Copyright

The White House has responded to the online petitions regarding SOPA with 'Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet' - something that someone must have worked on for at least a few hours. But there are a few problems.

First, and foremost, the Whitehouse using 'piracy' as a metaphor for people using unlicensed works is more than a bit disturbing. After all, our government sends Navy SEALs after pirates. I suppose that would mean that to combat online piracy they would use online Navy SEALs. The fact that the misuse of the 'piracy' metaphor has extended to the White House in responses to the SOPA bill demonstrates the lobbyist lean. Using unlicensed works is something completely different; piracy involves the sacking of a ship where the theft of something robs someone else of its use. Sure, using unlicensed works is wrong, but the methodology of licensing is at best debatable. Lawrence Lessig wrote lots of things related to copyright licensing that the U.S. Government should probably take the time to read instead of dismiss. I won't get into the Patent issues because they, too, are a complete mess because of misplaced metaphors.

Sort of like Money being Free Speech. Money, which is a concept used for barter, is seen as free speech - but can one steal free speech? Do we see the theft of money as a violation of the Freedom of Speech? Is that really where we are? Maybe the problem with the world right now is that some people have so much more freedom of speech than others, and that artificial constructs (corporations) are seen as people. When, then, do we declare a corporation legally dead? Or do we instead do organ transplants on them when they abused their organs before - something that typically causes most people to be unable to receive such a transplant?

Apparently our present level of bureaucracy in government allows only limited use of metaphors - the language truncated by 'free speech' of lobbyists.

But beyond piracy, there's an assertion in the White House response to the petition that I particularly needs some transparency:

...Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation's most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs..

I've already discussed the flawed metaphor of 'piracy'. Now we get to the vague 'harm' and 'hurt' - can anyone show the actual amount of 'harm' and 'hurt' that is being done by use of unlicensed works aside from the amount of 'free speech' the lobbyists are throwing at the government? We're talking, of course, about the same companies who happily sue children.

The White House requests input (but doesn't have an avenue for it despite running Drupal which has the ability right out of the box):

...So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days...

Here's my response: First, yes, there is a problem. However, the level of the problem has not been reasonably quantified. The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by idiots using unlicensed works and in the grand scheme of things, this issue of 'piracy' seems like an issue of convenience to push when the government is being looked to for the creation of conditions for more jobs in a country that effectively gives liver transplants to alcoholics. The freedom of speech of the few non-human humans has skewed the issue to such an extreme that the SOPA act was written in such a way that it obviously breaks freedoms that aren't defended by the same few non-human humans because they don't accumulate free speech (profit) from those freedoms.

There is no viable solution at the present level of thinking within government. The underlying issues need to be properly addressed for anything truly worthwhile to come of all of this. Then triage, because when it comes to solutions that should infringe upon freedoms, I imagine 'online piracy' is not the big issue. Those people occupying Wall Street didn't seem all that concerned about online piracy, but then I suppose that the government thinks that they have a lower level of freedom of speech and thus aren't worth listening to.

If lobbyists are lunatics and government the asylum, guess who is running the asylum? People say they don't want big government, which I agree with, but I'd prefer government over corporations running things. That seems to be the core issue. Fix that and everything will probably fall into line.

Image at Top Right courtesy Lance Robotson through a Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) license. Click image to view the original on Flickr.

Over the last 10 years, there has been something bothering me that I couldn't quite put a finger on. It was ethereal and numbing, something that defied description- yet aspects were apparent in so many different things. While people were busy trying to outblog each other in some insane competition for popularity and implicit revenue, I kept reading the same hype on different topics that simply didn't seem... warranted. Things were going to transform our lives.

In a lot of the world that can read this, people respond to 'on demand' as a very deep concept. And in developed world modern culture this is very true - it's steeped in society, with its brownian motion magnifying over time... particles colliding, making the modern culture a very strong tea. Exponentially so. And so now, people in that world can buy things on demand. Movies by Internet. Music by Internet. Software by Internet. Pornography by Internet. Junk mail by Internet. You get the idea.

People act as if they will be judged by one work within a life. But we're judged by our body of works... or should be.

Running can be a form of procrastination. It can also be a form of survival.

Success is accidental. Be prepared.

The only thing that truly protects freedom is the will to have it - and that will can only be negotiated from a position of weakness.

Any place that serves roast beef sandwiches without horseradish does not make sandwiches.

We all live in our own projected sanitariums, some more complicated than others, growing as we age. When the projections become complex, we sometimes simplify so that we can move forward. It's what we miss when we simplify that marks our innocence.

A benign enemy is better than a dangerous friend. But making that choice between the two can make a dangerous enemy out of dangerous friend.

If we follow our history of society, we can see patterns in our advances. If we consider mankind, as a whole, to be a creature instead of a species, we might consider that the need for freedom, as a trait, permits adaptability and generalization - providing a broader chance for the creature to survive. The more freedom we have, the more potential we have to react in a way that permits our survival. More freedoms, more likely to survive.

Bureaucracy protects decision-makers from the results of their decisions. Imagine a non-lethal electrical shock administered to a decision-maker for every poor choice made. I can dream, can't I?

When something goes wrong, some people stick in that moment to find a solution to the problem that they can live with. This can take a very long time.

If I wanted to control the world, the first thing I would do would be to control all the information and decide who gets to see what. Sort of like the present copyright and patent systems do.