Faith in Atheism
I was in the office of a church hall on Friday, picking up the keys for
the hall for our Canberra Irish
Set Dance Weekend, and while waiting for the people to work out the
bill a leaflet for an upcoming talk at the church caught my eye. The
topic of the talk was:
Why I Don't Have The Faith To Be An Atheist.
Now, I will freely admit that that's a catchy title, because it certainly caught my eye. And while I endeavour to understand other people's points of view I am often blinded by my own ideas of what is sensible and reasonable. But I cannot fathom how that that topic can be debated seriously in the affirmative.
On the one hand, to me it requires much more faith to believe in an arbitrary, contradictory, and often non-sensical set of teachings that fly in the face of the evidence around us than to not have to believe any of that. My Australian Concise Oxford gives its first definition of "faith" as: Reliance or trust in; belief founded on authority - the other definitions are the type of religion one believes in and a promise or intent (as in in good faith). In that context I would say that all religions have some authority, be it a book or a person, that is the foundation of their belief, whereas Atheism makes no such demand. Atheism has no book which is quoted chapter and verse, no authority figure that tells people to not trust science and believe what they teach in contradiction to the evidence.
On the other hand, if this is some kind of sophistry - some kind of cunning argument or uncommon definition of "faith" or "atheism", then I think one is entitled to ask if the speaker is going to be serious at all. If it's a straw man argument, then really what's the point of it? I can respect people who stick by what they believe even as they acknowledge the flaws in their own arguments - I can't respect someone who tricks their audience with a conveniently quelled paper tiger.
I was half tempted by Kate's sensible suggestion to actually go and see this just to actually solve this logical problem before it threatened to burst my brain. But as I have this sneaking suspicion that the whole thing will be preaching, appositely, to the choir.
I must now hide myself from the metaphor police.
posted at: 21:10 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Kangaroos saved, who cares about anything else?
Once again the kangaroo cull at the old Belconnen naval signalling base
has stalled again, with the animal liberation protesters calling it a
victory. The pity is that these people are really protesting about the
wrong thing.
On the one hand, they're protesting about the culling of 400 kangaroos. I wonder if they have realised that ACT Forestry has a license to cull 4,000 kangaroos - ten times that number - per year in the national parks. If I remember rightly, ACT Parks also has a license to cull 3,000 on other public land. So killing 400 as a once-off cull is hardly the great tragedy that it's being painted as.
On the other hand, there are animals and plants on that land that are highly endangered and under threat from the kangaroos. There's not only the Perunga Grasshopper and the Mouthless Moth in that area, but a rare species of grasslands flower that is being eaten by the kangaroos. While I'm a bit disappointed that the Liberals have chosen to make this one of those "if we were governing this wouldn't happen" issues, they're totally right - everyone's getting all upset because cute furry animals are going to die. And it looks like the Liberals are only making a fuss because Defence is flip-flopping, not because anything else might face extinction as a result of overgrazing by the kangaroos.
I got this information from a friend who wrote the policy on land care and kangaroo culling in the ACT. So I can't quote chapter and verse, because the conversation was informal and I didn't take notes. But I do think that the "animal liberationists" are way out of line. Don't get me wrong - generally I would like to avoid the kangaroos being killed at all. But to blow this out of proportion shows exactly the kind of loony-fringe unreasoning stupidity that these groups accuse their enemies of and that does their own credibility the most damage. And if you've got any species that is overrunning its ability to survive on the land, it's going to die off some way or other. Killing them quickly is far more humane than letting them starve, whether on a block in the ACT or elsewhere in NSW.
If only the human race would learn this and seriously consider
population control of itself.
posted at: 11:17 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Solar Power For Free
I have an idea which I think would revolutionise the power industry.
Of course, it requires a lot of venture capital to set up, something
which I am unable to provide nor have the knowledge to find. I offer
this up on my blog in the hopes that someone might read it, form a
business out of it, and change the world. If I get mentioned or
gain something from it, then that'd be nice, but making solar power
easy for everyone to get involved in is enough reward for me.
Let's call the company Solar Sails. They offer to install a set of solar panels and the necessary equipment to feed power back into the grid for free. When you sign up with them, you pay only for the difference between the power that you use and the power your solar cells generate. If that balance is zero or negative in the billing period - say a month - then you pay nothing for your power. That's the deal for the consumer. Solar Sails itself makes its money by selling the extra power you produce (over what you consume) back to the grid.
From what I recall, the pay-off time for solar panels - the time taken for your lower power bills to recoup the cost of installing the panels - is about ten to fifteen years, and that figure is probably going to get shorter as the technology ramps up. (As Dr. Karl pointed out in a recent lecture, the power pay-off time - the time taken for the solar panels to generate more power than they took in their production - is only about two years or less). There are plenty of businesses who look at investing money in processes with longer pay-off times. Admittedly, Solar Sails is only going to get a fraction of the money those solar panels earn (since the meat of it is going into paying for your power), but on the other hand they can negotiate better deals with the grid supply companies and with the solar cell and technology providers than we as individual consumers can.
And the important thing, I feel, to get solar panel technology widely adopted is to lower that 'hump' of initial outlay. The most sensible point for that is at zero, so it costs you nothing to join the scheme. Even the most power-wasteful person has no reason not to join the scheme if it'll start saving them money without any outlay at all. Once they realise that they can save themselves more money by turning off lights and being less wasteful, you've changed their bad behaviour. And even if they don't actually change their wasteful ways, the fact that their purchase will have contributed to helping lower the price for other people (through volume purchasing by Solar Sails). So it's a pretty good proposition not just for getting more power generated by solar power and making it easier for people to adopt but also to change people's habits and reduce power consumption overall.
As usual, I'd love to hear your
thoughts on this idea.
posted at: 23:12 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
We're all sorry
Kate and I went to (New) Parliament House on Thursday to witness the
government saying sorry to the Stolen Generation. Actually, we went
to the front lawn between Old and New Parliament Houses, because
there was no room in the Grand Hall. We watched on big screens as
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said sorry - personally, and as a member
of parliament and as the leader of Australia. That got a big cheer
from the audience; his speech was very well received and, in my
perhaps biased opinion, was very well written.
Brendan Nelson started well but quickly lost his way. His job was never going to be easy, having been under the thumb of a man who ruled his party with an iron fist and refused absolutely to apologise. His basic error was to try and excuse his party's previous views, which required him to justify them; no-one had come to hear this. There was much jeering, clapping to drown him out (useless when you're several hundred metres away watching a broadcast, but impossible to deny the urge) and people turned their backs on him. I eventually felt that I too could not support him by appearing to be interested and turned my back, as futile as it was. He did, rescue himself in some minor degree by finishing by saying sorry.
I also found it amusing that that rabies-infested pit-bull of the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott, found that the only way to criticise the Rudd government was to say that they weren't going far enough in saying sorry and should be giving away money. So now he's not only completely contradicting his own party's previous policies, but doing it in a way which makes him personally look small. Great work, Tony. Keep it up.
The article on living in homeless shelters for five days that Mikal Still referred to makes a reasonable case for giving money as well as other, more policy and planning focussed ways of bring equality to the Aboriginal community. The point made is that money might not solve all the problems, and it might slip into the wrong hands, but it solves a whole lot more problems than the individual hand-outs and concessions can. But Kevin Rudd made the excellent point that giving money to individuals in this situation is going to make far less difference to the Aboriginal society as a whole than to put that same amount of money into health care, jobs, education and training. In my opinion, we also need a whole lot of work done on the media to reverse the 'Aboriginal Cringe' that we have in Australia. Once an Aboriginal, or any person who doesn't look like they grew up in Europe, can walk into any company and not be seen as an outsider, then we really will have progressed.
Saying Sorry is important, but it's still a step on a long road.
posted at: 00:17 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Subverting keysigning - whoop de doo
We have Andrew Chalmers offering tequila for signing his unverified
key. We have Martin Krafft offering fake ID for signing his unverified
key. They talk about how clever they are and how they're making valid
points in subverting the web of trust process. They justify it by
talking about trusting 'reputation' over trusting an anonymous but
identifiable person, or being an "experiment". And my considered
response is "whoop-de-doo". It's the web-of-trust equivalent of claiming
that sexist jokes are 'free speech', defending violent anarchy as
'subverting the police state', or claiming that stomping on someone
else's project is an 'experiment' in destruction. It's still peurile.
The ultimate proof of this is to extrapolate what would happen if
everyone did this: the web of trust would die. Is this what these people
really want? If you don't want that, then don't do it. If you do want
that, then please don't pretend that you're only doing it to make some
highfalutin intellectual point. Shut up and try to behave. It's not a
web-of-friends, it's a web-of-trust-of-identity. I may not be a friend
of Arjen Lentz, but I'll sign his key to say that he's proved to me that
his key identifies him. And, frankly, Chalmers and Krafft make me want
to ignore them rather than befriend them.
posted at: 09:45 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Hate is a fallacy
Having read Murray Cumming's
slating of Jeff Waugh and Jeff's reply,
I feel little actual attachment to the debate over the GNOME elections,
whatever they are. And Jeff and I have had several, well, fights over
various issues, mainly on IRC. So I can't say that I'm Jeff's best buddy
or that I owe him anything.
But to me this is a classic example of Poisoning the well. Ordinarily I would say "oh well, keep on going", as everyone will have to anyway. But Murray's invective has gone way beyond mere reporting of facts and has headed straight into the mire of overblown, hyperbolic personal opinion. He doesn't give any actual examples of the behaviour he deplores, he grossly mischaracterises any disorders Jeff may suffer from, and his attack has all the hallmarks of something designed not to inform but to slander. Jeff says that Murray is entitled to his opinions, and even invokes Voltaire to say that they can be aired publically. But, to my mind, Murray is only entitled to state fact, something that, while hinted at, seems to be somewhat absent from his diatribe. I'd take that one step further and say that even the facts should be presented in an orderly way in a proper forum - posting up email conversations or IRC logs is not only airing one's dirty laundry in public but a misuse of what might have been private correspondence.
As John Howard found out in this recent election, with the Liberal party's many attempts at mud-slinging, such as criticising Kevin Rudd's wife Therese Rein's business dealings and the botched attempt to link the Labor party with radical Islamists and the Bali bombings, sometimes mud splatters back. Jeff's no saint, and I think he acknowledges that. But Murray's attempt at painting him as Bill Gates incarnate now seems more fanatic and irrational than Jeff might have ever been. Interestingly, Murray is not running for a post in this year's elections, but that to me doesn't clear him of much.
If this were in a newspaper Jeff could easily sue for libel.
In the blogosphere, with the parties being in different countries and
with an object that is both intangible and unpaid, we just have to settle
it the old-fashioned way - by everyone just moving on. Murray's comments
will stand in the record and he, as well as Jeff, will be judged by them.
posted at: 12:57 | path: /society/tech | permanent link to this entry
Im in ur tallyroom, chekin ur votez!
A friend of mine, visiting from Melbourne, and I decided to go to the
Tally Room that the Australian Electoral Commission runs at the
Budawang pavilion in the Exhibition Park centre in Canberra. Part of
the motivation was the talk that they may be closing down the tally
room in future; it is a big process to do all the security, the displays
are small, manual and hard to read, and all the TV stations now have
all the live links and stuff sorted out. The other part was wanting to
watch the result, knowing that it might have been a ghastly loss but
still too interesting to miss. So we went.
Overall it was really interesting for several highly significant reasons:
Helmets indeed!
After my
post yesterday, I received an email from
Leon Brooks. Since he could
be called a poster child for wearing helmets - given that wearing a helmet
on the day he was attacked saved his life - I feel sorry for having not
thought of him in the first place. Helmet proof
indeed![1].
[1] - I tried to find
the etymology of "bullet proof", which I was told came from late fifteenth
century armoury when muskets were in use. Armourers had to step up from
shiny, fluted armour (designed to present diagonal surfaces to arrows and
deflect them) to thicker, heavier armour capable of stopping a small lead
shot fired at high velocity. The armourer would fire a ball at a corner
of the armour, and the dent made was proof that a bullet would not penetrate;
hence 'bullet proof'. But I can't find an authorative reference - my
Google-fu is not strong today. And since I've now gone past the limit of
sanity for footnote length, I should quit now.
posted at: 11:16 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
No brain damage here
As I rode to work today, I had to slow down to go around a police car that
been backed to almost block the cycle track at one point. The policeman
behind it had just been chatting with a previous cyclist and only looked
up as I arrived. Putting a couple of facts together quickly, I admit to
getting a certain amount of pleasure at the fact that the cyclist ahead of
me had just been pulled up and issued with a ticket for riding without a
helmet. Since I subscribe to the point of view that wearing a helmet
improves your chances of surviving a head injury while cycling, I'm all in
favour of this law. To me, a cyclist without a helmet is carrying an
invisible sign saying "sooner or later, I'm going to take your taxes and
health insurance payments and spend them on my personal medical cover for
an injury which I could have avoided."
What amuses and depresses me is that, in trying to find the actual legislation on the Mandatory Helmet Laws for Bicyclists, I found a number of what I would classify as 'liberalist rants' on the issue. The basic gist of these is "there's no proof that helmets reduce injuries, and we'd rather give up riding than wear a helmet so there nyah nyah nyah". It's the same kind of rant that characterises seatbelt laws in the USA - the kind of blinkered 'you can't take our rights away from us' attitude that treats getting injured or killed as a right on a par with free speech. Even I, with an almost non-existent knowledge of the studies they quote, can see the flaws in their reasoning; for instance, one page says cyclist numbers declined after the legislation and concludes that the latter caused the former, a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There's also plenty of straw man arguments thrown in - for instance, that a study showed that soft-shell helmets grab the ground and thus cause more twisting injuries, ignoring the fact that almost all of the helmets sold these days are light-weight hard-shell helmets.
Like the debate over global warming, it's sad to see people deluding
themselves and sadder to see them trying to convince others of their own
delusions.
posted at: 14:19 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Free as in choice
A little while ago I had an energetic debate on IRC with a couple of people
about the nature of choice in relation to F/LOSS. It stemmed from my
rather
scathing comments on the colour of the
Software Freedom Day 2007
T-shirt, and in particular my questioning how the choice of colour was
made - which seems to be have by committee fiat without any actual
community input or choice at all.
I should just clarify at this juncture that by 'community input or choice', above, I do not mean 'everyone specifies their own particular shade, and somehow we will source T-shirts of that precise colour'. Nor do I mean 'everyone specifies their own particular shade, we then offer the entire gamut up for people to vote on in a two-stage election process that is democratically fair and representative across the entire world.' If Pia had given us a choice of four colours and anyone who wanted could vote on them, then that would be just dandy. It is the complete absence of any community involvement that I am annoyed at (besides, of course, the colour). I certainly never heard of any attempt to involve the community in this, though I wait in hope. But this is somewhat beside the point of this post.
On IRC, one of the well-known people on the #linux-aus channel on FreeNode, presumably thinking e was defending this unilateral decision on T-shirt colour, made the statement, "Open Source is not about choice". And, technically, this is true: nowhere in the Open Source Initiative definition, the Free Software Foundation's definition of Free Software, or the Wikipedia entry on F/LOSS does it actually use the word "choice" in the definition. Likewise, the key theme of the debate on IRC was that "too much choice is bad" - that making a new user pick between the hundreds of Linux distributions will lead to choice 'paralysis' and therefore the user would instead stay with their old, comfortable, familiar, expensive, proprietary, locked-in solution rather than have to make a pick based on a dozen factors including the exact license used, what window managers were offered and the software packaging method used by default.
All of which I totally agree on.
But this to me is misrepresenting the issue. To me, the fact that choice does not appear in the definitions is akin to the fact that a chemical definition of air would not need to include the statement "essential to human life". Air is not defined solely by its breathability by humans, and FLOSS is not defined as being solely an alternative to proprietary, for-money software. Likewise, air is not defined in terms of people choosing which air to breathe, and FLOSS is not defined in terms of people choosing amongst the variety of FLOSS offerings. But to say, therefore, that FLOSS is not about choice is akin, to me, therefore as being like saying "air is not about breathability". While pedantically true, it completely misses the point of what FLOSS offers the community.
And, ultimately, we look at the industry itself and see the real truth of this statement. With GNU/Linux, you have the ability to choose every level and every component of your operating system, from the kernel up; distros exist to provide pre-packaged 'known good' sets of software, but at every level these choices can be overridden by the user. The whole philosophy of user choice permeates the entire process of open source software creation and use, and the whole community supports your ability to choose what you run and how you run it. The efforts open source developers go to to provide users with a open, no-cost alternative to a proprietary product, or support for hardware on open, no-cost platforms, is legendary. While I'm walking close to that dangerous ground of quoting The Castle and saying "It's just the vibe of the thing", I believe that choice is an essential, integral and desirable part of F/LOSS development and use - that it is basically a emergent property of the definitions. And people are obviously choosing F/LOSS software and operating systems, despite any theoretical danger that they might be put off by the notion of choice.
Contrast this to the typical offerings of the proprietary software world. With Microsoft or Apple, the culture of not giving the user a choice goes beyond their simple offerings, in themselves designed to offer the user one window manager, one file system, one desktop, one browser, one suite of applications. They also lock the user into paying for their operating system in the future, lock the user into buying their own products rather than competing ones, and lock other companies out of competing with the software they offer through a variety of means fair and foul. Microsoft is legendary for ignoring or perverting standards simply to lock users into using Microsoft products, for hiding abilities in their operating system to make competitors products inferior to their own, and for abusing their own power in the desktop market to increase their server marketshare. And for a developer, the whole proprietary software industry is about secrecy - learning from each-others code is a matter of patents, licensing deals, lawsuits, agressive headhunting and infringements. Forget about trying to learn how to do something well based on someone else's code, or even trying to implement something that you've seen someone else do.
Look at the Four Freedoms, or the Open Source Definition. What's the point of all that freedom if you don't have choice? How do you run a program if the choice is denied you? What if the company dictated the purpose of you using it rather than you choosing your purpose for using the software? How do you study the source code if that choice is denied you? How do you redistribute copies, or improve the program, if you can't choose to? The very questions are absurd. You can basically replace 'freedom' with 'choice' throughout the definition and it makes perfect sense.
Anticipating the debating hand-wave from the "open source is not about choice" people, I would simply say that while it is trivial to create situations where one might choose to break the Open Source Definition, or the Principles of Free Software - for example, proposing that I can choose to write software that discriminates against a group of people and release it under an open source license - this is in fact a red herring. It's akin to proposing that, because people break the speed limit, that speed limits can't be used to increase road safety. Choosing to break the license doesn't imply that the license is wrong.
We should still want the freedom and right to to choose, even though we
can make bad choices or can get presented with too many choices at times.
posted at: 16:47 | path: /society/tech | permanent link to this entry
The Denialist's Deck of Cards
Starting with the two of clubs ('no problem', which I would call 'what
problem') and working up to 'it's bad for business', you can now
look
at the complete, ordered list of the rhetorical arguments denialists
use to squash debate on issues which affect their business. It also
includes handy references to actual cases where industry lobby groups
have used that particular tactic, just in case you thought no-one would
ever be stupid enough, for instance, to try and assert that it was
impossibly restrictive to require banks to actually keep their customers'
details private.
As tempting as it is to make up some kind of card game using these cards,
I feel too heated up about this kind of rhetoric-over-reason approach to
dealing with problems to be able to actually use them. I can play a
evil
mastermind, but not a corporate psychopath.
posted at: 16:40 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
Misleading Names
There are 'students' wandering around the campus surreptitiously
distributing copies of a broadsheet printed by the
Citizens
Electoral Council denying the existence of global warming and claiming
- wait for it - it's a hoax perpetrated by people who want to commit
genocide on our world's six billion population. They've also been seen
eyeing off bikes and are suspected of stealing some things from other
buildings.
It seems to me that this election campaign is getting really ugly. We've had the mud-slinging from the Prime Minister that succeeded only in damaging the reputation of his own party members. Now he's trumpeting the "the unions will win" line. In this age of Dog Whistle Politics, I get extremely suspicious when I see some new phrase come out of John Howard's mouth, as I suspect it's the sort of thing that is designed to leave most of us saying "how would that be possible then?" but send shivers running down the spines of a specific demographic.
Now, out of the blue, we have this little gem from a 'party' who can't work out if they're left or right. They want to repeal all the anti-union legislation that's been passed by the Federal government, but they turn around and claim that global warming is a hoax? Whose side are they on? They're associated with the LaRouche Movement and the Australian League Of Rights, all names which are impossible to judge alignment from. Rights - we should all be in favour of them, right? And a league for people who want them? Makes perfect sense. But instead you'd be rubbing shoulders with Holocaust deniers and Zionist conspiracy theorists, and Lyndon LaRouche himself has been locked up for fraud and tax violations. Sounds like just the organisation to join!
The thing that gets me the most is that the whole chain of wrongness implied in their actions. To get this ludicrous doggerel onto the kitchen table at work here, someone's had to write it up, someone's had to print it, someone's had to get these copies to the people who are wandering around campus now distributing it. All of these people have either been hoodwinked into believing it, or are deliberately conspiring to hoodwink others. And the truth of global warming is once again called into question, and once again scientists everywhere have to fight to make people believe the facts because there's this nonsense out there polluting people's minds. It's worse than a slander campaign.
It's times like this that I really want to emigrate off the planet and
into a Star Trek drama. I'll even be a redshirt. There'll still be
shadowy organisations trying to control the universe, but at least I'll
be flying in a star ship.
posted at: 15:13 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
Now you can both hate me instead
It's been interesting watching
Erik
and Simon
debate over Fred Nile's racism. Yes, Erik, it is racism in this era of
dog whistle politics. Ask anyone on the street what they expect a muslim
to look like - go on, I'll wait - and they'll probably say Middle Eastern
or Indonesian. That's why it's racist - not because Islam is a race, but
because Fred Nile's supporters and the Christian Right like to portray
them that way.
Now, as an Atheist, I agree with points of both their arguments. Islam has, on average, had as bloodthirsty a history as Christianity. Remember the crusades? The Inquisition? The forced separation of children from parents by Christians and Muslims thinking they're "doing good"? Islam, to me, just happens to be the most backward at the moment: their treatment of women is worse than the average Southern Baptist. But, to me, that's like saying soot is better than mud because it's less sticky. And it hasn't stopped the Christian Right wanting to put things the way they used to be. You know, stonings and all that.
One thing that I do think needs saying these days was highlighted by an interview with several moderate Islam clerics I heard on the radio. Put simply, the media love focussing on the Islamic radicals and downplaying the Christian radicals. We hear so much about that Sydney sheik whats-his-name simply because it's exactly what the newspapers and TV shows want us to hear - er, I mean, what they think we're interested in. No-one's going around talking about the fact that over 50% of the population of the USA believes that the Bible is literally true. Yeah, Erik, put that in your pipe and smoke it, Papal decrees or no. That's over 100 million people in the most heavily armed superpower on earth. Yeah, that's got to look good. Likewise, according to this interview there are plenty of Muslims who are not radicals, who believe the Koran needs to be interpreted, who believe that we need to get along with the people we live with and the laws of our country. Funny how you don't hear much about them, eh?
There's plenty of moderate Muslim clerics urging peace and good will. There's plenty of radical Christians going out attacking everyone and everything that doesn't agree with them. Why aren't they in the papers? When you answer that most of the rest of the pieces fall into place.
Erik also constructs an elaborate straw man called the Zebuts, and then fails to see the parallels between his argument and the democracy we have today. We've got a Prime Minister who's lied so many times it's boring to repeat it - Tampa? GST? - simply in order to retain power, and who continues to throw our environmental and political future into the fire to keep the populace warm. Which is why they vote for him. Which is why he keeps getting elected. If we called anyone who opposed these happy, warm, 'safe' voters "Zebuts", they'd still fit Erik's model pretty well. In Democracies, they're called "the minority". Sometimes, as happened in Queensland in the 1970s where I grew up, that's a 67% 'minority'. But, sooner or later, Joh was voted out; Howard will be voted out too. Even if I had a favourite Prime Minister, sooner or later they'd be voted out too. That doesn't mean it's wrong. That's just Democracy at work. I'm sure the Dutch are just as capable of being manipulated by Christian fundamentalists as anyone else.
Right or Wrong and Majority or Minority are disconnected - there's no relation between the two.
Of course we have to fight against what we see as bad, to protest against
things we don't agree with. Part of that for me is standing up and
saying "No, I don't believe in any God. And no writings of some
so-called prophet or disciple should be any more valuable to me than a
ten-year-old's poem for peace and harmony." Part of that for me is
standing up and saying "What about the future of our children. What
are we giving to them?" (Of course, since Kate and I have decided to
not have children, that'd be 'nieces' in that slot.) We have to do
what we think is right. But please, for the sake of your parents and
your children and for your friends and family, don't let that be
solely guided by the half-baked ravings of someone from a completely
different time that have to be 'interpreted' in order to make any
sense in today's world.
posted at: 16:31 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Ironic Culture 'Jamming'
Thanks to Kim Weatherall's pointer, I read Ian McDonald's
paper on
Creative Commons licensing in Australia. My overall impression is that
he still doesn't get the principles behind Creative Commons, and as
such really acts only as a piece of promotional material for Copyright
Australia and its agencies. It comes across as a frightener piece
intended to make anyone creating new things run away from the Creative
Commons license and pay APRA, the Copyright Council and the various
other interested bodies lots of money to 'protect' copyright.
The key disconnect is embodied in the sentence "Creators who apply CC licences to their material are likely to rob themselves of potential income in pursuit of what could be nebulous returns." (on what appears to be page 225 of the document. This is presented as some kind of hidden flaw in the CC licenses, something that they didn't tell you about. "Ooooh, those naughty people with their fiendish CC licenses, they were nearly about to rob me of my potential income!".
One the one hand, this is actually topsy-turvy. The 'potential income' is what is nebulous: there is no guarantee that any creator is going to get paid for their creation. Amusingly, McDonald quotes figures at the end of the document to show how much all those benevolent copyright organisations are paying out: $70 million in the case of the Australian Performing Rights Agency, who handles music and live performance. This is disingenuous: they don't say what proportion of that made its way to the artists (i.e. bugger all), how much they got paid originally, what their take was, and how it was judged. The reality is that most artists don't get diddly squat, even if they are a fee-paying member of APRA - most of the money goes to Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and the other big copyright holders. The ordinary performer gets nothing from APRA.
And, as we've seen in many cases on TV and in newspapers, the big media companies feel quite free to rip off legitimately copyrighted photos and videos without getting permission from the copyright owners. And even if you do strike it lucky and get someone writing a cheque for your nature photographs, soundscapes or mixed media collages, this is hardly likely to be anywhere near supporting you. It's increasingly hard for professional photographers (to pick an example) to earn an income, partly because there's now a glut of professional photographers and their products on the market and partly because it's increasingly easy to find work that's free or cheap and use that instead of paying the Steve Parrish wannabes of the world. Creative Commons licenses won't stop, or exacerbate, this situation.
On the other hand, the whole point of Creative Commons licenses is to create a new forum for sharing licensed media, in the same way that we share common land such as parks and out-of-copyright works such as Shakespeare's plays. Creative Commons licenses provide the necessary tools to people who are happy to give their work away so long as it isn't exploited (and sometimes even if it is). The one fundamental constant in the Creative Commons licenses is attribution; the one right they all withhold is the right for someone else to claim your work as their own. This is fundamental to copyright, of course. But it's also a tool for getting your name out there. In the past, bands waited for talent scouts and Triple J Unearthed competitions for their chance at the big time - now they do it by putting tracks on their websites and giving CDs away to friends. The Creative Commons licenses ensure that people can do that and not have Britney Spears singing their song in six months as if it were her own property (or, at least, the legal right to take her to court if she does so).
McDonald does have one point to make: that Creative Commons is for creators, not users. In other words, the only person that can put a work under a Creative Commons license is the creator of that work; no amount of will or energy can take a copyrighted work and make it available under the Creative Commons. McDonald sees this as a critical flaw in people's expectations of Creative Commons - that the things that 'culture jammers' like billboard defacers and the people who want to mash-up Mickey Mouse (obviously numbering in the myriads according to McDonald) want to see in the public domain are the least likely to ever be. This is a straw man: it lumps all the mash-up creators into the 'culture jammer' bag, calls them copyright vandals, and throws them out with the trash.
This is where I find McDonald's choice of title amusing. "Just Say CC's" was a trademarked phrase advertising CC's, a brand of corn chips in Australia. Now, according to this page, at least, a trademark gives you the exclusive right to use that phrase - according to the law, no-one else can use it. Now I'm not sure how far that extends, so I'd appreciate hearing from a lawyer or someone that can impersonate one on whether this theoretically prohibits use of the trademarked phrase or anything calculatedly similar to it in ordinary conversation, or as a title of an article. But my point here is that it came perfectly naturally to McDonald to choose an amusing, slightly 'hip' title by playing off a cultural reference known to most Australians as his article's title. The fact that this was a trademarked phrase was irrelevant to him. In his own article criticising the sharing of copyrighted works as creative, cultural common material, he uses someone else's trademarked words to promote his own article.
OK, this is not shock and horror and satellites raining on our heads. But it seems to me to be a bit unconsciously hypocritical. And it gets right to the heart of the reason Creative Commons exists. Theoretically, Snack Foods Australia has to sue anyone using its trademarked phrases in public to defend its trademark; otherwise it's diluted and unenforceable. Creative Commons was invented so that if you see the CC logo, you have a fairly good idea that you can use it (for certain uses) and you won't be automatically liable for impending lawsuits. The whole point of marketing is to get these trademarked, copyrighted, proprietary, all rights reserved phrases out into everyone's minds and on everyone's lips; just as 'xerox', 'hoover' and 'google' have gone from trademarked title to common term. Using 'Just Say CC' is a reflection on the fact that trademarks and copyrights become public domain through natural usage: the laws regulating this process are merely a formalisation of what we instinctively, intrinsically believe should occur.
Creative people are rebelling against a world where you have to ask permission for using things that we see every day. A world where you can face criminal charges for singing Happy Birthday in a restaurant or take a photo of a Starbucks cafe is a world gone mad with control. Creative Commons is a process of giving, not a process of taking; it is for this reason that people like McDonald and the Copyright Council of Australia still fundamentally fail to understand it. The people who use and want to use Creative Commons license extend far beyond the scapegoat 'culture jammers' that McDonald mentions; they are legitimate artists of all types. And the uses they want to put this new licensed media to are far beyond what the Copyright Council understands. Until it can come to terms with sharing, it will be forever stuck in the past.
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Of course. And I've now updated my
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posted at: 13:11 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.