but I do believe that humans, unlike animals, can educate their instincts.
It’s not the first time now will be the last and I’m pretty sure this is how the stadiums will be in 2014.
Brazil just don’t have time, money and will to change the whole sports, transport, safety and tourism infrastructure by 2014. If infrastructure can take seconds to destroy and years to rebuild, what happens with an infrastructure that is being destroyed over the last 500 years?
