If copyright law actually respected a balance between creators and the public, anything under digital restriction technology would be ineligible for it, since there's clearly no intention of adding to the public domain after the period is up. Of course we know it doesn't.
Anyone with half a brain knew the DMCA was a bad idea when it was being "debated". Now it's accepted because we've grown accustomed to workarounds. The only way our society will be fixed is when the reality-incongruent copyright system simply collapses.
> If copyright law actually respected a balance between creators and the public
Even talking about a "balance" suggests that we should acknowledge some inherent right of copyright holders for its own sake, rather than just as a means to an end. We shouldn't. We simply have a tradeoff between two desires of the public: getting more works produced, and getting those works into the public domain (to allow reuse/remixing/etc).
The difference between a life+70 year copyright versus a lifetime copyright seems unlikely to lead to the creation of any additional works. The difference between a lifetime copyright and, say, a 30-year copyright, might result in some additional creation of works, but probably not as many as the works suppressed by the inability to reuse/remix 30-year-old works. So if we want to use copyright as an incentive, why do we increase it without bound, without thinking about how many more works we'll get?
I don't recall ISPs being sued [and found liable] before the DMCA. That seems akin to the phone company being sued for someone singing happy birthday over their lines.
IMHO being thankful for "safe harbor" seems more like a post-rationalization than anything else. If poor definitions meant common carriers weren't actually exempt, then that could have been resolved with straightforward clarification instead of an unnecessary "compromise".
> Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena (1993) and Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. MAPHIA (1994). Both were held liable for unauthorized copies uploaded by users.
...in much the same way as Grokster and Napster, DMCA notwithstanding.
Post-DMCA it became a requirement to demonstrate that they were supporting copyright infringement (e.g. by showing screenshots of searching for and downloading songs that were not licensed for distribution that way in their marketing material) - see the Limewire case and the ongoing MegaUpload saga.
20th century BBS operators wore eye patches and drank rum and sailed the seas on wooden ships. The DMCA would not have saved them, so pre-DMCA cases where they lost tell you very little about what would happen to Google or Verizon without the DMCA.
(Well, a BBS is more akin to a website, but the shifted argument is still valid if one thinks "web 2.0" is a good thing. And MAPHIA seems irrelevant due to its significant findings of editorial control)
"Frena" wasn't necessarily a correct decision, especially given the extreme power imbalance between parties. Would the same decision be reached if the defendant had been a well capitalized business? Similarly, the modern inverse of an individual file sharer trying to hide behind the DMCA likely wouldn't fly.
The decision certainly goes against what one would expect from general legal principles, but I suppose that's inevitable in the face of cancer like intent-free criminality. The same reasoning would have indicted him for a cd-r tossed onto his lawn.
Copylefts only have teeth because of these "stupid" IP laws. Free Software would be nowhere without copyright. (Yes, you could redistribute binaries, but you could not compel the release of source code for derivatives.)
Let's assume the worst. Some company wants to make a photoshop competitor. They don't want to invest too much money into a internally developed project that will very likely fail. They disregard the GPL and fork the GIMP codebase without releasing the source code. Now a few months later they release their software at a $60 pricetag.
Those bastards! They stole all of our hard work to make some money! Now there are two possible scenarios. It will fail because they can't compete with GIMP which can be obtained at a $0 pricetag and respects their freedom. The user can have their cake and eat it too!
That's a pretty tough nut to crack but what if people actually end up buying the software? The only explanation would be that the fork presents added value that is worth paying money for!
In both scenarios the end user cannot lose. They either get higher quality software that suits their needs or software for free that respects their freedom.
Very interesting point which I'm sure gets overlooked quite often. It seems even Richard Stallman is in favor of preserving the idea of copyright (albeit reducing its duration), which came as a bit of a surprise to me given his otherwise radical views: http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/could-f...
Well one interesting thing about Stallman's "radical" views is that, unless I'm missing something, he doesn't actually advocate any kind of governmental action or laws to support his views (aside from shortening copyright duration as you mentioned). He wants people to voluntarily demand and require Free software; he never talks about having the government force it on people in any way.
Now contrast this to many other people, including the people in favor of stronger IP law, who want the government to enact their views into law.
Now what's really bad is that Stallman is the less pragmatic and realistic of these two camps, because he wants regular people to "see the light" and voluntarily subscribe to his views, which obviously isn't happening (he's been at this for 3 decades now, and while Free software has made traction for sure (e.g. Linux kernel in most smartphones and many other devices), users seem to have less real freedom than ever thanks to locked bootloaders, app stores, etc.). By contrast, the jerks who want to force more DMCA-style silliness and even lengthier (effectively perpetual) copyright terms are more realistic because their approach actually works: we have or are getting all these bad laws.
This somehow reminds me of the quote by Shaw about all progress depending on the unreasonable man.
I'd argue that you don't need the whole set of "IP laws" that are being complained-about, in order for free-software to function correctly. IP law has grown into a gigantic hydra monster.
200 years ago when IP had volume costs associated with it, where there was no way for creator to interact with consumer, they were useful. Flawed, but served their purpose.
Today, the purpose is lost, and the use is exploitative.
The original purpose was to incentivize creative works, and the desirability of that hasn't really gone away. For example, Free software would be a lot further along if there could be a lucrative business model behind it.
Enforcement is just utterly at odds with physics and at this point, the idea of "owning" control of bits in someone else's possession is incompatible with a free society.
"The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads."
There are plenty of lucrative business models behind free software - look at anything from Red Hat, who uses support contracts to fund development, to Krita, which uses crowdfunding each year to fund full time development. And within that spectrum you have projects like Qt, which offers proprietary licensing to appease lawyers to fund development of what will soon be a fully open source toolkit. Gitlab is doing fine despite their platform being open source, too.
At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.
This requires equating “stupid” with “all”. Once you recognize a concept of copyright, lawsuits are inevitable once you allow users to share files.
All you need at that point is one copyright holder who believes – right or wrong – that you are in sufficiently zealous about protecting their content and, poof, lawsuit. This goes treble if you have money and the actual infringer is likely to be a broke college student in another country.
A part of that part is nice, yes. There's a different part of that part which forces them to take anything down on any valid request. That means you can request taking down any service at all if you made an "honest mistake". (for example https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150728/05285531772/wordp... but google knows much more)
Another way the process is biased in favor of takedowns is that the counter-notification procedure is designed to thoroughly de-anonymize any individual who files one. A valid takedown notification need only contain "reasonably sufficient" contact information. A counter-notification is explicitly required to contain name, address, and phone number.
I guess I can't fault the authors for failing to anticipate petty YouTube rivalries back in 1998, but it seems like the sole imagined use case was a respected corporation going after a pseudonymous warez jockey.
You don't have to take down anything because of dmca. The only thing that happens is you lose protection if the content really was infringing. So if you are really sure, you don't have to do anything.
Except that it does not require you to own the copyright in order to send a take-down notice. It does not even require you to have a reasonable belief that you own the copyright. All it requires is a "good faith belief".
Your first claim is untrue - you must be the owner or their authorized representative. The good faith part only applies to your claim that the copy is unauthorized – you still have to describe the work precisely, and a responsibility to be accurate.
The law is far from ideal but a large part of the problem is the penalties for false claims are rarely enforced so there's been little corrective force against the companies which robo-spam claims. Additionally, companies like YouTube have invented additional processes which are often Kafkaesque and, since they're just arbitrary business processes, aren't subject to the normal legal process.
1) The DMCA had a _lot_ of good parts about it. The alternatives were a lot worse. That some parts were bad doesn't invalidate the good parts - be careful of hating the whole thing
2) You talk of something entering the public domain...The US doesn't do that anymore (tragic smiley)
I'd love to hear more about #1. I don't know the history of the DMCA, and as a non-American I never heard about it before I saw it in action on Youtube.
What were the (subjectively worse) alternatives being talked about at the time, and what do you think the best way out of this mess from today moving forward would be?
You seem to hold a unique perspective on copyright issues I haven't hear before!
During the debate of the DMCA the media lobby was bribing congress to insanity to make sharing copyright material online a felony, and that any site enabling it be liable as an accomplice and enabler.
We might not be in great shape in terms of intellectual freedom, but things could have gone much worse if big media got their way.
That's the Overton Window/door-in-the-face tactic -- introduce extreme rhetoric (felonies for uploaders) in order to get a "compromise" that's basically what they wanted all along (forced takedowns at their discretion).
Well, a big part of the DMCA was providing "common carrier" protections for sites that were hosting content others uploaded. So, YouTube, for example, an stay alive even when people post blatantly infringing material, so long as they respond to requests to take it down. Prior to DMCA, there was the very real danger of sites being sued out of existence as being accessories. (Or sites switching to manual confirmation of everything posted before it was visible, a system that doesn't scale). And while we're at it, ISPs themselves could have been liable for any illegal activity done over the internet by one of their customers.
(As a non-American, you may not be aware that the first question the average American has when something goes wrong is "who can I sue?". Sad, but tragically common)
Previous laws were the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), both of which got killed in court. They focused more on (trying) to prevent pornography from reaching the delicate eyes of children, but still touched on liability issues.
Alternatives to the DMCA went somewhat like Encryption talks now: INCREASE liability, give the govt lots of controls, etc. Sure the DMCA favors the copyright claimer, but if I'm a content host, you provide content, and I'm not liable. Then someone complains, and I let you know. You can dispute it, in which case I can keep it up without liability, or I can take it down. Alternatives didn't let it stay up, or would require that I prove your material isn't infringing myself, or other such things that fell even more heavily on the copyright claimant-side.
I don't think my perspective is all that unique - most of us that were around for the insanity that was CDA/COPA watched the DMCA with interest and had a "Well, this is progress" attitude even though we didn't really LIKE it, it was just a step in the right direction.
As for how to move forward, that's a multi-part issue:
* The places where DMCA is inadequate need to chafe so people get it changed. That's been happening for years, mainly in areas of general public concern, such as cellphone unlocking, takedown abuse, and format shifting.
* attitudes about "IP" need to change. That's been happening, but more slowly. I see non-legal people talking about IP as a wrapper for "this setting and associated characters" rather than "copyright/trademark/patents". News about patent trolls and related legal woes are becoming mainstream.
* One attitudes shift enough, the idea that "I thought of this, I can deny anyone else similar thoughts while being heralded as a hero" that currently drives copyright/patent policy will become more nuanced and allow for the idea that the legal protections afforded are for the public benefit, not private benefit.
Wow: I love this philosophical argument you have made about when we should even allow copyright. Thank you so much for sharing this: I do a lot of work on reacting to copyright law, and this is great food for thought.
People should have the right to tinker with whatever they bought.Telling them only they can, and not an expert 3rd party, make the change is ridiculous as not everyone is a rocket scientist in the respective fields.
If we buy car/tractor/phone/whatever, we should be able to modify it(its hw/sw) however we want. I fail to understand how it breaks copyright. No one is copying and distributing anything. Copyright law should be to protect IP theft. Fix the law instead of having a stupid meeting for exceptions every 3 years. Or copyright yourselves into stone age
If you want to fix copyright, you need to realize it's a complex matter with lots of different actors and conflicting interests. Thus you will need to be able to discuss it accurately, to ensure people aren't getting a mixed message.
So let me help you out with a starter pack of accurate statements.
Copyright is not a fundamental right. It's an artificial monopoly enforced by government based on promises of enriching society at large, by giving it back for free, in the future, after a limited period of exclusivity.
Violating copyright isn't theft. "IP" is a legal construct to make something fundamentally unnatural (owning an idea) seem natural. "IP" is not real property and it cannot be stolen.
Having firmware for stuff you own being copyrighted and implemented in a way which makes it illegal to tamper with is clearly not in spirit with the way copyright law was written nor its intent.
Having copyright last 100s of year in a time where something is obsolete or outdated in less than 5 years is clearly also at odds with "enriching" society. Nothing is being given back. And if it is, it's long past the period in which it would be useful.
If you want to "fix" copyright, we need to get more focus on the spirit and intent of the law, rather than the "right" part of the law and specifically how big corporations look at it like a blanket-right to profit, for all eternity.
>Copyright is not a fundamental right. It's an artificial monopoly enforced by government based on promises of enriching society at large, by giving it back for free, in the future, after a limited period of exclusivity.
What right isn't granted by the government? We like to pretend that rights exist outside of governments, but the only right what a government gives is might makes right.
>"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
Granted by, secured by, the effect is the same unless you believe people would enjoy the rights in the absence of something like government (specifically a gov't which effectively protects rights).
There is a perspective/philosophy* in which humans under anarchic/natural-law are born with 100% rights. E.g., if you were washed ashore with a number of ship-wreck-mates on an otherwise uninhabited island, there'd be nothing to stop you from implementing works copyrighted in other lands. Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights.
But let's say we're wiser than that. When we wash ashore, we all agree that it's in everyone's best interest to avoid killing each-other. Therefore, we each give up a measure of our unlimited rights and grant them to each-other in the form of governmental 'powers'--if someone kills one member of our new tribe, the other members will kill (or otherwise deprive the rights of) the one who initiated the aggression.
In it's ideal form, the government's purpose is to maintain the largest possible sphere of individual rights without allowing individuals to infringe upon the rights of others. It can only exist inasmuch as each individual condones and supports it's actions. To the degree it becomes imbalanced towards one party or another, the aggrieved parties retain the right to withdraw the powers they've delegated--in extreme cases they may fight the other party's government to reclaim their inalienable rights.
With this scenario in mind, imagine that you see me building a sand castle on my side of the beach. You like the design so you copy it on your side of the beach. I'm not flattered by the imitation but you haven't really deprived me of any rights either--I'm still free to do as I wish on my side of the beach. Since I'm not really harmed, I don't have an inalienable right to monopolize the castle's design. In fact, if I storm over to your side of the beach and knock your copy down, I'd be depriving you of the right to make that kind of sand castle should you see fit to do so.
Given such a dispute, the tribe (including yourself) might agree to relinquish the right to manipulate sand in particular ways and create a new governmental power. The creation of this power appeases and incentivizes me to continue voluntarily beautifying the beach with fresh and innovative sculptures and promotes continued peaceful cooperation. This a matter of policy, there are no higher laws or anything set in stone about the validity or duration of my claims, etc.
* I tend to agree with this philosophy but want to take a more objective tack for the sake of the great-grandparent poster.
> Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights.
There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with. The widely held belief is that freedom from murder is a right regardless of whether or not an institution is established to protect it. I believe it follows directly from our ability for higher order abstract thought, particularly our ability to empathize with others. So in some respects, you might say that our ability to empathize is what creates inalienable rights in the first place.
I didn't make it very clear in the parent comment but I don't consider murder to be an inalienable right either. My point was that it could be considered an 'alienable' right, if that makes any sense. I.e., because we ourselves don't want to be murdered and because we want to participate in civilization, we assent to limits on individual liberties--namely those in which individuals would infringe upon the rights of others.
As I think about it now, I would say that our inalienable human rights are derived from the fact that we exist self-aware with the desire and general capacity to assert our rights. I.e., to whatever end or purpose, we wouldn't have those abilities absent some reason. If you're alive, you want to live and you're not hurting anybody else; who's to say that you should be denied that life? If anyone, it's just some other guy who's opinion isn't actually any more important than your own. One might say it should all be self-evident :) .
At any rate, I think we're largely saying the same things.
Again, things can be different but related. An unalienable right can exist without being granted (that's the definition, in fact), and it exists whether or not something is in place to protect it. They are not mutually inclusive.
>An unalienable right can exist without being granted (that's the definition, in fact), and it exists whether or not something is in place to protect it.
Would you mind naming an example?
>They are not mutually inclusive.
I have a feeling that this may devolve into an argument over trivia, but I hope not.
The right of freedom from murder. I will grant you that rights in-and-of themselves are abstract and somewhat arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, but they are common enough from society to society that patterns start to emerge and one can start to identify what could be considered to be a universally agreed upon inalienable right. All I'm stating is that my right to live free from murder exists whether or not someone is there to keep me from harm.
It seems that you're trying to argue that freedom from murder is a positive right, in that it necessitates that someone else provide you protection from harm. It is, however, commonly understood as a negative right because it requires inaction from others rather than action. And as such, because universal inaction would be just as good as any active protection by a government, the right of freedom from murder does not require that one exists at all. Therefore, it exists outside of societal constructs and is inalienable.
How are you going to enforce that right after it's been violated?
>It seems that you're trying to argue that freedom from murder is a positive right, in that it necessitates that someone else provide you protection from harm.
I wouldn't say necessitates, but I would predict a lot more murdering absent the expectation of reprisal from your tribe or government.
> And as such, because universal inaction would be just as good as any active protection by a government
It would be better since governments murder people too, and since because universal inaction is universal. So sign me up! We can get started right away. I promise I won't murder you if you'll promise not to murder me. Deal?
"People should have the right to tinker with whatever they bought"
Absolutely. We've had so many on farm productivity gains by modifying our machinery. We've added curtains to our spreader to better spread lime, extended our machines axles to setup a CTF system and built our own wetting agent system for our seeder bar, just to name a few, all which required machinery/implement modification. In some cases, machinery manufacturers have come and looked at the modifications we've made to a machine (in the case of the spreader curtains), and then taken the idea and started building it into their machines by default.
If we really put this into law in a way that works, what's going to happen is that companies will stop selling people tractors and instead lease them to people for an unlimited amount of time for a one-time payment, or something similar.
Which is fine, really, as long as you don't use words "purchase", "buy" and "ownership". Call a lease a lease.
In this scenario, one of two things would happen:
* either there is a genuine need for buying/owning fixable hackable tractors, in which case there will be a market and companies will appear that sell those,
* or there is really no need, and leasing works just fine for tractor users, and it's only us couch-commentators who think we desperately need to repair tractors.
The key point/problem here is that we have a (deliberate) naming confusion: "ownership" should not come with rights restrictions. The same confusion was deliberately introduced with DVDs/BluRays, for example, not to mention computer software. The law should step in and force everyone to truthfully describe what they're selling: a product, a license to do certain things, or a lease.
The issue I have with that is that it screws up minorities.
There's likely always going to be a minority that wants or needs to fix their own tractor(or car) or have an independent 3. party fix it.
If that minority is objectively insignificant - well fine.
If that minority is 20% of all tractor (or car) owners, the manufacturers can switch to a lease model, and screw over 20% of the customers, those can either give in or give up farming or driving - most won't.
The point is that those 20% might not be enough to sustain a new vendor coming into the market to cater to them. With our current model the 80% that don't care can pay their vendor to fix stuff, the 20% that cares can do it themselves or help support independent mechanics.
Which means with the current model all consumers win, which I'm generally in favor of over a system that maxes profit to big vendors at the expense of minorities.
20% market share is significant enough for any new manufacturer. Provided their product doesn't lack in quality it will have the 20% disgruntled customers and gain more as their product reputation increases.
What you described could happen, if tractor market is a monopoly or if all manufacturers collude, which shouldn't be allowed to happen. American broadband situation is a good example when there is monopoly due to lack of choices. They can price whatever they want for broadband and treat you royally when you contact their customer service because you can't switch ISP.
Like in the extreme case of price hike of a pill to $700, that is what happens if copyright law stays the way it is now.
Current situation is not a win for customers or the general progress. There is a lot of room for improvement.
I refer you to the bulk of the *aas products. Even turbofan manufactures sell engines by the hour.
The company gets a clean, consise cost of units sold, reduced large capital calls and a leaner corporate structure. It's a very compelling business desire.
Edit: seems like people misunderstood, I meant the tractor company structures it like a lease but it is effectively a sale. For instance, unrefundable upfront cost of $10k, per annum cost of $1 after that.
So if you have the right to modify the software in a tractor, doesn't that imply that you have the right to modify the software that Microsoft is selling as well? The fact that the software we're discussing here is installed on a tractor rather than a PC shouldn't make much of a difference?
> doesn't that imply that you have the right to modify the software that Microsoft is selling as well?
The DMCA should not pertain to you flipping bits into your own copy of Windows to modify it's functionality. You can do that, and if it's a violation of the license, Microsoft can sue you. It's an entirely civil issue with the burden of proof on MS.
The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA criminalize any alteration of a device with the purported objective of protecting copyright. So now the state not only defends copyright, but the technical measures themselves, even if the real objective of the manufacturer is simply to be anticompetitive and incompatible. It's a massive privatization of criminal law in ad-hoc, unwritten form: "it's illegal to disable anything manufacturers claim defends copyright".
Of course I should be allowed to modify the software that Microsoft is selling as long as I am not redistributing the modified software. I paid for, and thus own both the software and the device that the software is running on, so why shouldn't I be allowed to do whatever the hell I want with it? End User License Agreements be damned.
> I paid for, and thus own both the software and the device that the software is running on
Wrong. What defines owning is not whether you paid or not, but the type of contract you made.
Moreover, you didn't pay for Windows; you paid for a license of Windows. This license specifically says what you are and what you are not allowed to do with the software, and among others, tinkering with is is not part of what you are allowed to do.
Let's not play dumb. Of course you got an EULA with your software, the point is the legitimacy of the EULA from a legal and jurisprudential point. Same holds for the copyright law.
I mean, there is obviously a law stating that you cannot do this or that because it violates copyright. This implies that you as a citizen might do something illegal as close yourself in your room, do some magic and then get out and forget about it, although what you did has no influence on the world whatsoever. That is a problem.
Now, if we want to be precise there is actually a clear definition of what you own, and in fact you probably do not own the copy of Windows running on your PC. Still it is possible that you own that PC, and its hard drives and other stuff, so when we say that you do not own the software but just a license to use it we are giving credit to stuff like this:
To sum up, sure you might not have the right to hack your properties, but that's caused by a set of laws defending a power inbalance between consumers and producers. I believe that claiming that any sort of "hacking your stuff" should be prohibited because the law says so is an example of irrational justificationism if not supported by further arguments, still I'd like to hear about the reasons why we need copyright law as is.
That's the thing though, you don't own it, you've been granted the right to use it. Of course I'm biased because I'm a proponent of Libre software, but that problem has been described since rms started his crusade: you don't own a software the same way you own a chair, so the license you have must give you the rights to effectively do whatever you want with (and to) it.
Those EULA are dumb, but you don't have to agree with them. In many cases there will be no alternative, for sure. However you can't accept an EULA and subsequently say "this EULA sucks, I don't have to follow it".
Well gosh, I don't remember signing a contract, just clicked some button to make that stupid wall of text go away so I could use the software after I already paid for it.
I never met a human (excluding lawyers) who actually has read through a single EULA, and I doubt most of them would be valid if actually tested in court, at least outside the US.
It is pretty absurd when you go to use your Facebook app or whatever and are presented with a 73-page wall of text that you are expected to read and understand before going on to use the app. If those things are legally enforceable, then something is definitely broken.
Edit: Often it's not even at purchase. There are numerous apps that will do this every time they change their terms. And they don't show you a change list either. It's the whole 50-150 pages. No reasonable person would actually read it.
I'd even say that a license clause that forbids users to modify the software is really not well-defined. Modification of what is actually forbidden? I have no access to the source code (assuming closed-source software). I have only binaries. Can I replace the first byte with 0x00? The second one? What if I accidentally overwrite the whole file with 0x00s? What if I truncate it? Can I start the software and modify it at runtime? Can I modify the dynamic libraries (or even the OS) to alter the software? What if a virus infects the binary?
It'd be great if anyone could point to interesting resources on this issue. It seems to be an intriguing intersection of law and economics.
and what's the problem with this? License the software as-is and with no re-distribution rights, but grant rights to modify and extend the software as you see fit. If you want to sell your modifications, so be it, but you can't sell the original software, just your mods. The same way as software developers don't have the right to give away Windows software with our code, we just have the right to sell our enhancements... so in effect (if you remove all the semantics and legal claptrap), we do have the right to modify the software that Microsoft is selling, otherwise hundreds of thousands of software engineers would be out of a job.
This is about a deal between two parties, both parties agreed during the tranfer of the goods, the conditions were known. Complaining after the sale is stupid. You had the chance to walk away from the deal because you didn't like it's conditions, nobody was forced. Interfering with this process reduces freedom. All I see a big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
"Complaining after the sale is stupid." I'm really tired of this argument. Just because the sale wasn't made under duress doesn't mean that we should never complain about the sale afterwards. By that logic, you shouldn't be complaining about the comments here, since no one is forcing you to read HN.
Ok, so according to you, what one should do is keep your mouth shut during the sale, buy an un-hackable machine and afterwards try to get hacking rights by "lobbying" the government. Imagine if you sold your product to a customer, he promises not to void your terms but then immediately he goes to the government to try to make it legal to void the terms he first agreed upon.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source, I love Linus/RMS for giving me such a beautiful product with which I make a living. But it was theirs to give, not mine to take. You have the same strange ethics as RMS, two consenting adults make a trade, based on rules known in advance (ie., you cannot see/alter the source code), no one was hurt and no one has anything to do with this trade... and yet... RMS calls this evil. Again: I prefer open source to anything but the rights are the creators to hand out and the customers to accept or not, that is freedom.
Buy a different Tractor or try to negotiate a deal before you buy a tractor. Or start a forum to gather a lot of people that John Deere may listen to. But don't buy it and then start crying you don't like it.
And "by that logic" I shouldn't post on HN if I don't like downvotes. But I agreed to this system before I post. I won't whine about it afterwards since the possibility of being downvoted/offended existed before I commented. By your logic I should now start to pressure the government to do something about these awfull comments on HN, because I don't like them.
As a society, we have decided that some contract terms are unenforceable, as there is often an asymmetric balance of power between vendors and consumers.
For example, what if the tractor terms say that you couldn't vote Republican or you would have to surrender the tractor? Or you could only use brand-name repair shops. Or that you couldn't open the hood.
Farmers need tractors. It's not like they have the option to not have one and wait forever for a deal that's never going to happen.
Buying means change of ownership and just because you write something into a contract doesn't change that fact.
To finish your example, yes, I would expect the buyer to be able to hack the machine. They bought it and it is now theirs to do with as they please.
Ah, I get to alter conditions under which I buy stuff based on my need, this is great! It is what I always wanted! Problem is... When I sell stuff under certain conditions I'd like my conditions to be honored. Like when I sell you a wafer stepper to make computer chips, I like you not to copy my patented technologies so that I can never reach return on investment. Even if you bought the machine and you own it now. And most costumers promise not to do so and honor their promise.
In the tractor case, I'd feel more honest (and much better in general) if I would just buy a tractor of a different brand with less stringent conditions attached. Why would you reward a tractor company that sells you stuff under screwy conditions?
First you vote with your wallet and make a screwy company rich, then you complain. Perhaps you should think before you buy something. Or, get a group of people together and make a nice case to the manufacturer. Where do we end if we can just break any agreement we make based on need?
The honest way to get to hackable tractors is to not buy un-hackable tractors. I'm all for hackable tractors, I'm all for hackable everything! So lets buy products that are hackable!
> When I sell stuff under certain conditions I'd like my conditions to be honored.
Frankly, if there are conditions, then as far as I'm concerned you're not selling anything. Selling implies a change of ownership. You've done something, but not sold something.
If companies want to attach additional conditions, then they should have to call it something else, and make it clear that the agreement isn't a sale.
> Why would you reward a tractor company that sells you stuff under screwy conditions?
Probably because that tractor company is the only one left by either suing its competition, colluding with them to both adopt anti-consumer license agreements, buying them out, or lobbying politicians to making competition illegal by abuse of patent or copyright law.
> try to negotiate a deal before you buy a tractor
This is part of the problem. "Contracts" have become one-way rights-limiters which perverts their original intent: For two parties to negotiate terms of a transaction. What we have today are contracts being abused to limit consumers' rights, limit their use of court to challenge them (arbitration clauses), and absolve the corporation of all legal liability that may ever come out of that transaction.
I think that in our age where consumers have no rights, its perfectly ok to enter into one-sided "contracts", then violate the spirit of those contracts by appealing to lawmakers to give consumers their rights back.
Well, apparently you do what people on HN are suggesting here: You wait until someone else builds a hackable tractor, you buy it promising you won't hack it, then you complain about it and hope you can pressure the government into making it legal for you to hack the hackable tractor.
Why are people buying these annoying tractors anyway? The reason to me seems: They are worth the trouble.
Sure, but when the other option is "stop farming", what would you have them do? The typical farmer doesn't know how to build a tractor from scratch, just as the typical car-owner doesn't know how to reproduce a Honda Accord.
So I buy a different brand. Or I comply with the rules I accepted at buy-time. In this tractor case I'd be mad at myself that I missed such a shitty condition of the contract, I'd write a blog post about how shitty it is. I'd try to pressure the manufacturer into giving me more rights. But not via the government, that just seems unfair. John Deere invents something, they proudly bring it to market, people (who did not have a John Deere smart-tractors before) start complaining and now that want you to alter your beautiful product? Go away! John Deere does not force anyone to buy their stuff! Why would you be allowed to force them into complying with your needs?
> But not via the government, that just seems unfair.
> Why would you be allowed to force them into complying with your needs?
Here's the thing. They should be able to lease equipment with restrictions. However, if you're going to call it a sale, then I don't see why they should have the right to restrict your ability to modify it. A sale implies a change of ownership. If they can restrict what you can do with the product after you bought it, then there wasn't really a change of ownership, was there?
50 years back, to 1966, is still very much preferable to 150 years back, to 1866.
As huge a gulf in technology as that may be, retracing over ground that has already been surveyed once is much easier than blazing a trail through wilderness. It only takes 50 years to advance that far in technology the first time you try it. The second time around, it goes much faster and less expensively, especially for everything with lapsed patent protection.
That particular tractor is supposed to be a bootstrapping device, so that in the unlikely circumstance that we do lose the benefit of modern infrastructure, it can mostly be rebuilt before anybody forgets how or why.
With the benefit of the modern manufacturing infrastructure, anyone else could copy a 1995 model of Deere tractor and just leave off the trademark elements.
The LifeTrac is designed around the resources that a self-sustaining OSE community could likely produce or scavenge. It's basically what two people and a rudimentary machine shop could build in a reasonable period of time.
Again, given the run-up in prices for used, owner-repairable tractors, there may be a market for copying the most popular models for new manufacture, and leaving out anything still patented or trademarked. Serious farmers won't build their own LifeTrac unless it is impossible to get a factory-built tractor.
Actually this is what some farmers attempt to do - buy tractors that do not rely on complex electronics and software. However none of the major farm equipment manufacturers make such tractors anymore, so they've had to turn to the second-hand market. Consequently the prices of these second hand tractors has skyrocketed. What a strange world.
It is well established that agreeing to some conditions doesn't necessarily make those conditions legally binding. There are many circumstances under which they are not.
Interfering with this process reduces freedom.
Interfering with freedom is necessary, almost everywhere. The very fact that two people can come to an agreement that they would expect to be enforced is a massive interference in freedom. To say nothing of that fact that you seem to be happy to interfere in someone's freedom to tinker with things, but not happy to interfere in the freedom to restrict that freedom. Do you want this "freedom" of yours or not?
If a contract contains terms which are illegal or become illegal, depending how the contract is written it may in whole or in part be nullified.
It's seen a lot in apartment/house rental contracts, where the renter puts predatory terms in a contract which aren't allowed by local or state laws. They try to enforce because "you signed it" but a challenge in court sees the contract, or at least those terms, scrapped.
This might seem reasonable. But... this way, capable people will not benefit from markets of scale like they could if they were allowed to tinker with their purchased goods.
> All I see a big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
Sadly, there is no big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
i'll bet there is. think of what the PTO (power take-off) enabled in general for the common tractor.
i'll bet hydraulics, electrical generation, and other systems can also be leveraged by 3rd-party or custom gear.
in fact, I'll wager that the FUTURE of the tractor INSISTS upon it being open and hackable.
The "Lying EULA that attempts to rebrand a sale a lease"
approach is bad for customers and bad for the world at large. It limits human innovation. Human innovation is what defines humanity. Perhaps we could just return to swinging in the trees and eating bananas unless our EULA allows us to walk upright and cook food with Fire(tm)
Pay attention, Tractor companies!
pay attention to your customers and stop listening to that shortsighted man in the pinstripe suit trying to cheapen your relationships that MATTER!
> i'll bet there is. think of what the PTO (power take-off) enabled in general for the common tractor. i'll bet hydraulics, electrical generation, and other systems can also be leveraged by 3rd-party or custom gear.
You mean a common platform, similar to what iOS is in the computing world? Sounds nice, but I guess we use a different definition of "open".
it will not matter economies of scale as the tinkerer cannot redistribute it. The tinkering is done in product already sold, like after market car parts. The tinkerer can tinker with as many tractors as he wish, even for money, but those modification is done with consent of owner on something that he already owns. If i brick something in process i should be able to replace it with factory stuff, like in case with if the said tractor's axil gets broken
This train of thought leads me back to software practices where all features exist in the software, but the level of license you pay for unlocks certain features (that are already installed), so if you allow hacking of the control module, you could theoretically unlock features you hadn't paid for... this would be a major concern for the developer.
> Turns out, copyright law is the thing that was broken all along.
While copyright law is being used as a legal wedge, the problem isn't just copyright. These arguments are often framed as being about copyright because obscures the other half of the problem, which is how these arguments ignore doctrine of first sale[1].
Case law has been confusing in this area, with cases such as Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc supporting the power grab where "licensing" overrules first sale. Other cases such as UMG v. Augusto reaffirmed that the original author's rights ended at the first sale. In our future that obviously includes software in many, many products, we either strongly reaffirm the right of first sale or we give up ownership[2] to whomever owns the software inside our products.
The DMCA is only part of the problem; this attack on first sale - an attack on the open exchange of culture[4] - has been going on a lot longer than the digital computer has existed.
[2] obviously, the actual copying of the software - instead of repair, resale, or other non-copying[3] uses
[3] if time-shifting is a valid use for betamax (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.), then any incidental, temporary copies of software that art part of normal use is fair use. The nonsense that a license is needed because a copy is made in RAM is patent nonsense.
I'm really with you on this one - getting angry at Copyright's protections being used as a weapon against First Sale is a distracting tangent. Even here with a strong tech audience, and plenty of back-stories and examples even non-technical folks can comprehend, as in iTunes/iBook/etc is selling a licence of a copy and can revoke that copy under select circumstances, IIRC.
If I was to come up with an comparable situation, I think it would be people demanding a "No Smoking on the Beach!" ordinance because of the cigarette butts littering the beach, when there's already a law against littering on the beach, but isn't being properly enforced.
Somewhat related, there's an interesting theory that the Germany industry only advanced so fast in the 19th century because German publishers deliberately ignored that new-fangled copyright thing, thus allowing information to spread fast and cheap, while the obedience of copyright stifled progress in Great Britain:
I'm curious why freedom-to-tinker is not considered free-expression in the USA, clear and simple. I mean we pride ourselves on it.
As long as the item is purchased (owned) and it is for personal use and warranties are clearly voided, what business is it otherwise to the manufacturer after they make the sale.
Of course they can get around this by never actually selling the tractor and only leasing it to farmers, then the farmers are screwed because they don't own it - until Chinese clones show up.
Our government does not take pride in it. People who can fix things or build things themselves are a danger to corporate interests, so hackers are considered to be dangerous criminals. Nobody gives a fuck if that means we're destroying our own future, because that's our children's problem.
Feels like the best approach is to encourage farmers to boycot at least one of the major tractor providers until these restrictions are removed. No new laws or lawsuits needed -- just some collective action.
Which provider do you propose we boycott, and which one do we use in the mean time? JohnDeere, CASE, New Holland etc dominate the industry, and no farmer is going to (let alone can afford to) stop using their current equipment, and spend millions of dollars (it would easily cost us this much) buying different brand machinery. Let alone dealing with the hassles that come with swapping from one stream of ag software to another.
What's most likely to happen is farmers will just keep modifying their machinery at will. It's already common place to chip your engine, or to physically modify machines/implements to improve performance or your production methods. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
> JohnDeere, CASE, New Holland etc dominate the industry
Look out, here comes China/Korea. Surely this policy of restricted software editing is intended to do one of two things:
1. force customers into dealerships for updates/repairs
2. stop a Chinese tractor appearing in the US market using the same or almost same but modified software that John Deere developed.
If it's the 1st then farmers will choose an alternative machine for future purchases, the tractor market in Europe at least has 20 brands jostling for market share.
If the 2nd argument is true, surely a license that allows users to modify and repair all the while restricting modified or original source from being distributed with the sale of a product, including resales, would solve this issue.
I think what the parent was suggesting is an arbitrary boycott for all future purchases. In other words, if they all use the same tactics, then make an example out of one to scare the others.
It sounds vindictive and harsh, until you consider that's exactly how the legal system is used all the time.
In the 1990s, when Smith and Wesson made a deal with the Clinton Administration, gun buyers and sellers did something similar.
We stopped buying Smith and Wesson firearms and their profits dropped like a stone. They thought that the increased business from the Federal government would make up for lost civilian sales but those Federal sales weren't what they were expecting and the civilian boycott was bigger than they expected.
It got so bad for the company that the owners had to sell it to get out from under the deal.
Bingo, thanks for explaining well. This will work if the switching costs between vendors is relatively low (like with guns); if not, the boycott would be harder, but likely sustainable for a limited amount of time, which would still extract a toll from whatever manufacturer was chosen.
Not going to matter. They'll say whatever they have to say to get people buying again and then sue anyone who is breaking the law. People can't do illegal things just because they got you to promise that you wouldn't tell.
It's going to be quite a while, if ever. I can sort of see the internet generation loosening copyright a little bit here and there, but then I can also see them not doing that.
> By the time we got an exemption to repair tractors, the Copyright Office said that only the farmer, and not her mechanic, could tinker with the software.
So this part of the issue is that you can only tinker with machines you own yourself? Then how about this:
1) Farmer sells tractor to mechanic for $1.
2) Mechanic repairs tractor.
3) Mechanic sells tractor to farmer for $1 + cost of repairs.
Look, if as per the article you need an army of lawyers to fix your tractor, that should be your first—no probably 10th—clue that your problem is not copyright law, but the idea that copyright law is something that you need to respect and obey.
You are always free to withdraw your consent from having your life be ruled by what a handful of people you've never met (and whose names you don't even know) have decided about how you and your community needs to conduct itself.
My life is markedly better for having those handful of people make those decisions. It is just that in a few cases, like repairing tractors, they get it wrong. That doesn't mean I want them gone, that just means I want them to stop being wrong, or at most I want different people to make those decisions and have that power over my life.
Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect is like writing in assembly for the rest of your life because C compilers optimize out unexpected things sometimes.
> Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect...
That's not what I'm suggesting at all.
I'm saying pick a structure and leaders that really do represent you. That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.
> That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.
I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :)
So.
Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress.
Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation.
According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state.
The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date.
There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52)
For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable.
For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800)
So, what's the largest state where this is feasible?
This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters).
So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.
Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative:
In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility.
While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state.
In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1]
[0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!).
[1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years.
all the more reasons why there should be a structure to not let our representatives make all the decisions for us. I'm sure we all had times when our representative is not actually representing our interests.
think tank mode:
what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants a different thing, like may be diagree button near to a decision and proposed alternative, which everyone can vote on or propose another alternative(only one alternative can be picked by a person). Its democratic, practical and doable right now. The alternative with which highest number of people agree is a clear win. This can be applied in all countries and any form of govt.
Its way better than any alternatives we currently have, like having to spend big time and effort on making petitions, or rally for cause, etc. Now a days even peaceful gathering gets violet due to govt mishandling the situation.
California has statewide referendums, which are generally pretty awful: state law is (for better or worse) pretty complex, and referendums never handle that complexity well. If successful, they'll impose some requirement without much regard for existing law in the area, and certainly without any regard for future laws. They're heavily lobbied, perhaps more so than regular laws, because easy appeals to regular people's sense of how government probably works are effective, regardless of the accuracy. Referendums can't be overturned except with another referendum. And you can fairly easily have conflicting referendums, which has given rise to court cases about which one prevails.
Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"
This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.
> So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.
lol, that is the opposite of my proposal, and your post (thank you for it btw) just further solidifies my point.
When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you, perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
See the rest of my comments in this thread for a clearer understanding of what I'm saying (and my apologies for the comments that HN makes difficult to read due to downvotes ;).
> When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you...
That's not at all what I said, and it's a dramatic misinterpretation of my words. There are substantially better mechanisms available to us to figure out what people want and what they need than for a decision maker to ask them, one-on-one.
From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say; people are surprisingly bad at both knowing what they want, and -even if they do happen to know- surprisingly bad at expressing that information coherently. It's trivial to structure queries in such a way to give different answers to what is effectively the same question. [0]
> ...perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
This is narrow-minded. Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen. [1] Go pick a country that you think is well run at the highest levels. Go look at their representative to constituent ratios. If they're like 10x or 100x greater than the US's ratios, [4] then you might have a point. If they're only 2x or 5x greater, you probably don't.
[0] A researcher wishes to discover what Presidential candidate a given person intends to vote for. He asks them "What Presidential candidate do you intend to vote for?". Most of the time, the answer to that question does not match what candidate that person actually votes for. The question to ask to get that information -most of the time- is actually "What Presidential candidate do you expect that most people will vote for?". Polling is full of crazy pitfalls like this!
[1] The other possible interpretation is either advocacy of voluntary expatriation of people who disagree with their Congressional representatives [2], or dismantlement of the Federal government. [3]
[2] Okay, sure. You do have the trouble of both finding a country that's governed in a way that you agree with, and will accept you as an immigrant, though.
[3] Ha. See the rest of the paragraph to which footnote #1 is attached.
[4] I'm fairly sure that's in the right direction. Again, I'm sick, sorry if my math is off.
Apologies, reading your comment was like going down a choose-your-own-adventure maze.
For footnote [3] my reply is that representative democracy is one of a vast variety of possible systems you could use. That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
> ...reading your comment was like going down a choose-your-own-adventure maze.
I guess you don't read many academic or technical papers. My ratio of words to footnotes is very, very high. :)
From your linked comment:
> This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Right. You're advocating expatriation (whether through emigration or secession). This is exactly as I said in footnote #1, and is a plan that is made substantially more difficult by the issues in footnote #2.
To apply the first bullet point at the end of the essay [0] would necessarily mean the end of the US's Federal Republic. Do you disagree?
In addition to that, let me ask a pointed question, along with two follow-up questions: Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation? If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
> That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy...
You should really read [2]. People are surprisingly incompetent. People are also often easily manipulated into acting dramatically against their own interests.
[0] The relevant pull quote is: "Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems"
[1] Pick any reasonable ranking that you like to determine ordering
> To apply the first bullet point at the end of the essay [0] would necessarily mean the end of the US's Federal Republic. Do you disagree?
It totally depends on whether groups/states decide to remain part of it. To the extent that they do it will continue to be, and to the extent they don't it will cease to be.
> Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation?
Heh, believe it or not that is a project I'd already set for myself.
It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now, but I will point out that Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
> If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
Ignoring for the moment the (non)existence of such a government, I'll rattle off a couple:
- Group rules do not represent the interests of group members. Most governments instead represent either the interests of the most wealthy (plutocracy) or the most vicious (dictatorships), and few (if any) provide explicit mechanisms for secession.
- Member votes are not properly weighed based on their understanding and knowledge of the issue they are voting on.
> ...to the extent they don't it will cease to be.
So, it sounds like the answer to my question is "No, I do not disagree.". It's abundantly clear that you're advocating for secession as the answer to perceived flaws in the US's Federal government. It's also abundantly clear there are at least several hundred thousand people who are similarly dissatisfied with the Federal government. If there are no real barriers to emigration via formation of a new Nation-State (however small) within the borders of the old, then the chronically dissatisfied, immensely stupid, and/or foolishly impassioned will be sure to do just that at the slightest provocation.
The thing about a Federation of States is that the group gains a lot of strength and stability if its member states are in it for good.
> It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now...
Oh sure. I didn't expect an immediate answer to the question. I do hope you get back to me on this, though. :)
> ...Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
There are a couple of things to note here:
* Despite Switzerland's "direct democracy", you don't consider it a shining example of a government that is well run. (I didn't expect that you would, I'm just noting it. :) )
* This "direct democracy" has -presumably elected- intermediaries, and (from what I gather) the vast majority of federal actions don't originate from the citizenry, and the majority of the real discussion that goes into shaping them is not open to the public. [0]
* The Swiss people must not be voting to decide even a tiny portion of what the Swiss government does. From Wikipedia: "Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, on 103 federal questions besides many more cantonal and municipal questions." That's three votes per year, on ten issues per year. I'm fairly certain that there is no state in the US that does so little. [1] I don't believe for a second that the Swiss people truly consider a significant fraction of the acts of their Federal government.
* The percentage of the population required to bring up an issue for reconsideration by the citizenry appears to be just over %1. [0] Coincidence?!? ;)
> That last issue could be addressed by liquid democracy...
How do you prevent the tyranny of the majority when any given government -or even a portion of a governed population- can splinter at a whim? How do you address the manipulation of voters to act against their best interests when everyone, regardless of understanding or expertise on the matter at hand has an equal say in how to address a matter at issue?
If your answer to that last one is "weight votes based on a person's understanding and knowledge on an issue", (as you mentioned in your comment) then my question is "How -exactly- do you plan to do this?".
Any reliable method will take substantially more effort than the vast majority of a given population will be willing to spend, [2] and many people are sure to disagree with an evaluation that means that their voting power on an issue they care about is less than a fellow citizen with whom they disagree. This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Moreover, doing the research required to arrive at a suitable solution for real-world issues is really tough, and often very time consuming. I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments. This is all to kinda-vaguely-address one issue at a really high level! Real issues take days, months, or years of dedicated study to understand and come to an informed decision on. Some guy who's working two jobs (or one job, and caring for kids) isn't likely to spend his very limited leisure time actually learning about the issues that he cares about.
[1] Given Switzerland's size and population, comparing it to many US states is entirely appropriate. :)
[2] To elaborate: Weeding out the nearly-completely-ignorant is easy. However, it takes between days and months to rank the knowledge and understanding of medium-to-high-performing individuals. [3] If you're really serious about weighting based on knowledge and expertise, then you really have to go the extra mile to try to distinguish between those who are merely very knowledgeable, and those who are the equivalent of a Gauss or a Newton when it comes to the topic at hand, no?
[3] HN is full of "Man, hiring is so hard!" and/or "Everyone does hiring wrong! Here's how you should do it!" posts that demonstrate this fact.
> Oh sure. I didn't expect an immediate answer to the question. I do hope you get back to me on this, though. :)
Sure, I can do that off of HN if you contact me via email or twitter. My contact info can be found on that site I linked you to.
> This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Who said anything about "zero-effort"? No need to interpret my words in the most absurd way to make it easy on yourself. ;)
> I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments.
People do not need to be green on the issues they choose to vote on. Having prior knowledge and expertise is what makes an expert an expert.
Liquid democracy, from every indication, appears to be vastly superior at fairly selecting experts to vote on issues than the silliness we're using right now. Since experts can have legitimate philosophical disagreements it's only part of the solution. A mechanism for the establishment of city-states to create a market of legal systems is one of the other important pieces.
Er, one of the specific values of the current system is that the people who (theoretically) represent me and make rules I must abide by also do so for millions of other people. This is genuinely advantageous, even for, perhaps especially for, copyright law. Things are in-copyright or out-of-copyright in a consistent way nationwide, fair use exceptions are defined the same way nationwide, public domain and author's rights exist or don't exist nationwide, etc.
If I have myself and a small number of people represented and ruled by a group of folks, the only way to get this result is for my group of people to form federations with other groups of people, and those federations to form meta-federations, and so forth, and have each group willingly delegate most of its authority upwards. But that's really similar to how I live now.
Whether it changes anything likely depends how you do it. For example, writing a letter to the editor may not change much, while renouncing citizenship would likely change a lot in practice.
But to renounce your citizenship you have to have another place to live. Unless you create your own country, or go meet the entire government, you're still "ruled by what a handful of people you've never met".
One could emigrate to or create a micronation or microstate. Sealand is a fairly well known micronation. The Conch Republic [0] is another, and is an example of (on multiple occasions) withdrawing consent from being ruled by the outside government.
lol @ HN downvoters who can't handle reality. That's OK, I understand and respect that you've chosen to subject yourself to rules you don't like. Just less whining and complaining, OK?
Could you clarify what your thought is? Are you basically suggesting civil disobedience as a form of protest? That has had some effect in the past, however it took a large coordinated effort, plus it took enough people from outside the movements to recognize the non-moral nature of the laws that were being protested, and finally it also caused a lot of sacrifice for those conducting the civil disobedience.
I am saying that if a large group of people feel they are being abused by a system that does not represent them, they are always free to reject that system and adopt another one that does work for them.
If you walk into a casino and notice that the rules appear to be rigged against you, do you try to work within the casino's system, perhaps petitioning the staff to change the rules to be more in your favor?
You have other options: (1) Leave the casino, (2) attempt to cheat the casino, (3) fight the casino using either violent or (preferably) non-violent means, (4) create a new establishment that you and your group are happy with.
Your other choice is to continue to play the slots and vent online when you keep losing, and although that might make you feel better it won't change the reality of the game.
I'd like this to succeed (really), but as far as we know, right now, you're choosing option 5 (venting online) while trying to convince us that 1, 2, 3, 4 are better. Show us what you've done.
And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
> And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
Tech projects can fall under (4). Tor, BitTorrent, Bitcoin, Silk Road, etc. were all tech projects representing withdrawal of consent through the creation of "new establishments". Creating a new country (if that's what you're referring to) also falls under (4) but requires a more cohesive community that does not knee-jerk downvote when told they have options. ;)
"Withdrawal of consent" isn't merely "creating things to skirt around the rules I don't like". Withdrawing consent is withdrawing from the system to which you no longer consent.
You do not get to reap the benefits of living in a society without subscribing to its rules and mores. You can work to change them from within, or you can walk. Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
> Withdrawing consent is withdrawing from the system to which you no longer consent.
You haven't actually defined "withdrawing consent" there, you've just repeated the phrase "withdrawing consent".
> Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
So tell me what would constitute "withdrawing consent" that doesn't mean "itistoday2 gets to participate in modern society without having to play by its rules", because AFAICT, those are the choices: play the game everyone else agrees to play and reap the benefits, or play your own game and forfeit them.
> The system is forced onto Canadian Citizens, there is no way to opt out.
This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Canada is a group that has chosen to play by these rules.
So long as the rules reflect the interests of the group members, there is no problem.
The problem occurs when a substantial portion of the group membership feels no longer represented by the rules and wants to play by a different set of rules (and mass-migration is not an option).
It is not about making taxes voluntary per se, but about allowing new groups to form. If a portion of Canadians wish to form a new group, separate from Canada, then they should be allowed to. They can opt-out of paying Canadian taxes, but they will lose all of the benefits that you refer to, and I'm sure they will miss them and therefore decide to implement their own taxation system that they feel represents their interests.
Perfectly, thank you. It seems we're rather in agreement: play along, or don't — where "don't" isn't just a matter of not paying taxes, but still using the roads, or whatever. I'm, personally, not interested in going back and forth on the notion or merits of internal secession, or "home rule" or any of that; that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make, and with which you appear to concur.
EDIT: But, for the record, I agree that it should, in principle, be possible. In practice, I think it's a far bigger deal than pretty much anyone who'd want to undertake it is probably prepared for, and that's likely part of why it's not allowed. Vanishingly few people have the resources to start their own wholly self-sufficient society.
Further, I submit that many, if not most, of the people who would want to would be doing so in order to perpetuate some prejudice or other. Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
> Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
If you are referring to a military takeover-type situation, the concept does not endorse that as in that instance the group members are not being represented.
On the other hand, yes, if the group members choose a set of rules that you (an outsider) disagree with, they should still be allowed to do so. To quote from the post itself:
Through awareness of the mortality of all systems (including our own), we should ensure a means by which any group is able to abandon our system in a conflict-free manner if its members want to adopt something else—even if we might disagree with their choice. Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems.
No, it was a fully "democratic" takeover, in that they saw a small town, much of which was for sale, and tried to buy up enough of the town that they'd have a majority, and be able to vote in whatever hateful nonsense they deemed fit. What do you suppose the town's original, non-neo-Nazi inhabitants should have done if they'd succeeded? They aren't exactly being represented in this case, either.
I guess, as long as you're cognizant of the fact that the system you're espousing offers potential institutionalized hate as a means of conflict avoidance, I don't think there's much else to say.
EDIT: Or, hell, let's just take it straight to ludicrous-land. Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, and raises their sacrificial virgins from birth to believe that it's in their, and their society's interest to be placed upon the altar, so they aren't inclined to leave the society that believes it needs their mortal blood for its upkeep. Do the rest of us just sit by and say, "Well, they're over there in West Whack-a-doo. Nothin' to be done about it", and let them go about their business?
Why do you have "democratic" in scare-quotes? That action is completely democratic. If a bunch of jerks buy up 60% of a town and move in, and now comprise a majority of the population, then they have every right to vote for horrible new laws (assuming they don't get trumped by state or federal laws of course). That's the nature of democracy. If you're opposed to that, then you're by definition opposed to democracy.
Luckily, modern democracies involve multiple layers of government (town/city, county, state, federal) to serve as a moderating effect to prevent some little town full of jerks legislating blatantly horrible stuff, but those jerks do have the right to move where they want, buy property, and to vote. To deny them those rights is undemocratic.
>Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, ..... Do the rest of us just sit by and say, .....
Well, it depends. Are they in a town within your country? Then obviously higher-level laws are going to prevent that kind of thing, and the feds have the right to send in the National Guard and take over the place for violating state and federal laws so blatantly, then prosecute everyone involved. However, if they're a separate country (and the group is the country; i.e. the country as a whole believes in this crap), then it's a little trickier. What is your proposal about how to deal with this screwed-up society? Invade, and install a puppet government? When has that ever gone well in the past? Not recently. Turn it into an imperial possession where the citizens there have no rights except what the imperial governor decrees? Maybe, but this also means you opposed democracy. Apply pressure from outside with things like sanctions? That seems to be the modern method, and doesn't seem to work too well either (look at the wonders it's done for North Korea). Honestly, this is something you could debate all day long, there's no easy answer.
That's a fair point, but from what you've shared it sounds more like an invasion of sorts than an actual secession movement. Do you know how much of a majority they had? If it was on the order of 51% of a tiny town that just doesn't seem sufficient.
As you say, it helps for the place to be self-sufficient.
A good example actually are the Amish. Their towns are almost completely composed of Amish and they're entirely self-sufficient except for the standing army part.
For this they actually pay fewer taxes than most Americans, but they still do pay taxes.
The formation of a country seems to require at least two things then:
1. Self-sufficiency in terms of resources
2. Self-sufficiency in terms of defense
(EDIT2: A friend points out that it's a bit more nuanced than this since many existing countries do not satisfy these criteria given the nature of modern trade. So these requirements can be filled by-proxy.)
On that last point, it doesn't necessarily have to imply a superior military. As long as you have some sort of leverage over neighboring countries (like trade agreements), you can arrange to have a truce or even an alliance between yourselves.
An example would be if Silicon Valley and neighboring farming regions banded together and said, "No more tech unless you give us autonomy."
Paying fines and/or avoiding jail (within the system) are not free as in beer. Likewise, leaving the country and relocating is also not free (e.g. there's a few to renounce US citizenship).
Whether we're free as in speech to withdraw consent from the social contract (by which I do not mean to speak to its validity or lack thereof) is more of a grey area. As with freedom of speech, the freedom to withdraw from the social contract is not without its (ominous) ramifications. See, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
> Paying fines and/or avoiding jail (within the system) are not free as in beer.
Well, in terms of copyright law it really depends. People violate copyright law all the time (see torrents) and vast majority don't pay anything for doing so.
Sometimes people do have to face consequences, but one of the reasons that is so is because of the folks who disagree with and vehemently complain about ridiculous laws that do not represent their views, while simultaneously taking actions to re-enforce the system that gives them those laws (like downvoting comments on HN that remind them they actually do have a voice and a choice in the matter).
Yes, torrents (and photocopiers, etc) are nearly free, except for the unlucky few who may be caught for purpose of example. And yes, this is in part due to uninformed, unmotivated, and/or repressed dissenters, regardless of where the first or largest blame may rest.
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe there's yet a torrent for tractor software, and my impression from other articles is that John Deere et al are more suit-happy at the moment than are the music, film, and publishing companies.
Let's rewind. VHS won because of porn. Listening to music is now a buffet style affair because of Napster. AC kicked DC in the nuts and the public applauded because it was better and it could.
I respect those working to improve the system from within, but also respectfully point out that change of the sort this article is talking about comes from the outside. Revolutions all have one thing in common. Out with the old, and in with the new. Copyright law is old, it is administered by old people, and it is kept in place by the old guard. Open source hardware, distributed open source software development, 3D printing, crowd funding, and on and on, these are all new.
You can attempt to evolve (fix) the old rules, you'll fail. It seems to me to be a safer bet to simply begin playing the new game, even though the rules are not totally worked out yet, even though people say it isn't legit, even though there are no referees to call foul or panel of judges to provide approval and award medals. Out with the old, and in with the new.
Re: VHS, granting that I was speaking in superlatives and that VHS might be one of one of multiple primary influences, here is a quote from an industry insider stating the same idea [1].
Re: AC/DC, DC was financially viable. You might notice that we still make use of DC, where it does much close quarter nut kicking. DC was financially uncompetitive over distance, but not because of magic finance. It was uncompetitive because someone had to buy, build, and install the associated hardware to make it work over long distances. AC required much less in that arena, because of the technology, not magical finance. AC as a technology was more viable then DC as a technology over distance because the technologist, not the banker, endowed it with such awesome, nut kicking powers. And nut kick it did.
DC was not "financially viable" at all. DC was completely unworkable because you had to have a power plant on every city block! It was impossible to transmit DC power over any distance because the losses over the wire were too great. You could use a higher voltage to mitigate that, but then you have high voltage entering peoples' homes and a greater potential for fire, plus it's harder to make devices (light bulbs, household motors) which work reliably at higher voltages.
The fundamental problem with DC is that, in 190x, there's no practical way to convert it from one voltage to another. That's why AC won the "current wars", plain and simple. Stupid Edison really thought it would make sense to have a power plant on every city block, but obviously that dream went nowhere, for good reason. With AC power, you use a "transformer" to step the voltage up to much higher levels for long-distance transmission, then another transformer to step it back down at the point-of-use. Higher voltage has much lower losses because the losses, according to Ohm's Law, are P=RI^2, where P is the power loss, R is the resistance (which we'll assume to be fixed for a given length of wire), and I is the current. Since P=VI (power = voltage current), stepping up the voltage means you have proportionately lower current, for the same amount of power, and as you can see from the first equation, the losses go up with the square of the current. This is why long-distance transmission lines use scarily-high voltages (some over 1 megavolts).
These days, we have ways of converting DC to different voltages using modern electronics and transistors, but these did not exist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was simply no way back then to make an electric generation and transmission system of any scale without the AC devices invented by Nikola Tesla.
That's exactly what happened. Initially DC was the only option because Mr. Edison personally bankrolled the first electric grids which required building power plants per section of the grid. Additionally, DC was replacing engine based industrialized factories, which indeed had on premise steam or coal engines, and so installing a power plant for just that factory would have made perfect sense. At the time particular time, granted very soon after, AC was not viable. Saying "not at all" is a bit global of a statement considering it contradicts history.
Ok, granted, compared to on-premise steam or coal engines or waterwheels, Edison's crappy DC was viable.
AC wasn't viable at that time because it hadn't been invented and deployed yet. It wasn't intuitively obvious and it took a brilliant Serbian electrical engineer to invent it (or rather, the machines to implement it; AC was theorized before Tesla) before it became viable.
However, as a competitor to AC power systems spanning whole cities and interconnected in a nationwide grid, DC wasn't even remotely viable.
How can something be compared as a competitor to spmething else that hasn't even been invented yet? It's difficult arguing the point when you keep regressing back to historically impossible what-ifs.
The old have lots of money and political influence, and a money making supermachine (look at Disney's copyright lobby, and then look at their box office revenue this year, and then consider they own pretty much a huge portion of all entertainment period) to fund perpetual bribery of politicians to maintain or further enact their will (see: TPP).
This is not something that will organically happen in our lifetimes. If it happens in the next fifty years, it will be a divisive war, not a slow decline. And at this moment there are four camps - the ultrarich perpetuating the system for profit, the apathetic masses that make up 99% of the population who do not care, do not know, or do not give a damn, the portion who defend the old guard on false pretenses that because this is the way it is this must be the only way that works and thus the best way, and lastly, in a tiny fraction of a fraction of people, who do not have the power or influence to push reality onto the rest, are those who fight against draconian IP policy.
It will take a lot more involvement and effort to actually reverse the tide. If any of the new age free thought IP out there ever became a tangible threat to the established media empire, it would be swallowed up instantly for the time being. And those in power are not unaware - there is a reason these companies are spending a large portion of their war chests buying patents and IP themselves, to produce an endless morass of bullshit ownership of ideas to drown anyone who threatens them in.
I was with you, right up until you said "Out with the old, and in with the new."
You're first paragraph is spot on. But.
The next step is, DIY tractors, as if they were hot rod motorcycles, since, let's be honest... Tractors are NOT high technology items.
Okay, so tractors aren't as sexy as motorcyles, and gear heads don't cut their teeth on John Deer. So... just buy ordinary tractors, why not? They are basically covered wagons with motors, and attached shovels. They scrape dirt. They sift potatoes out of mud.
Why do tractors need horrendously advanced software at all? How complicated is a riding lawn mower?
These are not jumbo jets with multi-core governed CPU voting systems. Tractors don't have ailerons that need to adjust pitch and yaw at hypersonic velocities.
They fucking creep along at like 5MPH. Christ.
Then, after that one little nitpick, I'm with you all the way.
Indeed. I stopped reading when I got to that line. Modern tractors are industrial production machines valued according to their output, and designed as such. These things are indeed complex, expensive, wonders of technology. Not only that, they are no longer simply tractors, they are now parts of systems.
correct, I'm presently doing work for one of the largest tractor manufacturers developing software for them. There are all kinds of technology in these things as well as on the farm itself in the form of GPS correction (called RTK) to deal with auto guidance and improving GPS accuracy. We are also building mesh networks so a tractor and a combine can be driven by one person & having the combine follow the tractor in side-by-side fashion. I work on over the air software updates, some of the touch screens are essentially custom computers running Android. We have a number of on board modules handling steering and precision farming as it's called in the industry. All these modules are interconnected with a mix of technology (CAN, TCP/IP over Broad-R-Reach, LIN, WiFi, and GPS). Check out ISOBUS too... ISOBUS is a technology where any tractor can be connected to any tow behind implement, including 3rd party, and that implement's GUI is shown on a touch panel for the operator to control and program. In short, there's a lot there. And it's a very competitive market.
Would love your take on the open-sourxe/proprietary issue, especially as it affects the farmers ability to fix or improve their own equipment, legally.
"tractors equipped with cutting edge technology, as agricultural equipment makers increasingly incorporate elements of data analytics, GPS and remote sensing in a race to make farming more precise."[1]
you are so fucking clueless... Tractors have a lot of technology in them. Here is a very short list of you:
RTK: Makes GPS based steering more accurate. Often a dedicated RTK transmitter is installed on the farm for the tractor to pick up and use to correct against the GPS you may be already familiar with like the one in your car or smartphone.
End of Row Guidance: A piece of software that allows you to program macros to control an orchestrated set of events for the implement you're pulling behind you. (seeder, bailer, combine). There are many repeatable events that happen when farming from lowering & raising seeders, dealing with drift, changing seeding depth based on previously collected yield data, etc...
Mesh Networks: So one guy can drive a tractor and a combine with the combine following next to the tractor.
Auto Guidance: Think self driving car. Functional safety is a huge problem for companies producing self driving tractors - see ISO26262
ISOBUS: Is a technology whereby an implement is attached to a tractor and the tractor's cabin display creates a GUI image and/or menu for that implement to control it. The display need not have any advanced knowledge of the implement. So even the implements have an on board computer too.
It really irks me to see comments like yours. You clearly don't work in this field buy your comments come off as someone with all this great knowledge about how things work. Have you even bothered to research such topics as precision farming? These tractors collect tons of data year over year in order maximize yield which is very important to farmers and their ROI.
you are so fucking clueless... Tractors hardly need any of that technology.
It really irks me to see comments like yours. You clearly don't work in this field since your comments come off as someone with all this great knowledge about how things work. Have you even bothered to research such topics as non-precision farming? These tractors collect tons of data year over year in order maximize worthless imaginary justifications for more cargo cult technology.
Grow up, learn to grasp the premise of the comments you read.
Anyone with half a brain knew the DMCA was a bad idea when it was being "debated". Now it's accepted because we've grown accustomed to workarounds. The only way our society will be fixed is when the reality-incongruent copyright system simply collapses.