The Walls Came Tumbling Down
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 31, 2009 in Commentary • 9 commentsThese are heady days for the free culture movement; the atmosphere of expectancy reminds me a bit of the time before the Berlin Wall came down.
iTunes has abandoned DRM under market pressure, and the RIAA admits that DRM is effectively dead. The entire iTunes library, some ten million tracks, is now DRM-free, and they’ve dropped all tracks which were unavailable without DRM.
The Pirate Bay conviction was followed by the Swedish Pirate Party getting seats in the European Parliament. The Pirate Party controls the single largest block of support among Swedes in their twenties, and my guess is that pirate parties will gain comparable strength throughout the EU countries.
Steve Ballmer seems to be caving on cooperation with the open source community, offering Microsoft driver source code for the Linux kernel so the Penguin-heads can more effectively design Microsoft-compatible desktop accessories. Quite a change from the days when Gates was ranting about “communism” and Microsoft was threatening Linux with infringement lawsuits. The phrase “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” comes to mind.
Google’s free Chrome operating system, coupled with browser-based applications, offers to destroy the proprietary operating system where Linux couldn’t. As my fellow C4SS commentator Tom Knapp puts it, the era of paying for operating systems is now officially over.
And Jeff Bezos, in the face of the backlash over Kindle’s remote deletion, aka theft, of books (by Orwell no less!) that customers had paid for, has apologized for the “stupid” and “thoughtless” move and promised that it will never happen again.
The latest gambit by the Copyright Nazis, Associated Press’s attempt to make web aggregators pay for “content” on pain of being sued (even when such “content” consists only of a hyperlinked headline) is almost certainly doomed to fail in a spectacular manner. The specifics amount to a kind of DRM:
“The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.”
Yeah, THAT should work really well.
AP Chairman William Dean Singleton is defending the policy in decidedly belligerent and combative language. First he warned “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories” (i.e., the theory that providing a snippet and a hyperlink is covered by the Fair Use doctrine), and then he announced that he’s “done talking about it.”
But I suspect he’ll be adopting a much meeker tone before long. A business model based on suing online news sources (not to mention search engines!) for linking to your stories makes New Coke look like a work of genius. It’s about like a record company threatening to sue if you mention the name of an album when you recommend it to your friends (as an article at Dvorak Uncensored put it, AP is “ready to be the new RIAA”). Some newspapers are already threatening to cancel their AP membership in response to the controversy. My guess is that within a year, even the AP will admit that the strategy backfired catastrophically, and they’ll just about curl up in a fetal position at the thought of ever trying it again.
It’s like the proprietary culture people are TRYING to relegate themselves to the ash heap of history as quickly as possible.
What’s the next step–helicopters airlifting refugees from the roof of Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, or CNN crews filming a statue of Bill Gates being pulled down?
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Kevin, this is really excellent. Except: New Coke WAS a success: it was a GREAT way to make Coke Classic even more popular!
"Google’s free Chrome operating system, coupled with browser-based applications, offers to destroy the proprietary operating system where Linux couldn’t. As my fellow C4SS commentator Tom Knapp puts it, the era of paying for operating systems is now officially over."
Great – the o.s. is free… but "all your data belong to us".
Google chrome os is nothing other than than a thin commodity layer between you and your wallet.
Beware this "the cloud" bogus. It's just another means of enclosurement.
Thanks, Stephan.
Autocrat: I share much of your skepticism concerning the "cloud." In the end, I like to have irreplaceable stuff backed up on my hard drive. And I'm enough of a pessimist to keep in mind the possibility that if some combination of Peak Oil brownouts or EMP disrupts the server networks, files distributed on hard-drives might be the monasteries of a post-apocalypse world. Still, before I made the switch to Mac, I found the trend toward browser- and web-based applications quite handy (especially the Firefox-based apps, and web-based email as an alternative to Outlook). And it's certainly useful as a competitive club to drive down the properietary rents on Windows.
I'd like very much to be a Penguin-head for ideological reasons, if Linux were a bit more user-friendly for non-geeks like me. Unfortunately, even the most user-friendly distros like Mint and Puppy don't work out of the box the same way Windows does. For example: I've yet to find a version of Linux in which I can simply click on a "connect" icon to get a dialer, without some sort of tinkering being required. And the developer community seems to include an unfortunate number of snobs with the attitude that nobody has any business driving a car unless they want to use a stickshift. It might be different using a PC with Linux pre-installed, I guess.
I actually liked new Coke. It tasted just like Diet Coke. Coke Classic is kind of acidy.
I've been noticing this debate on Internet adds in the MSM. Google will likely win it, since they have the power to simply not give space to the AP in its search engines. If Google even hints at this, AP will geek.
Interesting. I’ve always hated Diet Coke like the devil. When Zero came out, I was overjoyed because it tasted like real Coke, and could never figure out why they kept marketing Diet Coke when the company had finally figured out what a real diet Coke was supposed to taste like. I actually like Pepsi, because it has its own distinctive taste. But New Coke was far more insipid than Pepsi, an effort much like that of mass-market beer producers to cater to dumbed-down American tastes by removing all the hops.
American mass market beer is swill. Guiness Stout and Bass Ale are where it's at, although combining them as the unfortunate statist label of "Black and Tan."
Thanks, good to be here. I'm feeling increasingly at home.
Yes, I remember now that you said you used OOo. Good news! The bad news is, OOo will probably implement something that resembles the Word ribbon/tab interface. I happen to like it, but I recognize I'm in a distinct minority on that.
That said, this points up the advantages of FLOSS. First, I would bet substantial amounts of money that someone will fork the interface. Second, if I'm wrong, and they don't, it's not a problem, because you're not tied to a particular application or vendor. An ever-growing number of apps support .odt, like AbiWord, Kword, Bean, OOo, Lotus Symphony, and let's not forget Google Apps. We should, however, forget any MS product claiming to conform to .odt. It doesn't.
This matter will be a case study in the "tipping point." At some point in the next couple of years, the entire IT profession will turn on a dime, and .odt will go from being a curiosity to being the only sensible choice.
Kevin, speaking as a long-time “penguin-head,” I’m thoroughly convinced it’s more important to get away from Word than it is to learn Linux. The real power Microsoft wields is not the operating system that “your” software runs (most of the time, you don’t own it), but rather the file format your data is stored in.
Get yourself OpenOffice.org, and use the default .odt format to save your work. If you’re a Mac user, I’ve also found Bean to work well.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move to Linux eventually!
Nice to see you here, Steve. Actually, I’ve been an enthusiastic OO user since last Fall. I used to think Word 2003 was fairly decent, as it goes. But 2007 is a textbook example of the “gold-plated turd.” Any word-processing software so bloated it has to have a tabbed dashboard to handle the “feature”-creep needs a serious enema.