Free To Use

Just because everyone uses state facilities doesn't mean all citizens have democratically determined this is what's best. The cost of operating a private road or school must function three times more efficiently in order to compete with a state monopoly where costs can be deferred to tax payers. It's unlevel terrain and would fail if given an equal chance to compete.

And the Ban Plays on

I'll keep this brief as I usually don't like to do regional stories, but there is a tendency toward banning our little vices in this country under the guise of taking care of the populace. Yep, the government cares about its citizens just enough to extract protection money the 15th of every April. From safety belt laws to closing down liquor stores by 9 p.m. and bars by 2 a.m, rights and freedoms are only as valid as the readiness of those who are capable of fighting for them. Sorry, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution might as well be tissue paper if people aren't willing to man the ramparts in defense of their liberty. Bans of every type are something anybody remotely interested in preserving their rights as adults and rejecting the influence of the intrusive nanny state should oppose.

So, getting on with it, yesterday I got into a discussion with one of my co-workers over a pending Smoking Ban here in Wisconsin. He says he can see both sides of the issue while I contend only one side offers a non-violent solution.

According to my co-worker one side validly advocates the government refraining from interfering with the private sector, but on the other hand whenever he, a non-smoker, wants to join his friends at a tavern he is assaulted by secondhand smoke which is a medical risk and just plain abrasive.

My point is I recognize secondhand smoke is unhealthy, and I understand plenty of people have a problem with it, however, is that any reason for the government to violently impose one group's preferences upon another? Who's property is this anyway? We all know there is no such thing as public property just property that's owned by the state. If you don't believe me try sleeping on one of your "publicly" owned benches one night. But what most people do not realize is that the government owns everything, we're just renters. Wisconsin State Senator Alan Lasee, pictured to the right sporting a thirty gallon cowboy hat, has said essentially the same and said he'd consider voting against the Smoking Ban. Unfortunately, he's in the minority. The legislators can smell a power grab from a mile away that's why they're politicians in the first place. That's also why George Bush was never impeached or will never be prosecuted for war crimes. Aggression is the currency all governments deal in.

When somebody says let's place a ban on such-and-such commodity or service you can tell them in no uncertain terms that they're being intellectually lazy because government is a lazy solution. Be it prostitution, guns, immigration or drugs, when a non-coercive product is prohibited liberty wilts and economies suffer. If all of these activists really care about people's health and truly believe they represent the majority opinion I say stop lobbying your point of view in Madison, pool your resources and open a few smoke free bars. If they're popular then chances are you're right, it is what people want and you'll make a killing while providing a valuable service. If you're wrong and the businesses flop, well, good thing something so undemocratic wasn't put on the books in the first place. You can't be moderate about violence, and just as much as any other type of government program this ban is predicated upon violence.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

It's the mutha-fuckin' Stimulator with all the news you can't refuse! Best part of this week's episode is, no surprise here, the interview describing the in's and out's of Anarcho-Syndicalism.

This week:

Hamthrax
NAFTA Flu
Super Pork Pandemic
Flatulent Toxic Ass Amonia
COKECANUCK
T.R.E.A.S.O.N.
Gabriel Teodros
Political Boxes
What is Anarchy?

Put your copyright in, take your copyright out, put your copyright in and shake it all about

So it seems today is copyright themed, and the timing probably has something to do with the Pirate Bay ruling everybody's talking about. As an Anarchist problems surrounding property are quite intriguing to me and when it comes to the largely unmapped territory of intellectual property rights and cybertheft, more accurately known as piracy, my mouth begins to literally water.

If you know it or not Anarchist theory holds a lot of answers to life's questions, and, yes, copyright laws are one of them. Take the pending implosion of the newspaper industry. Everybody's panicking because they see it as the end of journalism as we know it (but is that really a bad thing? I'm looking at you New York Times).

It is simply the creative destruction of the marketplace. In the words of Eddie Vedder: "It's evolution, baby!"

If there is a demand for professional, in-depth journalism I'm guessing some enterprising individual will provide the service. If the void left by the Christian Science Monitor prods blogs into more dynamic news coverage I say more power to them. This type of pressure is a good thing. There's even a newspaper who is taking suggestions -- along with donations of course -- of what people want to read exposes about, the most popular subjects get the most attention. The cyber age is moving us in a more democratic direction where I feel more competitors will ultimately mean better quality products. With the launching of the Kindle, if Amazon or some other company can bring major newspapers aboard, it has the potential of delivering a techno-conscious service current news carriers just can't seem to get a handle on. This might just appeal to people already privy to buying a Kindle but maybe a subscription service that includes a package of magazines, ebooks and newspapers might be the answer.

In any case, to find out how these might happen without laws checkout crypto-anarchism, smart contracts and copyleft. In brief, if a content provider wants to ensure nobody pirates their product they can encrypt it and send it through a peer-to-peer service which secures a reciprocal business relationship. See, no laws need be invoked. Actually, now that I think of it, the reason more business isn't conducted this way is because copyright laws disincentivize this type of innovation.

For a great summary of all this stuff see this video. It's by a youtuber named ReIgNoFrAdNeSs, if you have a youtube account become a subscriber, his videos are, like, totally sinister.

Who Knew Discussing A Long Repealed Copyright Law Could Be So Interesting...

from the copyright-geeking dept

(http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090501/0113064710.shtml)

I wasn't at all sure what to expect yesterday when I went to a conference in honor of the 100th anniversary of the US's Copyright Act of 1909. After all, that law was superseded by the Copyright Act of 1976, and so it hasn't even been in effect for 33 years. However, the program was organized, in part, by Eric Goldman and Pamela Samuelson, and had some really big names on the speaker list, so I figured I'd at least check it out. Looking over the schedule, I figured I'd sit in on a few sessions and probably head out. However, the program actually turned out to be so interesting, that I stuck around for almost the entire thing (had to duck out for a bit at one point). Bill Patry joked that only a bunch of lawyers could get excited to discuss a law that was "repealed" 33 years ago, but what was so interesting was how much of the discussion was really about what's going on today.

The summary? Copyright law is so screwed up that even if you put a significant number of the top copyright scholars and students in an auditorium for a day, they'll disagree on almost everything, and only agree that the system is a total mess. Even simple questions like "how should copyright be handled on blogs" created a collective shoulder shrug, with everyone effectively admitting that copyright law has no answer for such basic questions. That should worry people. If the intention of copyright is to "promote the progress of science" then it shouldn't be so incredibly ambiguous and contentious. All in all, it seems to reinforce the point that copyright law has been stretched and twisted in so many different ways over the years, that it may be fundamentally broken. Basically, copyright law is adjusted every so often not based on any look at whether or not it actually promotes the progress, but based on whatever new technological innovation comes along that throws some legacy providers' business models into doubt. That industry freaks out, and politicians respond with some patch that protects that industry, but has little to nothing to do with actually promoting progress.

This goes all the way back throughout history. One speaker pointed out that the big innovation of the 1909 copyright was compulsory licensing on mechanical rights. This was put into place for one reason: fear about player pianos and how they would dominate the market and destroy the need for musicians. Within a matter of decades, the player piano market was effectively gone... and yet, these massive changes designed solely to deal with the player piano have stuck around ever since. Now apply that same story to basically every other technological innovation, and that gets you copyright law.

If there was a key theme running throughout the conference, though, it was on the single biggest change that the '76 Act brought into play: switching the copyright system from opt-in to everyone-automatically-in (not even to "opt-out" realistically speaking). In the terminology of copyright lawyers, in the '09 Act you had "formalities" to get copyright. In the '76 Act, you don't. While it was heartening to hear an awful lot of support for the idea of moving back to an opt-in system (i.e., if you want copyright protection, you need to proactively register/add a notice to get it, rather than automatically getting it on everything at the moment of expression), there was plenty of disagreement. Registrar of copyrights Marybeth Peters (who has a long history of supporting worrisome expansion of copyright law) kicked off the day by talking about why it was a good thing to switch to automatically in, because the old system resulted in too many questions about whether or not something was in the public domain.

Later on, Jon Baumgarten, who also participated in crafting the '76 Act, berated supporters of an opt-in system, saying that having practiced under it, it was only good for the lawyers, because everyone spent all of their time trying to determine ways to prove that someone had screwed up registering their copyrights, and thus the end result was lots of works accidentally fell into the public domain. On this last point, Peters concluded her remarks with the rather stunning statement "I'm so glad that copyright law no longer allows so much stuff to get into the public domain." (I'm paraphrasing the exact statement, but it was close... hopefully video will be up shortly and I can get the exact quote).

Think about that for a second. Yes, the context is important: her problem was mostly with items getting into the public domain because of confusion in the registration process, but it suggests a mindset that says "the public domain is bad." Later speakers pointed out that the difficulty of putting a copyright on creative works was actually a feature of the system, intended by the Founding Fathers to be difficult on purpose, because they believed how important it was to have a large and fruitful public domain.

Also, what was stunning was how much the "old guard" such as Peters and Baumgarten insist that an opt-in system can't work because it was such a mess under the '09 Act. They seem to be confusing the '09 implementation with the entire idea of opt-in. Sure, things were a mess before '76, but perhaps the problem was with the specifics of the "formalities" rather than with the concept itself. And, they don't even seem to acknowledge that modern technology could (and, in fact, should) change the entire thinking around copyright and how any sort of registration/opt-in process might work. And, in fact, David Nimmer's final keynote suggested that new technological solutions (he discussed a hypothetical system amusingly named "the panopticon") has shifted his thinking from being totally 100% against formalities to now believing that an opt-in system absolutely makes sense.

This post is long enough, even though there were plenty of other interesting discussions, but I did want to bring up three separate points that were interesting:

• Bill Patry (whose blog is seriously missed) tried to hammer home the point that it's absolutely ridiculous that Congress doesn't ever look at copyright law in terms of whether or not it promotes the progress, and totally trashed anyone (including Supreme Court Justices) who seem to think that the "to promote the progress..." part of the Constitution is meaningless preamble, even noting that in 1909 the legislative history made it quite clear that anything that did not promote the progress was outside the scope of Congress's power. It's sad that both Congress and the Supreme Court now seem to ignore this point.
• International trade agreements are evil when it comes to copyright. Sorry, but it needs to be said. There was a lot more talk about whether or not certain changes in copyright law would keep us in line with either the Berne Convention or TRIPs (and soon, ACTA!) than about whether or not it made sense. Basically, these trade negotiations, often pushed by industry reps without considering consequences for the public, have locked us into a narrow range of bad options. We simply can't do what's best for society and creativity, because we agreed to be bound by some really bad trade agreements. No wonder the industry loves them. They get to put a stranglehold on pertinent discussion (does this promote the progress?) and force people into discussing something entirely separate (does this violate our trade agreements?). It gets everyone focused on the trees and missing the forest.
• There's a lot of bubbling concern about conflicts between copyright law and the First Amendment. I'd mentioned how often this issue seemed to be coming up lately, and this event was no exception. While the old guard again insists this matter is settled and there's absolutely no conflict between the two, a large number of scholars disagree, and point out that it's a big open question, and some earlier rulings conflict and leave open some big loopholes to be challenged in court. Expect this issue to get a lot more play in the coming years.

All in all, a very interesting event that generated lots of thoughts and discussions.

Transhumanism: Your Bodies, Yourself

There's a theory about human progress posed by philosopher Peter Drucker who surmises that cultural evolution is similar to biological evolution insofar as cultures experience punctuated equilibrium as well. We are, according to some (and I happen to agree), living in just such a time. The lives of people a few decades from now will be so radically changed by science that their lifestyles could be rendered unrecognizeable. One of the most promising prospects for human modification is called Transhumanism.

Ok, so we're all fairly well acquainted with what Transhumanism is thanks to the Bionic Woman and the Six Million Dollar Man. But this technology actually ventures beyond finely articulated prosthetic limbs into indefinite life extension therapies and full body transplants. A person's memories, quirks, intellect and personality can be stored on a CD-Rom and exist solely in cyberspace or be implanted into a different body. It's no surprise that Stephen Hawking is a huge proponent of this type of research.

I know the naysayers will be bellowing "Machines will enslave humankind -- just like the Matrix!" This, to me, is utter nonesense. The fear of malicious robots is more psychological than practical in my view. We look at these blocky chunks of moving metal and see a loss of individuality. Because we have a theory of mind we try to project ourselves into the expressionless body of the bot and imagine what it's like to be this automaton. It draws out our own fears of losing our unique selves. Anyways, enough psychoanalyzing because the machines that are around today will not be anything like the robots of the future. Scientists have mapped the human genome -- (Wo)Man's information code -- and will in the next decade or two identify and map the human brain. With this knowledge in tow it will then be possible to create some subtle and emotional robotic implants capable of true intelligence.

As a side note, isn't science grand? Seriously, science might be the new religion and I mean that only as a compliment. Hundreds of thousands of human minds cooperating with each other for the betterment of the species, often times without the guarantee of monetary compensation. Every miracle religion promises science is en route to actually fulfilling. Religion says you will be given a new body -- science is achieving it. Religion says the lame shall walk -- science is doing it. Religion says you will live forever -- guess what, science is working on it.

How will human/robotic hybrids effect social life? Will interpersonal relationships be enriched or diluted? And what of the specialness of life, will it be even more sacrosanct in a Transhumanistic future or will it be cheapened by this sort of technology?

TechnoCalyps: Transhuman Part 2

TechnoCalyps: Transhuman Part 3

TechnoCalyps: Transhuman Part 4

TechnoCalyps: Transhuman Part 5

Technocalyps: Transhuman 6

Why We Fight (the Power)

by Roderick T. Long

(http://aaeblog.com/2009/04/26/why-we-fight-the-power/)

The Stanford prison experiment shows that if you give average people power over others, an alarmingly high percentage will abuse that power. The Milgram experiment shows that if average people are commanded by a perceived authority to commit atrocities, an alarmingly high percentage will obey.

On a cheerier note, Axelrod’s data show that average people, without any central authority to coerce them into cooperation, will nonetheless tend to cooperate to mutual benefit.

For libertarians, the principal moral of these findings is clear: the prevailing ideology has grossly underestimated the dangers of, and grossly overestimated the need for, government. If people tend to play badly with others when coercive authority is present (be that power their own à la Stanford or someone else’s à la Milgram), but tend to play well with others when coercive authority is absent, it’s clear what the problem is.

But there’s a further left-libertarian moral, because it’s not merely coercive authority that is shown to be problematic by the Stanford and Milgram experiments. The jailors in the Stanford experiment had no power to force their prisoners to stay; and the authorities in the Milgram experiment had no tool of compulsion more imposing than a lab coat. Neither had the backing of any legal sanctions. Nor did they have so much as the power to fire anyone from a job. Yet such authority as existed was still abused, and still obeyed.

The moral is clear: even absent coercive enforcement, there is a tendency for people both to abuse authority when they have it, and to acquiesce, indeed become complicit, in its abuse by others. Hence the assumption, common among some right-libertarians, that authority and hierarchy are fine and dandy so long as they don’t involve literal forcible compulsion, seems dubious.

[Hopefully unnecessary clarification: No, I am not saying that non-forcible forms of authority are rights-violations, nor that they should be combated by forcible means appropriate to such violations, nor again that those who wield non-forcible authority should be hurled into the Pit of Azathoth, there to boil and burn for all eternity in His howling, bubbling chaos. The solution to noncoercive authority is not coercive authority, any more than the cure for flu is pneumonia.]

If people have a harmful tendency that manifests itself in certain circumstances, then the appropriate response is obviously to try to a) reduce the strength of the tendency, and b) reduce the frequency of the triggering circumstances.

The tendency to abuse and/or obey authority may be too ingrained in human nature (or, more accurately: in the human situation) to be completely eliminated, but cultural factors can certainly reduce or exacerbate it. In our own culture, despite lip service (and, admittedly, often more than lip service) to anti-authoritarian values, the legitimacy of authority is constantly reinforced via everything from political propaganda and tv cop shows to the structure of school and workplace. This is one reason that left-libertarians often stress the need to promote anti-authoritarian moral attitudes that go beyond mere opposition to rights-violations. In the case of the Milgram experiments, part of the motivation for those who went along with the orders seems to have been the fear of embarrassment at the prospect of being the only one not to conform to what was “expected” and treated by others as normal; the inculcation of individualist ethical values would be a useful corrective here. (For a related point, see Christine Silk’s Randian take on Why Did Kitty Genovese Die?)

The other prong of the left-libertarian response is to decrease the frequency of those situations in which tendencies to abuse and/or obey authority is manifested, by working to reduce the prevalence of authority. Even if the elimination of all noncoercive hierarchy is not possible (and perhaps not even desirable), we could certainly do with quite a bit less of it. This is one reason that left-libertarians care, to right-libertarians’ bafflement, about combating such things as the hierarchical structure of the workplace.

Left-libertarians also think that such hierarchical structures are made more likely by various form of state intervention that socialise diseconomies of scale and render the labour market oligopsonistic; but that’s a separate point. Actually there are at least three linkages between statism and workplace hierarchies. On the one hand, statism promotes workplace hierarchies (so the two are linked via consequence thickness). On the other hand, workplace hierarchies, by reinforcing the culture of hierarchy and authority, promote statism (so the two are linked via strategic thickness). Hence statism and workplace hierarchies are part of an interlocking, mutually reinforcing system that needs to be combated as a whole. But on the, um, third hand, even apart from causal connections the two are linked by grounds thickness – i.e., workplace hierarchies are wrong for (some of) the same reasons that government-enforced power is wrong. The fact that government power tends to get abused is not the only reason for opposing it (not for us natural-rights types, anyway), but it’s certainly one reason to oppose it; and the Stanford and Milgram experiments show us (if the daily workplace experience of millions of people somehow, mysteriously, wasn’t convincing enough already) that this reason for opposing government power applies to private, non-forcible hierarchies as well. (And ditto of course for other disorders of hierarchy such as male supremacy, white supremacy, and hetero-supremacy, even when these are not propped up directly by force both governmental and “freelance.”)