Making Parking Easy
To: Roam Tollways
To: Wilson Parking
Re: paying for parking.
Dear people,
Many people have those little e-tags in their cars these days. They allow us to drive along tollways without having to stop and throw money into a machine. Another area where people have to stop their cars and throw money into a machine is in parking stations. We also have to grab the card that it spits out, carry it around and remember to pay for it before we leave, and if it doesn't validate or we lose it we have trouble getting out. However, you people have the solution for that.
Instead, we could drive up to the entrance gate of a parking station, the toll sensor would go 'beep', the boom gate would open and we'd drive in. Then, when we wanted to leave, we'd drive up to the exit gate, the toll sensor would go 'beep', the boom gate would open, we'd drive out again and the parking cost would automatically be debited to our account.
This would save us lots of time - time otherwise spent getting a ticket, paying for it, and feeding it into the exit gate. It would save you a lot of cost maintaining and repairing those machines. I'm sure you're already doing data mining on the journeys people take - this gives you a lot more interesting data. And you get a lot more people wanting to use your e-tags - people who like the convenience of being able to drive right into a shopping centre but aren't already toll users.
Go ahead and use this idea, I don't need any credit - just improve the planet.
Have fun,
Paul
posted at: 18:20 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Private Stupidity
Kate and I heard a talk on the radio the other day in which a
German-sounding American professor, or pundit, or something, tried to
establish that actually we needed a society where everything is owned.
Obviously it's hard for me to know his full thesis, because we started
listening in the middle of the talk and switched off in disgust less than a
minute later. But of the bit we heard all of it was, basically, complete
rubbish.
His idea seemed to be that public property was a real problem - that it made things difficult because then you had to have laws and police and you had people sponging off the public good and abusing public property. Then you had to pay all these taxes to keep everything going and it was all very draining and stopped people just doing whatever they wanted with their stuff. Yes, a nice straw man argument, but then the alternative completely baffled me. According to him, in addition to owning your own property you'd also have to be a kind of shareholder in the road in front of your street, and the footpath, and the fences between your neighbours and yourself.
What baffles me here is that he clearly didn't see this going much further. Presumably he stays in his own street, grows all his own food, has an amazing naturally-occurring spring of fresh water in his back yard, and doesn't use electricity or the internet. Because as soon as you start looking at where all those things come from, you realise that they're all some kind of shared property. Once you drive outside your street, you need to be a shareholder in the company that owns that street, and so forth. I can only assume the pundit doesn't have any friends, because they moment they come and visit him they're going to have to pay a fee to his street-ownership-company to get there and park. He may well never use a public hospital, gone to a public school, gone to a public park, flown in public airspace, used the public radio spectrum, or have to claim unemployment benefits, but only because he's most probably a well-off white male.
I'll hopefully save my readers the tedium of reading through the first course
in a standard lecture on Government and Democracy. It's just incredibly
irritatingly bizarre to hear someone spout this kind of nonsense which almost
naturally disproves itself. He probably even thinks the world will be a
better place if they followed his philosophy. I'd like to invite him,
publicly, to stop using all our public resources and only use the ones he
actually privately owns. Then, when the oxygen starts running out in a couple
of hours, he may like to reconsider. Meanwhile, get off my public
broadcasting network and pay for your own publicity yourself.
posted at: 13:27 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
The a-logical
On the drive back from CodeCave 2011 many moons
ago, Rusty and I (amongst many other things) talked about the problem we see in
modern society where some people use logic as a kind of optional extra. When it
suits them - usually when attacking other people's ideas - they can use logic
like a scalpel: dissecting arguments, finding flaws or exposing the problems in
your examples and analogies. Yet when it comes to their own beliefs, logic not
only doesn't apply, it isn't even in the same suburb.
You see these people in every role from the people that knock on my door and try to tell me to believe what they believe, through lobbyists and radio "entertainers" who wilfully exclude certain things from their arguments but are only too happy to criticise their opponents, to the run of the mill ordinary people who are outraged that people could be against gambling, drinking to excess, speeding, or whatever it is that they want to do. It's particularly pernicious in people we're dealing with personally, but aggravating when it's someone on the TV or in public life spouting their fallacious arguments and ignoring their own contradictions when we can't say a thing against it.
The fundamental contradiction is that they're ready to prove you wrong but won't accept the same in return. They use every trick in the book to avoid this - wilful misunderstanding of your arguments, using fallacies and specious logic, criticising your method of arguing, constantly turning arguments back on you, sidestepping or mis-answering your questions, and so forth - the catalogue is is too vast even for a Wikipedia page. You can't disprove them with logic. You can't be illogical or they point out the logical fallacies in your argument. You can't declare their beliefs invalid because that's too arbitrary. You can't reason with them, and yet if you don't you're portrayed as being unreasonable. You can't make up things like Pastafarianism without being, in some small part, the kind of thing you hate - and they don't see the relevance of your ridicule or see the parallels anyway.
Rusty and I debated a term for these people. When a person consistently does things that sane people wouldn't do, we call that person's behaviour insane. Yet to use the term "illogical" for who shuns logic consistently is more of a once-off offence descriptive of individual incidents rather than ongoing behaviour, and something that can almost be excused - like not sticking exactly to the speed limit. I thought that "alogical" would be a better coining - a deliberate absence and eschewing of logic. But sometimes these people can sound perfectly reasonable, and use very precise logic in disproving things they don't believe in.
Where is the balance? How do we deal with these people? Because I do believe that they are as much a danger to the social health of a community as office psychopaths are to workplaces. When these people can tell armies to go to war, make multi-billion dollar spending decisions based on pure fictions, and dictate how people are allowed to live and behave, their decisions cannot be based simply on whatever they believe and no argument will be entered into. As a society we need to see that there are rational, reasonable foundations for the principles governing our lives.
At the base of it I don't want to get into an epistemological debate - endlessly answering the questions 'why do you believe that' and 'what basis do you have for that'. Yes, at some point we have to have certain fundamental beliefs that may not be justifiable, or may even have a justification but be completely arbitrary, personal decisons (like my preference for blue over cyan, for example). How do we separate the preference of someone who says "I think someone who kills someone else is wrong and should be punished" from those that say "my magic book says that only men and women can get married" for example?
The only hope I have in this is that rationality and sense is gradually prevailing. We might rail against people who deny that climate change is man-made or who believe that the rapture will take them up to heaven according to the evidence in some pseudo-mathematical formula, but these are already far progressed from the kind of crank beliefs of centuries ago. No-one believes in spontaneous generation - that maggots are literally created from nothing in the presence of rotting meat. The belief that the earth is flat is rare to the point of extinction. Even school dropouts don't believe that the only elements in existence are fire, water, earth and air. These were all serious propositions debated by intelligent, reputable people - today we know them to be bunkum.
Likewise, in everyday life people tend to use rational thinking rather than magical. Everyday people no longer throw spilled salt over their shoulder to ward off the devil. Normal adults do not attribute stomach pains to demonic influences or yellow bile. People no longer use leeches to cure anything that isn't treated with cod-liver oil or tincture of sulphur. People do not say "bless you" when someone sneezes in order to ward off the devil stealing your soul from your nose. People walk under ladders with due care. Most superstitions are amusingly enjoyed rather than carefully observed.
While we obviously still have some distance to go, I think we are seeing
reason and sense triumph over bigotry and alogical thought.
posted at: 22:37 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
The Convoy of No Help
How does one tell the difference between a protest to get the government to hear
the legitimate claims of the people and a bunch of thugs whose idea of community
engagement and debate is to piss everyone off until they get their way?
Yes, that's a snide comment on the "convoy of no confidence" that's decided the best way to keep their generous handouts is to bring the traffic in Canberra to a standstill. But shorn of the inflammatory language it's a legitimate question. These people obviously feel they have a legitimate complaint. They think that the best way they can bring attention to their plight is to cause a big news story.
The problem here is that this is the same logic terrorists use. It's the same logic lobbyists use. It's the same logic the rioters in London used. It's the same logic that Martin Luther King used in the cause of racial equality. It's the same logic GetUp uses all the time in getting signatures on petitions and donations for advertising.
My question is really: is it valid? Is the right way to get your cause heard to shove it in everyone's faces? Does this not merely render us vulnerable to everyone with a loud mouth and a radical cause? How do we protect freedom of speech and the right of the citizens to have representation of their causes without also surrendering it to those louder than us?
Never mind the conflation of "Canberra" with "Government" in every non-Canberran news story I've ever seen - as if it was even possible that the entire 350,000 people living here decided, as one, to knobble the trucking industry. Never mind the howling rhetoric, invoking everything from the Eureka Stockade to the Dockyard Strikes in trying to justify the Convoy's actions. Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars the trucking industry gets in handouts to keep it profitable, while it screws ever-longer shifts and ever-tighter margins out of its employees.
Sadly, I fear it won't matter how irrelevant, stupid and aggressive these
drivers are - all that will be reported by the conservative leaning press
in Australia is that there was this big protest about how totally unfair the
carbon pricing is to all those poor ickle struggling truck drivers. Every
person I've seen commenting on the ABC news stories that is against the
convoy can state facts in support of their argument. Every person I've seen
commenting in favour of them evokes some brave, Patersonesque
"little aussie battler" in a truck struggling against some improbable
mad-scientist figure determined to cause their demise. Forget
the facts, forget the reasoning, forget the mountains of scientific evidence
for a carbon pricing scheme, forget the numbers showing how most industries
and most people won't suffer under the carbon pricing scheme, let's imagine
we can drag the country back to 1980 when the world hadn't heard of the
ozone layer using some sort of magical thinking that ignores evidence.
It's pathetic. Millions of people marched to protest against the war in Iraq
and the news services passed by. Now a couple of thousand get all the air
time they want. Trial by media indeed.
posted at: 11:52 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Dear Charles Stross
I agree with your idea of getting people to purchase a book if they want to
donate to you, rather than bypassing the publisher. I'd rather buy the
electronic copies, though, as I'm travelling and want to carry minimal weight
and as I want publishers to get the messages that electronic distribution is
going to make them more money than lumps of dead tree. So I thought I'd go
online to try and buy some of your books.
Let me say that never have trued words been written than Cory Doctorow's introduction to "Makers":
There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.My first attempt to buy the books got all the way to the actual checkout before the website informed me that their lawyers had decided to conspire against them to prevent me from giving them my money: yes, I was not in some weird non-approved area of the internet. Still prepared to go on, I found an Australian store which would sell me Iron Sunrise and The Atrocity Archive as eBooks. Not my first choice - I had been aiming for Saturn's Children and The Family Trade - but that's OK, I enjoyed Halting State and friends (albeit weird ones that like the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game) had enjoyed the Atrocity Archive. So I bought the books.I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.
Ah, but the wily legal departments were ahead of me again - they had encrypted the books using some Adobe encryption thing that FBReader didn't understand. There is, it would seem, no way to decode these things with out an "approved" player, and Adobe do not support the Samsung Galaxy S yet.
So I did what any sane, computer literate person would do at this point: I found a copy of the books on the internet and downloaded them for free.
This is the fundamental equation that the legal departments have yet to figure out: broken versus working. We're happy to pay, but not for something that doesn't work - and I mean it has to work everywhere. Every-****ing-where. Because if it doesn't, you've just made people go and find it somewhere else that does. It may not even be for free on the internet, it may be from your competitor's site. But your customers will leave you if they can get it working somewhere else. Figuratively, I went to a store, gave them some money, they popped my book in a bag, swapped that bag for a bag exactly the same weight and size filled with confetti, and gave it back to me.
It's not even "expensive and broken" versus "free and working", because we've already established that I wanted to pay for the ebook. I want to support Charlie Stross, and I want to support a bookstore and a publisher that will sell me a book in electronic format. Cory Doctorow covers all the things I want to say about ebook licensing, restrictions, and that kind of stupidity in his introduction, so I won't bore you with them. But I don't want to take Cory's bargain and buy a printed book, making the publisher think that dead tree accretions are more popular than ebooks. I want an ebook that works.
So, given the choice of the unpalatable, the unwanted and not paying the author
a cent, I will choose the unpalatable. I will buy what ebooks I can. If they
are shackled with digital restrictions, I will find a free version and download
it afterward. And I will find them, because they will be there.
Hopefully, some day, the publishers will save me the trouble of fixing their
mistakes.
posted at: 22:04 | path: /society/tech | permanent link to this entry
Shopping for Fail
I read an article recently about the increased competition regular shops
- in particular Myers, David Jones, Harvey Norman, etc - are facing from
internet retailers. Having recently bought a Kogan TV as a toe-in-the-water
test of buying stuff I'd normally buy by walking up, trying the actual
models out in store and then picking one, I was interested. In the article,
some high-paid consultant gave the eager retailers lessons on what they should
be doing to move into the digital age. Was this going to be the next wave of
retailing?
Reading it, however, I felt no real surprise and only a sense of sadness. The idea is that for retail stores to push "the experience" rather than just the price. People would go to Myers to meet and hang around with the purchasing elite; you might sip champagne and hear string quartets play while discussing fashion and homewares with the staff and like-minded shoppers. The article listed this consultant as having helped Microsoft, Borders and other large corporations come into the internet era.
Really? Even Apple fanatics don't go to Mac shops to hang out with people who also purchase Apple equipment. As far as I can see, people going shopping would rather not meet any other shoppers in their perambulations through the store - they'd rather have staff who pop up when requested, disappear when ignored, and know enough to answer questions correctly. Shopping as a social experience is done with friends, not complete strangers; even for exclusive fashion stores the idea is to be seen and to enjoy the exclusiveness, not to sit around and chat with random people. The whole idea is absurd.
Now, admittedly, my experience with exclusive fashion stores is pretty much nil, and my method of shopping for most of these items is antithetical to any idea of socialising: I work out what I want, I go in, I look at all the available options, I choose what I want (if anything), I pay and I get out. I don't mind being at least polite in a store - if someone's obviously curious about an item that I have some experience with I'll happily answer their questions or even offering a bit of advice if someone has a question that I can help with. Even at computer fairs, where I have been known to wander around checking random prices without any intent to buy those things even in the near future, I don't tend to socialise. But I still think most people would agree that they don't want to have social interactions in a store that are irrelevant to what they're looking for.
And the thing that really gives this away as a stupid con is that it's really actually almost what the stores do already. Marketing for those stores has always emphasised the look, the fashion, the style - carrying the bag of a designer clothes store through the mall has always been a statement about your fashion sense and purchasing power as much as it has been to own the thing in the bag. This "new strategy" doesn't change their mode of business, it just puts a new marketing pitch on it.
So it's really doomed to fail also, because it fails to acknowledge why people are shopping online: for the price. They know what they want and now they want to find somewhere that can give them one as cheap as is reasonable. We haven't suddenly turned into a society of asocial bastard shoppers; we're actually sick and tired of greeters, salespeople that are in your face when you want to browse and never there when you have a question, demonstration devices that don't work or don't allow you to test the device fully, and the whole ghastly traffic / parking ticket / crush of people / bland muzak / endless tramping experience. I'd rather spend that two hours shopping online, in my own home, in my comfortable clothes, sitting down, listening to my own music. Experience? No amount of champagne, exclusive brands, new seasons catalogues and perfectly groomed, charming salespeople can outweigh all the awfulness of going shopping in a modern mall.
My advice, for free (because it's the internet), to those stores is simple.
Sell the things that people want to buy from a real store. Then make the experience of buying in a store as easy and practical - I won't say enjoyable - for your customers as possible.
Seriously, most of it flows naturally from there. Don't bother with selling DVDs at Myers when they're already cheaper at JB Hifi and cheaper still online. The entire mall, from the entrances and parking spots to the locations of the toilets and price of the coffe, is part of the experience - don't decorate up to your front door and leave the rest as a hollow, concrete wasteland. Emphasise how safe it is to shop in a store, how the customers details and credit card information is secure. For the things that you do specialise in, make sure your range is good. For some things you can probably allow people a cheaper price if they don't buy one in the store but have your mail-order section post it to them (after all, that one hasn't been sitting in your valuable shop space). Make it easy for people to buy stuff from you online, too - use the technology where it works rather than avoiding it.
And make sure your staff enjoy their work. Putting pressure on them to sell a certain amount every $time_period makes them desperate, and customers can spot this three quarters of a league off in heavy fog. Avoid the cliched, inappropriate Americocentric selling techniques and manner of the eighties and nineties. You should see your staff as people to get involved in the whole process, rather than cloned droids with no personality.
I don't want retailers to die off. I think having a physical shop front to go and try things at is a useful thing: there are plenty of things that I want to try out or try on, or have a knowledgeable person on hand to ask questions about. And for things like warranty claims, purchasing compatible accessories, and finding out new brands or types, a shop front is much more convenient than an internet retailer. But I've bought things through the internet - I would have never thought I would have bought online: TVs, perfumes, fruit and veg (can't find a link, because it was long ago in Brisbane), even peppermints, as well as all the things we now buy and take for granted will be available on the internet - computer parts, books, CDs, and all sorts of neat gadgets. I've bought these things at shop fronts, too, so it doesn't have to be the death-knell of the retail industry.
And what's the next thing? What happens after the internet makes getting almost anything you want available easily from almost anywhere? I see a long process of things gradually getting easier to find, marketplaces consolidating, and drop-shipping mega-sites becoming more comprehensive, but that just increases the existing players. Where we pay money for formatted, compiled data - books, videos, music, etc. - it'll be distributed directly to you via the internet; these things will get more available and cheaper as competition and opening up of markets gradually overcome the idiocy of digital restrictions and market segmentation.
And the end, really, is the post-scarcity society: where you can have anything made available for you at close to zero cost, and the work you do participating in the society is valued enough to pay for that cost. Which is really the digital economy applied to physical things, because practically speaking we already have a system to distribute copies of data throughout the world at near enough to zero cost. Post-scarcity will happen - in some things it can be said to already be here - it's just a question of when.
To reuse Linus's quote: we don't aim to be the death of retail stores. That
will be a totally unintended side-effect.
posted at: 21:06 | path: /society/tech | permanent link to this entry
The monkey on ones back
I've just been listening to stories from a friend of mine about his new
place of work. Simple things like getting support have to go through
other departments and are quietly filed and ignored. New software is
anathema. Fixing problems is impossible, because it would admit that
the problem existed. People are regularly bullied into doing things
that are way outside their job descriptions. No-one knows the passwords
to any machines and point the finger at other people in an endless
circle. Managers actively suppress any dissent.
But the worse is yet to come. This place uses billions of tax-payers money and its budget continues to expand. Even revealing the name of this organisation or any substantiated claims can be considered treason and is a criminal offence. The money gets used on projects that regularly get cancelled, delayed and changed and often end up costing orders of magnitude more than originally budgeted. Any questioning of the spending is considered unpatriotic. Powerful people with distinguished careers have stood up to this organisation only to find themselves cut off and facing the sharp end of the law.
How does society get rid of this cancer? The theoretical function of
this organisation and its actual activities are so different as to
almost be antithetical. Yet it seems impossible to actually change
it, fix it or remove the harmful elements from it. Surely the only
thing to do is to scrap the entire thing and start afresh. Yet that
too would be considered heretical or traitorous by some. What can we
do?
posted at: 16:00 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
New-age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
New-age
terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
Imagine the terror that the world could be brought to with this new technique. All it would take would be a couple of drops of sugar solution or vitamins into the town's water supply, and tapping the reservoir in a specific way, to cause mass outbreaks of disease and poisoning (for if the toxin creates the antitoxin, something beneficial must create something harmful). A couple of taps by a nefarious homeopathic passer-by on your glass of water and whatever good elements that were in it could be instantly transformed into a deadly drink. And it would be completely indistinguishable from ordinary harmless water.
If, of course, homeopathy was actually true.
The question I want to put to a homeopathist is: how do you remove the memory of all the other stuff from the water? Surely just as you're tapping the water to activate the memory of the antitoxin of arsenic or hemlock or whatever, you're also activating the memory of the antitoxin of the urine and whatever else has been put in that water over time, diluted over centuries and millennia of use. I mean, there are lots of other questions to ask - how do you know you've processed the water enough? How does the toxin create the antitoxin? How does the memory stay in the water? Why do you continually refuse to go with any kind of scientific, double-blind trial of your medicine? and so forth. But I'd like to know why it is that they can be so sure that this phial of water is just carrying the one specific treatment and is now not just a broad-spectrum cureall for every disease and illness that have ever been in the water at all?
It's all garbage. The sooner these deluded people are taken out of
the system and prevented from administering placebos to people that
need real medication, the better.
posted at: 11:54 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Political dogma
I, like pretty much everyone now, am opposed to the Australian Federal
Labor Party's 'Clean Feed' mandatory internet filtering proposal. It
won't stop paedophiles getting access to child pornography, it won't
protect children from abuse, it won't stop people getting access to
illegal content or content on the Refused Classification list, and it
will almost certainly generate a huge number of false positives,
blocking much legal content. It will slow internet access down, it
has enormous potential to be abused for political or commercial gain,
the list of refused classification sites has no judicial or public
oversight, and Senator Conroy has avoided any actual definition of what
goes on the blocked list. It's stupid, it's bound to fail, and no-one
wants it.
So why, why, are Senator Conroy and Prime Minister Rudd continuing to not only support it but insist that it be put in place?
Every time this issue comes up, at work or with friends, that is the question on everyone's lips. Why does the minister continue to insist that it must be put in place? Why are they ignoring the overwhelming technical flaws in its implementation? Why do they even think that it will do what they say it will, when everyone else has positive proof that it won't? Why are they defying the wishes of the actual citizens who voted them in, 90% of whom don't want any internet filtering? Why?
I think we can conclusively say, from the evidence of Stephen Conroy's and Kevin Rudd's words, that this has gone beyond a debatable issue. They continually label everyone else's views as extremist and denigrate opposition as supporting the things they claim the filter is against. They continually ignore all the evidence that says that the filter will not work and insist that it will. This is no longer reasonable - this is dogma. They have an absolute and unwavering faith that the filter will work - that it must work - and nothing is going to change that view at all.
No protest will work. No petitions will sway them. No carefully crafted arguments will change their mind. Stupid attempts to DDOS Government websites will only make them more committed to ignoring all nay-sayers. Don't bother to blow up a bus or threaten to start shooting parliamentarians, it won't change their minds. In my opinion they will be ignoring their friends, their fellow Senators and Ministers, and they will be talking to all of them trying to convince them of the truth of their dogma, so while we should all write to our representatives in the houses of parliament - local, state and federal - little will be done by this; we will get form letters but the volume of complaints will make some small difference.
So what do we do now? How do you win an argument with a person who denies everything you say is true and calls you a supporter of the bad guys? How do we, the people of Australia, conduct a Representative Democracy when our elected Senators and leaders refuse to listen to us?
What do we do?
posted at: 00:42 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Lost Opportunities 001
Attention anyone looking for a business proposition - set up an electric
vehicles parts supplier business on the eastern coast of Australia.
There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.
Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.
If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent
me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the
baton.
posted at: 23:20 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Capitalising on success
I watched "RiP: A
Remix Manifesto" the other day on SBS - good on them for showing it
on mainstream TV. I fear it won't really have reached many more than
people like myself, who already know the problems and want to get to
the solution, but on the other hand any activism is good in this issue,
because there are a bunch of memes we're fighting against here that need
taking down good and proper.
The main one that struck me now is that the underlying theme is hypocrisy. The copyright industry is hypocritical in so many ways that it just permeates the whole process. Take, as an example, Walt Disney animating the old fairy tales - Snow White, Pinnochio, Cinderella, and so on; these were stories that had no copyright attached, and then Walt Disney (by redoing them) attached a copyright to them and prevented anyone from using them. That's perhaps a broad statement, but just imagine reprinting the story of Snow White and illustrating it without being a target for lawsuits from Disney Corporation - it's basically unthinkable. That's how much Disney has appropriated an out of copyright story and put their own copyright on it. The film documents countless other examples of artists using a riff or melody from someone else who's no longer around (or large enough, or is still naive enough to think that it's OK), and then suing any further artists who try to do the same thing with the melody they've just appropriated.
Strangely, I see this hypocrisy as actually now forming the basis of the whole "intellectual property" castle in the sky. Ask yourself why we have the laws of copyright, patents and intellectual property. Well, you tell yourself, imagine I'm some inventor with a brand new gadget, or a musician with a new song, or a film-maker with a new movie. If I don't "protect" that new thing, someone's going to come along and rip it off, and all my hard work will have been wasted because the cost of duplicating my work is much less for them than for me. That's why we have "All Rights Reserved" on CDs - because the idea that someone could take your hot drum lick and make the next Amen Break out of it and become instantly famous without paying you a cent and leaving your less popular work mouldering in the dust is a harsh thought to bear.
But let's think about this for a moment. Who is actually likely to carry out this threat here? Well, it might be someone you know or someone you show your thing to, but even in the days of ubiquitous internet distribution that's still a tiny tiny fraction of the actual people around. (Remember, we're ordinary people, we're not already famous - so we're unlikely to have people targeting us specifically.) For the most part the people that actually appropriate our work are going to be people just like us - artists, inventors, photographers, sculptors, and so on - and we all know what goes around comes around, and sooner or later if I copy my next door neighbour's work she's going to find out. Likewise, they probably don't have a huge internet following or lots of money to print CDs or pictures, so their ability to actually capitalise on taking our idea is limited. So it's not likely that we are the people who will take our fellow person's intellectual property and rip it off.
The people we have to most watch out for have three basic properties. One is lots of money - it means that any costs of duplicating our ideas isn't going to be an immediate barrier. Two is lots of distribution - not just big servers or copying machines but the ability to take that idea and distribute it to lots of people to generate some sales. Three is legal untouchability - not that they might be right in taking our thing (we've already established that we're using patents or copyright or whatever to prevent that) but the ability to entangle us in legal battles far beyond our resources to fight - or even the ability to take that new spatula idea and sell two million of them in China where you never go and have no knowledge. Who has all these three properties in one?
Well, it's obviously a what: the big corporations. That's right, the same big corporations who have been telling us that copyright and patents and intellectual property is for our own good; that it protects the artists who are just like us, that it stops people doing things we don't want with our ideas, and (in the case of patents) it helps puts ideas in the public domain for everyone to use. And we know that at the same time they're telling us its for our own good they're forcing us to pay for everything and fighting against every possible fair use of their products. It's hypocrisy on such an awesome scale that it's hard to take it all in.
I mean, we know that companies like Microsoft regularly rip off everyone else's intellectual property (e.g. the i4i lawsuit) at the same time as their vigorously defending their own intellectual property (e.g. the Tomtom lawsuit). We know in the software industry that its an unwritten rule not to look at anything that even hints of anyone else's intellectual property lest you be found to be deliberately infringing (rather than just 'accidentally' coming up with the same idea). We know that our ideas down here at the bottom of the heap don't matter one whit and its only the big end of town that gets a patent on every little idea they have and enforces it. We know that that "intellectual property" is being so vigorously enforced that DVDs force you to watch their ads and CDs install root kits to prevent you copying them and other forms of massive collateral damage in the neverending hopeless quest to prevent ideas doing what they do naturally, which is spread.
And yet to sell us on the idea that it's for our own good that we submit to this kind of intellectual thuggery takes guts. Guts, I'd argue, and a complete and childlike faith that the system is right.
Because we know that "intellectual property" is really a dead end. It's a noose that the corporations have made for us, but it tightens not around our necks but theirs, slowly choking them of talent and ideas and good will until they thrash around gasping desperately for the people that will not buy their goods and will not sell their ideas to them and will not buy into the marketing. We've known this since before John Lennon wrote "Imagine", but a more forceful statement of the truth is hard to find.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one; I hope some day you will join us and the earth will live as one.
Postscript: I'm surprised that it's not made more of in the film, but the
absolute key statement of the pro-copyright position is in the section
where a spokesman from the RIAA talks to a bunch of schoolchildren about
illegal copying. One kid asks him why they charge so much for copying
each song (with the tacit comparison to the little you can pay for the
same song if you'd bought it on a CD), and he goes briefly into a spiel
about copyright. He posits writing a song about love, and as an aside
says "Of course, I can't copyright the idea of love, boy, I'd love
it if I could do that..." (emphasis, of course, mine). If they
could get away with it, they would copyright the idea of love, and
charge everyone who feels it in whatever form at whatever time howsoever
derived. The fact that he even thinks it not only contemplatable but
desirable that one person could own the idea of love and prevent others
from thinking about it or feeling it shows how truly beyond rationality
the intellectual property corporations are.
posted at: 00:26 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Rocket fuel to the fire
I am finally moved to ponder on the Israeli invasion into Gaza. Of course,
I would like to see an end to the conflict and I think Israel's attack is
fairly high-handed. But it seems to me to be an act of sheer lunacy for
Hamas militants to fire more rockets into Israel. What's their
logic? Do they think that Israel will suddenly be cowed by this display
of defiance? That if they try to even up the 10:1 ratio of Palestinian
to Israeli deaths in the conflict that Israel will get cold feet? That
Israel will be pressured into withdrawing and then Hamas can try to get
some kind of pathetic revenge? That there's far too many virgins in heaven
and every Hamas militant should get their fair share? That while everyone
is watching Israel a few rockets and civilian deaths will go un-noticed?
Really, it's not only stupid but actually harmful behaviour. It's the kind of moronic eye-for-an-eye retaliation that gives the lie to any claims to be the victim in the conflict. If I were in Israel's position, with a bunch of barely-controlled militant lunatics with delusions of importance and a determination to wipe my nation off the face of the earth whatever the cost, I wouldn't exactly be tippy-toeing and being polite to them in every circumstance either. The sad thing is that Palestine has brought this on itself - Hamas recieves considerable (questionable) funding, it got elected on the basis of spreading this money about, and then Palestinian civilians are getting caught in the cross-fire between their own lunatic fringe government and the hornets nest they decided to stir.
It's the same sad process of politics, really - you vote John Howard in
because he said he wasn't going to put in a GST, and then he turns around
and says it wasn't a core promise; you vote Hamas in because they said
they were going to pay for hospitals and schools and instead they smuggle
rockets and arms in and take pot-shots at Israeli civilians. And the
world gets stuck with the fall-out.
posted at: 17:07 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
Words For The Next Decade
I had a realisation last night that there's a new word that I suspect will
be entering the news lexicon soon. That word is
The Urban Dictionary, which I won't link to here, has an alternate definition which basically is a derogatory term for someone too obsessed with the environment. I don't think this is using the -pathy suffix - meaning 'suffering or disease' - correctly; but then I'm sure the Urban Dictionary doesn't really care.
What it comes down to, for me, is that I believe that there are people and
companies whose view point on the Earth and the natural world is that it is
simply there for exploitation. They seem to believe that we can not just
keep on doing what we've been doing, but actually find new ways to exploit
the world, and the consequences simply don't apply to them. In this, my
basic stance is completely the opposite - I believe it's time to do
everything we possibly can to save the planet we live in. I also side with
my dad's line of reasoning on this, in that I can afford to be wrong, but
they can't.
posted at: 10:54 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Go to the Courts
There is a state in playing Go
where one recognises that a move might seem to give one a small gain in
pieces now but gives more power to ones opponent in the long run. While
I still struggle with this, and the larger question of 'what should I
play so that I do gain advantage over my opponent in the long run'
is one I still find exceptionally difficult to grasp, I have at least
started to recognise that getting a single eye now may actually give my
opponent a double eye later.
It occurs to me, albeit as a layman with little knowledge of the real processes of law in and out of the courts, that there is a common pattern to high-profile law cases. If the objective is for A to win over B, then it is:
So what's odd in the whole Nine versus IceTV is that Nine has done this:
I'm sure the legal minefield starts well back at the start of that previous paragraph, and so I defer to Kim Weatherall and other experts, but when courts start handing down legal judgements that imply that almost any information is copywritable by someone makes the whole existence of facts in the public domain highly tenuous. Can someone copyright my name? My address? Do I somehow own a copyright to my particular choice of phone number and address that means that Telstra owes me money every time they print a phone book? (Note here that when it came to moving house most recently, I was given the choice of a couple of numbers by Telstra and I chose the one I liked - therefore, it wasn't Telstra's creative input that determined my phone number, it was mine.) If someone uses the word "PaulWay" in a way that I don't like, and I've been using it since 1992 and therefore have 15 years of established usage to back it up (again, having chosen that name creatively), can I sue them for copyright infringement without ever having to register it as a trademark? And if it's a copyright infringement, do I get those penalties that the APRA and ACA and so forth have fought for - penalties that are much worse than if it was just a defamation or trademark infringement case? Can you go to prison for creating a post-it note that copies your bus timetable or a person's phone number?
Yes, I know, it's all wild speculation. But this whole judgement feels completely at odds with how people really think about facts and raw information. While I respect the old style of directory compilation, to me it still doesn't equate to a monopoly on the information so collected. The whole "sweat of the brow" protection - that the labour itself makes it enough to be protected - doesn't wash with me, especially in a world where facts, information, opinions and news wash over us almost continually.
Anyway, back to my point. I think that Nine has, in their attempt to
get their way in the short term, actually meant that IceTV will triumph
in the end. By presenting a case based on such a skewed interpretation
of the Australian copyright laws as they apply to facts and information,
they've opened it up to the High Court leaning in the opposite direction
and blowing Nine out of the water (and, I'd say, causing a considerable
re-evaluation of the Desktop Systems vs Telstra case).
posted at: 16:57 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
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