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Sin Synopsis · 24 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

Intellectual and material work are both naturally property since they both exist physically.

Copyright and patent are privileges, monopolies that suspend people’s liberty to produce copies of their own property or utilise/reproduce certain registered designs. They have nothing to do with making writing or designs the property of their authors or inventors – nature does this, as it imbues those creators with the exclusive right to their work. We have a natural right to exclude others from our private possessions, to prevent others copying or using them, but that doesn’t mean we can control others in the use of their own property, which includes what we sell or give to them.

What people subconsciously infer from copyright and patent is that patterns can be property, that wherever they proliferate/manifest in the universe those patterns must be regarded as the property of those who can claim to have originated or first registered them. That’s the spooky and quite unnatural delusion that so many people have been indoctrinated with – because it is lucrative to exploit such people’s consequent willingness to surrender their liberty (to utilise ‘spookily pervasive’ patterns that someone else has claimed as theirs).

There can be no justification for granting instruments of injustice (aka privileges). That a grant of such a monopoly in literary works might aid the public’s learning is a pretext, not a justification. Copyright was enacted to aid the state via a rewarded and beholden press. This is the same unethical motive behind ACTA, to control the distribution of information to and by the public, for the wealth and power that follows – not for the public benefit. Such corrupt legislation as copyright and patent is made for the benefit of those few in a position to benefit from it today and tomorrow, not for the benefit of generations hence – who having lost their liberty instead reap the cultural and technological deficit.

The wilful infringement of what is typically an immortal corporation’s privilege is today regarded as a venial sin, like sex before marriage. Everyone pays lip service to the censure that those who engage in it are reprobates, but behind closed doors everyone indulges in it – with a wink and nod across the pews after. But who can pretend righteous satisfaction to see delinquent youngsters sued for millions by legally created entities as a lesson to their peers? Who can then still refuse to recognise the definition of copyright as an instrument of injustice? Until people snap out of such complicity, and recognise that cultural intercourse is not only natural and within each individual’s liberty, but is fundamentally vital to mankind’s health and progress, then we work to the beat of the Morlocks’ drum.

Essay Writing UK said 17 hours ago :

I do have a question, plagiarism is a venial sin as well. A content was being copy to the legal author but doing rephrasing those words or the content is not a venial sin in the world of “writer” Right?

Sin synopsis – a very well specified that tackles the pattern and form of which property must not be copied.

The Corruption of Our 'Public Domain' · 28 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

Did you know that the definition of ‘public domain’ as ‘the few published works not protected by copyright’ is very recent?

All published works are supposed to be in the public domain. This was the original pretext behind copyright – to incentivise the delivery of novel and educational works into the public domain – for the public’s benefit (albeit at the cost of cultural liberty).

The modern understanding that copyright protected works are NOT in the public domain is a corruption in meaning we have to thank publishing corporations for. They want to stamp out any notions the public might otherwise get that published works somehow belong to them.

So even today, publication is still supposed to be delivery to the public (into the public domain) of knowledge, art, facts, ideas, etc. An intellectual work is supposed to enter the public domain from the moment of its publication. Allegedly, this delivery is incentivised by copyright.

It is only in the 20th century with the growing recognition by the public of the potential to utilise reproduction and communications technology to share and build upon published works that a work’s copyright status enters into the consciousness of the public at large.

Prior to the 20th century only publishers (or those editors/authors expecting to utilise a published work for inclusion, translation, abridgement, or derivation) were concerned about a published work’s copyright, or as we’d esoterically put it today, whether the work’s fixed expression was in the public domain as well as its ideas.

So it’s a very subtle perceptual shift that has occurred – recently. Only recently with a technologically enabled public is it more important to know whether a work’s fixed expression is available to the public than whether its ideas are.

And that’s why it’s only in the 20th century that ‘public domain’ has changed in meaning from ‘All published works and everything otherwise known to or accessible by the public’ to ‘Anything not protected by copyright’.

With such a gradual transition in meaning paralleling a gradual transition in technology (and publishers’ sabre rattling) there is no single point at which the meaning flipped from one to the other.

And so now, instead of all published works being considered in the public domain irrespective of copyright, everyone happily accepts the myth that ‘public domain’ has always meant ‘Anything not protected by copyright’.

The transition of public from ‘consumers’ to self-publishers trespassed upon the traditional publishers’ territory. That’s why the latter’s semantic inveigling of domain boundaries consolidates the ‘correct’ understanding that 99% of what would have been the public’s own culture properly belongs to immortal publishing corporations (what else would seek to extend an 18th century privilege from 14 years to a period far in excess of mortal lifespans?). Now they would have us believe that not even the ideas are in the public domain. All aspects of a copyright protected work now remain entirely the intellectual property of the copyright holder. Published works have now been repossessed, removed from the public’s grubby mitts and re-enclosed in a quasi-private domain (corporations can have no shame in claiming such human rights as privacy).

We, the public, thus find ourselves in possession of mere scraps, the cultural residue not worth appropriating and enclosing for proper and perpetual commercial exploitation.

Copyright is effectively a tax on the public’s cultural liberty. The state may collect a small portion of that tax to spend on the public’s behalf, but the bulk ends up in the corporations’ coffers (largely foreign). So why not abolish copyright and leave 100% of the value of cultural exchange in the public’s own hands? The state then ends up collecting more in tax from the greater cultural prosperity of its own citizens. The only ones to lose out are those immortals hoping to further exploit, enforce and extend monopolies that are increasingly ineffective – an admittedly very powerful lobby.

Effective intellectual property protection and enforcement are essential for electronic commerce to thrive. Existing intellectual property laws need to be applied in the digital environment.
From: Facilitating the Digital Economy A WITSA Position Paper – 5/98

Today the corporate state attempts to persuade us that unless our culture is ‘protected’ by the monopoly of copyright (a privilege granted to the Stationer’s Guild by Queen Anne in 1710), it cannot be commercially exploited, and so cannot therefore be of benefit to the public. What they would discard to the ‘public domain’ thus becomes a refuse heap full of expired and decomposing cultural detritus, picked over only by desperate scavengers and hardy anthropologists.

The ‘public domain as cultural midden’ is a corruption of meaning by corrupt entities borne of corrupt privileges, both spawned by corrupt legislators in the pockets of the unscrupulously wealthy and powerful.

All published works are in the public domain.

Those members of the public who would enjoy their natural right to copy, their cultural liberty to share and build upon their own culture, should do so – irrespective of copyright, irrespective of being pejoratively labelled as pirates. Mankind’s culture belongs to mankind, not immortal corporations. Are you a human being or a corporate slave?

We will help young people to understand intellectual property (IP), both as buyers and as potential producers – for instance when they upload a work of their own to the internet – as a seamless part of their cultural education.
From: Creative Britain – New Talents for the New Economy – 2/08

Crosbie Fitch said 28 days ago :

This article expands upon comments I posted to “Why World War I Recordings Won’t Enter The Public Domain Until 2049” on TechDirt.

NB Those WWI recordings are of course already in the public domain, and have been since they were first published. It is only that they will remain 'protected' by copyright until 2049 - beyond the lifespan of any mortal involved in their production.

Crosbie Fitch said 28 days ago :

I should also point out the related discussion in the comments to Glyn Moody’s article: “Towards a Commons Taxonomy”.

Selling Music - NOT Copies · 43 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

I’m blue in the face through saying it (again), but a musician is in the business of selling their music – NOT copies.

Copies were once expensive, and were traditionally sold by privileged entities termed ‘publishers’ (distributors of ‘content’ to the public via the sale of copies at monopoly protected prices, and masters of indentured artists).

Today and tomorrow, the self-emancipated musician, who has been warned against signing their soul away to a record label, sells their work directly to their fans. They no longer sell their music to the label, and they certainly don’t mass produce/distribute/retail copies – though, yes, the inertia of tradition keeps this quaint affectation going. And even for musicians to manufacture and sell their own copies is a bit of a challenge as Zygo wryly observes in Music: You’re Doing It Wrong

However, selling CDs is not selling music. It’s only copyright that makes that conflation of music with the copy.

In some accord with the form of Zygo’s article, here’s the sequence of steps that musicians interested in selling their music will go through:

  1. Invite your fans to pay you to compose/perform/record music
  2. Compose/perform/record music and deliver to paying fans
  3. Get paid (in proportion to number of fans)
  4. Indiscriminately distribute some or all of this music to file-sharing sites, etc.
  5. Having obtained more fans, goto 1.

Of course, there may well be no fans in the first iteration, music being produced as a promotional loss leader, but the general sequence is Demand->Supply->Exchange->Promotion.

Note in these steps that the musician does not get into the business of selling copies of their music on little plastic discs. Fans and anyone else can do that themselves if they want to (the musician should have delivered FLAC files to their paying fans, who taking on the role of the label get the masters they’ve paid for). Remember, there is no copyright. Copies cost nothing to make and people give them away for nothing. Yes, ok, the musician can still sell copies if they really must. Perhaps autographed, limited edition vinyl picture discs. Whatever floats your boat.

But, let’s get this straight: to sell music you exchange delivery of your music for the money of your fans who want you to produce it. It’s the music that’s valuable. The copies should be given away – especially if they don’t cost anything.

Prof. Bently et al Concluding the History of Copyright · 43 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

If you need some good reading whilst lazing on the veranda of your summer villa, look no further than Privilege and Property – Essays on the History of Copyright

Edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently, it’s bound (or not) to be a stimulating intellectual work.

The thing is, the history of copyright is rapidly reaching its inevitable conclusion, and so the number of such books that can be written on copyright’s history must soon tail off. Though of course, once it’s abolished there will be a whole new swathe of “It was obvious it had to go” books. No doubt these will be e-Books sans DRM.

The Open Book Publishers have included a CC-NC-ND license in the PDF (and presumably the printed collection of essays), which is something. The author of each essay is still free to make their work available under any other license. So we still have this ridiculous quandary of provenance in order to establish what a particular recipient can do with his particular copy (irrespective of it being indistinguishably similar to a copy available with a different license).

The PDF is £4.95. I can give you a copy here, but I’m not permitted to cover my costs nor receive any monetary incentive from you to do so (per the invidious NC clause). The paperback is £14.95 and the hardback is £24.95.

Even though this is supposed to be a ‘next generation’ publisher, they still don’t consider it’s any business of the purchaser to know how much of the purchase price actually ends up with the author (if anything). It’s still the proprietary ‘copyright holder is selling you a copy’ mentality. They’ve already made a deal with the author. So the public are still just paying for copies (at monopoly protected prices). Where’s the truly new model where the readers pay the authors to write, and those who want printed copies pay the printers to print them? Perhaps compare the WikiTravelPress model? Pop along to Lulu and print as many copies as you like and then even sell them if you want to.

Authors and publishers are having to migrate to a world without copyright, even if they like to kid themselves that it’s business as usual and copyright is as sprightly as ever and not at all decrepit.

It’s time someone noticed the nails keeping copyright upright upon its perch.

Copyright is history. Lawyers can read it and weep.

See No Evil · 43 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

I read on The 1709 Blog that even though Professor Lionel Bently concedes the legitimacy of copyright is a fit and proper subject for academic study, he cannot bring himself to pose any vision for the future in which it does not remain legitimate.

Lionel posed three visions to consider:
(i) judicial deepening of harmonisation in the ECJ;
(ii) further piecemeal legislation from the EU; and
(iii) a European copyright code and unitary European copyright.

(iv) Abolition, of course, being unthinkable.

The black swan of cultural liberation may be a nightmare for crown privileged publishing corporations and their lawyer footmen, but for the downtrodden mortals it cannot return from its migration too soon.

Perhaps Lionel Bently should have a word with Jessica Wood (see Darknet Enlightenment)?

Then again, maybe there are very few well heeled audiences that would attend any speaker who dared countenance a future without copyright?

Darknet Enlightenment · 45 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

Jon Newton of P2PNet brings my attention to a paper by Jessica A. Wood, The Darknet: A Digital Copyright Revolution, in which she notes that we are in the midst of a digital revolution – or as I’d put it, a veritable civil cyberwar between the aristocratically privileged corporations and the digital natives who would escape their iniquitous yokes of copyright and patent, to assert the restoration of their cultural liberty.

Thus the Darknet is not a den of delinquent thieves, but a community of the culturally liberated. While such liberty is outlawed they will remain outside the law, freely copying, freely creating unauthorised derivatives. The belief that such outlaws should suffer million dollar fines for sharing or remixing music is astonishing not so much in terms of monetary magnitude, but in that so many supposedly good lawyers indignantly affirm the righteousness of their persecution of the culturally self-emancipated – as if the bigger the fine the more right it must be. We are thus not quibbling over the amount, but whether it is right to fine someone even a penny for acts that prior to the 18th century enactment of copyright would have been embraced and cherished as part and parcel of folksong, folk music and mankind’s primordial liberty and necessity to engage in cultural exchange.

The Darknet is a cultural refuge from the instrument of injustice that is the privilege of copyright.

Understanding that the technological refuge of a ‘Darknet’ is as amenable to suppression as rumour or gossip among an insurgent populace is to recognise nature and the individual’s natural right to free speech and cultural liberty. It should not be mistaken as thieves being briefly in possession of superior technology to the state.

The Darknet does not signify defeat for a good law. It reveals that the privilege of copyright was bad law the moment lobbyists for the press convinced legislators to enact a statutory monopoly for their commercial enrichment (not insignificantly beholding them to the magnanimous state) – and on whatever pretext the people would find plausible.

No matter. The tide of nature returns and King Canute can no longer pretend dominion.

However, we have three centuries of copyright indoctrination to deprogram ourselves of, and unlike today’s young file-sharing delinquents, lawyers are up to their necks in it. So, it’s a great achievement for someone such as Jessica Wood to allow the logic of the natural world in front of her to overcome the dogma of the industry and its devout faith that music must forever remain non-copyable, unshareable, culturally untouchable, sterile and perpetually protected property of the privileged.

Even so, in her article I linked to above she is still using much of the publishing industry terminology such as ‘content’ which makes her ability to escape its clutches an even more surprising achievement.

She also falls for one of the more platitudinous pretexts for copyright. It only protects democracy in the sense that it provides the state with a self-regulating press and one beholden to quell sedition. The press became powerful as an effective oligopoly (and threat to the state) and that enabled it to lobby for the monopolies that made its commerce so much simpler and more lucrative (at the expense of liberty).

As to the technology underlying the ‘Darknet’, she appears to waver as to whether distributed systems are more efficient/economic mechanisms for diffusing information than centralised systems (see [24]), but that’s a forgivable wavering. They are fundamentally more efficient in all respects. Their only shortcoming is in being so much more difficult to understand and develop than centralised or part-centralised systems. Their designs and implementations thus end up being influenced and compromised by antagonistic legislation and a lack of resources.

The best thing of all is that even without her recognition of the difference between intellectual work (expensive) and copies (inexpensive) (caused in large part by her conflation of the two – as evinced by the nefarious concept of ‘content’), she still ends up correctly concluding that neither monopoly nor tax represent ‘solutions’. Indeed she concludes that copyright should be abolished as causing more harm than good (at least in the digital domain). I suggest she might also reconsider whether copyright was ever a ‘solution’, except to 18th century printers’ commercial interest. The pretext of it being in the public benefit is a sop to the public, for the public certainly weren’t crying out to donate their cultural liberty to the press.

So, Jessica recognises that far from promoting creativity and cultural exchange, copyright actually attempts the opposite, that it is man’s instinctive need to share and build upon his culture that incentivises extreme technological measures to achieve it, overcoming ever more draconian legislation and futile obfuscations such as DRM (also legislatively protected). How much better then to abolish copyright (saying goodbye to fat and wealthy publishing cartels) and allow the people to take over the task of free cultural exchange, dissemination and promotion…

And this is where Jessica appeared to peter out.

She reaches the unsatisfying conclusion that despite evident demand we are looking at a future where people will no longer pay for content. Content producers will have to sell something else, she suggests.

And that’s because she still has some residual brain damage.

The brain damage is (as I pointed out earlier) caused by her adoption and use of ‘content’ in her thinking – the conflation of intellectual work and copies.

She should take a look at the free software industry to help understand that when you neutralise copyright, ‘content’ decomposes back into intellectual work and copies. Once unbound, the copies are sold independently of the intellectual work, and with a free market in both, the copies are so cheap they’re given away for nothing whereas the intellectual work of the software is so expensive that coders are still paid to produce it. Though it must be said, many coders contribute their labour altruistically, especially to works with primarily community/public benefit. That doesn’t devalue their labour though, and so it doesn’t bring down the market price for software development services. The copies might cost nothing to make, but that doesn’t mean you can pay coders peanuts to develop the software you want developed. Intellectual work remains expensive.

Jessica should thus realise that the future without copyright is a future without the concept of content, but not without culture. Given there are no producers and vendors of containers at monopoly protected prices, there is no market for content nor containers/copies. Without copyright people will not pay for copies (well, not digital ones anyway).

The market for copies has ended – along with the market for content with which to fill them.

However, the market for intellectual work continues unabated.

And this is precisely where Jessica should focus next – the exchange of intellectual work for the money of those who want it produced. Copies are free. Let’s get over that. The only ones interested in selling the manufacture and distribution of copies are going the way of the dinosaur (made redundant by distributed systems and the instantaneous diffusion mechanism it is The Internet’s destiny to become). But the work that people want done, now that always has exchangeable value. Whether it’s a paragraph to put on a shampoo bottle or a three hour long movie, where there’s demand and supply there’s money and production. To say that without a monopoly for publishers no movies will be produced is a failure of imagination. If millions of people want a movie produced they will stump up millions of dollars.

And today the refrain is always “But if people can get it for nothing they won’t even pay a dollar”. And then I say “But we’ve already agreed that they can’t get it for nothing because if the producers don’t get paid they won’t produce it”.

Copyright causes this brain damage.

I daresay a similar conceptual stumbling block faced the inventor of the jukebox when he tried to convince people it would make money. “But, why will anyone put any money in it when everyone can hear it play for nothing?”

The people interested in the production of intellectual work pay for it to be produced. That the public are consequently at liberty to share and enjoy the product does not prevent this exchange from happening. Only copyright conditions people to believe that if anyone receives value from an intellectual work without paying for it that they are a thief. The fundamental economic principle is that you pay for labour. You do not charge for value extracted; you do not suspend liberty (copyright) and charge for its restoration (license).

Anyway, that’s the area I hope Jessica will explore next.

For what she has achieved so far, I can at least say “Well done Jessica! Great paper. May you and your words be found credible by those who need their eyes opened to the nakedness of the Emperor’s corruption.”

Essay Writers said 43 days ago :

This was a great read, even for a vicarious, willful infringer like myself.

Crosbie Fitch said 43 days ago :

‘Essay Writers’, why do you say “even for an infringer”?

Surely, that should be “especially for an infringer”?

Drafting Definitions for Cultural Liberty · 72 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).

There’ll be a wiki upon which I hope ethical law can be developed (for legislative protection of all individuals’ natural rights concerning the possession, production and communication of information and intellectual works).

So, in getting started, I thought I’d sketch out some definitions, i.e. without explanations or examples (which can come later). Suffice it to say, these definitions will be tweaked.

Definitions

  1. Individuals are human beings, a priori equal.
  2. Human Rights, the rights of all individuals, are naturally: life, privacy, truth, liberty.
  3. Right always and exclusively refers to right in the natural sense, implicitly qualified as natural right.
  4. Life is the naturally optimal functioning of an individual human being, the preservation of its health and integrity, the necessary maintenance and protection of its body’s boundaries, sustenance and environment, and the perpetuation of its operating period.
  5. Privacy describes the individual’s natural ability to exclude others from particular objects, information, and spaces that they possess, occupy, or are otherwise able to physically defend or secure. Privacy may be enjoyed jointly as well as singly.
  6. The right to Truth is against interference with, or impairment of, anyone’s natural ability to perceive, pursue or apprehend it, e.g. against fraud or misrepresentation.
  7. Liberty includes an individual’s freedom of movement, speech, or senses, in their natural habitat among their fellows, and entails that these freedoms remain without physical constraint – until the individual has been found in violation of anyone’s rights, and only then to the least extent possible and necessary for their rehabilitation and the protection of others’ rights.
  8. Freedom is the natural, unconstrained condition of the individual, i.e. one not subject to government. It is delimited by all individuals’ natural power and interest to protect their natural rights – who may collectively empower a government.
  9. Rights are inalienable. That means the individual cannot be parted from them, neither by themselves nor by their government.
  10. Rights take precedence: Privacy must cede to Life (invasion may be warranted in the protection of life). Truth must cede to Privacy (the public’s interest does not outweigh the individual’s interest in excluding it). Liberty must cede to Truth (where its impairment through deceit or fraud risks harm or social disharmony). In this way each right delimits the next, and all rights delimit freedom.
  11. Rights are imbued by nature in all individuals equally. They are not conditional, e.g. on gender, skin colour, religion, payment of taxes, nor good behaviour. If rights are not protected for the pariahs of society they are not protected for the paragons. If a government exempts terrorists from its protection it terrorises its own citizens as a consequence.
  12. A harmonious society is epiphenomenal. It is that which results when a government carefully protects the rights of the citizens that empower it. Their protection is primary – not secondary to protection of society nor to the existence of the government they create, and thus rights should not be derogated in pursuit of social harmony, benefit to society, ‘the encouragement of learning’, ‘progress’, ‘the common good’, nor upon a wish by the people to engage in a ‘social contract’ to surrender, waive or relax their rights to that end, whether in whole or part.
  13. Privileges (legislatively enacted analogues of rights) are always referred to as ‘privileges’, not as some call them: ‘legally granted rights’, ‘legal rights’ or simply ‘rights’. Privileges are instruments of injustice and not to be found in an egalitarian society nor any legislature primarily concerned with the protection of individuals’ natural rights.
  14. A Contract is an equitable agreement (voluntary) between two individuals concerning the conditioned exchange of their property, whether material or intellectual. A contract cannot surrender, abrogate, nor derogate from any individual’s rights – it is not a promise (as would alienate liberty). A government has no power to enforce completion nor penalise incompletion, only to arbitrate in any dispute as to equity or agreeability, and to mandate a remedy to that end as far as is practicable.
  15. A government is created and continuously empowered by its individual citizens, and those individuals are the only source of its power, which may be removed or redirected by them.
  16. A government may be empowered to collect taxes to provide and care for its citizens’ common interest: the protection of their rights, their safety, health, and social well being, e.g. policing, defence, energy, utilities, transport, and communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, etc.
  17. Corporations or any other legally created entity are not individuals nor even comparable let alone equivalent, and being unnatural are not imbued with rights. All such entities should be regulated to ensure their activities and motives are aligned with the common good, i.e. not simply maximisation of share value.

The Advertiser's Doom · 78 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

In Ad Blocking is Here to Stay Michael Castello notices another business model that is declining in viability and observes the complaints of those who would see it preserved at all costs.

Lazaris basically subscribes to the idea that because advertising has been a primary source of income for many websites, it should stay that way. This completely ignores the fact that the world changes, and things that were once highly profitable may lose relevance. It’s like farriers complaining about automobiles or whalers complaining about electricity – you can bemoan the changes all you want but the business choice is straightforward: adapt or be left behind.

Advertising (as is traditionally recognised) is inevitably in decline. This is because it resulted from an extreme asymmetry that developed between vendors and customers when vendors became mass producers, and could no longer meet their customers on a one-to-one basis. It was further exacerbated when vendors took advantage of mass communications technology (printing, broadcasting) to communicate UNIDIRECTIONALLY to their customers (current and potential). Very little communication has been possible in the other direction for decades if not a century or more, i.e. customers needing to communicate their wants and prices to potential vendors, especially mass producers.

With the advent of the Internet this communications imbalance is set to become balanced, i.e. vendor product advertising/customer discovery severely declining in proportion to the increase in customer need advertising/vendor discovery that is slowly rising to meet it.

When communication is unidirectional it is economic to pay others to compromise their own communications (parasitism) in order to reach potential customers that are otherwise effectively blind, deaf, invisible and dumb (they can’t get closer to the vendor to see or hear them, nor be seen by them, nor speak loudly enough to be heard).

When communication is bidirectional the value of inserting one’s message in another’s communication is liable to become much less than the loss of value it causes. Thus such traditional, parasitic advertising is likely to cease entirely.

Selling audience eyeballs is doomed as a business model.

Instead we will see both vendors and customers making their communications publicly available with a view to potential relationships/exchanges, and both looking to discover and be discovered by each other. Communication then occurs directly according to the relationships that are made.

See Doc Searls’ ProjectVRM for further details of this tectonic rebalancing of marketplace communications and relationships.

Steve R. said 73 days ago :

The unidirectional nature of advertising (including telemarketing/junk mail) has been a major irritant. Basically, in looking at this issue, we have been overlooking the rights of the recipient of the advertising message. Fundamentally, what “right” gives an advertiser the ability to “trespass” on the consumer? I posted on this topic here: srynas.blogspot.com/…

An indirect adverse effect of the unidirectional nature of advertising, has been the use of lawsuits as an attempt to silence critics.

Essentially, advertisers seem to believe that they have an entitlement to “accost” the consumer and if the consumer reacts by complaining to silence the consumer.

PS: There have been customer satisfaction surveys that I participated in. I hope that these surveys were valid attempts at facilitating two-way communication.

“Rosebud...” says News International · 100 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

News International retreats from the public, disagreeing with the idea that mere readers should be allowed, let alone encouraged to freely read and quote from newspapers, e.g. as I do now from “The Times paywall: An end to sharing” by Rory Cellan-Jones.

A great experiment is about to get under way, and it will tell us much about the future of journalism and the willingness of readers to pay for it. In Wapping last night, News International showed off the new websites for The Times and Sunday Times which have opened to the public this morning. Four weeks from now, a paywall will go up in front of the sites and, by News international’s own calculation, more than 90% of their audience will melt away.

This is of course nothing to do with readers’ willingness to pay journalists for their journalism, but the ability for newspapers to charge each reader for reading it, and prevent anyone who hasn’t paid from doing so. When you can’t sell copies, then selling access seems very similar – if you think like a newspaper, that is.

Rory later reveals:

I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,“I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”

That is Stockholm Syndrome. I would think most journalists care more about being paid for their intellectual work than enabling their employers to charge readers for copies of it at monopoly protected prices – and failing that, to charge readers for access.

If news can be freely distributed to the public, the only thing left to pay for is the journalism – and the readers who want more can pay the journalists directly – to write.

See earlier conversations, with:

Tipping Diaspora · 105 days ago by Crosbie Fitch

Diaspora is another snowflake in hell.

It won’t be long before it’s snowing.

Thousands of true fans want the pop group that is the fab four comprising the Diaspora project team to buckle down and do some intellectual work this summer. In exchange for close to $200,000, they expect the copyleft publication of that intellectual work (copyright neutralised).

More facilities like Kickstarter will arise to make such exchanges ever more easier, and to refine the details of those exchanges.

So, who needs copyright? Who needs a monopoly on the sale of copies when you can sell your intellectual work directly to your customers? Answer: Only the traditional publishers utilising anything from Caxton’s press to modern CD and DVD duplication plants. Not intellectual workers.

The intellectual worker does not need a monopoly. Moreover, that’s the last thing they need if they wish their audience and commissioning fanbase to grow in size (and revenue). They must remove the © prohibition against making copies of their work. They also need their work to be exempt from the collection society thugs threatening people for performing their work in public (qv PRS). The modern intellectual worker must restore the public’s liberty to their work, enabling their free promotion, so that many among their audience might just be inclined to commission them to produce more good work.

Anyway, back off the hobby horse and down to Earth.

The first problem the Diaspora team needs to solve in developing a distributed system is the identity/reputation of the participating computers.

Freenet may have some pointers. I’ve also written an introductory article: Ideating Identity.

With that not insubstantial problem cracked they can build from there, optimising the distribution and replication of information according to interest.

On top of that you then have the users’ identity/reputation issues.

And then the icing on the cake (that must come last) are the matters of privacy, secrecy, confidentiality, and discretion.

Privacy is physical and a misnomer in the context of distributed systems – it’s best not to use the term at all (to avoid confusing people).

Secrecy can be contrived to a limited extent via cryptography.

Confidentiality and discretion are inclinations of people, matters of honour/reputation and cannot be enforced through technology (or law). However, they can still be informally measured and incorporated as part of a social reputation metric.

So really, what one ends up with is simply a means of assuring high availability of all the information that anyone is still interested in. Moreover, guarantees will still be expensive. People will have to pay for guarantees of persistence and prevalence – if you don’t pay, and your information is uninteresting, it may degrade to offline storage, ultimately to evaporate.

Amy Lewis said 105 days ago :

Well, time for me to DELETE my account thee… not ‘deactivate’. I’ve changed over to folkdirect.com which so far is going well and lots more open privacy controls there. As word spreads the community will get bigger and bigger. All good. Worth a try.

Crosbie Fitch said 105 days ago :

Yes Amy, there are many flowers blooming. Diaspora is by no means the only one, and it’s certainly not the first to aim for a decentralised implementation.

I am amused at the oxymoron of ‘open privacy’. Either you disclose something or you do not. There is no such thing as a ‘circulation control’ that can be applied to human beings, especially when they are in possession of an instantaneous diffusion device. You can ask your ‘friends’ to be discrete, circumspect, prudent, even to respect your confidences and guard any secrets, but you cannot gag them.

Anyway, one day people will recognise that one can prevent indiscretion as easily as copyright infringement, which is to say not at all. The aspiration and attempt is foolish at best and antisocial at worst. There is no privacy or dissemination control in a system designed to efficiently distribute information to and among the public.

 

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