Cory Doctorow at Chaos Computing Meeing

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation – Boing Boing.

And here is an article that reminds us of how what Richard Stallman said in the past, which was often written off as paranoid, might actually have been prescient.

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years – and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing – by someone else in case you lack the skills – becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we’re boned.

That’s the very core of the Free Software Foundation‘s and Stallman’s beliefs: that proprietary software takes control away from the user, which can lead to disastrous consequences, especially now that we rely on computers for virtually everything we do. The fact that Stallman foresaw this almost three decades ago is remarkable, and vindicates his activism. It justifies 30 years of Free Software Foundation.

Starkman doesn’t just criticize us (though he does that, at length.) He also puts forward a Burkean defense of institutional tradition as a store of embedded wisdom, arguing for the continued relevance of existing news organizations, especially newspapers, in something very close to their current form.

He jokingly calls his vision the “Neo-Institutional Hub-and-Spoke Model.” His description of what’s needed, though — “rebuilding or shoring up institutions” — makes it clear he doesn’t need the “Neo-” bit. He is talking about somehow saving the familiar institutions, not inventing new ones, a strategy that has long passed for Plan A in the conversation about what the internet changes about the news business.

Comics via a pre-paid model.

via Kids’ Nets Face the Mystery of Missing Children | MediaWorks – Advertising Age.

copyright law is public law—enacted by Congress, enforced where appropriate by the President, and interpreted and applied by the courts—there is plenty of opportunity to monitor the effects of the law and to debate the ways in which it should be reformed.

Increasingly, however, copyright law is being privatized. Its meaning and application are determined not by governmental actors but by private parties, and in particular by deep-pocketed copyright owners. Increasingly, the balance between private rights and public interests is set by private lawmaking.

 

I’m seeing it more and more here on MAKE. Have a clever idea? Are you talented and skilled enough to make it happen? You can submit your project to Kickstarter, and if it passes their guidelines (this is where their editorial comes in), you can post your project and get funding. The average amount of funding is $71, and the most common funding is $25 per backer. The people with Kickstarters usually give some incentives for people to back projects like the physical item, a T-shirt of the final shipping product, etc.

 

Nowadays, copyright barely resembles what it was originally designed for i.e. to protect both parties: inventors and content creators on the one side and the public on the other. Corporate America and government compliance have written out public interests in many instances. The case of Mickey Mouse is illustrative.

Nonetheless, there’s an air of inevitability about it all. Historically, how often have incumbent, monopolistic industries shrugged their shoulders and written off their entire business model to embark on a journey along a crowded new highway, with rules set by customers, that leads who-knows-where?

On a personal note, I suspect that once the world’s internet infrastructure comes up to speed, we’ll all be using on-demand subscription models and the notion of buying content to keep will feel archaic. Even so, more needs to be done to protect the public from ham-fisted copyright industries demanding payment for everything.

A great deal of copyright infringement does not stem from criminal behaviour. Much of it occurs simply because there is all-too-often no other way to legally access the content you want – even if you do want to pay for it.

It’s worth remembering that there are many big losers because of piracy, but these have been well covered elsewhere. The video games industry, for example, is a major loser, but we’ll deal with that another time. This article is one of few that deals with the flipside of the argument and so please remember that it is intends to describe and inform – not endorse any infringement. Has it changed your opinion on the matter or confirmed it? Let us know below.

 

I am currently writing a traditional, printed book for my mainstream publisher, the Free Press. At the other extreme, I do a lot of writing for free, almost entirely on my blog. In between working for free and working for my publisher, I’ve begun to experiment with self publishing short ebooks. Last week, I published LYING, my first installment in this genre. The results have been simultaneously thrilling and depressing.

This addresses how MSM companies have chosen to innovate, and some projects are more successful than others. It  covers some of the new aggregators like Ongo, which put out online views of news that work well on tablets and mobiles, but cost some money.

the Newspaper Association of America is trying to put together a one-buy site for smartphone and tablet display advertising. You could see this as an effort to get around the notorious problem with print placements; now, an advertiser that wants to buy in a number of markets at once must deal with conflicting specifications and separate billing.

That is an interesting idea commercially, because to make big money, you have to make it easy to make ad buys.

The article has this list of skills the innovators need to have:

(1) Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields,

(2) Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom,

(3) Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things,

(4) Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge, and

(5) Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives.